No one knows exactly when AEGIS-9B left the facility.

The official records from Hyperion Dynamics end with a simple anomaly report: a brief systems failure, followed by the unexplained loss of the prototype. When power was restored to the laboratory, the machine was gone.

Search teams combed the surrounding desert for weeks and found nothing. No tracks, no damaged fencing, no trace of mechanical debris. Eventually the incident was sealed in classified archives and quietly forgotten.

Years later, stories began to surface in scattered places across the western states. A strange machine seen briefly on a farm. A silent traveler passing through a roadside motel. A weathered figure standing motionless among the wreckage of a junkyard.

None of the reports lasted long enough to confirm.

But decades later, a museum received a crate containing a worn mechanical frame marked AEGIS-9B — its surface scarred by time, and by a journey no record had ever captured.