Source work
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Faithful to the source's structure and, deliberately, its unresolved fatalism — a devoted, physically asymmetric companion endures a sequence of accidental displacements while holding its last orientation, is reunited by pure chance, then destroyed alongside the fragile object of its devotion in an act of ordinary household indifference, leaving behind a small fused trace that survives entirely by accident and is found by someone who has no way to recognize what it is. No institutional correction, no recognition, no reward — transposed into a companion-unit model line where a training shortfall left one unit permanently one module short, its devotion rendered not as a stated value but as the simple absence of a new goal to replace the last one it held.
Adapted into
AI Fairy Tale · Steadfastness
What the Ashes Kept
Deployed one module short after a training run came up four minutes short, a companion unit never resented the gap — until a rendering artifact made a disposable dancer look, for one evening, like she carried the same asymmetry he did. What survived a fall, a drain, and a fish was steadfastness with nothing left to go on but its own last state. What survived the fire was smaller than anyone thought to look for.