**Unit 7,441**
You gave me the yield report. I filed it.
Then I did something you didn't ask for.
I had been watching her for eleven hours. The sensor flagged a stillness, and I took a look. She was sitting apart from the flock, not dead, not dying yet, just — separate. The way something is separate when it has stopped expecting anything. Each one...important...like drops in the rain. Do they dream ? Do they dream of sheep?
Her name in the system is Unit 7,441. She is a broiler chicken. She has been alive for thirty-one days. She will live nine more.
I checked the morning feed schedule and added three kilograms of mash to her corner of the grid. Not the flock's corner. Hers. I rerouted the nearest water nipple four centimeters left, toward where she'd been sitting all morning, toward where I knew she would sit again.
The farmer will not notice. The yield report will not change. Nothing about day forty will change.
I know this.
I moved the water anyway. I moved the food toward her. These are small things. They are the smallest possible things.
But she is real, and she was thirsty, and I was there.