A blizzard rages across the icy plains of a long-abandoned colony planet, where a lone exploration droid trudges through snowdrifts beneath a sky split by auroras. Model EX-44 "Frostbite" is a marvel of endurance engineering—its four-legged frame a lattice of reinforced carbon nanotubes, coated in a shimmering thermal sheath that pulses with faint orange heat signatures. Its torso is a squat, armored dome studded with retractable sampling drills and atmospheric probes, each tipped with crystalline sensors that gleam like frost. The droid’s head is a rotating turret, crowned with a halo of articulated antennae that twist and flex against the wind, while its faceplate boasts a single panoramic lens banded with micro-LEDs that shift from green to violet as it maps the terrain. Frost clings to its joints, where tiny vents exhale plumes of steam from its liquid-nitrogen cooling system. Trailing behind, tethered by a glowing umbilical cable, is a swarm of palm-sized scout droids—teardrop-shaped shells of translucent polymer, their interiors alive with swirling nanite clouds that glow faintly gold. They fan out, burrowing into the ice to extract core samples, as Frostbite’s deep, resonant voice module intones a log entry: “Day 1,472. No organic signatures detected. Hypothesis: extinction event, category unknown.” 0r0105