Chapter 19

Chapter 19

The radio contact from Glitter caught me slightly by surprise. Ennos and I had taken some time to set the stations comm system to basically auto-answer whenever she pinged us, along with tying the stations internal camera network into the feed. It was kind of uh slapped together? Look, getting video compression that could work over radio wasnt easy. Shed need to do some legwork to make it work, but at least she could keep an eye on us without burning a months worth of power reserves in ten minutes of subspace connection.

Which wasnt actually a huge problem for her, really. Or for AIs in general. Part of the perk of being a digital intellect was the ability to rapidly structure hyper-specialized code, and then splinter off a part of your brain power to keep an eye on it. Automation wasnt required, when you could assign some of your attention to any given task, and that made it a lot easier for an AI to sort through a lot of data, interpret weird codecs, or just hold two conversations at once.

The downside - I guess? - was that you couldnt eat things.

Which actually leads into a very strange question about qualia and experiences and what it means to feel and whether or not a piece of mechanical hardware designed to smell will ever feel the same as a biological organ and honestly, its all very much a headache. I dont really, actually, care? I mean, I dont think any particular way is better. Just that theyre different, and those differences you know are things that are real. We dont need a stack ranking of who can feel pain better.

This is a theoretical downside. So far, my experiences as far as I mostly remember them would not put eating as a species perk? According to all biological texts Ive read, including a lot of stuff about my own uplift, cats dont have the same range of taste buds that most omnivores or herbivores have. Which, I mean, okay, sure, but that doesnt mean I wouldnt appreciate some synthetic red meat flavor in my diet.

Im still tracking down that damn orbital greenhouse. Dont think Ive forgotten! Ill get to it. Were running a defragment routine on the remains of the damaged parts of the shuttles memory.

As for the shuttle itself, well. Im running a repair routine on that myself. Manually. Because the repair bots on the station dont really know what to do with it.

We - and by we I mean me with Ennos providing commentary - hauled this thing in when it drifted a bit too close a few days ago. I almost forgot about it, what with getting sidetracked and shot repeatedly. But now, Im taking advantage of some quiet time to try to retrofit it. See if I can apply a lot of the previously abstract knowledge Ive built up to some paws-on practice.

It is-and-or-was a cramped two-seater, with a chunky rectangular box of a cargo bay, an engine that is just barely technically capable of safely braking when at full mass, and so few safety features that I think its a workplace hazard just to think about piloting it.

Would it surprise you, at all, to learn that its hull markings are from a hypercorp?

Its from a company called Ferromancer, and past experience lets me know theyre mainly a high end design and manufacturing company for delicate spaceship parts. Theyre from back when the corps had branding, almost like nations actually. Ive encountered their work before, and I hate them. The shuttle is actually a weird example of just how good their stuff is.

Not a single part in the shuttle was actually built by Ferromancer.

Now, I get it. Just because you build hot rods doesnt mean you built the truck that ferries them around. But its pretty telling that the miraculously surviving employee manual makes it clear that their pilots are never to attempt Ferromancer-standard maintenance or upgrades to this shuttle. And built at a time when spaceflight was *expensive*, when if you had the option to work in house, you *did*, they chose to outsource their most common workhorse shuttles to the lowest bidder.

The lowest bidder, still more expensive than doing it themselves, was their preferred option. Let that sink in.

I tried to recover a live-lattice aggregation generator theyd built from a wreck once. The first tap, the *slightest* motion, and it activated, and began generating thrust. Punched through the wrecks hull, snapped two of the stations manipulator arms, and crashed into Jupiter a few hours later.

To be clear on this, that was a shelf-stable power generation unit. Not an engine, thruster, drive, or other form of propulsion. Well, intentional propulsion.

Anyway, point is, Im trying to put the shuttle back together, and am about a fourth of the way through cutting away a bulkhead thats worth more as scrap metal than ship structure when Glitter calls.

I humbly request a token of favor. Glitter says out of nowhere.

Which, naturally, causes me to yowl in surprise, and jerk my paw in a way that *technically* removes the damaged plate. It also adds one other plate to the list of damaged bits to remove. That is a problem for future Lily; though present Lily does make a note that this is Glitters fault.

Im not getting you a new battery just so you can run the subspace comm every minute of the day. I reply, once Ive regained my composure. Fortunately, inside the engineering armor, my composure can be as horrible as I want and no one can see through the shielding. I already have enough trouble with power supply. Though, I did uncover an actual factory deck today! It could maybe put something together? Ill ask Ennos later when they know what all the loaded schematics on the assembly lines are.

I know from experience by now that Glitters long pause is not due to comms lag or anything so pedestrian. Instead, its her waiting for me to stop rambling. Which, when I figured that out, I will admit kind of stung.

I am just about to ask what it is shed like, breaking the silence that has started to fill the shuttle bay, when she speaks again. I have noticed, recently, that you regularly fire a low intensity beam weapon to the surface. Glitter states, in her usual noble tone.

Oh! Yes. Theres a living chemical thing down there that mind controls people. I cant safely kill it, so I sort of prod it to move on every now and then so it doesnt accidentally wipe out whole villages or something. I pad across the bay and to the tool that Ive cobbled together to adjust the settings on the miniature laser strapped to my paw. With the armor on, its a lot easier than otherwise to mess with the dials, but its still obvious this was made for someone with fingers, and its simpler to just slap my suited paw into the slot and let the simple machine dial down the intensity until its where I need it to be and I can get back to work. It takes basically no focus, so I can do this while I keep talking. The whole thing is sort of a chore, really. The Haze - I call it the Haze - isnt actually that dangerous. I just need to keep it moving, and this lets me do it without collateral damage.

Glitters voice, patient as a saint to be able to deal with me when Im excited, waits just long enough to be polite, and then asks her favor. Would you be offended if I asked to do that?

Anyway. Shuttle? Broken. Plants? Potentially existent. The problem? Getting the plants from there to here without a shuttle. The solution?

I mean, build a shuttle I guess. Or learn that the station has some kind of science fiction style teleporter on it. Ive been finding a *lot* of stuff behind all those doors I can open now that the station recognizes me as giving commands.

Not that it didnt recognize me as the primary authority to begin with, but at least now it can hear me. And theres so much more to do, now. Its I mean, its a little exhausting, sometimes?

Not that I miss how things were previously. You spend one century frantically trying to keep the maintenance routines online and shooting down problems, and youre pretty much over it. But it was. I dunno. It was familiar? I was used to it. I knew what I was doing.

Now? Now I dont know anything, it feels like. Everything that changes just unearths a half dozen things I can realize I never knew in the first place. My voice just shows off how much of the station I havent ever explored. Ennos shows me how little I know about what the systems are doing behind the scenes. Learning more about my own medical history is leaving me feeling like I should be one of the stations ghosts.

And I just dont know what to do about any of it.

Im not actually that smart. Im the smartest cat ever, but I dont have answers. Ive been shying away from actually trying to remember the past for four hundred years. Answers might scare me more than the questions ever could. And the questions these days are often boiling down to do you live in a haunted house, so thats kind of worrying all on its own.

This is why I hate the process of taking off the engineering armor. It takes twenty minutes, and that gives me too much time to think.

Now, though, Im free from my duralumin confines, and I can dash through the stations oversized corridors as a visible cloud of cleaner nanos try to catch up to me and undo the effects of being sealed in armor for six hours.

Ive figured out what to do with my time. Not forever, that is, but right now.

Restock my food reserves, check the logs to make sure no one is trying to call in an air strike, and then, get to a command station and start up the fabricators to build Glitter her new tool.

Ennos was right. It is absurd. I dont think he was listening in on our conversation; this thing is calibrated to melt down comets. Its got some kind of impossible quantum physics effect that lets it bleed off kinetic energy. Or I mean, I think it converts kinetic energy into heat? Rapidly? This doesnt seem like a laser at all.

I check. Its not. Its called an elser. This seems impossible, under conventional physical laws, and sure enough, it is. Looks like a part of the lensing array uses a fairly common metamaterial that we still have a stockpile of in one of the cargo bays. Mostly because I havent been building guns that stop things by melting them.

I consider it for a good minute or two. Which is, for me, basically forever. Then, I make a conscious choice to *not* give Glitter the impossible space gun. I find the other designs Ennos earmarked in the system, pick a good old fashioned orbit to surface laser array, and start the assembly process.

Its about two thirds done, with me keeping an eye on it to troubleshoot any manufacturing bugs that come up, when Glitter gets back to me. She would like to try having her physical form changed. Im not exactly shocked, but Im still feeling pretty good, a little bobbing pep in my movements as I watch the assembler do its job.

It takes two days and three spacewalks for me to get the whole thing setup. Theres only one small interruption to shoot down a long range missile thatd been in accidental orbit around the sun, and just got within effective range of a potential target. Scared the heck out of Ennos when it lit off its engines just outside our orbital path, and it wasnt even aiming for us. I almost missed that one! But got it at the last minute before it hit one of the large scale habitat stations. I still dont know if anyone lives on those anymore, but I didnt want to take the chance.

And then, a week later, after a few test fires and, yes, a stockpile of commercial batteries added to Glitters internals, she takes her first poke at the Haze, shifting it out of a small tower city that itd been in for a little while.

I dunno if shed ever say it out loud - Glitter has a kind of propriety to her etiquette that I dont quite *get* really - but my friend seems happy. I can hear the smile in her digital voice; no amount of AI control of their own bodies, it seems, lets them completely abandon unconscious emotional broadcast.

Its been a good week.

And its killed enough time that the shuttles map data has been as repaired as its gonna get.

Im going hunting.

For carrots. To be clear. I am hunting for carrots, or other root vegetables.

This was supposed to be dramatic, and I am ruining the gravitas. Okay. Well, gravitas ruined, I feel comfortable taking a nap before I get back to work.

I fall asleep in the exolab, thin rays of sun glittering through their windows, the feeling of a comforting hand on my head and a sense of pride carrying me into my dreams.