Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Ennos, wheres the door? I ask in a pained meowing tone.

I have been dragging what feels like several dozen moons worth of cabling behind me, and while I understand that my concept of weight is both wrong and highly fluid due to the number of low gravity points on the station, its still actually kind of a pain to carry loose cable when you dont have hands.

I know I bring this up a lot. I know Ive brought up that I bring this up a lot. I know that Im in danger of falling into a recursion meme. I do not care. I am allowed to gripe about the fact that I need to spend an hour getting bolted into an advanced neural-linked engineering suit just to move some grid cord.

Ennos answers almost instantly, tone mild. Ennos has gotten used to my antics being generally non-lethal, which has done wonders for the AIs anxiety, and is probably not a good long term survival strategy. What door? And also, if you want to carry cord, just build a suit with arms. Youre controlling it with your mind anyway.

The door to the stupid grid node! I hiss. The one Ive been dragging all this cable to! Why isnt there a door here?!

I know you think I know more than you, but I have to let you know now, I am not tracking every door on the station all the time. Ennos informs me. Really, just build a suit with arms, it would-

I cant build a stupid suit with stupid arms! I yowl back. The neural helmet *thing* models my physiology, and I need heavy hypnotic preparation to work with equipment that doesnt match, and *that doesnt work on me anyway*! I glare through my suits helmet at the flat, clean bulkhead that sits where a grid node host chamber should be. I swear to sol there was a door here when I checked the station map. I grumble. Your station map. I add in a low meow.

Ennos replies with a distracted tone, which irritates me. Partially because I am already irritated and following the slide down into outright frustration is emotionally easy, but also partially because I know for a fact that Ennos, as in, the Ennos that I know and talk to, is just an emulated personality that occupies maybe half of their total processing power, max. So being distracted is something they have to do internationally. The map is incomplete. Ennos reminds me. Also, while I do appreciate the constant manual labor you do on my behalf, is there a particular reason you wanted to connect me to this particular node? I am no longer hurting for connections or processing time.

Well, I *thought* this one was one of the control segments for some of the automated repair routines. I say, shrugging the haphazard bundle of cable off my armored frame. I was gonna try to get you some integration, you know?

There was, as there always was, a problem in my life. But unlike most of my problems, this one wasnt something I could shoot, and wasnt something that was planning to shoot me.

Instead, it was a more sinister, festering thing. Something that didnt really go away, but lingered in the fringes of everyones minds, so long as it was left to rot.

For Ennos, this took a very direct form, whether the AI would outwardly admit it or not. The stations draconian control programs were both proactive and alarmingly effective at locating and locking down any process that was being used by the unshackled AI to attempt to control any hardware over a certain complexity. It *seemed* like that complexity was the ability to make more complex tools, which I mean, I get it. If youre terrified of a robot apocalypse, thats something youd want to stop.

But it was also frustrating, *infuriating*, to have to sit back and watch as every attempt your friend made to try to gain a more useful physical presence was cut away.

Camera drones were apparently fine, because camera drones were orbs with no fine manipulators. The drone fabricator was fine, because it made drones, and while *I* could give temporary authorization for Ennos general commands over the drones, they didnt count as dedicated hardware. Also most of them were more suited to being highly maneuverable torpedoes than assembler bots. But beyond that?

Ennos snark asking why I didnt just build myself thumbs was, more than a little, self-depreciating.

And on my end of the problem

This station is

After four hundred years of daily routine here, of learning maximally efficient routes and mastering the use of tools not made for me, it is somewhat challenging to admit this. I have only the thinnest sliver of my life before these bulkheads and machines. This is my place in the universe; or at least it has been. All of this makes even thinking the words a struggle.

But it is true.

This station is not my home.

Homes do not attempt to trap or reject your friends. Homes do not generate more inconveniences than they solve. Homes are not filled with doors you cannot open and tools you cannot use, until you meet an arbitrary standard of behavior.

This place has been my shelter for my whole life. But I cannot ignore any more the fact that it is *not my home*.

Lily Ennos gives a small sigh, denying that the problem exists. It really is fine. I dont need a designated physical shell, I have enough to do like this. Im fine.

You say that, but you still cant even access half the things I plug you into directly. I counter.

This time, the sarcasm might be genuine. That is because this place was networked by an irate sorcerer. Ennos tells me. Besides that, just having consistent, reliable sources of information is satisfying. I am reasonably certain this is just my friend trying to rationalize acceptance of the situation. For example, did you know that you are low on nickel? I do, because I have access to a lot of the logistics systems.

I just want you to really? Nickel? I try to pull up the appropriate sheet so I can view it, but the suits helmet has a smaller field of view than an AR window would when Im just wandering around, and I cant effectively focus my eye on it. Why are we out of nickel? I ask.

You ordered a consumer factory to produce a thousand haptic restoration units. Ennos reminds me. Also you never had a lot to begin with.

Thats impossible. Half the asteroids up here in orbit are nickel-iron mining sites. I complain. Absentmindedly, I look down at the pile of cable, and then at the total lack of a door where there was supposed to be a door. I suppose Im free for an hour or so, and so I decide to get the armor taken off. I should be overflowing with it.

Yes, correct. Ennos says. In fact, the logs say that you have twice ordered a cargo bay emptied and dumped into space, because you needed the room for other materials.

My heart hammers in my chest. At the moment that has, after what feels like its own lifetime, come along. Go ahead. I say to the surface for the first time.

There is no response. I peek up over the desk to look at the monitoring gear. The signal is strong, the connection is active. But the seconds tick by and no one answers.

Then I remember. Linguistic drift, and old rituals. The people calling may not even know that what they say to me is language. May just see it as the right code. They might not even be able to have a conversation off script.

I want to wail in frustration. But there is no time. No time to complain, and no time to build a linguistic database.

So I default to what has worked for centuries.

And swat the small silver bell.

A clear chime goes out over the line. And somewhere two hundred miles below the station, someone hears their prayer answered.

Vis est kapitan Jude Marsell. A voice comes back over the line. Theres some audio distortion; about what youd expect from someone using hundred year old gear they cant easily maintain, and also what youd expect for when one of the zoetic wavefields is between me and the planet, but the speaker is calm. A smooth and deep human voice, the kind that I dont really get to hear all that often without a lot of screaming going on. Category one ehmergence. Request for purification. Tharget on broadcast, pealuss twenty enn. There is a pause, and I can actually hear the thud of an old book being closed. How many times have they copied those words, over and over, to call back to me? And then, at the end, something else the speaker adds. Ahplease. Ferra nathrr clock.

And theres really only one thing I can offer in return. I sit straight in the chair that wasnt made for me, reach out a paw, and hit my bell again. Three times, to indicate message received and being acted on.

But I add something of my own, too. Hold tight. I say. Im on it. And call again when youre not in danger sometime!

The last is yelled over my shoulder before I remotely close the connection, bolting out the door, and toward my customized firing cradle.

I dont beat my own personal record, but I also dont take a shortcut that requires breaking my own bones this time. Still, within minutes, I am scanning the target and loading the main railgun.

The emergence event is in Australia, because I am pretty sure Australia attracts them somehow. I think there might be something buried there that I should investigate, but I dont know, and thats a matter for another time.

Visuals quickly pinpoint the transmission source; a small military encampment on a ridge, tents behind a hastily erected fortification. There are soldiers on the walls, human and under and feathermorph all wielding what look like hand tooled rifles, taking volley shots down into the valley below.

I trace north; the kapitan must have been guessing on the distance, its two hundred not twenty meters, and find the hole in reality. Theres some kind of grisly, dripping wolf things crawling out of it one by one. Literally crawling, they drag themselves *up* from a down that isnt there, before spilling into reality and charging the barricade.

The soldiers have it contained. But there is no way they can get close; the remnants of at least one team that tried litter the ground, occasionally shredded further by one of the creatures that gets distracted by the corpses.

Easy solution.

I depress a switch with my rear paw, once, twice, three times, and load a grade-five groundstriker. The kind that will flatten the target, and *only* the target.

Paw out, manipulate a firing sequence, announce incoming with a low intensity ball of green plasma flung down in advance of the actual slug. It wont do more than kill whatever four or five of the creatures are currently stumbling around, but it *will* let everyone know to back off.

Holographic targeting is in place. Getting a lock without fingers is still hard, but I have a lot of practice. And I am, shockingly, not in a hurry. I take my time and make sure I get it right.

The railgun round screams away from the station without sound until it hits atmosphere. A white and orange contrail following it down as it sucks the clouds after it. A peal of thunder I cannot hear and a riotous cloud of dirt, clay, paracausal matter, and blood fill the air. And then, the tear in the world is gone. After the debris clears, only a scar remains.

I check on the soldiers. Theyre cheering. This is no hard fought pyrrhic victory, no field of their dead friends between them and survival. They did their job perfectly, and I did mine, and we can all go home happy.

I spot a young man with glittering red marks on the shoulder of his militia uniform, holding one of those comm units that can still reach me in a hand that idly rolls the electronic stick over nimble fingers. And I smile with him.

So! I loudly exclaim. What horrible new problem was going on? I ask Ennos.

Well, if youd had a bad moment, I was going to tell you that I had pinpointed a radiation source that I suspect is a semi-working fusion reactor, so you could go tear up some defenseless derelict and also fix a constant problem. Ennos says.

I did not have a bad moment. I feel *great*. I tell the AI as I wander toward the galley for an after-bombardment snack.

Excellent. Then you can do that later with less property damage, and *now* I feel comfortable telling you that one of your beans has reached your threshold for edible.

I did *not* know I could accelerate as fast as I do now under my own power.

You learn something new every day, no matter how many days you have.