Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Im dreaming again. Or something dream-esque. Its not a dream, really. Ive had some experience with dreams; all of mine are nightmares. When I dream, I dream of gunshots, and lost chances.

This isnt like that. But Ive been here before.Updated from novelbIn.(c)om

Its gonna be close. A voice sounds. My voice. Not from me, though. But thats something Im getting used to, when Im awake.

Shell get there. Another voice speaks. A woman, achingly familiar.

Alice. Mom. Are you there? I cant see, its all a grey fog. Where am I?

I know Im not dreaming, but I dont know what I *am* doing.

So I go with my instinct, and stumble around blindly for what feels like an hour or so. Wandering through this obscuring mist across a glassy surface.

Its not uniform though, and my brain is still working here, unlike when Im actually dreaming. And I notice when it loops on me. This place is not that large; at least the bit Im trapped in.

Which is why its a surprise when I run into someone else.

This is different. The gelatinous outline of a cat says to me in a wet meow.

Not so much for me. I reply, flicking my ears. A part of me wants to touch them, and see what texture the ambulatory puddle actually is, but I dont think that works here.

They move like theyre trying to look around. I heard someone. They say sadly.

See if you can find them. I tell them, craning my neck to look up at the grey nothing sky overhead. I think I have to go.

She startles with a liquid ripple across her body. Wait!

Ill see you soon! I try to call as I wake up. Abruptly

An alarm sounds. Is sounding. Loudly. The klaxon beating a pattering into my sensitive ears that I would really prefer it stopped doing.

I crack an eye open. Peer out from underneath the retracted razorspine slots of Dogs tentacle that is currently draped over my head, and try to see the color of the alarms light.

Sometimes there are lights. Sometimes theyre in colors I can process. Ive tried upgrading my eyes before, but it never sticks. Cybernetic rejection, and my own weird rapid regrowth keeping replacement organs out. Its frustrating. But at least Im lucky enough to see a little bit into the spectrum to be able to identify that this alarm is *not* red.

Red would be bad. Red lights with alarms usually mean something horrible is about to happen. This alarm just doesnt have a flashing light to go with it. Which means it could still be anything, but theres a *chance* its not horrible.

Let me up Dog. I mutter sleepily, half in cat, half in whatever spoken language Ive been emulating lately. I need to get to work. Work, as soon as I take a very long stretch.

No you dont. Glitters voice chimes from a nearby camera drone, hovering over the gap between the two rec couches in this communal area.

I pause, as Dog continues sleeping anyway and doesnt let me up. I dont? I ask.

On the couch across from where Ive been napping surrounded by six hundred pounds of militarized fur, Dyn actually offers information without prompting, which is a small miracle. Youre off shift. She says, her mechanical eye focused on the light and color of the holo-projector on the other side of the room. She and Glitter appear to be watching some kind of historical document, or an episode of a two hundred year old circuit opera.

Her words catch up to me. Off shift. Because we *have* those now.

Well, for the organics among us. Glitter and Ennos never stop working. But they also never get bored of working, and can keep working while also pursuing their hobbies at full capacity. Which is, honestly, completely unfair and Im so glad they can do it.

Our shifts arent scheduled. Because I dont think any of my sisters and I could handle that. Instead, we just sort of rotate through who has downtime for a while. Unless something goes wrong.

Its been almost a week, and its working very well. Which is probably why the alarm has turned off and nothing has exploded.

Speaking of things that are working well, I own a teleporter again.

The AIs are *aware* that I own a teleporter. They get, on a purely factual level, that teleportation is happening. Ennos freaked out when I sent a good chunk of the survivors back to the surface, thinking Id just disintegrated them or something. Id had to then repeatedly grab stuff from nearby, including myself coming back from a few salvage operations, to prove that I could in fact move matter without vaporizing it.

Even then, they still dont like thinking about it. I think Ennos has something akin to a note taped up to their wall that just says teleportation is possible, and they reference it when it comes up, because even the mention of it can hurt their processes.

Eventually, the station takes everything on it. And uses it for what it thinks its supposed to.

And I dont know why, exactly, but it doesnt want me to see my sisters. I guess I dont really need to know why, exactly. If it had a reason, it could have just found a way to tell me. I would have listened. We all would have. Maybe its for some grand purpose, or some greater good.

But more than Im four hundred years old, and I think Im out of patience for anyone trying to tell me theyre doing anything awful for the greater good. Sometimes the world ends. That just happens. Its not the end of the world.

My prey located, I briefly entertain the thought of just slicing the whole array in half with one of my paw lasers. I refrain. Because I have an even more powerful tool in my arsenal now.

I amuse myself for the next eighteen minutes and nine seconds by adapting a small piece of code to layer a short range resonance scanner over the interface for one of the mobile mount intercept masers, and then lighting up small chunks of metal in a way that is highly visible to the sensors of some of the grapple drones on station, and sending them out to grab it and dump the material in the industrial repeater.

The level of control I have through just my AR interface now feels like Ive just finished gnawing through a medical restraint thats been holding me down to an examination bed for the last three weeks. Which is to say, liberating. And also hungry. Its a remarkably similar feeling, actually. I should get lunch after this.

At the eighteen minutes and ten second mark, the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing reaches my ears. In here! I call politely, as Im joined by one of my new crew.

The vast majority of the survivors of the caravan that I teleported up here decided that living in space on an active battlestation that got shot, exploded, or infiltrated by hostile slime once a week, was a bad idea. They asked to be teleported *back*. Not literally back, just back to Earth somewhere. I put them in that one village that I helped once, which looked a lot larger than I remember. They were happy to meet them. I think. I assume.

The others stayed up here. Six new people. A doubling of my crew. The adventurous and foolish and brave. Thered been some family arguments when theyd decided to stay, but Id take anyone.

Especially anyone with hands.

Reporting, captain! The young adapted human salutes me. Or makes a motion I assume is a salute. Hes out of breath, panting, and clearly thinks this is an emergency. Which is why Im gonna feel a bit bad about this in a second.

Dont do that. I say to the salute. Also, can you unplug that? I point a paw at the transmitter, balancing on my other legs in a motion Ive gotten really good at.

He looks at it, then back at me. Wwhat?

I need that to stop working. I explained. Well, explained as far as I ever explain things. Dang, I should get better at explaining things. Ill try now! Its sending out a signal that I need to stop, and I *could* just blow it up or vent it into space or something, but I feel like it would be easier to just unplug it? Hes still giving me a wide eyed confused look, the secondary membrane over his extra large cloudy blue eyes flickering as he stares at me. Because I dont have hands? I add.

I guess that doesnt explain exactly as much as I could. I start trying to formulate a better explanation, when he shrugs, and goes over to trace the power line out of the transmitter.

The following process is more involved than I had expected. We talk for a while as I vaporize a hull weld so he can crawl back into a cable run channel. His names Luukri, and hes excited to be here, though this kind of work is weirdly familiar to being on a seafaring ship. The promise of a future, and my offer of actual pay (somehow) is just too good to pass up. His boyfriend stayed up here too. Theyve been trying to figure out what the religious meaning of the sculpture in all the crew rooms is.

I should probably explain *that* at some point, before I accidentally found a religion again.

But not now. Because now, the kid grabs his calloused webbed hands onto the end of a cord where it links into the main trunk, and pulls. And just like that, the suppression field thats been targeted on me vanishes.

I dont feel it, really.

But someone does.

The cleaner nanos swirl, more and more of them pouring in from outside the deck. They become visible, glittering black spots in the air that the kid notices as he crawls back out of the wall.

He shouts something thats almost certainly a surface curse word, and I mentally file it away as something else I can yell when I get annoyed, as the cleaner nanos begin to pull together more and more mass into a solid form that cascades with spiked geometric waves as it comes together.

And then it coheres, starts emulating being affected by local gravity, and drops her paws to the deck.

My sister, the first of them that I met, flicks her angular tail in a mirror my own as we face each other. Her artificial eyes widen in surprise, the nanoswarm that composes her body folding and refolding into increasingly detailed pyramid patterns until it looks like shes covered in familiar fine black and white fur, albeit fur that has a distinctly angular and artificial look to it.

She chirps a question, at about the same time the new kid asks something similar.

I just exhale a feline laugh, and step forward to rub myself into her flank.

Welcome back. I say, as she presses back into me. We have-

An alarm sounds. This one with a strobing red light. Why there even are colored lights for the station wide alarms *here* is beyond me, but whatever, no time for that now.

Introductions later. New problem now.

Somehow, Im less worried than normal.