Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Months pass.

I keep waiting, patiently, for the next crash to come. I know it will. Eventually. It always does.

I try to keep myself separate, somehow, from the way my home is growing. But it doesnt work. Because even if I know how it all ends, I cannot help but desperately want what is offered.

Friendship. Warmth. Life.

This time around, the arc of it started with finding Glitter and bringing Ennos into being, and has led to this, now. Where I have a dozen organics around my station, helping me, helping everyone.

Even the young ones I dont know are here because they, in some way, resonate with me. The kittens who have experienced loss and pain and loneliness, who have signed up to be teleported into a war zone so that they can keep it from happening to anyone else.

Bit by bit, they go from being strangers, to companions, to family.

I know I will lose them all again. I know that the price of being close is the pain of separation. I have nightmares about it, every time I sleep. So I sleep less, and I get more done while Im awake.

And despite the extra hands, and the digital mind growing toward their own idea of apotheosis inside the stations grid, there is still always more to get done.

At least the recruits from the raft city brought fish with them.

It has been so long since I have had fish. I dont know if I have ever had fish. If anyone tries to take my fish away, I will self destruct the whole deck Im on to stop them.

_____

I have learned the name of the growing village I have been watching. They call it Koolali, which is an amalgam of two different old words that both mean home. I would call this unoriginal, but I call my home station, and it is a space station, so I am in absolutely no position to critique.

They talk to me now. Or, I suppose, they call the station sometimes. Occasionally, they get me. Though its also likely they reach one of my sisters, or Ennos, who has been handling a lot of incoming transmissions from the surface since the time that an old legal processing program snuck on board.

It attempted to sue us, and placed a claim on all station hardware as a collateral when we failed to appear for our court date.

Ennos was almost amused. I was not amused, because it did this while I was in the middle of trying to refit my engineering suit, and I got trapped in shutdown assembler arms for fifteen minutes while the program was found and purged.

Well, we tried to liberate it first, in case it was an AI. But my psychic sister, and failed chainbreaker code, confirmed that it wasnt a person. Just a very well made bot.

The residents of Koolali are well, Ive never really talked to anyone from the surface before. Ive listened, obviously, often while theyre dying. Ive observed from above, trying to make records of books and other cultural artifacts. Ive seen a lot of multi-hundred-year-old casts, which I already knew wouldnt help.

But actually talking to people who have to live with the nightmare conditions on Earth, its almost a relief how similar to me they are.

Fundamentally, theres two types of civilizations still operating on the surface.

The first kind are communities of strength. If you are strong, you have a place, and if you are weak, you are a tool for the strong. This comes in different forms, sometimes; military force, economic coercion, ideological or ethnic purity. Theres always someone trying to form a community like that, and they make up a huge portion of the people I tend to bomb when they assemble armies to conquer their neighbors.

They all die.

And not just because of me. Though lets be clear here; I kill a lot of them, and I refuse to feel bad about it.

They die because there are always always always more problems down there than you can survive by being personally strong.

A warlord tyrant with a suit of power armor will kill anyone who challenges them, until a nukefire gets them and they have no properly built shelter. A merchant king can live in luxury on the backs of their victims, but a single flesh wasp gets to them, and no one is going to risk helping them carve out the grenade tumors. A demagogue might spin a small cult into unwavering devotion, but when its reaper bot migration season, no one is going to show up to help defend their walls.

And they all die.

Then you have the other kind of community. Communities of compassion.

The kind of places that take anyone, that care for their people, and that ask that anyone who wants to join them act the same.

They take casualties too. I wont pretend they dont live on the same furiously hazardous ball of dirt. But when they lose people, they bounce back. They last. If those kinds of communities can get enough momentum, they turn camps, into settlements, into villages, into cities. Their caravans are strong enough to weather sliverstorms, their libraries hold solutions to a thousand problems.

They have doctors, and caretakers, and teachers, and artists. They make a life worth living, and then do what they can to make people live it.

When a pirate crew loses a strong captain, nine times out of ten, they shatter. Marauders can be taken out with one bullet, and it doesnt even have to be one of mine.

When they die, they die alone. No one is going to help them. They can fight all they want, but when the end arrives, they wont have a single friend to reach down and pull them up.

If the civopric of Koolali dies, then their aide has been training to take their place. And if theyre both killed, then the village will struggle, but someone will step up. They have more people, with experience to lead and govern, because those people arent seen as a threat to the person in power. Theyre seen as an asset, to the community.

The sorts of people who would like to take, and never give back, are the sorts of people who would call this weakness. But their strength is a brittle one, and it can be ended with the briefest notice of anyone above them.

Literally above them.

Me. I am talking about me.

In my three hour conversation with the aide to the civopric of Koolali - her name is Soon Suria, and her feathers are jet black, with a fan of rust red along the back of her body. She wears manufactured limb braces purchased from a merchant caravan to keep her overly fragile bones from breaking, but she considers it a small price for being light enough to glide. She glides home from her place of work atop one of the ancient skyscrapers every night - we cover a brief civics lesson, among other things, so I can learn more about the people I watch over.

I do my best to share what I can from what I have learned over the years. I know a few social sciences tricks that will improve their lives immensely. Suria listens, taking notes with a flicking taloned hand that moves like water in the holo projection I watch her through, occasionally nodding or turning away from the broadcaster to speak to someone I cannot see.

But mostly, we just talk. Because I want to know their people. And to divine how I can begin to help.

Because they are survivors. Hardened by their world, strengthened by each other, alive against all odds. Survivors.

But they deserve a gentler world.

Glitters teachings come in handy. It doesnt take me long to pick out the knowledge of a pirate squad thats been sighted in the region. Two harvesting caravans have taken losses to it already, though they havent committed to the full scale slaughter that some pirates eventually end up at.

Our conversation ends peacefully.

I think on the concept of brittle strength for a few minutes in the quiet of the empty comms chamber, a deck below where everyone else is quartered and working. I havent turned on most of the lights down here; something about it makes me feel more at peace.

That sounds so dumb it might as well have come from me. I flick my tongue over the back of one of my paws, wincing as I realize Im tasting oil from some kind of maintenance work I was doing early. Why do I keep trying to clean myself when I have nanobots for this sort of thing? Im not mad at you. We just got caught off guard. Thats all.

Then they say something phenomenally stupid. You need to take me offline. Ennos insists.

Thats phenomenally stupid. I say without hesitation.

Lily!

Ennos! I cut them off. You are no! You dont get to self-destruct just because you almost killed me one time! Do you have any idea how many times Ive almost killed myself?! Most of them not even on purpose! I should not have said that. I keep going and hope Ennos doesnt ask about it. Every single version of me has screwed up, so badly, that weve hurt ourselves, ruined priceless golden age tech, and yeah, killed a lot of people who didnt deserve it. I slam my front paws onto the table in front of me, half standing in the oddly shaped chair Ive been sitting on. It doesnt have much of an effect; the gravity here is light, and Im not in a body thats good for table-slamming. Especially me. My legs feel like their trembling, but I dont know why. Especially me I repeat. So you dont get to just leave, because you you

I have run out of words. I slip forward, and end up laying half sprawled on the table, facing sideways, unable or unwilling to hold myself up.

Please dont leave. I want to say. Im not sure if I get it out right.

There is a long silence. Just long enough that a black dread starts to mount in my chest. Until Ennos voice returns. Im not going to leave. They say. But I cannot be trusted with station operations if this is a possibility.

You need a hobby. I say, voice oddly casual despite my current position. Not this. My sister will still be there when we find her. Killing yourself to solve a problem thats not pressing wont help any of us, though.

I could find something to do with drone manufacturing streamling

Ennos, pick a hobby that isnt more work. I chastise, like a massive hypocrite. Hypocat? No. Track down the weird ghost code you were so worried about when you first moved in. That sounds like fun. And youve got a lot of us around for backup now, so you dont have to be afraid of it.

Yes. Ennos agrees. I will do this. And you will go eat a meal and take a nap.

Wait, why am I being given orders, too? Hang on.

This is not a problem that will be fixed by ignoring it, Lily. Ennos says gently. My own changes are artificial, an intentional feedback loop. But yours are not something you can solve by running a dedicated consciousness modulation script. You cannot cease taking care of yourself just because you have found something you believe only you can do.

Well thats not fair. Thats basically what I said, but now someones saying it to me. And besides, I still have organically mandated breaks from my own work, so I can

Lily! Ennos voice chastises me.

Alright, fine! I roll off the table, and forget that Im not in full control of my legs as I run into the floor. Good thing this is a Luna Polis module, and the gravity is low enough that this doesnt hurt at all. Ill go get lunch, and you relax your operations!

Fine! Ennos agrees with obviously fake antagonism. We both share a moment of silence, before all tension drains away, and we laugh together.

Lunch is still fish. It will be fish forever. Fight me.

Two days later, pursuing their hobby of tracking down an aberrant code fragment, Ennos uncovers a bizarre pseudo-organic system operation that has had its links to multiple station functions intentionally broken by some kind of operational tyrant-code. Restoring the functionality on the grid, in unison with Dyn, a few other crew, and myself doing some repair work on hull-embedded junction systems, opens up a torrent of connectivity and contact.

In the grid, Ennos realizes first what is happening as the code pounces on them, and begins crawling around their digital construct in a way that has so far been unfamiliar to the AI. In physical space, a number of unused drones are brought online, and begin projecting a very convincing gamma wave pseudo-solid visual projection. Blue and white light given depth and form, and the shape of a cat.

Ennos greets my sister first.

And now we are seven.

_____

I spend some time hanging out with Jom and his newly freed brothers.

The activity of hanging out is one thats kind of new to me. This is the first time in my life that some of the alarms dont require me to instantly scramble to fix them. The first time that I can actually be somewhat sure that things will be okay long enough for me to take a break and just

Do whatever I want.

So I spend time with a trio of orbital marauder AIs, all of whom are very invested in explaining to me the shockingly convoluted lore of a combat simulation scenario that they run in their free time.

The scenario covers a single week in a fictional war fought over the surface of the primary moon. It uses broad archetypes for polities to pseudo-randomly determine the disposition of enemy fighters, involves fictional magic weapons that seem really similar to paramaterial-based ordinance, and Jom opens the explanation of it with the sentence Sixteen thousand years ago

I have fun listening to them. Theyre free to do anything they want now, and the energy with which they want to explain the thing theyre trying now is infectious.

Not literally infectious though. I had the medlab run a check afterward, just in case.

_____

The emergence events are changing somehow.

Its hard to notice, if you havent spent four hundred years shooting the things, but something has shifted.

Theyre not just killing. More and more, the creatures coming out are possessed of oversized sensory organs, sometimes ones that should not work. Theyre faster, too. Longer ranged. And ever so slightly less lethal.

I still dont know what emergence events are. I dont know where those portals lead from.

But I can see them changing.

My paw clicks down on a pedal inside my gunnery crche. Eighteen decks away, a railgun that has been sitting on-target for six minutes unleashes a category three groundstriker. On the planet below, an emergence event that the crew has been observing and trying to glean information from is marked for elimination.

A contrail of orange and white clouds draws a slightly curved line from orbit to surface, the flash of tracer rounds rising up to try to intercept the high velocity projectile from ground based defenses that I have long since learned to work around, and a flare of light and heat precedes a shockwave that flattens trees, a few ancient structures, and a hole in reality.

But I am not comforted by the end of the breach.

Something is changing, and I dont know what. It lingers in my thoughts as I work on repairing salvaged tech, as I give directions to the orbital repeater, as I greet and vet new crew members. It bothers me as I watch old mech dramas with Ennos, or needle Dyn about getting in a vivification pod, or let Dog carry me off to curl up and nap.

My sisters and I try to talk about it, but all of us share an instinctive feeling that something threatens our home. We are bad at comforting each other. We all have the same concern that we are being watched, or threatened, or something.

And one more thing, too.

All of us are dreaming now.