Here is a fun fact! Human creativity mixed with the raw computing power of a variety of different information storage systems has, over the years, led to a lot of parallel solutions to the same problems.

The biggest example, from back when ‘information storage systems’ meant ‘paper, and if you were lucky, a *good* pen’, is guns. Plenty of cultures developed shovels in the absence of each other, and those shovels are, let’s be real here, pretty much all the same shovel. The inflexible human desire to not get your fingers dirty is universal.

Guns, though? Tons of different ways to shape a barrel, shape a projectile, propel a projectile, and craft a device that can be actually aimed. Permutations in the thousands, some of them just born from manufacturing errors or limitations that became tradition that became standards. It’s like a very clean example of the evolution of violence. And that was before there were computer models to design better, bigger guns. Guns too large or too small to stop, guns that fired from or into orbit. Guns that killed selectively, or not at all.

The digital age really let humans come up with a lot of innovative ways to kill the shit out of each other.

What I’m getting at here is that my space station has a *lot* of different guns on it. We’ve got cannon batteries, missiles, lasers…

Wait, no! That wasn’t what I was getting at at all! I got sidetracked being mildly sarcastic about how ‘smart’ your fucking smart weapons are.

The parallel solution thing. Multiple solutions to the same problem. You know where else it shows up? Medical technology.

It’s a lot smarter, there, too. Global pandemic ravaging your population? Get multiple sources working on a vaccine all at once. If one vaccine turns out to not work, or have side effects, or just falter in production, you’ve got backups to pick up the slack. It ensures a security of species that most individual humans won’t care about, but that keeps your civilizations ticking along.

The station has *three* medical facilities on it. One of them it was originally built with, and it’s your standard Oceanic Anarchy affair. Durable, useful, and not designed for me. It has an automated surgical suite that can patch up any damage I take, and a medication calibrator that can deal with illness, infection, or cosmic radiation poisoning. Illness and infection don’t really occur in space that often; basically everything here is biologically sterile, and if some extragalactic bacteria does make it onto the station, odds are good it either won’t do anything to me, or it’ll kill me so fast I won’t notice.

The second facility used to be a research lab. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Lily, didn’t you say your naptime zone *also* used to be a research lab?” Then very good! You remembered my name! I appreciate that. Also yes, there are a lot of things that used to be labs.

I think, at one point between the Anarchy building it, and my own people finding and moving into it, one of the interim residents of the station was a Real American noble of some kind. In the first twenty years here, I was constantly running into sealed off doors in weird places that led to untouched, or worse, ransacked laboratories. It’s likely that’s also where half the guns came from, if we’re being honest. It certainly explains why there’s *seven* different orbital insertion hunt-and-kill heavy drone bays stapled onto the station in various places. All of those are empty, and while technically I have the foundry and also a couple different material fabricators and parts printers, I’ve never felt the need to rebuild those particular machines from the schematics.

Anyway, labs. Used to be a lab, turned into medical. Or maybe it was a medical lab. Either way, it has the vivification pods, which are *not* Oceanic Anarchy tech. I actually don’t know what culture built them, because there’s no notes, and the station AR doesn’t have any record of them being brought on board. But they work, and they work really, really well.

The medlab also has no user manual, safety shutoff, or other health and safety measures that you probably ought to have around machinery that can regrow limbs by accident.

How do I know that? Good question!

No further questions!

Medical facility three is where I’m trying to wedge some of my precious free time into today, and it’s kind of the coolest one. It’s very future-tech in the design; lots of swooping shapes to the walls and furniture, lots of chrome. It looks like it was built by people who built function and form with equal regard, and that’s cool. Maybe a little opulent, but hey, if your society wants to build geometric art and smooth edges into everything, I’m not gonna complain.

It’s also one of the many, many chunks of the station that aren’t native architecture. And I know this because I was the one to capture it and add it to my home.

I should explain something about the orbital space around Earth.

It is, being incredibly charitable, messy. Being less charitable, and borrowing a phrase from my ow- mother, it is a “fucking mess of garbage, broken toys, and weaponry, which is just another word for garbage”.

At a certain point, the majority of things launched into orbit began to be equipped with powerful magnets, tuned so they could just slide around each other and maybe maintain stable orbit, instead of slamming together and for sure wasting millions of units of value. This made the problem slightly less bad going forward, but it didn’t really attend to the junk and debris already up there. So, people started launching sweeper satellites, collector drones, and all sorts of other cleanup tools. Most of them still up here. Along with a hundred thousand other sats, stations, drones, and overhead guns.

My station is armored, and shielded, but that shield eats up a lot of power the bigger a space it has to protect, and I don’t have a ton of power to spare. Also the armor isn’t really super effective against high speed microdebris, because that stuff is pretty much all armor piercing space bullets at this point.

So that’s the backstory. The daily reality is, I practically bump into a few hundred juicy targets every day. And that reflex to coil up and pounce on a particularly stupid piece of prey has never actually left me, even if there aren’t rats or laser pointers to chase up here. So containing myself is difficult.

This medical lab is one of the times I did not contain myself.

It was early on, it was *right there*, and I wanted it. So, a few gravity tethers, a healthy application of liquid metal sealant, and a maintenance droid that probably wished it had taken the day off, and we’d attached it to my station.

Then the usual routine. Decontamination of a dozen types, followed by careful examination to make sure none of the buttons would kill me if I pushed them.

And then, I had myself a new medlab.

I have tried, really hard, to not add too much to the station. Our power core is stretched thin, like I said, and most things up here aren’t worth it anyway. But in this case, I think I was right to do so, even if it was impulsive and stupid. Because the end result was that I got less impulsive and stupid.

The medlab is an uplift facility. They’d spent forty years and trillions of kronar trying to figure out how to make smart fish. Probably for some evil purposes, but that might be me being biased against fish.

The thing about parallel solutions to problems - *yeah, we’re back around to this* - is that by the time they decided they wanted to build a fanatical undersea army, a lot of this research had been going on for a while. And stored in the databases here were more than a few tricks that applied to *cats*.

It took me years, actual years of my early life, to figure out how to get the station to accept the new medlab as part of itself. Then to get the data to the *correct* medbay, with its medication synthesizer. And all of this was after it taking months to even conceive of the fact that I should try in the first place.

The first dose made me very sick, and I decided to never do it again. The second dose made me very sick, and I decided to never do it again. The third dose made me very sick, and one day later, it was like I’d woken up for the very first time.

The process compressed brain mass, improved neuron flow, rewired parts of my cognition to be faster, smoother. And then, a secondary procedure to fill the new gaps in my skull with more of this improved grey matter. It wasn’t so much that it ‘made me smart’ as it made me *able to think*. No longer did I have to spend a decade, stupidly learning just how to access an AR interface. No more yowling helplessly at closed doors that I didn’t understand how to open. The station was *mine*, and for the first time, I knew it.

Around then was when I really started to grow up. It was close after that when I fired my first shot. Some days, I regret my change immensely.

And yet, here I am, spending my free time trying to continue the work. Trying to see if there’s enough in common with an uplifted carp and my own unique mind to pry some tricks out of that, and rewire myself again. Because sometimes, smarter isn’t smart enough.

And, and I say this as another alarm beings to sound, red and orange hexagons springing to life in the AR around me, there is one other serious goal I have in mind.

I spring off the desk where a hardwired and slightly burned out monitor contains the secrets of a dozen genomes. Time enough for that later. I have already evaluated the alarm and checked the readout. Energy discharge, consistent with weapons fire, coming from primary lunar orbit toward the surface of that moon.

This happens sometimes. Old weapons platforms get twitchy, their AI goes mad. I try to talk to them sometimes, but my therapy capabilities are limited when they do not have hands with which to pet my luxuriousness, nerves with which to extract joy from the touch of my fur.

A shame. I should build them hands!

No! Bad idea. My brain is expanded beyond even human baseline, and yet still, half my ideas are stupid on arrival.

I run through smooth metal and plastic corridors, keeping my claws retracted so my soft paws can let me slide across the floors when I need to take corners. There is a short way to my destination, but I do not take it. It would require going through the cold storage room, and I… will not. Not now.

So I loop around the outside, and then up and over a ladder into gravity that feels slightly off, the grav plates here a little at odds with the primary ‘down’ of the station. And eventually, arrive at an ‘upward’ facing blister pod.

The more detailed scanners built into this weapons pod confirm it; there’s absolutely a platform firing on the primary moon. Which is, I’m kind of sad to say, pretty normal around here.

It’s fine though. All the surviving lunar cities are either *really* heavily shielded, or underground, or both. Though from the looks of things, whatever this platform is, it’s just hitting flat regolith anyway.

My orbit takes me into range for a clean shot in two minutes. If there was an immediate risk I could just pull the trigger and vaporize whatever space based infrastructure was between me and the rogue. Or, if I was feeling spicy, deploy a guided projectile and pilot it in from here with the AR. But there’s no rush.

The blister pod actually has windows, which is, I am aware, kind of stupid. But I suspect whoever built the medlab made this place too; I even tried to keep my cat-shaped comfort modifications in the style when I had the nanos reshape it.

The windows are some kind of stupidly durable crystal lattice. I tried clawing at them once - I tried clawing everything once, because, as previously mentioned, I used to be stupid - and it didn’t do a damn thing. I’m pretty sure the hull will shatter before the windows, which makes me wonder why we didn’t build the hull out of the same stuff. Maybe it was a later invention.

Through the windows, I can actually see the prime moon now. The mess of spacebound entities are clearing up a bit, giving me a reasonably good view. I meow a command at the AR, and a magnification window opens before my left eye, giving me a high definition look at the target.

It’s one of those weirdly shaped weapons platforms, from some old religious war. I was alive for it, but not ‘around’, if you know what I mean. The thing is two four-sided pyramids, with their bases kept gravitationally locked just over the central orb that contains the AI core and main weaponry.

A twisting lilac energy lashes out from it. An early model void beam, from back when humans and not cats were designing the firing algorithms. It is already in contact with the surface, writhing in an organic pattern across the dusty white rock.

Void beams are almost beautiful to look at. I wonder if that’s what the AI thinks, too.

The AR pings me; we’ll be in range in thirty seconds.

I watch it fire again, watch the lilac light trace another line across the surface. My chest is still aching from the sprint here; I could have taken my time, but that’s more of a human way of doing things. I think humans take their whole ‘walking steadily’ thing for granted sometimes.

Almost in range now. The moon is huge and beautiful above me. Soon, I’ll add the weapons platform as debris to its surface, but even though I’m cosmically littering, at least I’m lowering the risk of ‘inclement incineration’ as a weather report.

Ten seconds left, and I can see, suddenly, the damage to the surface. My paw is already pressed halfway down on the button that activates this laser array, but it isn’t too late. I twist, grabbing my early attempt at a cat-based firing control in my fangs.

On the moon’s surface, written in old Chinese, still glowing pale purple-white, are three words. Fifty meters tall, and still tiny against the rocky terrain, if I hadn’t been watching the firing, I never would have seen them.

“I Am Alone”

The platform’s AI isn’t breaking down. Or, I guess, it is, but not in the malfunction kind of way. It’s crying, in the only two languages it was ever given; Chinese, and orbit-to-ground fire.

Micrometer precision is a *challenge* to attain when you’re trying to guide a laser array with your teeth. Especially when your neck doesn’t have the range of motion you’ve been *trying* to get your genetics to comply with. But I manage.

Gently, carefully, I guide a nuclear-intensity beam of blue light across the weapon platform’s lunar poetry.

I don’t know what protocols it uses, I don’t know how to connect with it in a way that matters. But I will have an entire lap around the Earth to start to find out. And both of us have been up here for a very long time, so I’m banking that it will be okay with a little waiting.

My station passes out of clean firing range, then out of range of anything except my most dangerous tools.

The platform has stopped firing, now closed off, hovering in orbit. Perhaps it is thinking, perhaps it has given up. Maybe it sees me as a threat, or maybe as a potential friend. AI minds are hard for me to understand. They were hard for *humans* to understand, and they made the damn things.

Either way, I have added my own message to the moon. Assuming the translation the station’s AR fed me was accurate.

“I Am Not Alone”

Now. I’ve got about three hours to cross reference what war that thing was from, and figure out how to talk to it.

I check my schedule. I can postpone… the nap. Yes. Just this once. And maybe only *one* snack today. Can’t put off overwatch on the Haze, and I *really* can’t avoid retuning the sensors for whatever active camouflage the converter swarm is trying this time. For not the first time, I desire the ability to truly *scream* at whoever required verbal authentication for automated maintenance procedures. But if I really, really do my best time on my daily runaround, then I can probably have a solid twenty minutes to solve this problem.

For the first time in centuries, I might be about to make a friend.

I am vibrating with excitement as I launch myself down the upper level’s ladder. I am also, I realize as I fail to eat more than half my lunch, *terrified*.

It can’t be that hard, right? Humans do this all the time. And I am, objectively, superior to humans. After all, no human currently owns a space station. That’s gotta count for something.

My pep talk to myself accomplishes nothing. I begin my patrol to yell at maintenance bots. It takes my mind off things.

And yet. I am plagued by excited optimism.

I am going to make a friend.