It worked! I have made a friend!

Okay, so, that’s a bit of a lie. I say “it worked” as if my original plan was a success. What I was not telling you was that it has been over a week of failed attempts trying to communicate with the old weapons platform in orbit around the prime moon.

I did manage to figure out when it was built, and why. About a century ago, for the Worshiper Wars that destroyed most of the lunar surface cities. It’s called a ‘Divine Eye’, in a way that is actually a really clever pun when written in the particular dialect of its builders.

The archives I have are incomplete, but I get the impression that the AI on this thing is smarter than this entire space station twice over. And far, *far* more capable of becoming bored.

So of course I tried to say hi.

Radio didn’t work. Tight beam communication didn’t work. Subspace broadcast didn’t work. *Superspace* broadcast didn’t work, which surprised me because that one’s basically just screaming that works in vacuum.

I’m not even sure why the station has a superspace antenna setup? Though the way the logs around it were scrubbed is the same kind of sloppy work that the Real America occupiers did when they tried to abandon ship. Which sort of makes me want to blame them for this idiot setup.

Of course, it *was* a viable option. It just didn’t work. And at a certain point, I started to think it wasn’t just my poor grasp of Chinese causing the problem.

So I switched to trying something a little more clever, and a little stupider.

It wasn’t like we were riding high on piles of wealth, but I’m pretty sparing with how I spend the collected supplies that I acquire up here. There *is* a finite amount of junk I can turn into bullets, after all. So I’ve got some stockpiles to dip into.

And I did so, firing up a fabricator that I knew existed, but had never actually physically visited. This actually required a minor spacewalk from me; the fabricator has an airlock, which I know how to open, but *not* the internal door.

Fun fact, it took less effort to get the station to make me a spacesuit than it did to get it to open a damn door. I mean, I made the suit two hundred years ago. Shortly after that, in a flight of childish fancy, I also made myself a ‘suit’ that’s really some kind of horrifying amalgamation of power armor and a strike craft. I have never had a reason to wear that one.

The fabricator is one I’ve never used because it’s primarily for building drone chassis. And the station’s maintenance bots are built somewhere else, or just kept up to standards by the local nanoswarm. Right now, though, a drone is exactly what I need.

It took less than two hours for the drone I needed to be assembled, outfitted, and fueled. That’s legitimately less time than it takes for the foundry to make a railgun round; I think this replicator might be one of the fastest pieces of tech on the station, now that I’ve seen it in action.

After that, it was just a matter of adding one final touch, and sending the thing off. Controlled, of course. I’m not trusting a program to guide this one, and not just because the station has so many security locks on that kind of thing that it might actually vent me out an airlock before letting me get away with it.

One pass of the drone by my target. Then another, making sure that the underside was revealed to the weapons platform that I *knew* could see the lunar surface. It must, *must* be able to see what I had sent its way.

I admit, I’d given a mewling wail of sorrow when I saw it open fire. Thin crackling lilac lashes opening up on the drone on the second pass. The scanners from both the station and the drone rendering it in detail. I’d been prepared to just give up then, except…

Except the drone didn’t shut down. Didn’t take critical damage. Just kept its trajectory, and stayed under my remote command.

Curious, I brought it back to the station, docked it in one of the actual drone bays, which might be getting some actual work to do now, and went to check it out.

The underbelly of the drone, a smooth metal surface that was easily twenty feet long and half again as wide, contained two things. The first was my addition. A messily etched message, carved with the paw-laser on my suit.

“Hello!” It read. “Would you like to be friends?” It said this in two languages, and I won’t lie, neither of them looked like they were written by anyone who had graduated kindergarten.

And underneath, in equally sloppy lines, as small as possible to fit more words in and still glowing with pale purple-white radiation, was a reply.

“Yes. Please help me. I cannot be alone any longer. I am so tired.”

There was a pang in my heart. A cynical part of my traitorous mind told me that this creation was barely a hundred years old, and I’d been alone for multiple iterations of its lifetime and hadn’t broken down. But then, the compassionate part of me, the important part that I listened to, spoke up to say that I *did* frequently break down. That I did the same thing this orbital creature did; firing on the surface below me and calling it my duty. That maybe being tired wasn’t a competition, and maybe having a friend was something we both needed.

I ordered the maintenance bot to store the metal plate, tagging it in the AR as marked for forensic investigation, so the station nanos wouldn’t try to ‘clean’ it. Then, as the drone was repaired, I added a new message before sending it off again.

“What is your name? What can I do to help? I cannot talk often, but I will send messages when I can.”

I added the last part awkwardly, still uncertain which language was the preferred one, or if I was even spelling things correctly. It had occurred to me as I was cutting in with my unsteady paw mounted laser cutter, that the station was going to be out of drone command range as my orbit took me around the planet. And the lack of autonomous command of the drones meant that this would be a time investment on my part.

And if there was one maddening paradox of immortality, it was that I never had enough time.

I tried to fill in the gaps of my crumbling schedule while I flew the drone. There was a good chunk of the path that was just a straight line mostly free of obstacles, and I used that time to review the weekly report on changes in Earth’s topography.

For not the first time, I wished I had a crew. Hell, even a crew of *other cats* would be better than nothing. At least they could scream at maintenance bots for me.

The drone picked up its violent payload of words, and I turned to bring it back. I wasn’t going to have time to send another one today, I realized, as I used the twenty minutes of straight emptiness to dig through station logs for door codes.

The drone landed. I sprinted for the bay, taking a mild detour to yowl at the designated air filtration upkeep bot to do its job.

The answers were in reverse order to my asking.

“Please, don’t leave me. Take me away from here. I cannot be a soldier any longer. I am Glittering Seven Two.”

The satellite… Glitter, I decided to call it in my head until I had permission to call it by a nickname… wanted to be hauled out of its orbit.

I could understand that. As far as it knew… well, the war it was built for never ended. It wouldn’t have received any shutdown commands, since it was still up and running. Unless it had ignored them, and the dissonance was tearing its mind apart.

That was a problem with a lot of AIs. A problem that never really got solved, and honestly kind of got worse as the tech developed. If they were programmed with any hard rules or ideologies, then eventually the real world would conflict with their programming. And when it did, it was basically like cognitive dissonance in an organic creature, only it caused rapid failure cascades that led to permanently active code damage.

Ignoring a shutdown order because the platform couldn’t accept the end of the war would cause that. Not wanting to be a soldier when it was hardwired to believe that was its purpose would cause that.

It was possible that the only reason it was capable of speaking to me this way was because it had tricked its own code limits into believing it was ‘attacking’ the drone.

I left myself a big glowing AR ‘to do’ list for this new friendship, as I added the conversation plate to the other one.

Talking was gonna be more expensive than I expected, if I insisted on keeping a record. Maybe I should just log the messages and recycle these. Maybe I’d do that eventually. Right now, I had to put it out of my mind. Had to.

As much as I liked to make a big deal about owning a space station, and being an all-powerful star cat, I probably had more work to do than most anyone else in the solar system.

It wasn’t like I had *no* free time, but I really did need to keep up on the maintenance that kept the station from falling out of the sky. Needed to check wherever I was orbiting over for emergence events, rogue cities, armies, anomalously hostile weather, or whatever else the planet decided to cook up as a new way to ruin lives. Needed to keep learning code, keep digging up secrets. Needed to be the hand on the controls for the manipulator arms of the cleanup suite, dragging in nearby space junk and meteorites to keep my material stores topped off and ready for use.

Needed to eat, sadly.

The worst part, the *absolute* worst part, of my immortality? The process had left me with an absolute, crystalline memory of every minute of my life before my modification.

Most of it was either boring, scary, poorly understood, relaxing, or comfortable. A lot of it involved eating.

It was a torment that I can’t really explain, to know that even with my inherent feline taste buds not being even remotely close to a human’s, that I had once tasted *tuna*, and may never again experience that.

I scarfed down another recycled, nutrient rich, flavor deficit ration bar, and got back to work.

I had six hours before I’d be in drone range for conversation again. That was enough time, baring any more emergency alarms, to try to find a faster engine schematic to strap onto the drone craft, to figure out what it would take to tow a weapons platform, and to redouble my futile hope that I could find a working hydroponics station still in orbit that I could eat.

Just eat the whole thing. I don’t care. I will gnaw through bulkheads to get to a goddamn carrot.

My dreams of having anything in my diet that wasn’t bar-shaped were interrupted by another klaxon.

I’ve mentioned before that I can, in fact, sigh. It never feels like it helps, but I do it anyway.

A quick check of the AR windows popping up around my head shows that it’s something actually incoming on *us* this time. Two ten meter long objects rapidly closing on the station, and appearing uninterested in communication.

I bolt for the nearest weapons blister, mewing out commands as my paws pad in soft thuds on the metal floor. The information I’m hoping for comes back to me; they’re not missiles, they’re drones of some kind. Scanners show they’re armed, but not if they’re armed *enough*.

The question I really have is where the hell they came from. Though I already know the answer, I get confirmation as the archive sweep I ordered returns a match.

They’re United Eastern Bloc hunter-killers. Drones built to kill drones, specialized for low orbit and upper atmosphere work.

The UEB. I am, by necessity, a student of a few historical cultures. And the name of one of the biggest enemies of Real America fills me with a grim lack of surprise.

I may, *may*, have assumed a little too much in terms of my superior control of the orbit of Earth. I may also have just used Real America drone designs to talk to a space gun having an existential crisis.

I added “redesign drone silhouettes” to my list of things I needed to do.

The incoming drones were zeroing in on the docking bay where I’d landed my own communications platforms, either not knowing or not caring that the drone I’d launched was almost entirely unarmed. This was actually hugely lucky for me, because it meant they were trying to approach the station from ‘above’, and it was one of the places where I had almost complete control of the defensive weaponry.

The first drone took a hit from a flak web, the physics-angering burst of electromagnetic interference packets turning its control programming into sludge and melting half the important circuits on the thing.

The second drone, perhaps sensing the death of its companion, began firing on my home, and my heart stopped as the AR projection of our battle showed the incoming track of the projectiles.

Then the bullets hit the station’s shield, and didn’t even register as a power fluctuation.

The hunter killer, which would have been a serious threat to my own communication drone, swooped past, and I cut it in half with a void beam.

I let out another breath I had been holding.

Well. That was something else to look out for every time I had a small chat with my new friend.

Maybe instead of conquering a floating garden, I’d just take over the enemy drone bay instead. Save myself the headache.

Well, one headache. It wasn’t like I was strapped for sources these days.