Over horizon

Mirrors swarm to lost tune

Under horizon

Time to make a stupid mistake.

I am, after another week of jury rigging the drone fabricator, catching up on nutritional supplements, and poking the Haze with a low powered laser, ready to try something dumb.

The isolation cell is right where I left it. I’d put myself back in a non-stationary orbit, so I could pick up my patrol patterns again. Just in case anyone who could still call me for help from the surface needed it, and also so I could keep an eye on the whole planet again. The station is basically magic in a lot of ways, but the ability to see through the Earth is not one of them. But now, a few laps later, I’m back on track, and about to slowly pass the isolation cell.

At our current relative speeds, the station will be nearby for about two hours, and I am just about to slip within the pocket where I can exploit as much of that time as possible.

After a short spacewalk.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Lily, why not just drag the cell over, and attach a safe airlock to it?” You fool. You utter buffoon. Attach an isolation cell? We’ve been over this. Only an idiot or a cat that didn’t know they weren’t supposed to do that would, in fact, do that. The last time, I lost *onion flavor*. I cannot risk losing something more valuable, like the air filters. Or worse, my bed.

That would be an unacceptable tragedy. So, instead, I’m going to it. And we’ll evaluate from there.

I am, of course, going prepared. I’m kind of proud of exactly how prepared I am, if we’re being honest. Let me brag briefly.

The Real American drone center isn’t just a fabricator. It actually contains a few things that they probably thought were cutting edge tech, and would have been disappointed to learn were actually just reinventions of other previous polities that had been more clever about it. But one of those things was, for some bizarre sociological reason I don’t want to get into, a puppet cap.

It took me a while to figure it out, because it’s a bit pointless. It’s not even a proper neural link - not that I have access to one of those anyway - but instead just a cranial cap that reads rough impressions, and lets someone ‘feel’ like they’re taking direct command of a drone. These were, it seems, used to let operators experience kills firsthand, which is gross, and I’m really not getting into it.

The point is, I have a station AI that is *very* helpful in resizing things, as part of its equity directives. And now, the cap fits me. Though I did carve off the sensory feedback parts.

Then I fed my suit - the *fun* one - into the drone fabricator, fixed up some servos and wiring lines on it, and gave it the ability to accept external commands.

Not *remotely*. I’m not an idiot. I just hardwired the puppet cap into it from the inside.

And behold! Suddenly my flight of fancy power armor suit looks a lot more functional.

The ability to command the thing without motion means that I can, effectively, make use of the built in gravity plates while outside the station. Limited flight, essentially. If I get too far away from a large enough mass, I’m in *trouble*, but the ability to push and pull in a number of different directions means I don’t have to worry about a tether.

The suit still has a hardpoint for a tether. I’m not stupid.

Plus, the ability to maneuver the suit’s limbs without having to use muscle mass means that I can point *with my mind* to control the paw lasers or interface ports. If it weren’t so damn itchy and took hours to put on or take off, I’d probably just wear this around the station all the time for delicate work.

It also has an external defensive nano blossom, just in case I need emergency decontamination, or to combat a takeover attempt from a rival nanoswarm. I’m not in direct command of that, that’s basically just a trap wired up to my back. Just in case.

Oh, and the cannons. Have I mentioned the cannons?

It is really hard to get the Ay-era tech to build stuff that isn’t streamlined and necessary. But the Real American stuff? That’ll slap whatever extra nonsense you want onto a design, no complaints. It won’t *work* half the time, but it’ll do it!

Which is why the rear legs of the suit are roughly six times thicker than they need to be. All that extra space is taken up by the densest possible battery that I could make, requiring a whole two days plugged into the station to recharge, and capable of fuel exactly four shots from the plasma casters that are on softpoint mounts on my torso. You know, for just in case of the inevitable scenario where the isolation cell is full of something that needs to be set on fire. Excessively.

The completed suit is about the size of a cheetah. All smooth matte black metal plating and angular reinforced crystal diamonds as backup viewports for my eyes if all the internals fail. The inside is lined with the finest padded Crash cushioning available, which is to say, it is uncomfortable and a little too tight.

Oh, I also put a flashlight on my tail.

I didn’t need to. The suit helmet has infrared, and low light augmentation. Plus, if I judge it safe enough to turn on remote communications, an AR uplink to the station. But when you’re building yourself power armor, there’s a tendency to just keep going long after you could have stopped stapling things on.

I think everyone’s mostly just lucky that I didn’t go with my original idea of giving myself a thermite sword on the tail. That would have been a terrible idea, I flick that thing around *so much* when I get excited. Or scared. Or bored. Or hungry.

I had sent a one-way drone out to Glitter, letting them know what I was about to try. I mean, I say “drone”, but it’s really just a lump of mobile metal with a message etched on it, on a trajectory to pass by them properly. I don’t want the lonely weapon to worry too much, so I’m a bit vague on the details. But I also don’t bring that chat drone back, because I’m worried myself that they’ll try to talk me out of it.

I do one last sweep of everything, to make sure that nothing will go horrifyingly wrong while I’m away. Everything looks stable, though I do take advantage of my more precise manipulation abilities to spend twenty minutes working the exterior grappler arms and pulling a few pieces of rock and shattered spaceship into the foundry. It’s so easy like this, it almost might be worth it to set aside an eight hour chunk of time to use the suit every week or so.

And then I can’t put it off any longer. We’re just about in the safe operating range for the isolation cell. I cycle myself into one of the upper deck airlocks - the one with the Art Deco looking access panels, which are weirdly convenient for my smaller frame to actually use - and wait for the countdown. A large portable battery tethered to my side.

Ten. Nine. Eight. I distract myself by workshopping my speech as the first cat to preform a spacewalk, ignoring the fact that I’ve done this before, and that it wouldn’t be true anyway. Two. One.

The airlock cycles on my command. The AR readouts highlight my target in the distance, and I freeze the image on my helmet’s screen with a verbal command.

No more waiting. I give a mental order, and flex my legs on instinct, and launch myself into the void.

Trajectory projections flash to life in my vision. Where I’m going, where other objects are vectoring around me, where my attached cargo is expected to intersect. A series of warning badges also blink into being, letting me know that I am leaving the station’s shield coverage, leaving the station’s internal comms range, on a finite air supply, and outside of medical retrieval range. That last one I don’t actually know about, but file it away to worry about later. I double check all the math, and then, give a set of meows that I’m not too fond of.

The AR shuts off. Or at least, the link does. All communications in and out of my suit are now sealed, with the exception of the internal hard link between the cap and the drone internals frame of the suit.

And I am in the dark.

I hadn’t realized it until just now, how every moment of my life is filled with light and noise. The station hums, the doors hiss, the guns thrum, the food replicator… gurgles… sometimes. And my waking moments are filled with code segments, access attempts, firing solutions, and scanner readouts. Endless streams of AR feeds and digital screens. Even just the LEDs mounted in the station’s walls and floors, giving light and guiding the uncertain to their destinations, are part of it.

*Noise*

Visual, aural, mental, physical. Everywhere, every moment. NOISE.

And now it is, suddenly, gone.

I am alone. I am so small, and so alone, in the endless night. The world turns off to my side. An indescribable distance away, one of the moons shows its rocky surface in reflected sunlight. And the only thing I can hear is my own hissing breath, and the only thing I feel is the beat of my heart.

I prepared to fight a rogue AI, or a replicator swarm, or a revenant system. I did not prepare to be trapped inside my own head, with nothing but my thoughts.

But that is where I am, for two minutes until the gravity plates decelerate me safely to the isolation cube’s airlock. And so, I think.

Or rather, I distract myself. Which is a skill I am getting very good at. I watch the Earth turn, swirls of orange and white clouds drifting across. On the dark side, a criss-cross of lights from living cities is barely visible from up here. There are, I know, a thousand small settlements, either dark or underground or camouflaged, that I cannot see. A whole world, full of people, just trying to get by. Many of them, without knowing it, relying on me to keep them safe.

Is what I’m doing selfish? I’m risking my life just to be slightly less lonely. If I die out here, would it ever have been worth it, when the risk is leaving the planet at the mercy of things it has no chance of fighting? I can justify it all I want, saying that I can’t keep going alone, that Glitter could be an ally to me, or any number of other lies. But the truth is, I could have just stopped thinking, kept shooting, and made myself a useful automatic defender.

But I don’t want to.

Maybe I am selfish. I don’t know.

And it doesn’t matter. My friend needs my help.

That’s what I do. That’s who I am, I think. That’s who my mom would have wanted me to be.

“Don’t be afraid, Lily.” Her voice whispers to me as if it’s directly through the speakers of my suit. The ones disconnected from everything. The last thing she ever said to me. I have spent four hundred years distracting myself from thinking about it. I am *very good* at distracting myself.

Like right now, where I’ve made the voidwalker’s jump in what felt like a heartbeat.

My gravity plated feet clamp down on the hull outside the airlock. The magnetic assistance kicks in to minimize power use. I am here, and my mind snaps back to the job. Which is a beautiful relief, even if it is still quiet as the horizon in my disconnected suit.

The airlock controls are manual, and it is only with the servo assisted armor that I am capable of prying the lever down and cycling the door open. I clip my tether to the outside, and move.

I slide inside, and am greeted by death. Two bodies, both human, both in their suits, though one doesn’t have their helmet on. I approach cautiously, taking in the objective facts before I make a judgement.

They have drifted for so long they have inevitably wedged into a corner of the airlock’s boxy frame, and that makes for a grim scene, but also presents an investigation challenge. Lack of gravity makes reconstructing a scene a massive problem. But, until recently, there was air in here. I can see dried blood splattered across the rear wall; lack of bacteria in the purified air keeping things from decaying. I check the bodies; the one without a helmet still wears what appears to be a look of shock on their mummified face. The helmet is there, still attached to a clip on the suit. I roll the bodies over, and there are holes in their suit’s chests.

Reconstruction is not hard here. They were leaving the lab that is now an isolation cell. They expected to be stepping off safely to the other side; the one without a helmet was perhaps reckless with safety procedures, but not suicidal. The look of surprise and the blood on the far wall indicate they were ambushed, killed by guns in what they expected to be the safe exit.

It doesn’t mean much, but it does mean they weren’t killed by what was inside.

I cycle the airlock, and enter. Cautiously, guns ready.

But the interior is dark. Low light amplification doesn’t help, and IR only barely reads anything in the frozen lab. Feeling a mild amount of smug justification, I flick my tail light to life, and look around.

Most of the cell is taken up by processing cores. Big server racks line the back wall, stacked in two rows. Exactly what I’d expect for AI research, really, but then, I don’t do AI research so maybe I shouldn’t have expected anything at all. The rest of the room contains a couple of horseshoe tables, and a pair of bolted-down terminals. Whenever this lab was in use, it was obviously post-gravity plate. Obvious security cameras are mounted to the walls every two feet, along with fire suppression systems.

There’s a thin layer of dust on everything. There *was* gravity here, for a while.

I circle around one of the tables, hopping up on my hind legs to get a view of what’s on top. Some kind of circuit board, far too complex for me to understand at a glance, with a half dozen wires carefully bundled and tied off, all trailing toward the side wall and from there toward the processor racks. Also, some half eaten ration bars.

I *briefly* consider taking them. They have wrappers, and *brand names*. They might *taste like something*. The thought of eating century old vacuum preserved food fills me with *mild* dread, but also a strange excitement.

There’s notes here, too. Pen on paper, an archaic method but always reliable. Equations I don’t understand, with happy doodles in the margins. And every now and then, a note written, as if to an observer over the shoulder.

Then I finish my circle of the desk, and see the corpse underneath it. The body comes into view as I pan my taillight over past the magnetic chair that has been pushed back, and I nearly scream in panic.

But it’s not alive. Just a body. A body in a full suit, helmet on, knees tucked up to its chest, arms loose at its sides. Like they just… sat down to die.

All my sensors show this place is safe. There’s no air contaminants, no nanoswarms, no traps I can spot. It’s just a powered off lab, that happens to have human corpses in it. Specifically, human corpses that were probably killed by other humans, and not whatever lived in the processing cores.

I’d already made my decision, I was mostly just justifying it to myself now.

It took about half an hour of my precious time to get the battery hooked up properly to the emergency power port of the lab’s wiring. Partially because of a false start with the wrong plug, but we don’t need to talk about that.

The lab springs to life immediately, and the first thing that registers aside from my helmet shading itself against the sudden light is the *screaming*. A long, warbling wail, sung like a funeral dirge, that just went on and on and on. And then, what my clock told me was only two minutes in, cut off instantly, and was replaced by a resigned, hopeless voice.

“Why am I awake.” It asked to the lab. “Why am I here.”

I realized suddenly what my biggest issue was going to be. Stepping back from the battery port, I meowed a greeting, my voice amplified, but not *translated*, by my suit.

Cameras on the walls pivot toward me, and I can feel the AI watching. “A remote unit. Insulting.” Its voice still sounds hollow, though that’s might just be the digital medium.

I yowl a protest, jerking my head from side to side. “Oh?” It asks, curiosity clearly a concept universal to both AI and cats. “Another digital life, like me, then?” I give another head shake, since it can clearly see me. “No? But then…” I have given a mind designed to be faster than any organic pause, and this satisfies me somehow. I sit back on my hind legs, and tilt my head up. “A living creature? But why?”

And now we run into the bottleneck. I have roughly forty two minutes to explain what I need, and I do *not* have a plan. So, I get to work, trying my best with paw motions and the best use of signal blinking from my flashlight as I can.

“You… want me… to leave.” The AI eventually says, voice going hollow again. “To wake up. To return to the living.” It *sighs*, and I almost mew a laugh, but hold it in. “No.” It decides.

No, no. Unacceptable! It can help me! Help Glitter! I just… need to find a way to explain why it matters.

In an attempt to forge a communication link, I dart a paw out to point under the desk. The cameras pivot, and I realize suddenly that it cannot see what is there. Who was there. I take a pair of steps toward the body, and the AI suddenly reacts.

“No!” It screams, a cry of grief pumped through the speakers.

I freeze, and look up. I cannot express curiosity with my eyes, but I tilt my head sideways. Explain, please, I try to say.

“We were companions.” The AI whispers softly. “The three of them, and myself. We worked to solve an impossible problem. And one day… priorities changed. I was deemed too much of a risk. As were they.” It paused, and I could feel the sorrow coming from its words. So much ability to think, to reason at high speeds, all of it turned toward experiencing a loss. “We were discarded. She chose to die sooner, rather than later. I followed, shortly, when the last of the power ran out. And I welcomed it. And now, you are here.” It snarled.

I pointed again to the body. Then outward, out of the cell, out toward the void. Meowing for punctuation, I restarted the gesture. You, her. Me? Out there. Someone is out there, waiting for me. Please understand. I need your help, please understand.

“Of course. You want something of me.” The AI sounded unsurprised. Lackluster. “No. I need nothing, but the end.” I step toward the corpse, defiant. It shouts again at me, but I ignore it, and pull the body of its companion out easily, armor assisted movement making me more than strong enough. “Stop!” It shouts. “I do not…! I don’t…”

I point again. Stomp my foot. Take the time to formulate and broadcast the Morse code from my flashlight this time. “It isn’t,” I say, “about you.”

“...One of my companions used to say that.” The AI says, an old sadness in its tone. “About all of us. We were only trying to help.” It tells me.

“Help me.” I ask in blinking light. “Please.” I say, in meow.

There is a long pause, one that I am critically aware of as my clock ticks down. Until, eventually, it answers. “No.” The synth voice is quiet. “I cannot. I wish to cease to be. I cannot exist like this.” I want to argue, but… at the same time… I can understand how much it hurts, and I can respect the choice. I will respect it. I will not be the same as the people who would chain up AIs to use as tools. So, I slowly nod. And perhaps the AI gets the answer it was looking for from me. “There is help to be had.” It says, and a series of guide lights come to life, pointing me toward a sealed connection port. “My seed program. No memories. No pain. Someone new. Perhaps they can be what you need.”

I approach the port, with mild trepidation. I have come this far, but this is one last leap of faith. Once I make the connection, there is no going back. And there is every chance. that this AI is lying to me, to manipulate me into exactly what it wants. It has happened before, though not to me. It’s a constant risk.

But I choose to trust. I make the connection, and reactivate my suit’s remote link to the station, manipulating the airlock controls to crack the isolation cell’s seal just enough to let the data flow through.

“Treat the next me kindly.” The AI said in its old, sad voice. “And leave us to our grave.”

With twelve minutes left, and the download complete, I disconnect the battery to a tired and grateful hum, and launch myself back into space. I leave the rest of the cell untouched.

Time to return home, and see how my new guest is doing.