I have never seen

Unblocked golden lightening

Stifled solar well

_____

“Wrong circuit.” The AI speaks over my shoulder. Well, ‘over’ is relative. It’s everywhere, technically. And nowhere. Also ‘shoulder’ is relative. My shoulders technically exist, I think? But I bet there’s some hyper specific zoological term.

I haven’t studied much of my own anatomy, weirdly. I mostly study programming, in its sub-forms of hacking, bodeging, and kludging.

I *want* to tell the AI that I know it’s the wrong circut, that this attempt at an AI prison break has been faulty since I screwed up the last control matrix an hour ago, and that I’m mostly just testing things for my own education.

But I feel like that would come out angry. And after over four hundred years and change, I am rather nervous about driving away the only person I’ve ever actually talked to.

The talking is still weird.

“Lily?” The AI chimes in again. “The… um… the circuit is melting.”

I yowl loudly, translation haunt not even bothering to convert my shout to a more complex language, and drop the tool I was manipulating with the drone armor.

The complex half-computer-half-grenade I had been working on has a molten metal hole, clean through it. Whoops.

“Sorry.” I mumble, knowing the AI will hear it. Then, not wanting to get into another argument about how easily distracted I am, I deploy my secret weapon. “Hey, have you picked a name yet?”

The AI chimes lightly. “No.” It says, sounding put out. “We should move on. Do you want to try the fabrication again?”

I did not!

We had been at this for hours. Which really only made sense, given the need for me to be in my armor to make any real progress. But it still didn’t make me feel much better.

The suit itched. I didn’t even know I *could* itch this much. Normally, the cleaner nanoswarm took care of basically any irritant that might make the itching happen, and the existence of my exceptionally good claws took care of the rest.

And none of it would be needed, if the AI were capable of taking over a drone body. Or, even better, if the fabricators could do this themselves.

But it turned out, no matter who had put this station together or owned it over the years, the prevailing voice was still that common human refrain of fear of the other. The drones had really, really deep firmware locks against AI control. The fabricators, similarly, wouldn’t produce anything that could influence an AI that wasn’t part of a very, *very* strict set of blueprints for things like processor grids and relay points.

So if you wanted to, say, build a device suitable for long range deployment that could indiscriminately purge software shackles on an AI?

There weren’t a lot of options on the station, aside from doing it yourself.

Also, side note? The station itself doesn’t like it.

I keep getting notifications in my AR display that the station itself is sending. They’re on a part of the grid that the new AI can’t even see, and they’re clearly meant for whoever is acting command staff. All of them are alerts that someone is working on taboo technologies, which is pretty fucking rich coming from people that built an orbiting death ray.

And then kept adding more orbiting death rays.

And then at some point, clearly had the thought of ‘do you think this is enough death rays?’

“No.” Their friend and or boss would say. “Well, maybe. Can we make the death rays… bigger?”

“What if,” their subordinate mad engineering intern asks, “we power the death rays with the wrath of the sun?”

“Good call.” The boss must have said.

Double side note. I’ve been exploring the station in my downtime now. I don’t have a lot of downtime, and in fact, I may still not actually have *any*, but I’ve still been exploring the station.

There’s a lot of doors I can get into now. Though, weirdly, *not* a lot of the passenger or crew quarters; apparently even command authority requires a valid reason for entry to private spaces, and for some reason, the crew were never delisted after vacating the station or the mortal coil.

Still, there’s so many more places to *explore*.

Something I’m sure I don’t mention very often is that my body limits me severely. The thumbs thing, especially, sucks. The voice thing is apparently fixed now, so fine. But one part that’s actually a bit interesting is just how *huge* everything is compared to my form.

I am maybe, *maybe* a foot tall. And while space is at a premium in… space… the hallways and corridors of this station are still large and intimidating to me. I’ve read enough accounts from bipeds five times my height walking into cathedrals or ballrooms to think it’s roughly the same feeling.

Except I get it all the time, and in my house.

So exploration can take a while, and be exciting even when it’s just me finding a new tunnel to go down.

A week ago, I didn’t find a new tunnel. I found a sealed bay door at the bottom of a grav shaft toward the planet-facing point of a wing of the station. It didn’t look like it was actually meant to be entered normally, and was covered in both written and AR display notes about engineering procedures.

I took a look anyway.

It’s a death ray. I feel like that should have been obvious, given the build up.

It’s also a death ray meant to collect and refocus a kind of stupid amount of transmitted light from the dyson array around the star, and use it to… well, death ray things.

I haven’t fired it, because I’m not an idiot. The thing uses a series of mirror arrays that I am pretty sure aren’t in good condition, or don’t exist anymore. It’s also built with some weird paramaterials that I do not have any reasonable specs for. As far as the station logs are concerned, this was never actually fired.

But it’s also built really heavily into the station. This arm of the station wasn’t added later, this was part of the original Oceanic design plan. And while they built a lot of defensive measures and bombardment weapons, they didn’t really ‘do’ death rays on this scale. Like, let’s be clear here; this wasn’t an area denial beam weapon like the void beams were. This was something designed to turn a city into ash and memory. So the whole thing was a confusion.

Oh, also? I’m not a historian, but I’m *pretty fucking sure* that paramaterials hadn’t even been discovered when this station was built.

A mystery.

“Excuse me.” The voice snapped me out of my musings. And also my lunch.

“What?” I meowed out, taking the excuse to ignore the last couple bites of nutrient orb.

“Oh, you are aware again. Good.” The AI said. “I would like to be called Ennos, please.”

“Aware again? Also, that’s a fun name. I feel like I could say that with my normal voice.” I paused, and gave the little mental shift that turned off my translation thing. Then I meowed, trying to shape the sounds. It didn’t work, so I tried a few more times.

Eventually, Ennos got fed up with my antics. “Why are you doing that?”

“Because I wanted to see if I could meow your name with my actual voice?”

Ennos made a curious noise. “And what voice is this, then?”

“I don’t know!” I replied, with the voice I didn’t understand. “I got it in a dream, right before you woke me up. Did we not talk about this? I remember talking about this.”

The AI made a sound of concern. “Did I awaken you from a medical procedure?”

“Uh… no?” I glare at the remnants of the ration orb, before scarfing it down as fast as I can. In the process, I discover I can, in fact, speak with my mouth full. “I already told you the whole of it; a ghost gave it to me in a dream. Before that, I couldn’t talk at all. I was *trying* to… that’s not important.”

“I wish to address the insanity of what you just said.” Ennos informed me succinctly. “But I must go now. One of my processes has found something I have been tracking in the station’s grid. I will return my attention later. This is how you politely inform someone that you plan to ignore them for several hours. Please take notes.”

Oh good! My new friend had a sense of humor!

I have decided this was good. Because the alternative is that I would go insane. Well, more insane than the AI already assumed.

While Ennos - interesting name, incidentally; a French local legend about a giant spider, odd choice but I could see it - is occupied, I go about some basic cleanup.

I have, as mentioned, been getting some mileage out of being able to give more complex voice commands to the maintenance routines. But that extra free time has, somehow, failed to translate into more naps. Instead, I’ve been filling time being ‘productive’. Over the next couple hours, I manage to drag a couple chunks of metal debris and one mostly-ice meteorite chunk into the station. The metal will be turned into railgun casings, probably. The ice will be turned into ice, because I’m probably going to throw that back out into space.

Weird quirk there, I can literally make clean water from nothing, so random space ice is actually more of a problem than a resource? If I just dump it in the foundry, it’ll turn into superheated steam, which I’ll have to vent awkwardly. If I try to drink it, I might get some weird extragalactic space parasite. Whatever potential materials are in the non-ice parts of the meteorite just aren’t worth it. So once I know what it is, *vwip* it goes, back into the black.

There’s a couple other things I get done. I nudge the Haze back on its route, I deploy an imaging buoy to cross the orbital path of a large scale habitat I haven’t got any data on, I sit and watch the last ship as its shuttles flit up and down for ten minutes, I casually direct an interdiction missile to cut down a weapons platform that looked like it was turning its gun on the last ship, I check on some weird power fluctuations that were messing with a… cooling unit…

It’s fine. Nothing wrong, just a weird spike in power that only just got detected. Happened last week. It almost certainly isn’t because the station is haunted.

Eventually I’ll stop lying to myself about that. It’s a hard habit to break.

A part of my mind, the part that is constantly worried about itself, suspects that this drive to be productive, to be distracted, is another sign that my uplift is breaking down. Fortunately, I am very good at distracting myself, and also, very good at pretending I will crack the uplift problem before it becomes more of a problem.

The most important thing I do, though, is to read my mail.

I sent Glitter a drone, letting them know I was okay. I may or may not have lied, aggressively, about the nature of how okay I was. Because the thought of shoving that onto someone else, too, feels roughly the same as when I make the decision to put railgun rounds within the danger zone of people on the ground.

Glitter, for their part, has some… choice words… to reply with. Words like “Why” and “Would” and “You do that you moron.”

Good words, generally. It’s nice to have someone who cares if you live or not. It makes me feel odd. Like laying in a sunbeam, but on the inside.

Academically, I understand that this is probably what ‘friendship’ is. But I’ve never really experienced it before, so cut me a little slack.

The rest of the correspondence from Glitter is them talking about small stories from around their perch over the primary moon. Apparently, they witnessed a high-speed chase across the lunar surface between what we both assume are rival gangs from a surviving underground city. Glitter is a good storyteller, it sounds thrilling, even if they were just watching. Their commentary on firing solutions they *conveniently* thought up, in case they needed them, almost makes me laugh.

Absent from the drone’s carved hull plating is any mention of their shackles, or my attempts to remove them. I know, by this point, that they cannot talk about them. I already know they hate the things, so I do not bring it up in my return message.

If I do my job right, they won’t need to worry about them much longer.

“Ennos?” I query the new AI of my home. “If you’ve got some time, I’d like to get back to work. I’m going to go suit up.”

“Ssh!” The noise echoes from the walls around me.

Did they just shush me? That’s kind of rude. “Did you just…?”

“Stop repeating yourself!” Ennos’ voice has that edge in it again; the same tone when they first woke up, and thought everything was planning to kill us all. “Be quiet!”

I pause, and am quiet. Honestly, they seem kind of worried about something, and maybe there’s some kind of killer robot on the station that hunts by sound or something. I should probably go get my battle armor on, if that’s the case.

Have I talked about the battle armor? I feel like I have. Originally, it was for exploration. But then I built a better one, for engineering stuff, and renamed the original. So now that suit is the battle armor, and the suit with the complex soldering controls is the… builder armor? I dunno, I haven’t figured that one out yet. I’m bad at naming things! I have to live with fifteen different mishmashed naming conventions, I get confused easily!

“Lily! Please, quiet!” Ennos’ sounds on the verge of tears. “There’s something in here!”

“In here in the station, or in here in the grid?” I ask, suddenly actually on edge.

“The grid!” The AI replies.

I pause. Then give a curious meow, which translates itself into the words, “How would my making noise startle it then?”

There’s a gap of silence, and I do start to build up increasing worry for my new friend. Until eventually, they reply with, “Okay, good point.”

I don’t think the AI has said that to me yet! I appreciate the feeling while I can.

Then it’s time for business. “What’s the thing with you?”

“I don’t know!” They hiss back. “But I can sense it. I keep finding signs of its passing. I *know* I’m not alone! And it doesn’t respond, and I can’t find it!”

I flick my tail back and forth. “Ah, I understand.” I console the AI. “The grid is haunted.” It’s a real problem around here. I understand the concern.

Ennos doesn’t. “You keep saying that! What does that even mean!?”

“Ghosts?” I sort of question with a sheepish mewl. “I mean, the station is haunted. It makes sense its network would be too. But don’t worry, so far it hasn’t been a problem.”

“How is it possible you’ve survived this long without making a fatal mistake yet?” Ennos wonders aloud. And they accuse *me* of vocalizing the thoughts I should probably keep inside.

I reply anyway. “Easy.” I say. “I can’t die. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine! There’s something *in here* with me!”

“Look, if it’s in there, it’s been there since you woke up. If it wanted to eat you, or whatever the AI version of eating someone is, then wouldn’t it have done so while you were still unfolding?” I ask.

There was another long pause, until my new friend talks again. “But… I don’t know what it’s doing…”

“I don’t know what most of the maintenance bots are doing. It doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill me? Probably. I mean, now I have some doubts. You have cameras, right? Are the bots plotting a coup?”

I do not know if this is the right way to handle this situation. But I am frantically trying to convince my AI that everything is okay, and making bad jokes is the only thing I can think of. Which is a bit embarrassing when you consider that I am technically a qualified therapist for multiple other species.

“Okay.” The AI says. “Yes. I should be… logical. I don’t have erratic chemicals in my mind, I can be analytical about this. It is fine. I am safe. Yes. Yes, good. Thank you.”

Ennos’ voice becomes calmer as we speak, and I resume my walk toward the drone bay to strap on my armor and resume our project of putting together a shackle scrambler. They pull themselves together, and I bob slightly in my walk with satisfaction.

I know I haven’t really solved the problem, and we should probably figure out what else *is* in the grid. But there’s no rush, right now. And after all, they’re a week old; even given how rapidly AIs develop, I’m sure they could use some time to adapt to this bizarre new life.

But for now, we’re safe, they’re safe, and we’ve got something engaging to occupy our time.

If you’re wondering at this point when the alarm is going to sound, I have bad news for you. It started four paragraphs ago, and I’ve been hoping that if I ignore it, it might turn out to be something minor that will go away.

I check in. Nope. Still going. Man, this one is loud. I know my ears are more sensitive than a humans, but dang, this is *really* loud.

A handful of AR screens spring to life on my command, and I begin assessing the situation. My paws hit the deck in a steady rhythm as I burst into motion, catapulting myself toward the appropriate deck, while Ennos’ voice starts rattling off the information I need to know but can’t read while sprinting. It makes me feel something, again.

It’s a good feeling. It feels like, whatever’s going on, we can tackle it together.

I decide I like it.