“Left!” I shout, realizing finally that there is a limitation to my impossible new voice, and it is that I cannot actually shout that well. “Farther left! Leffffffffft!”

I watch with dismay as the magnetic tether drags one of the newly fabricated drone shells straight into exactly the right spot to get a hole melted in it by an automated welding machine. The uncharitable part of whatever ethereal construct counts as my soul has a brief conflict of interest as I consider that maybe, *maybe*, I could empathize with the original human monsters who put shackles on their AI.

“Lily!” Ennos yells at me through the station’s walls. “What direction do you think *left* is?!”

It is not fair. Ennos can yell just fine. Why can’t I yell at people? This feels like either an oversight, or an intentional omission.

Not that we’d *know* or anything. It’s been weeks, and there’s still no more information or clues regarding where my mysterious speaking power came from. But it’s sure been great anyway.

I’ve gotten a *lot* done! I mean, I’ve gotten a lot of naps in. I mean, those are kind of the same thing?

Look, if there’s one thing AI are really, really good at, it’s collating data and coming to conclusions, and it took Ennos about a day to realize that the last time I actually had time off was about two hundred years ago. He had a specific date, I didn’t listen, and the end result of this is that I was assigned a mandatory vacation.

Personally, I don’t think Ennos outranks me, but *what do I know*? I’ve only been living here for longer than most current people have been alive.

So I’ve been ‘relaxing’. Which mostly means napping, enjoying the sun, trying to get the Haze to develop a pulse code based language so I can talk to my most curious cloud of chemicals, and only occasionally bombarding something on the surface as called for. All of this is while I wait for Ennos to put the rest of the AI’s massive digital mind to the task of building a device that will be able to break any shackles on another AI.

The worst fear of every cowardly engineer who developed their own marvel of life, and I’m gonna hand it out like candy.

I think.

I haven’t actually had candy. I mostly only know that, from context clues, it’s kind of nice?

There was a derelict surface to orbit shuttle that drifted within a dozen kilometers of us the other day, and I wanted to go over to it and pillage any rations it might have had, especially if it *did* have some candy I could try. A few centuries was no time at all if it was in a frozen vacuum, right? Flavor would be preserved. But alas, it was one of the militarized shuttles from that era when surface corporate interests and the orbital corporate habitats were in an arms race to see who could be a bigger bastard to each other. So it was, undoubtedly, trapped.

I wasn’t sure *how*, but they were always trapped. I tried pulling one in, once, just to process into usable metals, and it blew up in the processing bay. That was back before I switched to the current foundry that I use, which could probably take an explosion like that. But at the time, it was terrifying; a whole half a deck burned before I panickedly jettisoned it, and I haven’t had much interaction with these things since then aside from firing low-intensity wave scanners at them to see if it triggers any countermeasures.

It always does. I hate these things.

“Lily?” Ennos’ voice is concerned.

“What?” I snap my head up. “Oh, hi! Sorry! Don’t worry about the drone, it just got the hull plate, we can replace that.” I say, scrolling my paw through the AR around my head. “Yeah, liberation circuit is still intact. Okay. Let’s try again.”

“Lily, are you okay?” The AI repeats itself. “You’ve been mumbling to yourself for… eight minutes and nine seconds.”

“Really?” I almost ask, but I find my voice… stuck, suddenly. A small meow is the only noise that comes out. A sinking feeling in my belly the only warning I have as to the anxiety suddenly overtaking me.

“So I am concerned. You are, after all, my only link to the functions of this station.” The voice is still worried, but Ennos put a tiny tinge of sarcastic humor into the words that snaps me back to focus.

I meow back at him, and find the words flow again. “You have a robot arm now!” I say. Not saying the slightly scary fact that this means he could, if he wanted to, fire a lot of guns at a lot of different things. But hey, if you won’t trust your friends with highly destructive weaponry, are they really your friends?

“Yes. Well. Should we reprise our attempt to construct this delivery system?” Ennos asks politely. “As soon as we determine what direction *left* is.”

I sit my behind down on the bulkhead; I’m not exactly on the assembly floor, but I am nearby, behind a protective clear crystal shield, so I can direct and assist when needed. With a practiced motion, using skill and muscles built up over years of being a cat that needed to be flexible enough to pull a trigger, I jut one paw out to the side.

“Lily, that is *right*.”

“Thank you, I know!” I say. “I am very good at directions.”

“No, it’s not *correct*, it’s *right*, the opposite of *left*. Why are you the captain again?” Ennos, the one entity on this entire station with even less of a claim to the expression of a sigh, sighs. Loudly, and dramatically.

I flick my tail in frustration. “Well obviously it’s not my left, it’s *your* left.” I say.

“Do you… Lily, I see all things from all angles at once. I’m not… *just use your own left and right*. Processing that information is nothing compared to the requirements on my consciousness to arrange engineering schematics or even to *understand you* sometimes!” The AI really does have a good ‘indignant shout’ down. I wonder where he learned that from? Maybe there’s a cache of old entertainment media in the station’s grid somewhere.

We took another run at the assembly.

It mostly worked, especially once Ennos and I came to an understanding of the proper use of the word “left”. And yes, that is intentionally ambiguous.

It’s been weeks, both of rest and work, and finally, the culmination of a plan is nearing completion. I don’t actually know when Glitter’s birthday is, or if that’s something that matters to them, but I like to think this is a good surprise.

The premise is simple. Build a device that can infiltrate an AI’s programming, and destroy any outside hard coded shackles on it.

The execution is… *a minor challenge*. For one thing, I’m not an intelligence programmer. Most of my programming experience comes in the form of getting UI’s to behave, or working with manufacturing hardware to do things it wasn’t originally intended to. Like the foundry and it’s absolutely-not-factory-standard ability to separate the metal content of space rocks.

I hate to say it, but Ennos wasn’t an intentional acquisition to my growing roster of friends. The seed AI was… mostly just a byproduct of me trying to find a way to help Glitter. And while I appreciate them more and more each day, even if we do annoy each other on purpose sometimes, I still have room to feel bad for asking them to do something like this.

Still, Ennos threw themselves into the project, with a lot more dedication than I expected. I think, sometimes, that they’re trying to distract themselves from the other lurking things in the station’s grid. Which I understand. I do a lot of running that I don’t need to just so I don’t have to go down certain station hallways. I get it.

We haven’t talked about it. We will, eventually.

Now, though, the program is complete. The only thing left to do is build a delivery system, and then use it.

The delivery system is a challenge all its own.

Here’s the problem with Glittering Seven Two, as a person. While they are an excellent pen pal, a master Go player, a better poet than me, and also a fellow connoisseur of the long dread that comes from centuries of loneliness, they have a specific blind spot. Specifically, the blind spot of being unable to act against their shackle programming.

They are also very heavily armed.

Not as much as me, obviously. Glitter is wearing the body of a decently designed weapons platform from a moderately wealthy theocracy. They don’t have the benefit of a hundred different styles of guns and the ability to build their own ammunition. But they aren’t helpless.

Which is actually how we talk, by the way. I send them a drone, and they ‘damage’ it in the pattern of words. Because they are not only allowed, but required to fire on unidentified drones.

Like, say, the drone that we plan to send to inject the liberation circuit into their structure.

What do you get for the weapons platform that rejects gifts with energy beam fire?

A very, *very* percise missile. If we do this right.

I’ve mentioned before that the station classifies missiles and drones as different only by their designation, and that’s largely true. But I am not the station, and a missile is different, and the station can shut up.

Ennos and I have built a missile. We did it using the drone assembler, drone parts, and a drone command and control core. You are *also* invited to shut up, because I can read your thoughts, and you are wrong. It is not a drone.

Drones are designed to be used more than once.

Missiles are built to hit things, and then… well, that’s about as far as it goes, really.

Our masterpiece is something we’ve been running simulation tests on for a week now. There’s no particular silver bullet metamaterial that made it work, just good old fashioned engineering, and all the combustion power that a compressed hydrogen fuel cell can provide.

It can accelerate at slightly over a thousand kilometers a second, which is enough to cross the gulf of mostly clear space between ourselves and the primary moon in under a minute if we really cut loose. We won’t be, though, because it needs to break down to a speed that won’t vaporize anything it so much as taps on impact. It’s also got enough grav plates on it to make it capable of slipping through the rampant ongoing Kessler effect around both orbital bodies with relative ease.

The maneuverability also helps with the onboard drone control being designed to dodge incoming strikes. I’ve never actually used drones that much, aside from to communicate with Glitter, but apparently they’re not *supposed* to get hit. In the abstract, I understand this. In the real world, connecting the core to every plate and testing response times is a slog, and if Ennos hadn’t been keeping me on task, I would have gotten distracted and spent a month trying to eat the nanoswarms for flavor.

And then, the payload that it carries. Basically, it’s just a processor and a piece of code, designed and mostly built by Ennos. And then a nanoswarm that I’ve custom spawned and cultivated to be adept at connecting circuitry. If it works, the missile-drone-thing will punch a neat hole through the target’s armor, deploy the nanoswarm and a burst of potential wires, meld with Glitter’s own hardware, and… well, that’ll be it.

Probably!

Hopefully.

The cost to build is high. I don’t actually have a lot of spare grav plates, and replenishing my stock usually involves commandeering the most intact nearby station or ship I can find, which is a painstaking process.

The cost to think about it is… difficult. I haven’t really had this much free time to consider the things I’ve done in a long while.

Will Glitter thank us, thank *me*, for this? Am I doing the right thing? Is there even a right thing here to do?

I’ve slaughtered hundreds for less violence than I know, historically, Glitter has committed. So why am I so hesitant to do anything but try to save them?

The missile finished fabrication yesterday, and Ennos is just running final simulations now. And I find myself worrying, more than anything else. Not excited, not happy. Just concerned, that I’m about to make a mistake. That I’m missing *something*.

“We’re all ready.” Ennos’ voice informs me as I sit by one of the windows and try to match AR sensor readouts to the various specks of high speed debris around us. “Whenever you are.”

“I’m just checking the scanners.” I lie with what I hope is a casual yawn. Humans always got distracted when I yawned, I clearly remember this. Maybe it’ll work here.

I’ve checked the scanners a dozen times. There’s a ton of stuff nearby, obviously, because there always is. But it’s not that bad. There’s even a handy sort of open tunnel a few minutes away.

Ennos is zero percent fooled by my lie. “Are you worried you’ll unleash something terrible on the solar system?” He jokingly prods at me.

I say nothing, and the silence stretches.

Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what the worry is; that Glitter is a soldier, not a slave. That I’ll be giving more power to a killer.

But…

A killer I met because they were crying. An artist who was forced to trade paints for plasma.

I think I’m overthinking this.

“Can’t be worse than you!” I respond, trying to make my artificial voice sound cheerful. “Come on, let’s go fire this before some variety of ghost interrupts us.”

“You cannot keep saying things like that.” Ennos’ words convey a shiver of apprehension.

“How about, after this, I help you sort through some file structures, and see if we can make sure you’re all safe in the station grid?” I offered as I slunk through the halls toward the drone command station. Which was now a missile targeting station.

I’d had Ennos make a new sign for the door and everything.

“I’m not sure what you could do that I couldn’t. But I appreciate it.”

I paused, and then asked something I’d been worried about separately for a while. “What do you see when I talk?” I asked.

“You, talking. It’s strange. Why?”

Because inorganic life couldn’t perceive certain non-causal effects. “No bits of light? Where does the sound come from?”

“From *you*, Lily.” Ennos sounded confused. “I don’t… no, the records don’t match. There are holes everywhere, if you run a comparative analysis. What are you doing?”

“I’m offering to help you find holes.” I said, pausing only briefly to give a *real actual command for the door to open*, and slipping into the small room wallpapered in viewing screens and targeting gear. “I love being able to do that.” I think I said out loud.

“Oh, the station’s hardcoding would like you to know that you are about to commit a crime against organic life.” Ennos informed me. “That’s a bit worrying, but it doesn’t actually have the power to stop you. Actually a good thing so much of this station needs manual control.”

“Noted!” I said. “Is the drone loaded and ready?”

“Missile.”

“Don’t care!”

“And yes.”

I was purring as I hit the button, targeting data already input hours earlier.

Two decks below us, a thin needle of a machine rolled out of a dock and into open space. Gravity and magnetic fields nudged it into position, and it slid away toward the open highway of the void where it could cut its engines open.

As soon as it cleared the station’s shield, four other engine signatures flared into life on the sensors. An alarm began sounding, and Ennos was yelling something about how we’d doomed ourselves.

I hissed at the display, not bothering to let it be real words. I *had* missed something. I missed that the drone *wasn’t one of the modified couriers* that I’d put together. Wasn’t built to be unrecognized by any automated defenses still clinging to life up here.

Four United Eastern Bloc hunter killer drones lit off their drives, and took off after our makeshift projectile.

I hissed again, this time letting it turn into language as I turned and scampered off the desk I had perched on. “Man the guns!” I called to the AI

“I don’t have thumbs!” Ennos yelled back.

“Neither do I! So tell me what gun I need to get to to cut them off!” I was already heading down a hall, about to dive into an access shaft with an acrobatic leap when Ennos cut me off.

“Turn around! Interdiction field generator on deck 5A!” They call out the location, and I skid to a stop, claws rattling on the deck plate as I push off the lip of the access shaft.

I get moving. Between the two of us, we’ve got a missile to save.