The radio contact from Glitter caught me slightly by surprise. Ennos and I had taken some time to set the station’s comm system to basically auto-answer whenever she pinged us, along with tying the station’s internal camera network into the feed. It was kind of… uh… slapped together? Look, getting video compression that could work over radio wasn’t easy. She’d need to do some legwork to make it work, but at least she could keep an eye on us without burning a month’s worth of power reserves in ten minutes of subspace connection.

Which wasn’t actually a huge problem for her, really. Or for AIs in general. Part of the perk of being a digital intellect was the ability to rapidly structure hyper-specialized code, and then splinter off a part of your brain power to keep an eye on it. Automation wasn’t required, when you could assign some of your attention to any given task, and that made it a lot easier for an AI to sort through a lot of data, interpret weird codecs, or just hold two conversations at once.

The downside - I guess? - was that you couldn’t eat things.

Which actually leads into a very strange question about qualia and experiences and what it means to feel and whether or not a piece of mechanical hardware designed to ‘smell’ will ever feel the same as a biological organ and honestly, it’s all very much a headache. I don’t really, actually, care? I mean, I don’t think any particular way is better. Just that they’re different, and those differences… you know… are things that are real. We don’t need a stack ranking of who can feel pain ‘better’.

This is a theoretical downside. So far, my experiences as far as I mostly remember them would not put eating as a species perk? According to all biological texts I’ve read, including a lot of stuff about my own uplift, cats don’t have the same range of taste buds that most omnivores or herbivores have. Which, I mean, okay, sure, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate some synthetic red meat flavor in my diet.

I’m still tracking down that damn orbital greenhouse. Don’t think I’ve forgotten! I’ll get to it. We’re running a defragment routine on the remains of the damaged parts of the shuttle’s memory.

As for the shuttle itself, well. I’m running a repair routine on that myself. Manually. Because the repair bots on the station don’t really know what to do with it.

We - and by we I mean me with Ennos providing commentary - hauled this thing in when it drifted a bit too close a few days ago. I almost forgot about it, what with getting sidetracked and shot repeatedly. But now, I’m taking advantage of some quiet time to try to retrofit it. See if I can apply a lot of the previously abstract knowledge I’ve built up to some paws-on practice.

It is-and-or-was a cramped two-seater, with a chunky rectangular box of a cargo bay, an engine that is just barely technically capable of safely braking when at full mass, and so few safety features that I think it’s a workplace hazard just to think about piloting it.

Would it surprise you, at all, to learn that it’s hull markings are from a hypercorp?

It’s from a company called Ferromancer, and past experience lets me know they’re mainly a high end design and manufacturing company for delicate spaceship parts. They’re from back when the corps had branding, almost like nations actually. I’ve encountered their work before, and I hate them. The shuttle is actually a weird example of just how good their stuff is.

Not a single part in the shuttle was actually built by Ferromancer.

Now, I get it. Just because you build hot rods doesn’t mean you built the truck that ferries them around. But it’s pretty telling that the miraculously surviving employee manual makes it clear that their pilots are never to attempt Ferromancer-standard maintenance or upgrades to this shuttle. And built at a time when spaceflight was *expensive*, when if you had the option to work in house, you *did*, they chose to outsource their most common workhorse shuttles to the lowest bidder.

The lowest bidder, still more expensive than doing it themselves, was their preferred option. Let that sink in.

I tried to recover a live-lattice aggregation generator they’d built from a wreck once. The first tap, the *slightest* motion, and it activated, and began generating thrust. Punched through the wreck’s hull, snapped two of the station’s manipulator arms, and crashed into Jupiter a few hours later.

To be clear on this, that was a shelf-stable power generation unit. Not an engine, thruster, drive, or other form of propulsion. Well, intentional propulsion.

Anyway, point is, I’m trying to put the shuttle back together, and am about a fourth of the way through cutting away a bulkhead that’s worth more as scrap metal than ship structure when Glitter calls.

“I humbly request a token of favor.” Glitter says out of nowhere.

Which, naturally, causes me to yowl in surprise, and jerk my paw in a way that *technically* removes the damaged plate. It also adds one other plate to the list of damaged bits to remove. That is a problem for future Lily; though present Lily does make a note that this is Glitter’s fault.

“I’m not getting you a new battery just so you can run the subspace comm every minute of the day.” I reply, once I’ve regained my composure. Fortunately, inside the engineering armor, my composure can be as horrible as I want and no one can see through the shielding. “I already have enough trouble with power supply. Though, I did uncover an actual factory deck today! It could maybe put something together? I’ll ask Ennos later when they know what all the loaded schematics on the assembly lines are.”

I know from experience by now that Glitter’s long pause is not due to comms lag or anything so pedestrian. Instead, it’s her waiting for me to stop rambling. Which, when I figured that out, I will admit kind of stung.

I am just about to ask what it is she’d like, breaking the silence that has started to fill the shuttle bay, when she speaks again. “I have noticed, recently, that you regularly fire a low intensity beam weapon to the surface.” Glitter states, in her usual noble tone.

“Oh! Yes. There’s a living chemical thing down there that mind controls people. I can’t safely kill it, so I sort of prod it to move on every now and then so it doesn’t accidentally wipe out whole villages or something.” I pad across the bay and to the tool that I’ve cobbled together to adjust the settings on the miniature laser strapped to my paw. With the armor on, it’s a lot easier than otherwise to mess with the dials, but it’s still obvious this was made for someone with fingers, and it’s simpler to just slap my suited paw into the slot and let the simple machine dial down the intensity until it’s where I need it to be and I can get back to work. It takes basically no focus, so I can do this while I keep talking. “The whole thing is sort of a chore, really. The Haze - I call it the Haze - isn’t actually that dangerous. I just need to keep it moving, and this lets me do it without collateral damage.”

Glitter’s voice, patient as a saint to be able to deal with me when I’m excited, waits just long enough to be polite, and then asks her favor. “Would you be offended if I asked to do that?”

“To… be a mind control cloud?” I pause, yanking my paw back from the rotating rubber pad and making sure my laser is properly set before heading back to the shuttle.

“To be the one that prods it, as you say.”

I blink, eyes widening under my helmet. “You want to do my chores for me?” I can’t help but ask with a puzzled meow.

“Partially.” Glitter says. “I wish to be of use, in some way. There is a debt between us that cannot ever be paid, and-“

“Nope!” I reject that entire notion out of hand. “I’m capricious and neither pay nor collect debts!”

“-and I wish to repay you regardless.” Glitter sounds exasperated with me. Which, you know, fair, I suppose. “But also, I am adrift. I have nothing to do. My war is long over. I could aid you in your own, but what possible thing could I do that would matter? Your armaments outmatch mine a thousandfold. Your detection systems are more varied and useful. The only thing I have to offer you is your own time. And now, with the madness of contradiction pushed back and broken, I find the excitement suddenly missing. And I wish to participate, in your life, and in the world of the living.”

The way Glitter talks sometimes is hard to parse, but I cannot help letting my tail flick in amusement as I instantly decipher this particular paragraph of courtly poetry. “You’re *bored*!” I accuse her.

“I am bored.” Glitter confirms, sounding dejected.

I decide almost right away not to tease her about this. The mental image of a morose weapons platform, suddenly devoid of anything to do, is equal parts sad and scary. And also, aside from the obvious concern that she might get bored enough to start carving art into the planet, there’s just the fact that Glitter is my friend, and I wanna help.

“Okay! So, we’re gonna need to get a variable beam projector installed in you, huh?” I say out loud.

“Ennos was not joking…” Glitter sounds amazed. “You really do not realize you’re doing that, do you?”

“Doing what?”

“I would not concern yourself with this.” Glitter almost certainly lies to me. “Although, modifications to myself? Could I not take remote command of your own, now that my connections are not fettered?”

I give a sheepish mewl that probably would have just been translated as “Ah.” If I’d let it. “So.” I speak normally. “The station kind of… rejects that. Like, a lot. It’s some kind of infectious code that’s gotten into pretty much every system. I’ve only managed to convince it to even give Ennos permission for a couple things, and basically never weaponry. So, unless you have some kind of void beam trick that makes it not violently annihilate matter, we’ll need to get something else loaded onto you personally that you can have complete access to.”

“I have never been changed.” Glitter says distantly. “Even software patches. Even *orders*. I do not know how to feel about this.”

“Well, you’ve got some time to think about it. I’m gonna have to build the projector anyway, and… hm. I need to go check on if our fabricator can… actually, hey Ennos! What’cha up to buddy?” I call out to the station. The extra volume really doesn’t actually matter, they can hear me just fine anyway and have some kind of recognition program set up for use of their name. But it feels more personal this way.

Ennos’ voice joins our conversation, and now I’m talking to two people I can’t see. “I am currently running a metadata diagnostic on the linguistic database.” Ennos says. “Specifically, on the piece of strange programming attached to it.”

“How’s that going? Also, do we have a blueprint for a laser?”

“Yes. We have eighty four ways to construct a laser with the known resources on the station. Six of them are useful. I’ve selected the one that you’ll want, because it is absurd, and cost means little to someone who can harvest tungsten and platinum from an entire orbital junkyard all to themselves.” Ennos pauses and then addresses the first part of the question. “And it is going strangely. Something shifted just before you began speaking to me. The watcher program I have running reports a near doubling of activity from the parasite code. I need to focus on this. Please excuse me.”

Ennos goes quiet, and I wait a minute before going back to talking to Glitter. “So, that sounds promising.” I say. Enthusiastically! I say it enthusiastically!

Glitter may not share my enthusiasm, but Glitter’s simple request to help with chores is sort of turning into an existential crisis for her. I give her some time to figure that out, while I figure out what I’m doing with my time in general.

The shuttle is… I hate to say it, but the shuttle is scrap. There’s nothing left here for me to actually work with. Engine’s shot, control board is dead, hull is compromised. It would be faster for me to build my own rather than try to repair this wreckage.

Which I might do, I guess? There’s nothing really stopping me, except for time, resources, and expertise. But I’ve got literally all the time in the world, an entire Kessler syndrome of resources, and… I mean, trial and error can get you a long way. I should know!

But also there are engineering guides stored on the grid. I’m not actually that dumb. Don’t worry.

I don’t even really need a shuttle right now anyway, I guess. I’m mostly just sort of presuming that we’ll find a magical realm full of edible plants, still somehow growing after all this time, ready to be harvested and eaten. Hopefully ones I’m not allergic to? I don’t actually know what I’m allergic to, but I’ve read a lot of biology texts, and it looks like cats can’t eat a lot of things. But I still think I’d eat an entire garlic bulb if that was what we found, just to taste something, anything.

Anyway. Shuttle? Broken. Plants? Potentially existent. The problem? Getting the plants from there to here without a shuttle. The solution?

I mean, build a shuttle I guess. Or learn that the station has some kind of science fiction style teleporter on it. I’ve been finding a *lot* of stuff behind all those doors I can open now that the station recognizes me as giving commands.

Not that it didn’t recognize me as the primary authority to begin with, but at least now it can hear me. And there’s so much more to do, now. It’s… I mean, it’s a little exhausting, sometimes?

Not that I miss how things were previously. You spend one century frantically trying to keep the maintenance routines online and shooting down problems, and you’re pretty much over it. But it was…. I dunno. It was familiar? I was used to it. I knew what I was doing.

Now? Now I don’t know anything, it feels like. Everything that changes just unearths a half dozen things I can realize I never knew in the first place. My voice just shows off how much of the station I haven’t ever explored. Ennos shows me how little I know about what the systems are doing behind the scenes. Learning more about my own medical history is leaving me feeling like I should be one of the station’s ghosts.

And I just don’t know what to do about any of it.

I’m not actually that smart. I’m the smartest cat ever, but I don’t have answers. I’ve been shying away from actually trying to remember the past for four hundred years. Answers might scare me more than the questions ever could. And the questions these days are often boiling down to ‘do you live in a haunted house’, so that’s kind of worrying all on its own.

This is why I hate the process of taking off the engineering armor. It takes twenty minutes, and that gives me too much time to think.

Now, though, I’m free from my duralumin confines, and I can dash through the station’s oversized corridors as a visible cloud of cleaner nanos try to catch up to me and undo the effects of being sealed in armor for six hours.

I’ve figured out what to do with my time. Not forever, that is, but right now.

Restock my food reserves, check the logs to make sure no one is trying to call in an air strike, and then, get to a command station and start up the fabricators to build Glitter her new tool.

Ennos was right. It is absurd. I don’t think he was listening in on our conversation; this thing is calibrated to melt down comets. It’s got some kind of impossible quantum physics effect that lets it bleed off kinetic energy. Or… I mean, I think it converts kinetic energy into heat? Rapidly? This doesn’t seem like a laser at all.

I check. It’s not. It’s called an elser. This seems impossible, under conventional physical laws, and sure enough, it is. Looks like a part of the lensing array uses a fairly common metamaterial that we still have a stockpile of in one of the cargo bays. Mostly because I haven’t been building guns that stop things by melting them.

I consider it for a good minute or two. Which is, for me, basically forever. Then, I make a conscious choice to *not* give Glitter the impossible space gun. I find the other designs Ennos earmarked in the system, pick a good old fashioned orbit to surface laser array, and start the assembly process.

It’s about two thirds done, with me keeping an eye on it to troubleshoot any manufacturing bugs that come up, when Glitter gets back to me. She would like to try having her physical form changed. I’m not exactly shocked, but I’m still feeling pretty good, a little bobbing pep in my movements as I watch the assembler do its job.

It takes two days and three spacewalks for me to get the whole thing setup. There’s only one small interruption to shoot down a long range missile that’d been in accidental orbit around the sun, and just got within effective range of a potential target. Scared the heck out of Ennos when it lit off its engines just outside our orbital path, and it wasn’t even aiming for us. I almost missed that one! But got it at the last minute before it hit one of the large scale habitat stations. I still don’t know if anyone lives on those anymore, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

And then, a week later, after a few test fires and, yes, a stockpile of commercial batteries added to Glitter’s internals, she takes her first poke at the Haze, shifting it out of a small tower city that it’d been in for a little while.

I dunno if she’d ever say it out loud - Glitter has a kind of propriety to her etiquette that I don’t quite *get* really - but my friend seems happy. I can hear the smile in her digital voice; no amount of AI control of their own bodies, it seems, lets them completely abandon unconscious emotional broadcast.

It’s been a good week.

And it’s killed enough time that the shuttle’s map data has been as repaired as it’s gonna get.

I’m going hunting.

For carrots. To be clear. I am hunting for carrots, or other root vegetables.

This was supposed to be dramatic, and I am ruining the gravitas. Okay. Well, gravitas ruined, I feel comfortable taking a nap before I get back to work.

I fall asleep in the exolab, thin rays of sun glittering through their windows, the feeling of a comforting hand on my head and a sense of pride carrying me into my dreams.