I am, at this point, wholly prepared to believe that the ration replicator is haunted.

Or possessed? Maybe just generically ‘influenced’. I’m not sure what the proper terminology is. I don’t care.

For all I know, it’s Ennos having figured out how to modify its routines, and I’m being subjected to a month long prank. But that doesn’t seem in character for the AI that I would most describe as ‘orderly’.

What am I talking about, you ask? I am talking about *geometry* of course.

Specifically, the geometry of my food. I know I complain about the food sometimes, and I admit, I’m sure that gets old. But you know what else gets old? The food. And it’s been getting older for me than it has for you, so you aren’t allowed to complain. I am vaguely aware from a treatise on social etiquette published six hundred years ago in East York, that these are, in fact, ‘the rules’. But, let me put your worries to rest: I am not here to complain about the taste of the food today.

For the longest time, the galley unit rotated between thin rectangular bars, and a kind of doughy oblong shape for what it dispensed food as. In the absence of things like fresh ingredients, flavorings, the galley relies on the replicator, which can transmute electricity and some abuse of physics into matter. But, doing this safely is basically impossible. Doing it in a way that isn’t woefully reckless requires that the replicator pretty much stick to making one nutrient-compact flavorless hydrocarbon. Which is then pressed into form by the galley, and served to me.

Room temperature.

But for the past couple weeks, that hasn’t really been holding up.

First it was small changes. Rounded edges on the nutrient bars, small lines on the outsides of the ration orbs. Then, it started to get a bit weirder. I’d get to the dispenser and it would present me with multiple small ration balls, with little dots of extra ration paste on the outside. Or, more recently, the time it served me a torus.

Now, I’m looking down at the plate that has some kind of hydrocarbon-based ziagarraut on it, and wondering what is going on in my life. Three stacked square tiers, but with a set of smaller steps going up one side and what looks like detail lines carved into them. Small markings that cannot possible serve a food-based purpose.

“Ennos!” I call out, not taking my eyes off what is supposed to be my lunch.

“Yes, Lily?” The AI’s voice echoes from the hallway outside. “Is this important? I am mapping intercept trajectories.”

“What did you do to the galley?” I ask, a bit belligerently.

There is a pause, before Ennos’ honest voice comes back. I know it’s his honest voice, because he sounds worried, and he can’t lie worth anything when he’s panicking. “Nothing? Why? What’s gone wrong? Are you alright? Is something on fire?”

I flick my eyes toward the door, afraid that if I stop staring at my lunch sculpture, it might vanish. “Nothing is on fire. Why are you talking from outside?”

“The galley does not have proper access to the internal resonance comms.” Ennos sounds even *more* worried, which is strange. Normally he feels better when things aren’t on fire. “What is wrong?”

“My lunch looks like a Nova Brazil college campus, and I want to know why.” I call back. Some time passes, and I don’t turn my eyes away from the small food ziggurat. More time passes. I realize I am holding my breath, like I’m coiled to pounce. “Ennos?”

“Hm?” The AI’s voice sounds distant. “Yes, Lily?”

Well now *I’m* worried too! “Did you forget about the food thing? Is something eating your memory? Oh no, is there a virus in the grid with you?!”

“Oh, no, I assumed you were joking and resumed work.”

“Ennos!” I yell. “This is serious!”

“No, it isn’t!” The AI informs me, *cheerfully*. “Enjoy your lunch!”

I glare at my ‘lunch’ for another half hour, before my stomach pangs with pain, and I give in to the urge to eat. Chomping down on the top layer of the ziggurat and tearing off a wet chunk of the pressed nutrient laden hydrocarbon mixture with my fangs.

It tastes like ration paste. I’m not sure what I expected.

The time wasted isn’t that bad. I can afford time, these days. The maintenance is where it’s supposed to be, just needing one verbal check-in every day, Glitter is handling the Haze problem, Ennos is doing… something. Look, Ennos is an outlier; they’ve kind of got their own thing going on. I asked if I could help once, and they just *huffed* at me, and told me I couldn’t do anything without an IOI. And then ignored my explanation for how my body rejects cybernetics. Very rude.

The point is, before I get too sidetracked by how rude Ennos is, I can take a long lunch. Not something I’m used to.

After that, chores.

Check the ammo stockpiles, the material reserves, and the spare parts. Snap up a few chunks of debris from around us with the magnetic grapples, restock all those high quality metals that I need to make more stuff. Make sure the factories are running properly.

I have multiple factories now! I’m mostly using them to jury rig consumer goods into something more useful for us. One of them is running off portable batteries that can, technically, be linked up into larger clusters with only minimal loss. I’ve already got one stack over on Glitter, and I’m setting up a few more here so I can have a fourth backup power supply in case anything… happens.

The other one is just making tiny hoverdrones. Basically just a wireless connection and a camera for Ennos and Glitter to make use of. And a *speaker*. There *was* a blueprint for a speaker this whole time!

I want to briefly tangent - yes, briefly, shut up - into the fact that I have far less experience navigating the station’s grid than I thought. I keep calling it “the grid”, and that’s just wrong. It’s been wrong this whole time, and I didn’t really understand how or why.

Imagine a landscape. Mountains, rivers, trees, and a few towns. The towns are ‘civilization’. But they’re divided by the rivers and mountains. That metaphor basically sums up the whole grid here. There’s tens, maybe hundreds of different systems, all of them connected in some way to the central ‘station’ intelligence, but all with different quirks to them.

Some required a physical presence to access or activate, some were indexed while some weren’t, some had large swaths of data hidden inside other files or libraries that weren’t labeled at all, or sometimes just didn’t show up without drilling down to core code.

It was actually infuriating. I’d spent hundreds of years getting to know the physical space I inhabited, learning to keep the air flowing and the lights on, learning to aim and fire weapons with paws and work a welding laser while covered in fur. And yes, reading, too. Reading everything I thought I had access to; I’d read so many digital textbooks that I had *reread some of them* when I got bored.

And I hadn’t even scratched the surface. Not just of the physical station, which I was now learning more and more of, its size proving to be larger and larger with each new door unlocked, but also of the incorporeal grid, a whole other world with its own pile of secrets and inconveniences.

Great.

Okay, tangent over. What were we talking about?

Chores. Right.

There’s actually a weird loss marked for a small chunk of metal stocks, and a power expenditure from the subspace tap production of a hydrogen fuel cell, and I don’t remember where this came from. I track it backward, and find that one of the drone fabricators is apparently putting together some kind of heavy cargo drone.

The only thing I can think is that it was in the build queue when Ennos and I slapped together the recovery flotilla for Glitter. I double check the launch bay those drones are in, and find none missing, and - more importantly - no new ones either. So, this problem hasn’t gotten out of hand, and I cancel the project now before it goes too far and eats up a bunch of the stuff I need to make kinetic projectiles.

An alarm sounds. Ennos patches a frantic SOS through to me. It takes me forty eight seconds to get to the gunnery controls at an irresponsibly reckless speed, and another twenty four seconds to line up a shot. The groundstriker turns an old bioweapons lab into a smoking crater, and an inferno round followup purifies the area. Two crossing void beams dig defensive trenches while a third and fourth carve up the flesh horrors spilling out of the area. The defenders, an exhausted looking band of about a hundred people of a score of different species, collectively slump as the crisis resolves.

It took me barely more than a minute to get the call, and take action, but my traitorous eyes can’t help but look at the various detail scans on my AR displays and realize that I have saved well under a fifth of the people there.

Who were they, I wonder? A village, or a caravan? Explorers accidentally unleashing hell, or a coalition tracking hell back to its home?

I wish I could have done more. I wish I could spot these problems before they’ve already killed so many. But even from up here, I can’t see everything. Especially not the future.

The skirmish has my stomach roiling, a grim sorrow threatening to take over my limbs. I don’t really have a good sense of time, but by the time I silently wrap up the rest of the chores I had planned, the clock says that I’ve been at this for about six hours.

I eat again. I am served a blooming flower. I glare at it with hunter’s eyes and poke it with extended claws before making the decision to start eating.

It still tastes like ration.

“Ennos, are you certain the galley isn’t alive, haunted, rogue, infected with a hostile nanoswarm, being targeted by an infiltrator bot, or being controlled by someone on the surface who has found an ancient buried access terminal?” I ask.

The AI hums at me. “Some of those are rather… specific.”

“Look, a lot can happen in a few centuries.” I meow back. “Just… what’s going on with this thing?”

“I really do not know what you mean by that.” Ennos replies. “It is connected to the station’s main command routines, all safety protocols are operating at full effectiveness, maintenance readouts report that it is in working order, nanoswarm reports it has been thoroughly cleaned… everything seems to be fine. In fact, compared to several other systems on the same deck, it’s in exceptionally good condition.” Ennos pauses. “Actually, it is almost… too perfect. Strange. But I am attempting to avoid unfounded paranoia. And you should as well. Odd shapes perhaps indicate that the galley has simply restored functionality that was previously lost. After all, is maintenance not much more efficient now?”

“You and your efficiency.” I mutter.

“Quite.” Ennos says. “And, as one of the perks of my exceptional efficiency, I have for you now a set of potential coordinates to search.”

My heart leaps in my chest. “Search for… something horrible, that might kill us all?” I ask, keeping my expectations low.

“Search for an orbital farm.” Ennos corrects, a smile in their voice. “I have traced back the reconstructed path of the shuttle you retrieved, and I believe that I can safely tell you when our orbit will next intersect the-”

“I’ll get my armor on!” I yell, not even bothering to translate from cat to whatever dialect Ennos is familiar with. The excited meow comes out like a wail, but there’s no hint of angst left in me despite what noises I may be making. Instead, I’m already running for the drone bay, moving fast enough and taking strange enough shortcuts that it takes Ennos a couple tries to broadcast their voice properly near me.

“Lily!” The AI tries to catch my attention. “Lily, you have four hours until we’re even remotely close to the target!”

It is too late. I am excited now. I plant my paws on the marked spots and meow a command to the system that ‘assembles’ the space suit and armor that is technically a drone. Heavy machinery moving with almost delicate care pulls away from the cargo drone it’s been putting together, and moves to bolt and weld pieces of grav plate and operational utility around my body, gently beginning the process of sealing me into the armor.

“Lily, go take a nap or something! You’re going to get all irritable if you’re in your armor for six hours!” Ennos chastises me.

I scoff. Who could possibly sleep with something like this on the horizon? Naps are for when you’re *sad*, not when you’re *vibrating through the deck plates*!

“Wait, are you actually sad every time you go take a nap?” Ennos asks with shocked concern. “Lily, that’s not okay! Come on, pause the assembly routine, and let’s go open some dangerous unknown airlocks or run an unlabelled code fragment or something else that you like to do.”

“Or, we could fire up the engines, and…”

“The engines are *not* safe! This station has too many engines and too many structural weak points! It’s a miracle that it hasn’t had parts fall off using them before!” Ennos sounds exasperated, so I don’t say anything, instead trying my best to look innocent. Which is actually pretty easy, since cats tend to generally always look like they’re guilty, which makes it hard for Ennos to tell when I’m actually hiding something. “Lily.” The AI sighs. “What broke off of the station?”

“Outer science wing.” I mutter. “And an engine pod. And a high yield reactor core. And a... hydroponics bay.” I meow again, pausing the armor assembly. It takes a minute for it to undo what it’s already done, and I shake out the white fur of my paws as I step out. At least *that* fur didn’t get shot off, so the parts of myself I see most often still look properly feline. “Alright, alright. I’ll be patient.”

“Thank you.” Ennos sighs again. “Besides, six hours isn’t that long. You could probably-“

They never finish their sentence. Another alarm sounds.

Now *I* sigh. The gesture still sort of alien to my biology, but cathartic all same.

Ennos was right, though. Six hours wasn’t that long. And by the time I’ve shot down the infiltrator satellite that was trying to turn off the life support, it’s a lot closer to the hour when we’ll be crossing paths with the potential orbital farm. This time, no one with actual patience complains when I start getting bolted into the armor.

I check in with Glitter and make sure she’s doing okay, reset all the maintenance routines, and connect a few of the finished camera drones to a private grid on a civilian computer I printed out so that Glitter and Ennos can control them completely. I eat, one more time, before getting armored up. It’s a cube. No comment, except that it tastes like ration.

And then, when the projected timer ticks to zero in my vision, I take a running start and launch myself through the bay shield and out of the flight deck, tumbling away from the station’s embrace, and out into the void.

I feel a lot more relaxed about this one than the last time I did it.

But I maybe should have waited for more of my fur to regrow.

Turns out, this suit itches when it rubs against my bare skin.