I am, once again, drifting through the condensed nothing of hard vacuum.

My AR link is cut off as soon as I’m outside the station. How, exactly, the station has decided what is and is not inside itself seems arbitrary. But I also don’t have the position to complain about it; after all, it’s not like I plan on rustling around in root code that I can’t even read to try to tamper with the directives that keep my air going.

I’m in communication with Ennos this time, though. A simple encrypted radio link is good enough for this. There’s an amount of interference, obviously, given… you know… everything. All this stuff. But it’s not like we really need anything more powerful, given that I’m traveling to something within jumping range, and not more than a light second away.

Okay, I said that, and then I remembered how space works. “Jumping range” has more to do with when I starve to death than with how much distance I can cover.

It’s not that I ever forget how space works. Just that I spend most of my time… not… in it.

Below me, Earth looms. So large that I feel like nothing compared to it. My home is so high up, with such a massive vantage point. And yet, I watch over only a tiny sliver of the world at a time. There are still millions of people down there, and while they may not know it, a lot of them rely on random chance, the luck of having me overhead when a certain type of problem crops up.

It makes me angry. So, so angry.

My station is unbelievably old. So old, it has had to purge old data records from the grid as time went on. But it doesn’t wear down, it doesn’t age, it doesn’t decay. It keeps going, even when the maintenance routines slip and the life support shuts down from lack of use, the emergency backups keep it going. For *thousands of years* it has kept going. For so long, I can’t even tell you how long it has been.

This is what people used to build. Even when that golden age ended, and rivals started taking and retaking the station, adding their own tools, their own purpose to it, it kept those parts going too. It’s a living library, a near invincible record of the people who once were.

And now, all that is lost. The station is all that’s left. Half memorial, half sentinel, watching the sophonts of Earth scramble in the dirt to try to rebuild even a scrap of what that old golden age produced.

There are culprits, of course. Demagogues, corporations, reactionary movements. I don’t have a whole picture of history, but I have moments. Snapshots, dredged up in my ongoing research. The station’s grid has a lot more storage on it now than it did when I woke up, let me tell you. I don’t wanna lose another history text again.

But all those culprits are long dead. It’s far, far too late for me to shoot any of them. All that is left below is ruin and ash.

Poison clouds, radioactive wastes, rogue machines from forgotten wars and pointless greed, dead cities, mass graves, crashed starships, old automatons, mutated wildlife, and an endless supply of violence. And everywhere, people. Hanging on by threads sometimes, but *people*. A beacon for emergence events, for parasites like the Haze, or just for their own folly.

But hanging on.

“Lily? Are you there?” Ennos’ voice crackles through my internal comm.

“How can something so big be so small?” I mutter back.

“That’s called perspective.” Ennos says dryly, missing out on the profound and fragile nature of Earth. “And speaking of perspective, you may not have noticed, but you’re approaching a pair of satellites in a magnetic orbit with each other. Recommend engaging grav plating, and shifting starboard three-two-six degrees at time one-four.”

“I don’t even have a…” I stop. There is, in the corner of my vision, a glowing red number displaying a time stamp. It ticks up as I watch. How did… they get this in here? I didn’t put this here, that would have been foresight, and I don’t do that. Also… “We’re within a light second of each other, you don’t need to timestamp maneuvering commands. Void, you don’t even need to give maneuvering commands in general; you can just yell at me to dodge and I’ll probably be fine. I’m basically immortal anyway.”

The word ‘basically’ does a lot of work for me. I should thank whoever invented it.

Ennos replies with the sort of voice that makes me think they’ve been going through media archives and really, really want to be a fleet admiral now, but are getting stonewalled by me crushing their dreams. “Just dodge the stupid satellites.” They sulk.

“Yes captain.” I reply.

“I thought you were captain. Wait. How is it that you are in charge of the station, anyway?” Ennos asks, suddenly curious. “There are no other cats on board. I… never thought about this. Where did you come from? Are you of a lineage of uplifts removed from a cryo pod every generation to maintain the station?”

Well, I have some time while I float closer and closer to the potential orbital farm. I can answer a few questions. But first. “What cryo pod would I… do we have cryo pods?”

“Yes. Several hundred. Did you…?” Ennos doesn’t bother finishing the question. Of course I hadn’t noticed. “Ah.” They sigh.

“I’ve been here most of my life.” I said over the radio link, shifting my paws up to fire the grav plating and roll myself away from the dancing satellites. “My mom - adopted, you know - brought me up with a delve crew a while back. They were looking for… I mean… they…” I trail off, the words fizzing out as I falter. “There was something on the station they wanted.” I decide on.

This answer does nothing to clear up Ennos’ confusion. “The only surface-to-orbit activity in the last fifty years, by the record, has been either shot down, cargo railguns firing to nowhere, or otherwise a failure. Except for the drop shuttles of what I must assume is the Last Ship?”

“Yup.” I say, carefully keeping my tone neutral and my eyes on the looming farm structure. It’s starting to come into focus now. Three big pillars, connected by smaller struts. Hallways, maybe? Without going inside, I can’t know if these are meant to be tall, or wide.

“Lily?” Ennos asks several minutes later, voice small. “How… old are you?”

“Uh…” That’s an awkward question! How do you tell your friend that you’ve lost track? “Some number over four hundred?”

“Four hundred… what?”

“Years.”

The answer silences Ennos for a long while. I’m close enough to the farm to make out individual portholes by the time they speak up again. “You have been out here, alone, for all that time?” They ask softly.

“Oh! It’s not that bad!” I instantly deflect from what I am forced to accept is pity. “I wasn’t even that smart when I got here; just a normal old cat. So I didn’t start to get bored for… I mean, there’s always something to do… so… you know…”

“You… uplifted yourself?” Ennos sounds either doubtful or incredulous. I’m not sure what the difference between those words is, so it could go either way.

I refrain from nodding, not wanting to have to course correct if I screw up my momentum. But I think about it. “Oh yeah! Give a cat a century or so and she can learn stuff. It’s just harder. I mean, compared to… I guess anyone? I bet I could learn faster than a shark, though.” I get sidetracked, and start mentally listing to myself all the animals I was probably more clever than. “Anyway. It’s been fine.”

“Has it?” Ennos’ voice is so quiet, I wonder if I’ve actually heard anything. “I’ve been alive for weeks. And yet… it feels like a lifetime. It *is* my lifetime. Four *hundred years*?” They sound so… sad. “What have you been doing?”

“Trying to have a peaceful life, I guess.” It’s such a stupid answer. It’s so… nothing. And a lie. And a lot of other things.

I’m a couple hundred feet closer to my destination, starting to spin up the grav plates to break down to safe landing speeds and look for an airlock, when Ennos continues the conversation. “I would not have assumed you wanted a peaceful life.” They say. “I had thought you had chosen ‘combatant’ as your path.”

The words hurt. More than body slamming through a metal grate hurts. More than getting shot had hurt. More than that one fabrication error where I’d gotten one of my forelegs sliced off and had to spend a week in a vivification pod hurt.

I wasn’t expecting it to hurt this much.

I already knew I was a combatant. I self-identified as a soldier, of sorts. But still…. I don’t know. I don’t know how to react. Part of me wants to run and hide, but I am trapped in this conversation by virtue of being a quarter mile drifting into space and unable to hang up on my guiding assistant.

So I say nothing.

“Lily?” Ennos sounds afraid.

“I wanted to build things.” I mutter back. I’m not even sure I was trying to use my projected voice, but the words come out clear anyway. “I didn’t want to be a killer.”

“You aren’t…!”

“I kill things.” I hiss out. “It’s practically all I do.” I want to pace, to claw at something, even if it’s just a deckplate, to curl up and sleep until my erratic brain lets go of this line of thinking. “I am a *very* good killer.”

I have killed so many things. Many of them deserving, but assuredly some of them not. Many of them monsters, many of them not. Railguns and void rays and flak cannons and mag webs and intercept beams and good old fashioned lasers. I have killed so many things.

“We don’t have to…” Ennos grasps for words. “You’re coming up on the orbital farm. We can talk about something… you’re not a bad person. You’re protecting people. It’s not hard to see. I’m only a few weeks old, and I know you’re a good person!” They pause, then add, “You saved Glitter! You found *me*!”

“You’re biased.” I mewl. I’m not feeling so great right now. Maybe this trip was a bad idea.

“No!” Ennos snaps at me suddenly. “It’s fine! Nothing is going wrong, and you complain endlessly about the food! Go find some berries or something!” There’s a hint of desperation in their voice, and I realize something all of a sudden.

They’re echoing the fear of their predecessor. Ennos is afraid of being left alone.

“I’m not going anywhere.” I mutter, reassuringly, the spirals my mind has been going through suddenly arresting themselves. “Don’t worry. I’m alright.” I sigh inside my suit.

It’s a different experience, now. Before, I was, in the abstract, responsible for the lives of everyone below. But beyond that, nothing tethered me that much. Now, though? Ennos and Glitter were *here*. With me. Talking to me. Ennos *needed* me.

It’s a lot harder to be self destructive when you’d be taking someone else with you.

“I’m okay.” I say again. “I won’t do anything stupid. I mean, *this time*.” I preempt Ennos’ snark. “Aside from throwing myself into space, obviously.” I feel one last twinge of sorrow, and I try to express it, to push the sliver of hurt out of my chest. “I just… I would have wanted my mom to be proud of me.”

Except I don’t say that.

I mean, I *say* that. If you played back my words in cat, and translated manually, I am absolutely sure that is what I said. I did say that.

But that is not what comes out.

Instead, my projected voice *twists*. Wrenching itself out of my grasp, changing and uncoiling. And for an instant, I see the mechanisms inside of it, laid bare in a mental construct of twisted glass and moving parts, before it slams shut again.

And with a sensation not unlike being flicked in the nose, the words that come out do so differently.

“I think my mom would have been proud of me.” I… say? I say.

And somehow, I know that’s true.

Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to say that last bit over radio, and Ennos has mistaken my quiet contemplation of the nature of reality for sulking. Which… okay, *fair*, but also rude. “Okay, enough moping!” They speak in an enthusiastic tone that doesn’t feel right coming from the normally reserved or panicked AI. “Suit sensors have three spots on this part of the hull I can mark as airlocks! All of them look sealed, so aim for the closest one, and we can get in that way.”

I huff out a tired breath. Okay, emotional turmoil later. Work now.

The farm looms large before me, no lights of its own giving it away, but glittering in the ambient light all the same. The thing is *huge*. Almost as big as my own home, easily several kilometers long; the hexagonal pillars build to maximize internal growing space. I give a few minor tweaks to the grav plates, and land lightly on the extended flat plating around the middle airlock. Judging by the orientation, these pillars of metal are tall after all.

“This airlock seems… not large.” I comment.

“Personnel airlock, not cargo.” Ennos informs me. “Most of these will be; your suit’s visuals picked up what looks like bay doors on the end segments. They probably ship out produce from there. These are for maintenance staff to do spacewalks.”

“No repair bots?” I muse.

“Lily, don’t take the magical repair bots for granted please.” Ennos sighs at me.

Okay, now that’s not fair! *I’m* allowed to sigh, but why do they get to sigh? Ennos doesn't even have lungs!

Unimportant. I let it go, and ask the more relevant question. “How do I get in?”

“Look to your left. There’s an access… *left*. Your *left*. Yes, there.”

It’s impressive how I can actually feel the AI rolling their eyes.

Oh man, Ennos has camera drones now! They can *actually* roll their eyes! That’s going to get old so fast!

But that’s a consideration for future Lily. Present Lily has a challenge.

Reorienting the grav plates, I walk up the ‘wall’ next to the airlock so that I can flick my suited tail down to near the access port. The plug obviously isn’t the same, but that’s fine. That’s why this suit has *two* different engineering nanoswarms built into it. I trigger one now, the blossom on my back unfolding and giving a simple-yet-complex command to the nanos. They’ll have a limited operations time, outside of the station, but that’s fine. They can recharge in my suit when done, and it only takes a minute or two for them to reconfigure the connector on my tail to fit properly.

“Checking… data codec is in the archive.” Ennos mutters as they work. “Airlock is secured. Codes are… there. Hah. Drawing from suit batteries, cycling now.” The hull rumbles under my paws.

And a second later, the airlock doors slide open.

I unhook myself and slide inside. We repeat the process again to open the airlock to the inside.

There is - and this is a good example - a *reason* that an unshackled AI is a scary thing to the people who have codes they would rather not be effortlessly shattered.

The interior is dark. I trigger the launcher in my suit’s shoulder, and fire a pinpoint chem light into the darkness. Then another couple, for good measure. In short order, a red glow illuminates the area just inside the airlock.

Old space suits - human suits, obviously - and a stocked locker of repair tools that are well past obsolete for my own home. There are small mementos in the lockers; photos, scraps of paper, the odd unsanctioned object. It makes the place feel somehow more alive, and I hope against entropy that there is more life left within.

Empty storage bins and piles of some kind of cloth line the walls. A grate for a floor, which would be a nightmare to walk on if I wasn’t in a suit with paws wide enough to not slip through. Against one of the walls, a narrow set of stairs built into the hull leads up to a sealed door, while another similar internal door sits directly underneath. An angular hallway leads off to my right, while to the left is an access to a cargo lift.

But ahead of me… ahead of me, lit up in the red glow of the chemlights, is a sign over an access door.

Greenhouse Layer M, it reads, the old monitor reads. There is no power going to it, but it held those words for so long, they burned into it.

“Air reads as clean.” Ennos tells me. “There’s no real airflow, but it’s a safe oxygen mix. No pathogens, no spores.” I shiver. I have had enough spores for a lifetime, after *the incident*. “No power signatures. Not unexpected, but it… wait.”

I wait. But Ennos is clearly distracted. So I don’t wait too long, before I am investigating the door to the greenhouse.

I trigger the manual release on the door. Carefully, so as not to accidentally destroy anything, I deploy a few more chemlights around the threshold of the door.

Row after row, a grid of troughs, lattices, and automated gardening tools. Sprinklers, solar lamps, pollinators. Some of the spaces are dirt beds, others are layered hydroponics, the two layered over each other to maximize use of space.

The place is cramped, dark, and… empty.

I double check the readouts. The air here is clean. With a mental command to my drone-suit, and a hiss of equalizing pressure, I open the helmet’s face plate.

The smell of dry dirt, with just a hint of old rot, slams into me. Something so close to what I instinctively know is the scent of the living world. And yet…

“It’s empty.” I whisper.

I fire more chemlights to be sure. But the bigger picture just makes me even more disappointed. The dirt is dry and lifeless. The last remnants of the things that once grew here are scraps of vine and leaf on the floor, the space so dead that the bacteria didn’t even eat everything on the way out.

But I don’t give up hope. This farm is *enormous*. And if it’s survived, without a hull breach, for this long, then *anything* could be left inside.

I move up, and check the next deck.

Empty.

Next. Empty.

Next! *Empty!*

I sweep the lower decks first, before moving up. Layer by layer, greenhouse by greenhouse. Until I have seen everything I need to of this third of the farm.

There is nothing left alive here. There was, once. I am in the right place. I’m just decades, or centuries, too late.

My heart hammers with frustrations and disappointment as I finish my sweep of the second segment. I have found a few sealed pallets of dirt; an early attempt at a stable nanoswarm imitating living soil. It’s a technological curiosity, but nothing more. I have found dozens of pieces of documentation on exactly how much produce this place used to ship out to other orbital habitats. I have found lost mementos of lost people, small bits and pieces of old lives lived here. Decorated gloves, shared graffiti in the galley, a deck of cards that look handmade. I don’t go into the crew quarters; I don’t want to know if the crew made it off or not before this place was decommissioned. I don’t need to disturb their rest. I have long since put my helmet back on. The smell of dirt is almost pleasant, but very taunting.

But whatever my search turns up, live plants are not part of it.

“Lily.” Ennos butts in on the radio channel.

“What!” I meow out, a little angrier than I intended. I gotta watch that; my voice should be what I want it to be, not what I reflexively let it be. “Sorry, what?” I soften my words.

“There’s a power source active there.” Ennos tells me. “I’ve triangulated it, from between your suit and the station’s sensors.”

“...Where?” I refuse to get excited again, only to be let down. But I’ll still check.

“Your segment, two decks down.” Ennos tells me.

I begin moving. I really should have brought some ration art along for this, I’m starting to get hungry. I could dawdle, but there is technically a time limit. We’ll be in similar orbital paths for another hour or two. And while I could come back anytime now that we know the coordinates, it’s actually quite hard to properly aim a jump that’s four thousand kilometers long. So… I hurry, is what I’m saying. I don’t want to get stuck here and have to hop across old wrecked warships to get home.

“What is it?” I ask Ennos as I move down the decks.

“I do not know.” The AI replies. “But it’s to your… side. Yes, that side.” They sigh in relief. “Look up. There. That way.”

There’s another sealed door. This one is *very* sealed. It takes Ennos a whole four seconds to crack the access codes after the engineering nanos do their thing.

“What were they storing in here?” I muse to myself as I pass the threshold. The material on the inside changes, dramatically. Some kind of shielded material; my sensors are having a hard time working with it scattering some of the methods of information gathering they use. The lights are on here, too. Or at least, the are once I - okay, once Ennos - opens the door. Casting a low white glow across the interior.

It’s a single chamber. Small. Not sized-for-me small, but small enough that a human would have a tricky time in here. Especially with the walls being as crowded as they are.

The walls are lined with crystalline pods.

Some of them are the size of a single paw. Some of them are the size of a single *all of me*. They jut straight out of the walls, cutting a good couple feet off the floor space, each of them with a trio of lights next to them. The lights glow in different colors for each pod. Some orange, some red. A scant handful of them, green.

“What…” I meow to myself.

And then my eyes realize what they’re seeing.

The pods are full of seeds.

This is a genetic vault.

And the stasis engine is still running.

“Ennos.” I say as I reseal the door behind me, one of my backup battery units attached to the system, *just in case*.

The AI sounds almost as excited as I do. In that sort of distracted, vaguely interested way that Ennos tends to sound. “Yes, Lily?”

I pause by the pallets of nano-enhanced dirt. Briefly, my brain considers the concept of logistics, before I land on a decision. “We’re going to need a shuttle.”