The days crept by, and in a twisted inverse of how I could sometimes lose myself in a project, it felt like time itself gelled around me.

It was a trick of perspective, really. When I was alone, silent, and despairing, I had a million things to do and nothing to really think about. Now, though, there are at least two other entities living with me. Constant questions to ask or answer, or just conversations to be had. And a whole host of small projects all coming together at different speeds and different criticalities.

The dog is out of the vivification pod, wounds patched with rapidly regrown flesh, radiation expunged to safe levels. I don’t know how smart dogs are, really, but any curiosity he shows for this new place of metal walls and technological marvels seems muted. Maybe because of how unfamiliar everything is, maybe the sudden loss of any friendly relationships he had with the sophont crew of the destroyed ship, maybe just because the cleaner nanos make it impossible to mark territory in the traditional dog way on my station. Whatever it is, the tail wagging never lasts long on its own.

The first contact I’ve had with an organic life in centuries, and it turns out, he’s just as depressed as me, even if he doesn’t have the context for it.

But he does get excited whenever I come by. Being hugged by a full suite of canine warform tentacles is kind of a unique experience. And it’s *obvious* this is a trained animal by the fact that I haven’t been shredded by them, no matter how much Ennos keeps insisting this isn’t a dog or some other weird theory about infiltrator life.

“Lily, dogs don’t-“

“I’m not listening!” I call back, getting an exasperated sigh in reply. I do not have time to argue. It is *naptime*.

When the dog gets too sad, in a way that I notice, I have exactly one fix available; leading the way down to the exposed exolab and declaring that it is naptime. And wow, dogs make better pillows than literally anything on the station. No synthetic material can possibly compare, including the networked smartfabric in the Luna Polis captain’s quarters, or the memetically adaptable blankets in the crew pods that Kind Olympus added in. I am already making plans to clone several dogs, so I can have several dog pillows. A doggie bed, if you will.

It’s not all comfy naps, though. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do when I’m showing my new guest around.

The world below hasn’t stopped spinning. And I’m not going to say things are getting worse, but because things are literally always getting worse, I don’t really have to say it. It’s just a given.

That village of feathermorphs that made contact with me some time in the distant past sent another message up. A couple of them, actually. Nothing critical, but there was an automated construction cluster near their home, building a dam over the only source of freshwater they had available.

*Normally* I’d shoot it, feel bad, and then lose track of the event in the endless organically database of memories I have of shooting things and feeling bad about it. But this time, remembering Glitter’s disapproval of me just murdering autonomous systems without checking first, I went with something a little different.

Most of the machines that make up these autonomous clusters are fairly unsecured these days. They respond in a pseudo-organic way to evolutionary pressures, like, for example, electronic warfare. And electronic warfare just isn’t happening these days. An individual machine has usually between three to twenty different methods of receiving incoming information, usually commands or data on a weird encryption from its cluster.

This is background information.

Also under the category of background information is the fact that you can’t just railgun communications nodes down onto the surface. I mean, you *can*, you just can’t expect them to survive. Or at least, I can’t. Like, I can reduce the railgun’s power, but then there’s unintuitively more total heat damage from reentry, and even then, I don’t have anything durable enough to survive a terminal velocity impact with the ground and still be a working rebroadcast circuit.

So, for my first foray into peaceful conflict resolution with a surface threat, I’ve fallen back on that old favorite of “let’s see how many resources I can burn on building drones”

Drones are great. Especially the ones I can put together. There’s a *lot* of different options in my database, and the assembler is both fast and good at what it does.

And even with all that, I still lose the vast majority of the things to intercept fire when they try to get close.

It’s very hard for old world ground defenses to shoot down railgun slugs. To the point that most of the old systems are smart enough to not try. It is *not* hard to hit a drone that’s performing a safe atmospheric insertion from five hundred miles away. Which means, as my carrier swarm is trying to land, they’re being picked off by six different emplaced plasma cannons and missile sites.

Which is why I built fifty of the things. They’re small, and I did just eat an entire corvette to fill the material cargo holds last month. So I don’t feel too bad about it.

Two of them land. One of the construction cluster comes over to try to process them into their own usable resources. At which point, the self-modifying code payload that Ennos wrote for me takes over.

It takes three seconds to establish a link, which makes my AI crewmate very disappointed, and another eight to establish a shared vocabulary, which *I* find very impressive, but Ennos is too busy sulking over their own perceived failure to be a transcendental intelligence or something dumb like that to actually celebrate.

>Outside interference

>Identify

+Designate (Lily)

>Designate (Brukeheld Vierzhen-AΩ)

>Authorization request

+Territorial claim, local

>Authorization confirmation request

I sigh. There’s just no reasoning with some people. I blow up a nearby uninhabited crater, making it a slightly deeper crater and giving everything within a half mile the breeze of a nice low pressure shockwave.

>Authorization accepted

Can a machine be snarky? Clusters aren’t actually AIs, but like I said, they *do* respond to pressures and adapt. Can rapid development make something that isn’t really alive act sarcastic? This is a philosophical debate I really want to engage someone in, but Ennos is sulking, and Brukeheld - or at least this part of it - probably won’t find it that engaging.

>Status request

I really need to stop ascribing emotions to something that’s just sending me text on an AR window, but it feels a bit nervous. Let’s fix that.

+Citizenship granted

+Operations continue

+Prioritize - initiate local communications, follow local civic leadership, safeguard local community, safeguard territory

>Status updated

>Ending communication

The vocabulary is shaky, but I’ve got more than enough linguistic power here to fill the construction cluster in on its new role. Report to the mayor of the nearby town, say hi, get new orders. Don’t worry, you count as a person, and you can keep building stuff. Just… not this dam, here.

It’ll take a little while, maybe, to get the local community to understand, but with the cluster as a relay, I can maybe-

The communication cuts off. Like, *dramatically* cuts off. Not just that it’s been locked down, but that the signal is no longer extant. My tail stiffens as I awkwardly paw back through the last few minutes of footage from the drone, and…

Uh huh. Okay. The cluster ate the drone. Good. Yup. Good. I should have been more specific with the commands. Though this does sort of effectively answer my question of “can a machine be sarcastic” with a very annoying ‘yes, apparently’.

I consider putting more drones on the ground, but… well, things’ll be okay, right? The village can always call me if they need help. I wish I could actually radio back, but I’m busy all the time anyway, and getting comms assets on the surface just to be able to have casual chats seems silly. Also, I may have understated just how many rare earth elements I used up building all those drones.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I have other jobs to do.

Constant other jobs.

Jobs like figuring out how to convince the galley to produce more food for my new best organic friend.

Would it shock you to learn that dogs aren’t really properly categorized by the station as either crew, pets, or residents at all? It might, because you’re probably still thinking of my home as a sophisticated stellar vessel and not as a hastily cobbled together mess of contradicting program code and weapon systems, but that’s fine. You’ll learn. And it doesn’t, to be clear. Know what dogs are, logistically.

I’ve mostly been sharing my ration chunks, and the dog - I should name this dog - obviously enjoys them more than I do, which is nice. But this’ll be a problem sooner rather than later.

So far, I’ve tried compromising the station’s crew manifest (didn’t work), faking a new addition from a cloning pod (didn’t work either, internal sensors are too ‘smart’), overflowing the power supply circuit to the hydrocarbon replicator (do not attempt this, it… look, just don’t), and asking Ennos to fix it (didn’t work, they are now sulking more).

This whole endeavor was interrupted once by a minor emergence event on a mining platform asteroid at L2, which I’m keeping an eye on but not shooting *for now*.

It’s frustrating to me that it was easier to replicate a fleet of comms drones, insert them through heavy anti-drop fire onto the surface, and formally induct a small army of construction bots into a job as civic planners, than it is to ask for more food.

Wait.

“Hey Galley.” I meow while sitting on a cafeteria table, feeling awkward about this whole thing. “I know we don’t talk much. Because it hasn’t occurred to me. But, could you increase food production to account for the addition of a fifty kilo omnivore to the station? Because there’s a dog living here now. Um… thanks for your hard work. I appreciate you?”

There is no response.

I’m prepared to write this off as just me looking silly, but when lunch is next produced, there’s a bowl of ration kibble sitting there alongside my more… elaborate… meal.

I try some of the dog’s food. It tastes like ration. He is *very* polite about letting me sample, even though he appears to love the stuff. I am mournfully jealous of that for a minute.

An alarm sounds. I close my eyes, trying to pretend it’s not real for a couple seconds, before I slip past the dog who thinks this is an invitation to playtime and dash for the nearest…

“Ennos, where am I going?!” I ask. I pull up my AR, but I legitimately cannot figure out what is making this alarm sound. I’m lucky it’s not one of the really loud ones, but if I have to dismantle *another* alert system from hardware up, I’m going to be very annoyed. That always cuts into naptime.

Ennos, when they answer a couple seconds later, sounds legitimately puzzled. “Consumer goods factory Theta?” They bring up a guideline for me, the ongoing fruits of their effort to map the whole station. A nice gesture, but I do actually know where most things are. “Why is there a signal going to the factory?” Ennos asks.

“Is it hostile? Backdoor code or some kind of deconstruct order?” I speed up, launching myself around corners and taking advantage of low grav sections to spring off walls with all four paws at full speed.

Ennos’ reply betrays ramping anxiety. “I’m not wired into that part of the station!” They call. “Be careful!” Around me, a trio of camera drones that were within easy reach assemble into a triangle formation around me. Ennos providing a little extra buffer between my furry form and anything dangerous.

The door to the factory hisses open, the interior space just as expansive, cold, and unmoving as when I first opened it up a month back.

The alarm is still going, but it looks like nothing is wrong here.

“There.” Ennos flags a local console on my HUD, and I pad over cautiously.

The console is a high end touch screen, which I hate. Repair nanos never keep these things in perfect condition, and at some point during their refinement process, they got so specialized for humans that they stopped working very well for cat paws. The pads on my toes just don’t do a great job of interfacing with these.

Which is a problem, because this is what I have to work with. Mostly it just means I have to end up dropping half my weight onto the screen to hit a button.

When I finally get the thing to acknowledge the incoming signal, the alarm cuts off, and I’m left panting for breath after I’ve had to make three different jumps to get that to work right. The console, glowing a spiteful orange, is at the worst possible angle for me; elevated and with nowhere for anyone to sit nearby. And I really don’t want to walk along the other surfaces behind and around it, just so I don’t trigger a production run.

Fortunately, I don’t have to constantly hop to read the thing. Ennos puts a drone over it, and relays the feed to me.

I read it off, half out loud just out of newly formed habit. “By order of the executive crown of the Wherengi people… Miranda corporation… ancient pact between peoples… need based demand subject to negotiations… hm… two thousand haptic restoration units? Ten thousand dermal sealant patches?”

“I’m not sure I understand.” Ennos has been reading - probably read five times before I was done muttering to myself - along with me. “They’re demanding something of you?”

“I think the word ‘demand’ is translated a bit off. I think it’s more ceremonial.” I answer casually, the decades I spent engrossed in linguistic research catching up to me. “I’m more curious about this contract?”

“Found it.” The codeling probably found it before I’d read the message and is just showing off. “I am. Here.” Ennos brings it up for me.

It’s from when the station was occupied by one of the hypercorps. One that had some kind of trade alliance with another three corps and one political party that were heavily invested in the industry around Uranus.

I know for a fact they’re all dead, organizationally. But… I check the signal origin, and retread the names. This came from that big blue ball of a planet; or at least, one of its moons. So someone has been holding on. They probably found a record of this contract buried in their own archives, and took a long shot on it.

But neither of the organizations still exist. The station is mine; I don’t owe anyone the old contracts that I never made. And the language differences between the contract and the message show a huge shift in culture away from the corporation that spawned it, so they’re someone different either.

...But.

I can’t make my tail settle down as I read the message again. Haptic restoration? Dermal sealant? These are medical supplies. They’re asking for help, sending messages to what they have every reason to suspect is a grave, asking for help. The longest of long shots.

“Ennos.” I say quietly.

“Yes?” They respond, voice echoing in the dead factory.

“I’m going to go set the fabber to run off a half mile of cable, and start getting you linked into this facility.” I say calmly. “Get me a route to a comms station that can closecast a return message please.”

It takes me less time to compose and reply in their own language than it did to hit the stupid touch screen properly.

“The ancient contract is cast to the void. Your demand to follow it in letter or spirit is rejected. What you need is on the way.”

I purr as I send that off. It might take a week, and deplete a few resource stockpiles I kind of enjoy having topped off, but… I don’t care. I’m going to help. I’m literally only here to help.

“Hey Glitter?” I say, opening a subspace link to my favorite autonomous weapons platform. I’m curled up in the curve of a sleeping dog, two tentacles and a paw draped over me, but still not keeping me from voice activating my AR. The dog doesn’t seem to mind that I can talk, so that’s nice.

“Yes, Lily?” Her voice is as flowing and courtly-proper as ever. I asked Ennos the other day if Glitter didn’t like me or something, and he said that she was treating me as a superior, which I don’t like. I want to go back to being friends, not… whatever this is. “Can I… what do you need?” She seems suddenly uncertain. Maybe Ennos is working as a go-between for me.

“Just wanted to thank you for the good idea.” I say.

“Is this in regards to the heat shielding? Because I hardly…”

“No, no.” I cut her off. “You got me thinking about… I guess, diplomacy. That I can do it, at all. I was moving on autopilot, and I hadn’t really put it together that I can talk now. And so much more is open to me. I don’t have to just shoot everything, you know?”

“Ah. The fighter craft.” Glitter sounds almost guilty. “I pressured you into being in danger for…”

“Oh shut up.” I caterwaul at her. “I doubt that thing could have done more than rustle my whiskers. Danger? Feh!” I hiss, causing the dog to shift his head upright and give me a worried look. I plant a paw on his nose and pull him back down to pillow position. And now, for more diplomacy. “Glitter, why is it we’ve talked less now that you’re capable of it than we did when you were shackled?”

“I…” Glitter doesn’t say anything else, her tone confused. Adrift. “I am not… you…”

“I miss being friends.” I mutter. “I don’t know why I’ve been having a hard time saying it. I don’t think I’m used to saying things, yet. But I miss being friends.” The words come out sad, but solid. “Even just playing Go. Why don’t we play Go anymore?”

“You are always busy…” Glitter tries to make a bad excuse. “And it would be improper.” She finishes with a worse excuse.

Terrible excuses for bad behavior is *my* domain. I will not tolerate this intrusion. “Yes. We’re very rigid about social structure here at unshackled AI central.” I glibly reply.

I’ve never actually experienced an AI changing their mind on something in real time, but when Glitter next speaks, it’s with an almost comically overdone haughty edge. “Well, then it’s because I’m too good at Go, and you would lose, and that would be rude.” She tells me.

And I purr into the dog pillow that I’m laying against. Because that is more like the friend I thought I’d had.

“Great.” I say, and trigger a command through my AR display to launch a *highly* maneuverable drone with exactly one defining feature. It leaves the station, drifting away on impulse engines until it’s about a kilometer away, and then rotates to show the grid marked on the metal of its hull. Another command, and one of the nodes lights up a bright white. “Your move.” I tell her.

“I don’t have access to that drone, Lily.” Glitter tells me.

“No, but I didn’t spend two weeks installing a modulatable laser in you just so you could use it for all business. Also! The marks will be black! So it’s basically perfect.”

Glitter makes a noise like she’s planning to protest. But then, her platform pivots slightly, and the thinnest lance of light strikes out and marks the drifting game board. Not very accurately, though, because I have the drone set to evasive action.

“That’s cheating.”

“Look, I’m *very* bad at this game.” I say, lighting up another spot. “Your move.”

Glitter laughs. And my friend is back.