The nanoswarm cat and I have been staring at each other for about an hour now.

This is becoming increasingly awkward for me, and I *think* it’s awkward for them too because I’ve noticed the nanoswarm shifting back and forth on its vaguely stable paws.

Dyn has decided this isn’t her department, and has started doing engineering checks on the power core, before we learn from the afterlife that it had a crack in it somewhere. I can respect this. Every now and then she passes between where I and my nanoswarm copy stand across from each other, briefly breaking eye contact between us.

And every time, I wonder if the nanoswarm is going to vanish. Just a fragment of my imagination. One more ghost I imagined or wished for. And I’ll wake up soon to learn that I was too late and I’m just dreaming again and everyone’s dead but me.

And it’ll all happen again.

One more cycle for the pile that is my life.

“Shift, yan.” Dyn nudges at the side of my still-breached suit with her knee. I should have built this engineering suit bigger; I’m three times my size and barely come up to her knee. At least she’s comfortable enough to try to move me around when I’m in the way now, though. I find that life or death combat really brings people together.

I move, slightly, trying to keep the nanoswarm in sight, but then Dyn moves between us again and sets a portable seal tank she unloaded off Jom while I was staring. Which blocks my staring, let me tell you. I move again.

Nanoswarm’s still there.

I suppose I should get it over with.

“Are you real?” I ask.

“Sort of!” The nanoswarm replies in fluent Cat, a mix of a meow and a flick of the ears. It’s an expressive language, and I’ve never actually had it spoken back to me before. It’s strange. “Are you?”

“Ye- well, okay, maybe.” I concede. That’s kind of a heavy question, if we’re being honest here. My brain, treacherous organic machine that it is, ticks into motion pondering that without my consent.

I come up with a few silly answers pretty quickly, and all the psychic tension that’s been holding this moment together and keeping this maybe-dream stable bleeds out like it wasn’t there.

But I don’t wake up this time.

I pad over to the nanoswarm, still perched quietly on the wreck of the corp war era killing machine. My suits pawpoints clatter roughly as I climb up next to it, the jagged metal of the breach in my chestplate cutting into my skin all over again. I reach out slowly, and then rapidly land a bat of a paw on the nanoswarm’s head.

The cloud of high tech particles deform slightly, then spring back to the shape of my own head when I pull my paw away. “Stop that.” They say in Cat. That phrase in Cat is mostly just a yelp, with some paw flailing mixed in.

“What are you?” I ask.

For the first time in a while, I *haven’t seen this before*. If I were feeling better, this might be a fun experience. As it is… well, it’s still an experience! I lean into it. I’m not waking up. Dyn’s not dead. Jom’s not…

“Hey Jom, you doing okay out there?” I ask through the local comm net. I get back a tactical appraisal of potential threats within ten seconds of us, and a ready status. And then, shortly after, an almost sheepish ping that he’s fine. Jom’s learning to socialize more at my speed.

“It’s good that he’s growing.” The nanocat - I’m calling it a nanocat, that sounds cool - flicks her tail at me. “And I told you what I am.”

“What?” I pause. Then think back. On the station, when the nanoswarm first joined me in my suit, as soon as the sealed shell blocked off the station’s link. It spelled something out. “Uh… friendly?”

I’ve never had a nanoswarm *roll its eyes at me* before. Dammit, *I* can’t roll my eyes, how come it gets to? You’re pretending to be a cat, you can’t cheat like that!

But that was what it had said, right? It had said it was a friend, and then it had made fun of me, and called me a…

…Silly old cat.

Wait.

“What are you?” I ask, quieter. “No. *Who* are you?”

The nanoswarm regards me sadly with fabricated eyes that still register to me as tired, and old. “My name is Lily.” She says. “Lily Ad-Alice. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk to you.” There’s a brief pause. And then, the nanocat’s ears perk up. “Hello!”

I might need a moment to process this.

“No kidding.” The nanocat says. *Lily* says. I hold back the impulse to claim that name as mine and mine alone; that’s not gonna be helpful here.

I had wondered about it, but I had just kind of assumed it was something weird but normal. A system that had taken a liking to me. An AI that had slipped on board, or been unshackled, that had decided to finally say hi. A ghost. Something *reasonable*. This was starting to get outside the realm of normal.

I say, sitting on a commandeered corporate spy frigate, in orbit around a dying Earth, trying to make the processor cores a suitable home for an AI.

Normal is relative, I suppose.

I still have questions. Questions like “How come you’re speaking Cat and not… whatever I’m using?” I ask.

The nanocat flicks her tail at me in a precisely controlled emulation of organic motion. “I don’t have what you have.” She says, looking like she desperately wants to say more. But for all that we know it together, we also know that Cat is a very limited language. “Something changed you.”

Someone changed me. A dream. An echo of the past. Someone gave me something I’m not supposed to have. I think back on Ennos’ being equal parts concerned and curious about the strange mix of digital pseudo-life that seemed to trail behind the language database that I was likely drawing on. And I remember a fragment of an old conversation, where they mentioned that it wasn’t just one thing; it was a whole artificial arena of combatants with cross-purposes.

And them looking too closely was what had pushed me to come here. To find something outside the station for Ennos to take up as a residence.

Wait. I’m *still talking*.

“Yes?” Nanoswarm-Lily cocks a paw at me. “Wait.”

I’m still talking *while we are deliberately not linked to the station*.

“This could be a problem.” I start to say. Then stop. Intentionally drop my mental connection, and say it again in Cat. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve done it before, either to deflect hard questions or just because it was funny, but this is different. This is… this is a *fear*. Like I’m being watched from the other end of the tether.

I don’t like it.

“Stop talking!” Nanocat-Lily chastises me with a bat on the helmet of my suit.

I am also bad at it.

The two of us are both starting to sink into pseudo-silent contemplation of the level of trouble we’re in.

It lasts right up until Dyn gives a series of cables a small nudge, sending the engineer’s ropes floating through where we’re *trying* to have a conversation.

And when Dyn talks, I realize that I’ve understood her this whole time, too. I’ve just been intentionally ‘listening’ to the spoken slang, and not the whisper of the meaning that’s feeding into my head. “Stop sitting around and solder that in.” She snipes over the comm. “Unless we’re all gonna die again. You have to tell me.”

“I can’t turn it off.” I mumble to myself.

The nanocat glowers at me, occasionally rippling as she rearranges her constituent parts to make it look like she’s bound by the gravity this ship lacks. “That’s bad.” She meows.

Yes, thank you, *me*. I am aware that is bad.

“I’m not you.” She rolls her eyes again. “I’m…”

She trails off. Because that’s a good question. If we’re the same cat, but we’re not the same person, then who is she? Who am *I*?

We table that existential crisis in favor of properly wiring in the cables Dyn threw at us. She gave us four, when we really only need two, so that it’s okay when the reactor surges slightly and melts one of them into a kind of glowing black goo that sticks to the deckplate that it drifts into. There’s work to do, and getting the frigate’s damaged stealth system back online is just the first step.

I try to stay quite while we work. I really do. But that’s just not going to happen. Though it becomes clear after a while that either the station is already aware of what we’re doing, or it just can’t see through my weird link to the language database, and literally nothing I can do right now will change it either way.

“Engines are scrap.” Dyn swears creatively as she stalks up from the lower engineering compartment.

That’s fine. We don’t need the engines. We need a hard to find high power computer, preferably with some armor. And we’re halfway there anyway.

“Comms system is online.” The nanocat says. “I can start on a filter?”

“Yeah, if you could.” I say, pacing a path next to where she’s pretending to sit on an officer’s chair, drawing a molten trench in the floor with my paw laser and letting the backup engineering nanoswarm I have on me process the material. We can lay the cable here more or less safely later. “Can you… do you have a digital mind? There’s a code tile in my suit if you can read it.”

“I’m a cat, not a computer.” Lily retorts at me.

“Okay, hang on.” I pause, letting the laser snap off with a hiss that I can actually hear through the hole in my suit. I flick my tongue over my mouth inside my helmet as I turn to face the nanocat. “You’re a living nanoswarm with my name and face. Are you sure you’re a cat?”

“You’re a biologically immortal smartass wearing an engineering department as a coat. Are *you* a cat?”

I won’t lie, that sentence doesn’t exist in spoken Cat. Or at least, it didn’t until that moment. We’re writing it together.

Also, hey!

“Well, I could have used your help you know. Over the last… uh… some amount of time.”

“I was still learning.” She says, a little defensively, as the nanoswarm pads over and extends a tendril of mass into my suit to retrieve the code tile. Fortunately, that thing survived me getting spiked. “Also, I cannot see you on the station.” I twitch slightly as the nanobots tickle my fur again, and give her a questioning tilt of my head. “At all. The parts of me around you on the station are slaved to low level cleaning routines. I think. It happens in several spots I am not allowed.”

And here I thought just having to deal with doors not opening for me was a nightmare.

I have a worrying thought. Not like I have any non-worrying thoughts anymore, honestly. “How’d you talk to me in the suit? How’d you find me?”

She gives a rippling nanoswarm shrug. “I saw you… learned about you from… we don’t have a word for this.”

“Oh.” I realize and remember, all at once. A warm room. Another cat in Alice’s lap. “I saw you in a dream.” I murmur.

“Yes!” She ripple-nods back at me. “And then I knew how to look! She… showed me. Mom showed me.”

I have so many more questions. And also no idea what those questions are.

“You can understand that?” Dyn asks from nearby. She has one hand out and cocked downward, a gesture that I think means disbelief? I haven’t observed her closely enough yet.

“Of course I can.” I tell her. “You should learn Cat. It’s an elegant language. I made it myself!” Lily meows at me with irritation. “We made it ourselves!”

“No.” Dyn answers. “It’s not going to kill us, is it?” She’s still eying the nanocat with hostility. I think. Maybe that’s just how Dyn looks at things. “Because if not, get back to cutting.”

Dyn has turned from afraid to speak to me, to giving me orders, in only two life or death crises. That’s a record! It took at least five before Ennos lost all respect for my mysterious majesty. I’m proud of her. But then, I guess even with Ennos being a superintelligence capable of learning at an accelerated rate, Dyn still is, like, eighty years old. That must be worth something.

I still shut up and get back to cutting.

Together, the three of us program protocol filters, lay cable, purge databases, bring ancient systems back online, lay the dead to rest, lay the combat drone into a material shredder on the industrial repeater parked near the station - thanks Jom, I hated that thing and it was in the way - configure systems, run ready checks, and make sure nothing is going to explode.

It takes us two days to get the frigate up and running.

Well, ‘running’. Dyn was right, the engines *are* scrap. And I don’t have the stuff to get them running; engineering nanoswarms can only go so far without the right blueprints. Actually, even then, they’re not the best tools. I actually have a ranking order of tools that tends to open with the most specific possible thing for a job, but those all take thumbs, so they…

You know what? This isn’t important.

Our life raft is online.

Dyn complains that this ship would have been the wealth of a generation for her people. Jom complains that the ship lacks point-intercept flechette guns. Other Lily complains that… actually, she’s not complaining at all.

“Why aren’t you complaining?” I ask. “Get in on it. Everyone’s having fun.”

“I’m just looking forward to getting home.” She says. “Even if… we won’t talk for a while.” The nanocat brushes up against my side, particles splashing across the suit like thick water.

She says that. But I hope she’s wrong.

And if she’s not, I’m going to start breaking things on the station until it gives into my demands.

I haven’t finally found myself just to lose her again.