It’s one thing to feel like you’re being held back by an increasingly convoluted series of bureaucratic madness and technical limitations. It’s another altogether to realize those things have been weaponized against you.

Ennos showed me the command access logs from our recent bout of democracy. Not all of them; void, no, that would take forever, and mostly be meaningless. We’ve been at this for a week, Dyn and I having to individually agree on every single element of our non-standard social and command structure.

It’s been enough time for two more emergence events to show up planetside, and for two more emergence events to get railgunned. Enough time that I could program a few workarounds to some of the trickier elements of setting up the station to my specifications. Enough time that a zucchini finished growing, and is being prepared to be eaten.

That last part is the important part.

Okay, no, it’s not. No it’s not. It… I just…

Four hundred and eleven years. Four hundred. Of ration paste, flavorless water, and every tiny bit of food that I managed to scrounge up being fleeting and ephemeral and limited. Compounding mistakes, lack of time, and just bad luck leaving me without hydroponics, without the growth lattice, without anything but bare survival.

And now I have stir fry. With multiple ingredients. Dyn even shared a sealed salt packet she found on the corp ship while we were screwing almost dying around over there.

And I don’t care.

I feel empty. Like the vacuum outside is the only thing in my chest, and I’m barely holding it in. Food isn’t going to fix that.

The station is trying to… what? Kill me? That doesn’t seem right. It could have a million times over if it wanted to. And the digital impulses that we uncovered don’t point to that anyway. Or at least, not only that.

Something here is alive enough to *hate*. Wow, does it ever hate the AIs. Hate them being added to the crew, hate them being acknowledged as people.

But there was something else in there, too. Something… neutral. Almost. The cool impartial logic of a simple smart machine without a personality. Right up until that last moment, of course.

It was hard enough to figure out what was going on behind the scenes while we were running through the process of the update. Ennos took days to put it together and show me, so much was the young AI drowning in the flood of access to the grid. But now, looking at the key points from between when we agreed on who has door access and who is allowed to change the ambient temperature, it’s a story of a claws-out scrap happening in the landscape of the station’s hardware.

The station is fighting itself.

And me.

A long, long time ago, I came to terms with the fact that my home is haunted. That there is something that roams the halls and touches on dreams and lingers in the quiet moments between breaths.

I just… always thought I knew who it was.

Even if I never said it.

And now I’m not so sure. Now I feel like I’m being held in a cage. It took hours to figure out what, exactly, the subsystem that was constantly running and couldn’t be turned off was. And again, we get back to Oceanic Anarchy tech. That original golden age design; durable, self-maintaining, smart, and infuriatingly hard to use without thumbs.

A disciplinary tool. A compassionate one; to let people still act like normal, but without being able to get near those they had hurt, or places they weren’t allowed. Steered with a series of psychological tricks and obstacles toward other places and other jobs.

Keeping me out of some spaces. And I never noticed. Because I never knew what I should have been looking for.

How did I know, the wraith in the machinery asked, as it screamed at me out of sight for copying a single data file. And all I can think to say is, because there’s more than one ghost around here.

I wriggle my hindquarters as I press farther on through the small maze I’ve put myself in as my thoughts cycle over and over. Here, in between the inner and outer bulkheads, in the realm of ductwork and cabling, I find occasional flashes of clarity of purpose. I may not fully understand what’s happening, but I have a target now, and the process of pushing through a tangle of wires without strangling myself or unplugging a critical system somewhere keeps me focused.

I cannot, I have discovered, turn off the discipline isolation thing. Because it is *just* smart enough to protect itself, and also, I now suspect, because something is helping it. That is frustrating. I have considered taking a quick jaunt outside in my strike suit, along with a heavy ordinance deployment pod, so that I can simply *remove* the problem, but it’s actually buried kind of deep in the station’s guts, and distributed across a dozen different nodes, and the sheer number of things I’d have to blow up to get all of it would basically be the same thing as just crashing the whole station through atmosphere. So, no.

Instead, I’ve decided to take an alternate approach to one specific part of the problem. Literally. I am approaching through the walls.

Ennos tells me this is some kind of tradition, and I didn’t actually ask tradition for *whom*, but I suspect they’re making fun of me because this is something that keeps happening.

Ennos is helping. So’s Glitter. Right now, both of them are emulating my presence as best they can; a workaround that will eventually be detected and closed off by the automated system. But in the meantime, it allows me a certain degree of freedom from the lockdown. Freedom that can be extended, if I, say, wriggle my tail through the between spaces, instead of taking the hallways that are much more monitored.

I shove myself past a duct, grateful that the cleaner nanos keep the dust from building up here, but still unhappy with the way one of the clasps catches on my fur and rips away at my hide. I’m thirty meters from where I’m going, dripping blood from more than one small cut just like this one, and uninterested in slowing down.

Only once have I had to use my paw laser so far, to get through a particularly impassable piece of ventilation. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t important. And I mean that seriously; it seems like it was busy moving filtered air between two sterilizers, entirely cut off from anything that might have made the air worth sterilizing.

Now, fifteen decks and two segments down from where I’ve made my base of operations for the last fifty years, I use it again. Carving through weld points and hinges, detaching an alloy plate from its moorings, and opening up a path for myself.

Okay. Almost. The bulkhead is just sitting there. I nudge a paw forward, and feel the distortion of a line in the air where the gravity shifts.

This is a problem. Without gravity to pull the separated plate down, this is going to be a lot harder. But… well, I’m not going back now.

I backtrack a few meters, climbing back up a column of bundled wiring, doing my best to not let my claws dig *too* far into it. When I make it to something close enough to a ledge to perch on, I turn, make some mental calculations, flick my tail a few times for good luck, and jump.

I hit the plate with all the force of a cat that has decided to headbutt a hull plate. It’s not much. But momentum is momentum, no matter who’s adding it. My ricochet bounce off the plate puts a little bit more on it, and with only minimal spin, it slowly starts to float out of place and into the gravity-devoid hall beyond.

Taking the opportunity, I slip out of the gap backward, holding on with my paws until I can glance around, find a spot where there’s nothing floating, and launch myself into gravity.

I normally don’t come down here, because down here has always been somewhere I didn’t need to be. The whole deck is a processing center for two fusion cores, a rad array, all the solar collectors, and a few other different energy plants that got turned off a long time ago when the fuel ran out. Though if I ever need to, I can restart the plasma core just by having a repair bot deliver a manufactured fuel rod to it. But largely, I haven’t needed to come here, because the whole place takes care of itself.

Which should, I realize, have been a big clue to something being weird here. The station is *great* at taking care of itself, but only when it’s literally the last resort. Half the stuff, it’s happy to let break if I could have fixed it myself.

But I’ve never had the time to care. I’ve either been too busy, too exhausted, too caught up in other things, or too injured to ever think “I wonder why the power systems I inherited work fine?”

Partly it’s because I know why. There’s something living down here that regulates power surges. Glitter ran across it a while back, and lost a few drones to the exposure. I’ve never felt like testing it, especially when there was work to do.

But now? Well.

There were a few places on that activity map that stood out to me.

I pad through the hallways down here, the layout familiar, and yet strange. The same make and design of the core station above, but colder, less bright. Some of the access panels have been melted off, leaving spools of electrical wire in convenient positions tethered to the walls in a way that makes me snort with recognition. I do that. It’s one of the ways the automated repair bots get in the way, actually, when they follow behind and close up all the…

How long has the station been fighting me? The thought hurts, even now. It keeps coming up.

I move on, moving quickly while I try to take in as much as I can. This place is obviously going to be monitored, so I need to move fast before Ennos and Glitter’s interference is cut off. I wish I could ask how long I have, but that would be too much of a beacon, so I just hurry.

Making a choice, I head to the rad collector. I’ve done alignment on it a few times, but the processing, down here in one of the deep parts of the station, is something I’ve never needed to worry about. But it seems like as good a place as any to start. I pick up the pace, my paws finding gnawingly familiar patterns in the gravity fluctuations and hull scuffs.

The door to the rad collector is sealed. I open it with a command authorization, and blink away the blast of heat that floods over me and into the corridor outside. I’m almost certainly down for a week in the vivification pod after this; I can *survive* cancer, but it’s not fun. Still, I stalk inside.

The chamber is centered around the machine in the center; a mid grade nuclear reactor, from the looks of it. The support arms around it feeding in cosmic radiation, crystallized through contact with one of the more stable paramaterial devices the station has. The connections are bad, though; small crackles of energy dance across badly linked cabling. And at the base of the machine, there’s a tangle of looped black cable that almost looks like a nest it’s so coiled up.

I look closer.

There are glowing objects in the nest. It is a nest.

Well heck. I take a step forward, then stop. What am I even doing down here? Is this one of the things the station’s spectre was trying to keep me from? Is it protecting this? Are these… eggs… going to hatch into something awful and kill me? Me and Dyn and Dog and probably the AIs too. I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing would surprise me anymore, I don’t think. Maybe that’s what the thing in the machine was; just a digital part of a life form that feeds on energy and needs time to grow before it hatches.

I can almost feel sympathy for that.

I head over to the control panel, to double check this place’s stability, and see just how much these things are eating out of my power supply. That last part is more important than I want to admit; we are almost *constantly* gated by how much power we can produce. And finding stable sources out here is hard when they’re often what automated weapons lock onto and target.

“The siphon ratio is fine.” A crackling voice says from the door to my side as I start trying to manually pull up information. “They’re just taking ambient heat and radiation, really.”

I jolt into a turn, fur bristling in anticipation of an attack, kicking myself backward so I can get my paw lasers up if I need to. But no strike comes. Instead, there’s just someone standing in the door, watching me quietly.

They feel familiar. Even though they’re a two foot tall crackling outline of ghostly blue plasma. Maybe it’s the achingly obvious quadruped form, or the nervous flicking of their tail, or the way their ears are laid flat on her head. Maybe it’s because they spoke to me in cat, a language that really only one person knows. Or maybe it’s the feeling of quiet desperation and exhausted, empty pain that she gives off.

Or maybe it’s because I know her as soon as we make eye contact.

“Hello Lily.” I meow softly.

“Hello Lily.” She says back in a voice like a leaking battery.

“So…” I pause. What do you say to yourself? Or, someone who could have been you. An old mirror, still showing someone you recognize, but a little off, and a little different. What do you tell a you that you don’t know? “Do you have taste buds?” I ask. “Because we’re making stir fry upstairs, if you want to come eat with us.”

She sobs like a geometric ripple through her electrical form, deflating as tension drains out of both of us, taking a stumbling step forward, cautiously testing if we can make contact without killing each other. And then, leaning into each other as we meet properly for the first time.

Ennos pings me that the system has located me. But it can’t undo what’s been done now.

Though I’ll have to find a new way to trick my way to the other points on the activity log.

Because I suspect, now, that I have more than one sister in my home.