I’m dreaming again. Or something dream-esque. It’s not a dream, really. I’ve had some experience with dreams; all of mine are nightmares. When I dream, I dream of gunshots, and lost chances.

This isn’t like that. But I’ve been here before.

“It’s gonna be close.” A voice sounds. My voice. Not from me, though. But that’s something I’m getting used to, when I’m awake.

“She’ll get there.” Another voice speaks. A woman, achingly familiar.

Alice. Mom. Are you there? I can’t see, it’s all a grey fog. Where am I?

I know I’m not dreaming, but I don’t know what I *am* doing.

So I go with my instinct, and stumble around blindly for what feels like an hour or so. Wandering through this obscuring mist across a glassy surface.

It’s not uniform though, and my brain is still working here, unlike when I’m actually dreaming. And I notice when it loops on me. This place is not that large; at least the bit I’m trapped in.

Which is why it’s a surprise when I run into someone else.

“This is different.” The gelatinous outline of a cat says to me in a wet meow.

“Not so much for me.” I reply, flicking my ears. A part of me wants to touch them, and see what texture the ambulatory puddle actually is, but I don’t think that works here.

They move like they’re trying to look around. “I heard someone.” They say sadly.

“See if you can find them.” I tell them, craning my neck to look ‘up’ at the grey nothing sky overhead. “I think I have to go.”

She startles with a liquid ripple across her body. “Wait…!”

“I’ll see you soon!” I try to call as I wake up. Abruptly

An alarm sounds. Is sounding. Loudly. The klaxon beating a pattering into my sensitive ears that I would really prefer it stopped doing.

I crack an eye open. Peer out from underneath the retracted razorspine slots of Dog’s tentacle that is currently draped over my head, and try to see the color of the alarm’s light.

Sometimes there are lights. Sometimes they’re in colors I can process. I’ve tried upgrading my eyes before, but it never sticks. Cybernetic rejection, and my own weird rapid regrowth keeping replacement organs out. It’s frustrating. But at least I’m lucky enough to see a little bit into the spectrum to be able to identify that this alarm is *not* red.

Red would be bad. Red lights with alarms usually mean something horrible is about to happen. This alarm just doesn’t have a flashing light to go with it. Which means it could still be anything, but there’s a *chance* it’s not horrible.

“Let me up Dog.” I mutter sleepily, half in cat, half in whatever spoken language I’ve been emulating lately. “I need to get to work.” Work, as soon as I take a very long stretch.

“No you don’t.” Glitter’s voice chimes from a nearby camera drone, hovering over the gap between the two rec couches in this communal area.

I pause, as Dog continues sleeping anyway and doesn’t let me up. “I don’t?” I ask.

On the couch across from where I’ve been napping surrounded by six hundred pounds of militarized fur, Dyn actually offers information without prompting, which is a small miracle. “You’re off shift.” She says, her mechanical eye focused on the light and color of the holo-projector on the other side of the room. She and Glitter appear to be watching some kind of historical document, or an episode of a two hundred year old circuit opera.

Her words catch up to me. Off shift. Because we *have* those now.

Well, for the organics among us. Glitter and Ennos never stop working. But they also never get bored of working, and can keep working while also pursuing their hobbies at full capacity. Which is, honestly, completely unfair and I’m so glad they can do it.

Our shifts aren’t scheduled. Because I don’t think any of my sisters and I could handle that. Instead, we just sort of rotate through who has downtime for a while. Unless something goes wrong.

It’s been almost a week, and it’s working very well. Which is probably why the alarm has turned off and nothing has exploded.

Speaking of things that are working well, I own a teleporter again.

The AIs are *aware* that I own a teleporter. They get, on a purely factual level, that teleportation is happening. Ennos freaked out when I sent a good chunk of the survivors back to the surface, thinking I’d just disintegrated them or something. I’d had to then repeatedly grab stuff from nearby, including myself coming back from a few salvage operations, to prove that I could in fact move matter without vaporizing it.

Even then, they still don’t like thinking about it. I think Ennos has something akin to a note taped up to their wall that just says “teleportation is possible”, and they reference it when it comes up, because even the mention of it can hurt their processes.

I yawn, interrupting my thoughts.

Consider going back to sleep. But now I’m up, and the feeling of ‘an alarm just happened’ doesn’t go away instantly.

After trying for a few minutes to figure out what the void Dyn and Glitter are actually watching, and failing, I push my way out of Dog’s embrace, and drop to the deck with a heavy thud of my paws. If I’m up, I’m up, and I can at least get some work done.

Maybe today I’ll make progress on what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last… month?

Time gets away from me.

I don’t mean that literally. I feel like, sometimes, I have to clarify. Both that I *am* capable of metaphor, and also that I don’t have a time machine. Or whatever other terrible device is implied by a turn of phrase.

I’m halfway through floating at high speed across a no-gravity gap when I realize that I might actually own a time machine, depending on how that one experimental interplanetary drive actually works.

But I probably don’t.

But maybe.

I start to pull up my display and make a note to myself to check that out when I have time, when I realize, I… do have time. And also, the greatest force multiplier on time to spend ever; friends.

So I ask Ennos to look at it instead.

Ennos is kinda busy with some kind of encryption breaking on a data pad that one of the Earthers found in their temporary room, so they take a minute to get back to me. When they do, it’s mostly just to tell me that the hard lines to the drive are both not hooked up properly, and appear to be shielded against digital intelligence in a way that’s more of a giant caution sign than an actual barrier. I’ll look into it later; for now, it’s not critical.

What’s important right now is one thing. Okay, two things, but my garden doesn’t need my attention at the moment. Okay, three things, but I think the new crew members can settle in just fine without my help. Okay, four things, but…

Look, if I list everything that’s important, we’ll be here all year. At a certain point, I have to prioritize, even if it’s just prioritizing badly.

What’s important - to me personally, right this moment, under the current circumstances - is that I’ve been running highly tuned variometer sweeps with a really, really top end model of the device that I apparently salvaged off a sleeper ship that never got to launch out of the system. I feel like I must have grabbed this by accident, but I don’t know how, because it’s the size of a personal crew quarters. But the point is, I’ve had it running for a while, and I think I’ve narrowed down exactly what kind of interference has been following me around the station.

What’s more important is that I have a highly skilled AI, who has a problem with badly designed grid systems, and too much spare time. And, with those two things combined, along with a spare piece of tracer code that I had lying around handed to Ennos to repurpose, I’ve got a rough idea of *where* in the station my problem is coming from.

I’ve spent a few days worth of my personal time prowling it.

There’s still so much of this station that I haven’t seen. I’ve technically been from one end to the other; I’ve prowled through empty docking bays, done repair work on a hundred different weapon systems, seen the nanofabber where more of the molecular bonding engineering substrate is made. I’ve sat in the one isolated chamber where the only noise is the raw input of a thousand different sensors and your own breath, and I’ve seen the micrometer-precise internal mirror array designed to catch the sun and throw it back again.

I’ve even been in the central… room? Place? The strange machine that the station was built to house and hide, the source of my immortality and the world’s catastrophe in equal measure.

I’ve probably seen a good five to seven percent of the station. Which is really impressive!

I stop outside a bulkhead so unused that the cleaner nanos haven’t even dusted it. The ones following me swirl around in a barely perceptible aura, bringing the hatch back to a pristine shine, as I find the command code to open it and enter this particular deck of the station.

This one I didn’t build, or patch together, or accidentally acquire. This one was put here by a faithcorp, whose name translates best in word and intent as Divine Prophet Motive, and they probably thought that name was very clever. I don’t know what they were doing, because this is the first I’ve heard of them, except that they seem to have very swoopy arches on their hull braces. Which seems bad.

The local grid registers me as a valid employee, which is a sign of station-corruption. All systems, eventually, become what the station wants them to be. It greets me like I’m the CRO, and ritualistically reads off this quarter’s reports, ending with a recitation of the Last Oath that catches me off guard.

I’m already exploring this place while it talks to me, since I can’t figure out how to shut it down.

It’s quiet, except for the hum of some kind of air filter nearby. Dull and dusty grey giving way to shining silver under the nanos as they decide the area is in use again. I prowl through the segmented deck, opening all the doors on the crew cabins with a flick of my paw, and hoping that maybe someone left a shelf stable flavored ration bar behind somewhere.

No one did. When they left, they left thoroughly. A bit of a contrast to all the violent overthrows of this place over the centuries. The place was empty, even if some things were still identifiable.

Here was the skeleton of a grow lab. Here was what was left of an engineering floor for designing suspended animation pods. Here was… a secondary ensconced space?

It took me a while to figure that one out. It was a very close quarters psychological observation chamber, for studying how people got along in confinement together. That part, it seemed, hadn’t been cleared properly. It was full of bodies.

The whole deck wasn’t large. It was two loops of hallway stacked on each other, tucked inside a large space on the station’s bulk that left it surrounded by a massive radiation scrubber, and a cargo hold. But the faithcorp had packed a lot into that space, and it took me a while to find what I was looking for.

It’s basically just a grid node, honestly. An old one, low density environment. But somewhat isolated from everything else, drawing minimal power, and hooked up to a long range transmitter that got left behind when the corp moved out. It’s been here for a long time, and it would have been perfect for the station’s purposes.

Because the node is still active.

Eventually, the station takes everything on it. And uses it for what it thinks it’s supposed to.

And I don’t know why, exactly, but it doesn’t want me to see my sisters. I guess I don’t really need to know why, exactly. If it had a reason, it could have just found a way to tell me. I would have listened. We all would have. Maybe it’s for some grand purpose, or some greater good.

But more than I’m four hundred years old, and I think I’m out of patience for anyone trying to tell me they’re doing anything awful for the greater good. Sometimes the world ends. That just happens. It’s not the end of the world.

My prey located, I briefly entertain the thought of just slicing the whole array in half with one of my paw lasers. I refrain. Because I have an even more powerful tool in my arsenal now.

I amuse myself for the next eighteen minutes and nine seconds by adapting a small piece of code to layer a short range resonance scanner over the interface for one of the mobile mount intercept masers, and then lighting up small chunks of metal in a way that is highly visible to the sensors of some of the grapple drones on station, and sending them out to grab it and dump the material in the industrial repeater.

The level of control I have through just my AR interface now feels like I’ve just finished gnawing through a medical restraint that’s been holding me down to an examination bed for the last three weeks. Which is to say, liberating. And also hungry. It’s a remarkably similar feeling, actually. I should get lunch after this.

At the eighteen minutes and ten second mark, the sound of footsteps and heavy breathing reaches my ears. “In here!” I call politely, as I’m joined by one of my new crew.

The vast majority of the survivors of the caravan that I teleported up here decided that living in space on an active battlestation that got shot, exploded, or infiltrated by hostile slime once a week, was a bad idea. They asked to be teleported *back*. Not literally back, just back to Earth somewhere. I put them in that one village that I helped once, which looked a lot larger than I remember. They were happy to meet them. I think. I assume.

The others stayed up here. Six new people. A doubling of my crew. The adventurous and foolish and brave. There’d been some family arguments when they’d decided to stay, but I’d take anyone.

Especially anyone with hands.

“Reporting, captain!” The young adapted human salutes me. Or makes a motion I assume is a salute. He’s out of breath, panting, and clearly thinks this is an emergency. Which is why I’m gonna feel a bit bad about this in a second.

“Don’t do that.” I say to the salute. “Also, can you unplug that?” I point a paw at the transmitter, balancing on my other legs in a motion I’ve gotten really good at.

He looks at it, then back at me. “W…what?”

“I need that to stop working.” I explained. Well, explained as far as I ever explain things. Dang, I should get better at explaining things. I’ll try now! “It’s sending out a signal that I need to stop, and I *could* just blow it up or vent it into space or something, but I feel like it would be easier to just unplug it?” He’s still giving me a wide eyed confused look, the secondary membrane over his extra large cloudy blue eyes flickering as he stares at me. “Because I don’t have hands?” I add.

I guess that doesn’t explain exactly as much as I could. I start trying to formulate a better explanation, when he shrugs, and goes over to trace the power line out of the transmitter.

The following process is more involved than I had expected. We talk for a while as I vaporize a hull weld so he can crawl back into a cable run channel. His name’s Luukri, and he’s excited to be here, though this kind of work is weirdly familiar to being on a seafaring ship. The promise of a future, and my offer of actual pay (somehow) is just too good to pass up. His boyfriend stayed up here too. They’ve been trying to figure out what the religious meaning of the sculpture in all the crew rooms is.

I should probably explain *that* at some point, before I accidentally found a religion again.

But not now. Because now, the kid grabs his calloused webbed hands onto the end of a cord where it links into the main trunk, and pulls. And just like that, the suppression field that’s been targeted on me vanishes.

I don’t feel it, really.

But someone does.

The cleaner nanos swirl, more and more of them pouring in from outside the deck. They become visible, glittering black spots in the air that the kid notices as he crawls back out of the wall.

He shouts something that’s almost certainly a surface curse word, and I mentally file it away as something else I can yell when I get annoyed, as the cleaner nanos begin to pull together more and more mass into a solid form that cascades with spiked geometric waves as it comes together.

And then it coheres, starts emulating being affected by local gravity, and drops her paws to the deck.

My sister, the first of them that I met, flicks her angular tail in a mirror my own as we face each other. Her artificial eyes widen in surprise, the nanoswarm that composes her body folding and refolding into increasingly detailed pyramid patterns until it looks like she’s covered in familiar fine black and white fur, albeit fur that has a distinctly angular and artificial look to it.

She chirps a question, at about the same time the new kid asks something similar.

I just exhale a feline laugh, and step forward to rub myself into her flank.

“Welcome back.” I say, as she presses back into me. “We have-“

An alarm sounds. This one with a strobing red light. Why there even are colored lights for the station wide alarms *here* is beyond me, but whatever, no time for that now.

Introductions later. New problem now.

Somehow, I’m less worried than normal.