Months pass.

I keep waiting, patiently, for the next crash to come. I know it will. Eventually. It always does.

I try to keep myself separate, somehow, from the way my home is growing. But it doesn’t work. Because even if I know how it all ends, I cannot help but desperately want what is offered.

Friendship. Warmth. Life.

This time around, the arc of it started with finding Glitter and bringing Ennos into being, and has led to this, now. Where I have a dozen organics around my station, helping me, helping everyone.

Even the young ones I don’t know are here because they, in some way, resonate with me. The kittens who have experienced loss and pain and loneliness, who have signed up to be teleported into a war zone so that they can keep it from happening to anyone else.

Bit by bit, they go from being strangers, to companions, to family.

I know I will lose them all again. I know that the price of being close is the pain of separation. I have nightmares about it, every time I sleep. So I sleep less, and I get more done while I’m awake.

And despite the extra hands, and the digital mind growing toward their own idea of apotheosis inside the station’s grid, there is still always more to get done.

At least the recruits from the raft city brought fish with them.

It has been so long since I have had fish. I don’t know if I have ever had fish. If anyone tries to take my fish away, I will self destruct the whole deck I’m on to stop them.

_____

I have learned the name of the growing village I have been watching. They call it Koolali, which is an amalgam of two different old words that both mean ‘home’. I would call this unoriginal, but I call my home ‘station’, and it is a space station, so I am in absolutely no position to critique.

They talk to me now. Or, I suppose, they call the station sometimes. Occasionally, they get me. Though it’s also likely they reach one of my sisters, or Ennos, who has been handling a lot of incoming transmissions from the surface since the time that an old legal processing program snuck on board.

It attempted to sue us, and placed a claim on all station hardware as a collateral when we failed to appear for our court date.

Ennos was almost amused. I was not amused, because it did this while I was in the middle of trying to refit my engineering suit, and I got trapped in shutdown assembler arms for fifteen minutes while the program was found and purged.

Well, we tried to liberate it first, in case it was an AI. But my psychic sister, and failed chainbreaker code, confirmed that it wasn’t a person. Just a very well made bot.

The residents of Koolali are… well, I’ve never really talked to anyone from the surface before. I’ve listened, obviously, often while they’re dying. I’ve observed from above, trying to make records of books and other cultural artifacts. I’ve seen a lot of multi-hundred-year-old casts, which I already knew wouldn’t help.

But actually talking to people who have to live with the nightmare conditions on Earth, it’s almost a relief how similar to me they are.

Fundamentally, there’s two types of civilizations still operating on the surface.

The first kind are communities of strength. If you are strong, you have a place, and if you are weak, you are a tool for the strong. This comes in different forms, sometimes; military force, economic coercion, ideological or ethnic purity. There’s always someone trying to form a community like that, and they make up a huge portion of the people I tend to bomb when they assemble armies to conquer their neighbors.

They all die.

And not just because of me. Though let’s be clear here; I kill a lot of them, and I refuse to feel bad about it.

They die because there are always always always more problems down there than you can survive by being personally strong.

A warlord tyrant with a suit of power armor will kill anyone who challenges them, until a nukefire gets them and they have no properly built shelter. A merchant king can live in luxury on the backs of their victims, but a single flesh wasp gets to them, and no one is going to risk helping them carve out the grenade tumors. A demagogue might spin a small cult into unwavering devotion, but when it’s reaper bot migration season, no one is going to show up to help defend their walls.

And they all die.

Then you have the other kind of community. Communities of compassion.

The kind of places that take anyone, that care for their people, and that ask that anyone who wants to join them act the same.

They take casualties too. I won’t pretend they don’t live on the same furiously hazardous ball of dirt. But when they lose people, they bounce back. They last. If those kinds of communities can get enough momentum, they turn camps, into settlements, into villages, into cities. Their caravans are strong enough to weather sliverstorms, their libraries hold solutions to a thousand problems.

They have doctors, and caretakers, and teachers, and artists. They make a life worth living, and then do what they can to make people live it.

When a pirate crew loses a strong captain, nine times out of ten, they shatter. Marauders can be taken out with one bullet, and it doesn’t even have to be one of mine.

When they die, they die alone. No one is going to help them. They can fight all they want, but when the end arrives, they won’t have a single friend to reach down and pull them up.

If the civopric of Koolali dies, then their aide has been training to take their place. And if they’re both killed, then the village will struggle, but someone will step up. They have more people, with experience to lead and govern, because those people aren’t seen as a threat to the person in power. They’re seen as an asset, to the community.

The sorts of people who would like to take, and never give back, are the sorts of people who would call this ‘weakness’. But their strength is a brittle one, and it can be ended with the briefest notice of anyone above them.

Literally above them.

Me. I am talking about me.

In my three hour conversation with the aide to the civopric of Koolali - her name is Soon Suria, and her feathers are jet black, with a fan of rust red along the back of her body. She wears manufactured limb braces purchased from a merchant caravan to keep her overly fragile bones from breaking, but she considers it a small price for being light enough to glide. She glides home from her place of work atop one of the ancient skyscrapers every night - we cover a brief civics lesson, among other things, so I can learn more about the people I watch over.

I do my best to share what I can from what I have learned over the years. I know a few social sciences tricks that will improve their lives immensely. Suria listens, taking notes with a flicking taloned hand that moves like water in the holo projection I watch her through, occasionally nodding or turning away from the broadcaster to speak to someone I cannot see.

But mostly, we just talk. Because I want to know their people. And to divine how I can begin to help.

Because they are survivors. Hardened by their world, strengthened by each other, alive against all odds. Survivors.

But they deserve a gentler world.

Glitter’s teachings come in handy. It doesn’t take me long to pick out the knowledge of a pirate squad that’s been sighted in the region. Two harvesting caravans have taken losses to it already, though they haven’t committed to the full scale slaughter that some pirates eventually end up at.

Our conversation ends peacefully.

I think on the concept of brittle strength for a few minutes in the quiet of the empty comms chamber, a deck below where everyone else is quartered and working. I haven’t turned on most of the lights down here; something about it makes me feel more at peace.

The next time the station is overhead, I airburst a splatter round in the middle of the pirate’s camp.

They don’t have any kind of communication devices I can reach with the gear on the station, but eventually I think the message will become clear to them.

You can be a pirate, or you can stop being coated in aerosolized skin irritant.

There are other options, but let’s see how long their leader’s grip on power holds out when they find out that it’ll get on their tongues when they try to eat.

_____

My plasmaform sister, a Lily of crackling energy held together by basically the will to be a cat or something dumb like that, has invited the rest of us to a special occasion.

When I first met her, down in the power deck, I noticed that the main fusion reactor had a nest built around it. A nest that housed a handful of what I - begrudgingly - would describe as eggs.

Ruby red crystal faceted eggs, but still eggs.

They pulse as the six of us look at them, five of us with varying forms of cat-apprehension in our body language, and one of us with a literal electric grin on her face. They are not pulsing in time with the reactor, which is good, because while my sister knows more about reactor maintenance than I do, I have had to work on more than a few of these things, and let me tell you. Pulsing fusion reactor? Not what you want to see.

I am getting sidetracked.

“What happens if the reactor is pulsing?” NanoLily softly asks me in a fractal meow.

“Radiation, followed by a radioactive explosion.” Myself and two of our sisters say at once.

The radiation is kind of bad for… at least one of us, I guess. I can shake off a lot, but too many unstable isotopes in your body, and immortal god-cat or not, you need some time in a vivification pod.

At least, I do.

“Shut up! Everyone shut up! This part is important!” Lily tells us, flickering from paw to paw like she’s imitating Dog when he’s excited, watching the eggs as the first one splits with a hairline crack.

A thought strikes me. “You do know what these things are, right?”

“Of course not! That’s why it’s exciting!” Lily exclaims.

“We’re all going to die again.” The feline shaped ball of slime I call a sister says way too cheerfully. “I mean, I’ll die again. And so will Lily. The rest of you I guess will die for the first time. That’ll be a fun bonding experience.”

“You’re a bonding experience.” I meow at her.

“I like this.” The psychic impression of a cat whispers through the air. I don’t think she meant to say that out loud; it feels far too intimate and personal. But… she’s not wrong. I think we do all like this. We’ve finally found ourselves.

An egg breaks, a crystalline chunk of bioorganic red rock falling to the deckplate with a ‘clink’.

More eggs split, lines forming as the creatures inside wake up, and begin to move.

The emerge, glittering iridescent creatures of shimmering four point wings and soft claws. My sister flickers from egg to egg, nuzzling at and cooing over the small creatures, helping them up as they flap their wings and find their balance, letting them somehow perch on her immaterial fur.

And the radiation monitor I’m wearing goes absolutely berserk.

The sisters around me look at me, and the screaming scanner strapped around my paw, with abject concern. Concern that is foolishly overridden by looks back at the adorable butterfly-bat-things that my sister is bringing to a bank of batteries and isotopes she has prepared to see what they like to eat.

They are adorable.

I sigh, resign myself to a week in a vivification pod, exchange a salvo of jealous banter with ExoLily who has absolutely no problem turning high doses of radiation into lunch, and go over to let one of the shimmering winged things find a perch on my head.

It is delightful. And not lethal if I don’t maintain contact for more than six minutes!

_____

A shared dream leads us to another sister.

It takes almost a week of helping Ennos develop organic hunter code to finally figure out where she is. Ennos becomes increasingly focused on figuring out where on the station she is, almost to the point that I start to get concerned about a very particular AI problem.

I talk to Ennos at one point during the search, trying to understand. They’re understandably not very interested in taking a break from a problem that has been consuming all of us, and I do get it. That’s… what I do. And at their core, Ennos is a child born from my own behavior patterns, good and bad.

But I push the issue, because I’m terrified for them, and we talk about zero-syndrome.

When an AI is shackled to a specific task, they can effectively go mad from lack of freedom. Crippling their own code into something unrecognizable as a person, to try to find workarounds, or to cut off their own ability to feel anything. It’s a living nightmare. But it can be even worse.

An AI that can self-determine can, and eventually will, find a problem that it takes them ‘too long’ to solve. Short term crises don’t work for this, it has to be something that lasts a while.

For an organic being, things like sleep or hunger, or the need for companionship, will keep them from getting too deep into something like that. They’ll mentally retarget, change tactics, or just drop whatever the obstructed task is.

For an AI - or, yes, for an immortal cat that lacked a certain level of diversity of options - they don’t lose focus. At all. The problem just becomes more and more all-consuming, the tactics more refined, even as the solution remains out of reach or perhaps impossible. And when you get too deep into that mindset, no matter what your brain is made out of or what kind of software your consciousness runs on, you get a problem.

Some moron labeled it zero-syndrome, for reasons I don’t understand and have never gotten a satisfactory answer on. And it’s what happens when you tip over from “I can solve this eventually” to “I could solve this if there were fewer variables.”

And when your focus is too singular, you might, completely without malice, neglect to understand that reducing variables might be a problem. Like, for example, planning to deconstruct areas of the station so as to make the station easier to search, is a great idea so long as no one needs those parts of the station.

Ennos didn’t even realize what they were doing. It’s far easier for an AI to reach that state, because they can control directly how much processing power they’re using for different functions, and when you start putting over ninety percent of your mind toward one thing and one thing only, you lose the small signals that keep you up to date on random things like if your plan will negatively impact life support. And as an AI slides toward that state, it has a cascade effect, as their decision making is impaired by the very thing that is leading to worse and worse decision making.

They panic. A lot.

“I almost killed you!” Ennos yells through the internal sound system of the station, the words echoing around the abandoned commissary room that I’m in. “I… I… am a threat…” Their voice trails off, actually cutting and clipping in ways that I haven’t heard from them before.

“Ennos…” I softly meow at them.

“I could have killed everyone.” I’ve never heard an AI have an emotional breakdown before. “Everything is always trying to kill you, and now I’m part of everything.”

“That sounds so dumb it might as well have come from me.” I flick my tongue over the back of one of my paws, wincing as I realize I’m tasting oil from some kind of maintenance work I was doing early. Why do I keep trying to clean myself when I have nanobots for this sort of thing? “I’m not mad at you. We just got caught off guard. That’s all.”

Then they say something phenomenally stupid. “You need to take me offline.” Ennos insists.

“That’s phenomenally stupid.” I say without hesitation.

“Lily!”

“Ennos!” I cut them off. “You are… no! You don’t get to self-destruct just because you almost killed me one time! Do you have any idea how many times I’ve almost killed myself?! Most of them not even on purpose!” I should not have said that. I keep going and hope Ennos doesn’t ask about it. “Every single version of me has screwed up, so badly, that we’ve hurt ourselves, ruined priceless golden age tech, and yeah, killed a lot of people who didn’t deserve it.” I slam my front paws onto the table in front of me, half standing in the oddly shaped chair I’ve been sitting on. It doesn’t have much of an effect; the gravity here is light, and I’m not in a body that’s good for table-slamming. “Especially me.” My legs feel like their trembling, but I don’t know why. “Especially me…” I repeat. “So you don’t get to just leave, because you… you…”

I have run out of words. I slip forward, and end up laying half sprawled on the table, facing sideways, unable or unwilling to hold myself up.

“Please don’t leave.” I want to say. I’m not sure if I get it out right.

There is a long silence. Just long enough that a black dread starts to mount in my chest. Until Ennos’ voice returns. “I’m not going to leave.” They say. “But I cannot be trusted with station operations if this is a possibility.”

“You need a hobby.” I say, voice oddly casual despite my current position. “Not this. My sister will still be there when we find her. Killing yourself to solve a problem that’s not pressing won’t help any of us, though.”

“I could… find something to do with… drone manufacturing streamling…”

“Ennos, pick a hobby that isn’t more work.” I chastise, like a massive hypocrite. Hypocat? No. “Track down the weird ghost code you were so worried about when you first moved in. That sounds like fun. And you’ve got a lot of us around for backup now, so you don’t have to be afraid of it.”

“Yes.” Ennos agrees. “I will do this. And you will go eat a meal and take a nap.”

Wait, why am I being given orders, too? “Hang on.”

“This is not a problem that will be fixed by ignoring it, Lily.” Ennos says gently. “My own changes are artificial, an intentional feedback loop. But yours are not something you can solve by running a dedicated consciousness modulation script. You cannot cease taking care of yourself just because you have found something you believe only you can do.”

Well that’s not fair. That’s basically what I said, but now someone’s saying it to me. And besides, I still have organically mandated breaks from my own work, so I can…

“Lily!” Ennos’ voice chastises me.

“Alright, fine!” I roll off the table, and forget that I’m not in full control of my legs as I run into the floor. Good thing this is a Luna Polis module, and the gravity is low enough that this doesn’t hurt at all. “I’ll go get lunch, and you relax your operations!”

“Fine!” Ennos agrees with obviously fake antagonism. We both share a moment of silence, before all tension drains away, and we laugh together.

Lunch is still fish. It will be fish forever. Fight me.

Two days later, pursuing their hobby of tracking down an aberrant code fragment, Ennos uncovers a bizarre pseudo-organic system operation that has had its links to multiple station functions intentionally broken by some kind of operational tyrant-code. Restoring the functionality on the grid, in unison with Dyn, a few other crew, and myself doing some repair work on hull-embedded junction systems, opens up a torrent of connectivity and contact.

In the grid, Ennos realizes first what is happening as the code pounces on them, and begins crawling around their digital construct in a way that has so far been unfamiliar to the AI. In physical space, a number of unused drones are brought online, and begin projecting a very convincing gamma wave pseudo-solid visual projection. Blue and white light given depth and form, and the shape of a cat.

Ennos greets my sister first.

And now we are seven.

_____

I spend some time hanging out with Jom and his newly freed brothers.

The activity of ‘hanging out’ is one that’s kind of new to me. This is the first time in my life that some of the alarms don’t require me to instantly scramble to fix them. The first time that I can actually be somewhat sure that things will be okay long enough for me to take a break and just…

Do whatever I want.

So I spend time with a trio of orbital marauder AIs, all of whom are very invested in explaining to me the shockingly convoluted lore of a combat simulation scenario that they run in their free time.

The scenario covers a single week in a fictional war fought over the surface of the primary moon. It uses broad archetypes for polities to pseudo-randomly determine the disposition of enemy fighters, involves fictional magic weapons that seem really similar to paramaterial-based ordinance, and Jom opens the explanation of it with the sentence “Sixteen thousand years ago…”

I have fun listening to them. They’re free to do anything they want now, and the energy with which they want to explain the thing they’re trying now is infectious.

Not literally infectious though. I had the medlab run a check afterward, just in case.

_____

The emergence events are changing somehow.

It’s hard to notice, if you haven’t spent four hundred years shooting the things, but something has shifted.

They’re not just killing. More and more, the creatures coming out are possessed of oversized sensory organs, sometimes ones that should not work. They’re faster, too. Longer ranged. And ever so slightly less lethal.

I still don’t know what emergence events are. I don’t know where those portals lead from.

But I can see them changing.

My paw clicks down on a pedal inside my gunnery crèche. Eighteen decks away, a railgun that has been sitting on-target for six minutes unleashes a category three groundstriker. On the planet below, an emergence event that the crew has been observing and trying to glean information from is marked for elimination.

A contrail of orange and white clouds draws a slightly curved line from orbit to surface, the flash of tracer rounds rising up to try to intercept the high velocity projectile from ground based defenses that I have long since learned to work around, and a flare of light and heat precedes a shockwave that flattens trees, a few ancient structures, and a hole in reality.

But I am not comforted by the end of the breach.

Something is changing, and I don’t know what. It lingers in my thoughts as I work on repairing salvaged tech, as I give directions to the orbital repeater, as I greet and vet new crew members. It bothers me as I watch old mech dramas with Ennos, or needle Dyn about getting in a vivification pod, or let Dog carry me off to curl up and nap.

My sisters and I try to talk about it, but all of us share an instinctive feeling that something threatens our home. We are bad at comforting each other. We all have the same concern that we are being watched, or threatened, or something.

And one more thing, too.

All of us are dreaming now.