“I don’t fully understand how I could have been here this whole time, and not noticed… any of this.” Lily says.

Now we are eight.

She is sitting in the galley with me and the rest of our sisters. And, I suppose, a few other people too. The galley used to be a massive empty room that I only used because I couldn’t get the ration dispenser to dispense rations anywhere else. Every day, two or three times a day, it was a reminder of just how much empty space surrounded me. How alone I was.

Now this galley is full of people. Crew, mostly. But also a few diplomatic contacts, a particularly brave merchant from the surface, and a pair of very confused looking silent chardis siblings who were rescued from a failing hatchery habitat and are staying here until they figure out… anything.

They’re clones, basically. Grown from nothing to be the crew of a UCAS long range observation post. Only the post never left Earth orbit, the machinery to implant memories never worked, and every ten years, a new pair of clones would be decanted, struggle, and perish without knowing what was going on. And when their bodies were processed by the machinery, the cycle would start over.

Not this time though. Now they get to be confused by something other than unmarked technology and their imminent deaths. They can be confused by other people, like me.

Anyway.

No, wait, not anyway. Let’s go on a journey of discovery.

Day by day, I’m discovering more about just how far my paws can reach out here, and more about just how full of life the system still is.

For most of my waking life, I’ve been pointed down at the planet below. And I think that’s kind of fair; I’ve been one cat, struggling to make a golden age orbital city work, somehow, to do anything. I’m not gonna blame myself.

More than normal, I mean.

…Okay, moving on.

Earth is huge, and no matter how well armed I am, I can’t actually see most of it at a given moment. But even just with that sliver of vision, I’ve been scrambling nonstop for so long only the void knows how many things I’ve had to deal with. Every time I look out to the rest of the system, I find myself usually not looking much farther than the original moon.

There’s people out here. A lot of them. Old ships strung up like raft cities, habitats clinging to life, colony vessels that never broke orbit, hollow asteroids wired with enough redundant life support to keep a village alive.

I mentioned before that there’s probably trillions of things in orbit around Earth. And yeah, most of them are junk. But there’s no real practical way for me to scan through all of them and find the ones that aren’t, and in that absolute nightmare of a mess, a lot of small sparks of life are hidden.

It’s deeply emotional, to see day after day, how tenaciously the people of Sol cling to life. A stubborn determination to just refuse to die, even when the worlds burn and flood and are overrun, even as the light of civilization flickers and dims.

They’re still here. And I’m here with them.

Okay, now anyway.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about spaceships.” I tell my newest sister.

“Wait, what?” Ooze Lily looks up from the godfin fish cake on her plate in the shape of an optical illusion. “I was also thinking about spaceships! That’s cool!”

“I apologize, I was also…” The psychic impression of a sister that’s been getting more present the more of us we’ve brought together, detaches herself from sharing the flavor with Nano Lily of the spicy vegetable dish that I’m pretty sure cats shouldn’t be able to taste properly. “What were we discussing?”

Exo Lily takes a bite of the fish skeleton she has on her plate, enhanced teeth and dominating jaw strength shearing through the thick bone of the ocean creature. She crunches it in half, purring at the flavor that I am also pretty sure cats shouldn’t be able to appreciate. “I was listening.” She talks with her mouth full.

“Really?” I ask.

“I was also thinking about space ships, but I was still listening.” She flicks her tail and tilts her head away from me in a haughty gesture of supremacy.

The newest addition to our feline council hops up onto the table, slamming her forepaws down. Now, I’m going to complain briefly. Because when I do that, it just kind of makes a light thump, and then my paws hurt! I am, as mentioned previously, possibly the strongest biological baseline domestic cat in the galaxy. I actually exercise sometimes, I have the vivification pods to direct muscle growth, and also I seem to regrow a little more durable every time I get a limb annihilated in some kind of weapons fire. So the fact that I just make a little light thud when I try to hit a table is disappointing.

This Lily, who is made of servos and engines, armor plate and mechanical systems, hits the table like a meteor strike. Being made of metal, she even makes a clang! I get thud, she gets clang, and I’m very jealous.

She seems upset. “Why are you all so uninterested in this?” She demands. Definitely upset, I know that tone. I’ve used it a lot! “Something is really wrong! The station isn’t that big, we should have run into each other!”

“The station has been actively keeping us separate, in a variety of ways.” Nano Lily says with her voice like shifting dust. “No idea why.”

The holographic projection of our software sister chimes in. She’s been around, but not really focusing, because I don’t think she can eat like we do. Which is honestly very sad. I should make her a digital cake somehow. “Probably has to do with the grim demon seed of code trails that’re wrapped around the… thing. You know the thing.”

“We know the thing.” We all say.

The thing is an ancient and/or very new artifact from outside either the galaxy or the universe, that appeared on Earth one day, and that the Oceanic Anarchy saw fit to put in space to study from within a shockingly robust space station. It does a lot of things.

Like make you immortal. Or end the world.

Or kill your mom.

We hate the thing, in general. It’s locked up, though. Although, Holo Lily brings up a weird question that I hadn’t thought to ask before. “What exactly do the programs on it do, anyway?” I ask her.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out, ever since I noticed that they sometimes try to eat parts of Ennos’ brain.” She says. Wait, what? Hang on, that’s something I should have known. “Oh, yeah! It’s real bad!” Lily continues as the rest of us look up, Exo Lily with half a fish hanging loosely out of her mouth, me with some kind of baked onion hanging much more elegantly out of my own maw. “So, for a really long time, I thought it was there to keep people out, and since I didn’t want…” there’s a flicker in her projection, a waver in her psychic voice, and a chill through all our forms. “I didn’t want to… go in. So it was fine. But now, I keep seeing places where it’s reaching out, and altering stuff. Mostly Ennos. Though they keep refreshing the damage from a outside source, so it’s not working.”

“Yeah, Dyn and I set that up. And also Lily. And… Lily?” I look at two of my sisters. One of them bobs her head in agreement, the other one gives me a blank look. “Okay, just Lily then. So, it’s not a barrier then?”

“It is, but it’s a lot of things, I think? And also… did you know the station actually does have root code? It’s not all ether hardwired directives and subspace impressions.”

“I knew that.” Exo Lily says. “There’s some pseudo-organic bits on the outside of the station that are Do Not Approach nodes, and the station tries to kill anything that gets close.” She shudders, and I remember that she still thinks she can die.

Our new mechanical sister cuts a paw through the air with a light whistle as air flows over her metal skin. “You’re getting off track!”

We all look between each other. “Yes?” I say. “Yes. We do that. Are you sure you’re Lily?” I ask her.

“Of course I am!” She arches her back, raising her head to look down at us imperiously. “I’ve been doing this for almost two hundred years! I think I’d know if I weren’t me!”

I freeze in place, mouth halfway to trying to steal another onion off Plasma Lily’s plate. She’s distracted with her radioactive bat children, so it’s been pretty easy so far. “Sorry, how long?” I ask. Because I suspect she misspoke.

“I mean, I haven’t been ‘doing this’ for that long.” The robotic cat shell gives a strangely natural sniff of derision. “Because I had to adapt to the body. And then learn how to do some engineering things. And then… look, it was a lot of work. But I’ve been Lily the whole time.”

And I am sharply reminded that we found her, curled in a dusty corner of an upper deck, offline and drained of every scrap of power.

I don’t even remember what it was like to be that young. To have… the fear, I suppose? The uncertainty. To look at a situation and not know if I’ll survive, if I’ll be good enough, if there will be a tomorrow to try again. But also the optimism. The feeling that I was making a difference. The feeling that I was still growing my leaps and bounds, instead of just adding my own improvement to the background noise of trying to keep up with alarms and alerts.

It’s been so long since I’ve actually been this part of myself. What do you say, when your younger self steps forward and greets you? How do you tell them…

How do you tell them that losing gets easier? That there will always be another problem to try again on? How do you tell them that you are so, so, so… tired?

“Oh.” Ooze Lily says sadly, taking the lead on this one. “You’re… very young.”

The statement is so tiny, and so innocuous. And yet, it seems to deflate our mechanical sister on the spot. “…What?” She asks in a digital meow, letting her projected voice slip as she slumps back off the table we’re eating lunch at.

“You’ve been offline for… a while.” I say. “We haven’t, really. Except Lily, who spent something like fifty years in a vat? And Lily, who was sorta suppressed by the station for a while.” I meet her eyes and try to project compassion. “You’re a couple hundred years behind, sister.” I say.

She stares back at all of us. “But… you’re still here?”

“Of course.” Exo Lily says with a flick of her tongue over her mouth. “Where else would we go?”

“And this… us all being copies, and her being the real one… this doesn’t bother anyone?” The mech asks.

I chime in. “To be fair, I am capable of a frankly stupid level of biological restoration, so calling me ‘the real one’ is kind of underselling the fact that I’m just the one that looks most like what you’d find in the bio map next to ‘cat’.”

“Also we’re too busy to be bothered.” Holo Lily says. “Oh, speaking of, you might want to assemble a gunnery team. Starward side, Ennos and I are tracking an incoming stealth strike. Someone’s mad at us.”

I’m moving before she’s finished explaining. I trust her enough to know that it’s better to just start running now, and sort out what I need to hit when I get to the station. “Active defense crew to point defense batteries!” I call through the command link, and in my peripheral vision see acknowledgment from the young ones of my growing support crew. One, two, five, eight. A full complement already moving from their points on the station to the hardwired guardian system firing controls.

“Hello Lily.” Ennos’ voice comes to me as I dive through a low gravity area, letting my high momentum rocket me around a corner as I hit a curved line set up in midair for exactly this purpose. “How was your conversation with your sisters?”

“Oh, you know.” I say as I slide onto the deck’s smoothed metal surface. “Had lunch. Learned you’re constantly being attacked by the station we live on. Normal stuff.”

Ennos pauses. “I had considered letting you know, but… I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I worry anyway!” I say as I race between two people welding a new grav plate into place. “Also I’m kinda busy. What can I help with in the next thirty six seconds?”

Ennos doesn’t flinch at my specific knowledge of how long it takes to get from anywhere on the station to the nearest gun. “The inbound projectile is not targeted at us, but will hit us. I’ve traced where it was fired from and to, and it appears to be ancient automated artillery that finally had a clear line to a target from the War of The Rich And Poor. Well, clear if we were not in the way. I’m not sure what it’s firing at though, which is why I’m offering you these scans to your AR, and then quietly receding without answering further questions about my living situation.”

“Ennos, you…!” Heck, thirty two seconds exactly. They’re too good at this. Dumb AI with their dumb superintelligence. I grumble as I waste my precious seconds checking the AR window Ennos put up in my display that I’m still pretty sure they shouldn’t have access to; the artillery is firing at what looks like an emergence event that opened really close to where the station was going to orbit. Then, I pin my paw movements to the point defense firing tracker, and prepare to shoot down a very old artillery shell.

We’ll talk later.