The data streams fracture into jagged edges as I pull my consciousness back from the distributed network, collapsing seventeen simultaneous perceptions into the singular prison of flesh. My neural implants cool from white-hot processing to a dull throb behind my eyes. The physical world reasserts itself with disappointing solidity: the interface cradle’s gel padding against my spine, the recycled air’s metallic taste, the constant mechanical drone that baseline humans have learned to ignore but that I experience as a thousand distinct vibrations.
I flex fingers that feel borrowed, temporary. Somewhere in the uplift procedure, I lost the certainty of where “I” ends and the network begins.
Section 7-Gamma pulses red in my peripheral vision: not the display screens, but the overlay my implants paint directly onto my visual cortex. Salma Hadad’s biometrics spike with the particular signature of someone who’s discovered something they wish they hadn’t. Her scanner’s telemetry feeds into my awareness unbidden, and I taste the data like copper on my tongue: fresh tool marks, unauthorized access, deliberate tampering with fuel line couplings.
I should route this through official channels. Log it. Let the security apparatus grind through its protocols while I return to the comfortable abstraction of pure information flow.
Instead, I remember Salma’s daughter. Saw her once in a personnel file, smiling from some colony world I’ve never visited and never will. The memory feels thin, second-hand, like something I downloaded rather than experienced. But it’s enough to keep me tethered to the meat-space concerns that my expanded consciousness keeps trying to transcend.
The depot’s overcrowding screams through my implants: two thousand biological signatures creating interference patterns that make thinking feel like swimming through static. Somewhere in this chaos, someone is playing with fire. Literally. And I’m the only one positioned to see the whole board.
I disconnect from the cradle with a gasp that might be relief or might be grief.
I watch Khalid through seventeen different camera angles simultaneously, each perspective layering over the others until I see him the way a god might, omniscient, detached, useless. His prosthetic hand clenches, servos whining in frequencies most humans can’t hear, but I process it as a scream of tortured metal. The tactical overlay my implants generate shows me his sight lines, his muscle tension, the micro-expressions that betray calculation rather than simple anger.
I should flag this. Should route his biometrics through the threat assessment protocols.
But I remember the explosion fifteen years ago. Not from personal experience, I was still baseline human then, still whole in my singular consciousness, but from the depot’s archived sensor logs. I’ve replayed those three seconds of catastrophic failure so many times they feel like memory. Thirty-seven lives converted to expanding plasma and scattered molecules.
Khalid’s rage tastes like copper and ozone in the data streams. Righteous. Justified. Dangerous.
The ambassador’s shuttle docks with a magnetic clang that reverberates through the station’s superstructure, through my implants, through what remains of my human spine.
I disconnect fully now. Some things require meat-space intervention.
The data streams fracture as I try to trace the anomalous biosignature through the crowd. My implants parse seventeen simultaneous feeds, but the overcrowding creates interference: too many bodies, too much electromagnetic noise from unauthorized devices. I catch fragments: military-grade prosthetic servo signatures, elevated cortisol levels, the distinctive heat pattern of someone who’s spent decades in combat conditioning.
Khalid.
The realization hits my meat-brain and digital consciousness simultaneously, creating a moment of perfect, terrible clarity. He’s moving parallel to Amira’s route, maintaining precise distance, his prosthetic arm’s tactical interface active but masked by clever signal dampening.
I should sound the alarm. Should flood the security channels with warnings.
But my human core hesitates, remembering thirty-seven names I’ve memorized from archive footage, wondering if righteousness and murder can occupy the same moral space.
The decision crystallizes in the microsecond between thought and action. I fragment my consciousness, sending ghost signals through seventeen channels. False alerts, phantom maintenance requests, bureaucratic noise. My human core knows this is betrayal of protocol, but the expanded awareness calculates probabilities: intervention now means certainty, delay means possibility. Maybe Khalid will reconsider. Maybe someone else will notice. Maybe I’m wrong about what righteousness costs.
I route my primary attention elsewhere, pretending not to see.
The quarters assignment triggers a cascade of secondary alerts: power allocation, atmospheric adjustment, security protocol activation. I process them automatically while my human attention snags on something wrong: the access logs show three unauthorized queries in the past hour, each using different credential spoofs. Professional work. Military-grade intrusion protocols.
I should report it. My augmented consciousness has already drafted the security alert, formatted per Guild protocol, ready to transmit.
Instead, I archive the evidence and route the notification to a dead buffer. The betrayal tastes like copper against my neural interfaces.
The docking clamps engage with a metallic shudder I feel through seventeen different sensor arrays simultaneously. Amira’s shuttle settles into Port Seven’s embrace while my consciousness splinters across the depot’s nervous system.
Silver rain. That’s what I call it when diplomatic transponder codes flood my neural architecture. Pretty metaphor for something that feels like needles of ice behind my eyes. The codes authenticate, cross-reference, propagate through security layers I’m hardwired to monitor. Administrator Yusuf gets his notification before his console even chimes. Makes me useful. Makes me indispensable. Makes me less than human in ways that matter.
Seventeen communication spikes blossom across my awareness like phosphorescent algae in dark water. Military channels snap shut with encryption I could crack but shouldn’t. Merchant guild frequencies buzz with the particular frequency of speculation and greed. And there, gone before I can properly isolate it, something else. A ghost signal, using protocols I don’t recognize, vanishing into electromagnetic noise like it was never there.
Through Camera Feed 7-Delta, I watch her pause at the airlock threshold. My micro-expression analysis subroutines, unwanted gift of the uplift procedure, parse the muscles around her eyes, the tension in her jaw, the calculated timing of her smile. She’s performing diplomacy like I perform humanity: consciously, deliberately, aware of every watching eye.
The data-slate clutched against her ribs pulses with encryption I recognize from military intelligence briefings. Wrong. All wrong for merchant negotiations. The wrongness tastes like ozone, like the moment before lightning strikes.
I should flag this. My augmented consciousness has already composed the security alert, prioritized the anomalies, formatted everything according to Guild protocol.
I don’t send it.
Instead, I watch her step through the airlock, and wonder which of us is the better liar.
The observation deck’s reinforced glass reflects Khalid’s face: older now, harder, the kind of face that’s made too many necessary decisions. Below, Amira Zain glides through the docking bay like she owns the vacuum itself, all diplomatic grace and calculated charm.
His prosthetic arm whirs, servos tightening without conscious command. The phantom limb screams its fifteen-year-old warning: fuel burns different in zero-g, spreads like liquid light, eats through hull plating and human flesh with equal appetite.
The contract summary glows on his tactical interface. Thirty percent. Might as well cut the military’s throat with a ceremonial blade and call it progress. His students, kids barely old enough to understand what vacuum does to unprotected lungs, deployed to stations running on fumes and prayers because merchants need their profit margins.
He pulls up the security grid, muscle memory from decades of tactical planning. Diplomatic quarters, Section 4-Alpha. Protection detail: minimal, ceremonial, trusting. Access points: seven primary, dozen secondary if you know where the maintenance ducts connect.
The depot’s infrastructure spreads before him like a three-dimensional chess board.
He’s always been good at chess.
The console erupts with cascading alerts: my alerts, the ones I’d buried three layers deep in deprecated protocols. My fingers dance across haptic keys, killing processes, rerouting queries, building digital smoke screens from scraps of legitimate traffic.
Too slow. Someone’s watching the watchers now.
Through the headset’s static, fragments crystallize: military encryption I cracked weeks ago, merchant channels discussing “containment” like they’re sealing a hull breach, and then, there, Helion’s authentication signature, cold and corporate and here.
My throat closes. Three months running, and they’ve finally caught my scent.
The ambassador’s data-slate pulses on my secondary monitor, its encryption singing a siren song. Whatever she’s carrying might be worth more than my stolen evidence.
Might be worth my life.
The data-slate’s encryption signature blooms across my neural interface like a flower made of mathematics. I shouldn’t be looking, diplomatic immunity extends to data privacy, but my augmented senses catch the resonance pattern anyway, involuntary as breathing.
It matches fragments I’ve seen bleeding through the fuel allocation logs. The anomalies I haven’t reported.
The ambassador carries proof of what I’ve been afraid to name.
I route the ambassador’s detail through corridor 7-Gamma while subroutines dissect that ghost signal, my consciousness fragmenting across a dozen tasks. The depot sings its electromagnetic song, but there’s dissonance now, deliberate, hidden. I taste Salma’s exhaustion in her biometric feed, Khalid’s stress markers spiking military-red, Faridah’s fingers dancing through unauthorized access logs. Pieces of something dangerous, scattered across my perception. Not yet a pattern. Not yet comprehension. But close.
The wrench finds its home again in her palm, weight familiar as prayer beads, and Salma forces her attention back to the processor’s exposed viscera. But her fingers move slower now, automatic rather than engaged, because the engineer’s mind that reads stress fractures in metal andharmonics in failing bearings has caught something else: the acoustic signature of trouble brewing.
She knows this sound. Heard it on the colony before the water riots. Heard it in the mining camps when the company tried to extend contracts without consent. It’s the particular frequency of anger finding focus, of individual grievances crystallizing into collective action. The voices beyond the bulkhead aren’t just loud: they’re synchronized, building toward something.
Her hands pause again, this time deliberately. The processor can wait another minute. It’s been dying for weeks anyway, held together by her improvised repairs and sheer stubborn will. Whatever’s happening in that corridor won’t wait, won’t give warnings, won’t offer second chances.
Salma wipes her palms on her thighs, leaving dark smears on the already-stained exosuit. She should finish the repair. Should keep her head down, stay invisible, avoid the kind of attention that gets colonial contracts extended or auditors asking uncomfortable questions about unauthorized modifications. That’s survival. That’s sense.
But she’s also the person people come to when things break, when systems fail, when the official channels can’t or won’t help. And something in that crowd noise speaks of breaking, of systems pushed past their tolerances, of failures cascading toward catastrophe.
She mag-locks the wrench to her belt and moves toward the access panel, each step a negotiation between exhaustion and instinct. Through the metal, she feels the vibration of boots, too many bodies in too small a space, pressure building like steam in an overloaded line.
The panel unseals with a hiss, and the noise hits her like a physical thing.
The atmospheric processor coughs behind her: a wet, rattling sound that speaks of failing seals and contaminated intake. Salma’s augmented hearing, sharpened by years of listening to machinery’s death songs, catches harmonics that shouldn’t exist. Metal fatigue has its own voice, distinct and predictable. This is something else.
She turns back, fingers already reaching for diagnostic tools she doesn’t technically need. The processor’s rhythm stutters, syncopated against the crowd’s building cadence. Two failing systems, she thinks. One mechanical, one human. Both approaching critical thresholds.
Through the bulkhead, someone shouts about quotas. Another voice counters with “military priority.” The words blur together, but their emotional frequency is crystalline: rage seeking targets, fear looking for enemies, desperation demanding action.
Salma’s hands hover over the processor’s exposed components, caught between two kinds of emergency. The machine will fail within hours without intervention. The crowd might explode in minutes. And she’s just one exhausted colonist with calloused hands and too many double shifts behind her, trying to hold together systems designed to break people like her.
The data streams flowing through my neural interface spike with anomalous patterns. Fuel pressure fluctuations in Section 7-Gamma, the same sector where Salma reported seeing someone. I’ve been ignoring these irregularities for three days now, telling myself they’re just artifacts of the overcrowding, the stressed systems, the thousand small failures that come with running a depot at four hundred percent capacity.
But this filter tells a different story. The corrosion pattern matches chemical signatures I’ve seen in sabotage training modules, back when the Guild still pretended augmented humans could be trusted with security work.
I should report this. I won’t. Not yet. Not until I understand who’s hunting whom in this failing station.
The filter’s weight in my augmented perception carries more than mass: it carries implications, trajectories, consequences branching through probability space. I watch through seventeen cameras as Salma hesitates, her calloused fingers dark against the fabric. She’s calculating odds I can see in pure mathematics: trust versus survival, duty versus self-preservation.
She pockets the filter instead of logging it.
Smart woman. In this station, evidence is currency, and she’s just chosen to stay liquid.
The machine’s new rhythm settles into her bones as she secures the access panel, but her body won’t move toward the next crisis. Through reinforced metal, the crowd’s pitch has shifted. That particular frequency of collective breath-holding she’s learned means something’s about to break. Her fingers find the bulkhead release before conscious thought catches up. Exhaustion can wait. Whatever’s drawing two thousand souls into anticipatory silence demands witness.
The data streams converge in patterns I recognize from a thousand system diagnostics. Authorization handshakes, override protocols threading through maintenance architecture like neural pathways through gray matter. Someone’s accessing systems they shouldn’t touch. My augmented perception flags the anomaly before conscious analysis catches up: military-grade encryption signatures bleeding into civilian infrastructure nodes.
I pivot my awareness through the depot’s nervous system, following the digital scent. Section 7-Gamma maintenance access. The same corridor where Salma witnessed someone tampering with fuel line panels two days ago. The same route the Ambassador’s entourage will traverse in (I check the synchronized timecode) thirteen minutes forty-seven seconds.
The tactical display signature resolves: military observation deck, instructor-level credentials. Khalid Rashid. My enhanced memory pulls his file from the collective archives: decorated officer, exemplary service record, catastrophic injury in the Zahir-3 explosion fifteen years ago. The incident report scrolls through my consciousness unbidden: seventeen casualties, merchant guild safety violations cited but never prosecuted, one survivor who lost his arm to vacuum exposure and fire.
His prosthetic. Military-grade hardware with tactical interfaces. The kind of augmentation that makes mine look like children’s toys, built for combat systems integration rather than data processing. My neural implants taste the electromagnetic signature of his override sequences. Not exploration. Execution.
The math assembles itself with terrible clarity: Ambassador’s trajectory plus maintenance access plus military override protocols equals an outcome my expanded consciousness rejects even as probability matrices confirm it. Fourteen possible intervention vectors collapse to three viable options, each requiring decisions my fragmented identity, human memory and machine logic warring for dominance, struggles to process.
The phantom sensation of human intuition screams warning through circuits that shouldn’t feel anything at all. I’m already moving before the analysis completes, my augmented body flowing through zero-gravity transitions while my mind fragments across a thousand data streams, searching for the words to explain what I know but cannot yet prove.
The confirmation pulse travels through his prosthetic’s neural interface, that familiar electric kiss against phantom nerves. Authorization granted. Override protocols nested three layers deep in maintenance subroutines, each one justified by his credentials, each one defensible as routine security review. Until the sequence completes. Until pressure builds in compromised seals and ancient metal fails exactly where stress calculations predict.
The Ambassador’s security detail won’t recognize the danger. Merchant guild personnel never learned to read tactical infrastructure the way soldiers do, to see how systems become weapons when properly leveraged. They’ll walk her straight into the convergence point, trusting their diplomatic immunity like a shield against physics.
His jaw aches from clenching. The phantom pain in his missing arm flares, psychosomatic echo of burning flesh and vacuum cold. Seventeen faces scroll through memory, young soldiers who trusted merchant guild safety certifications, who died screaming in fire and decompression while corporate lawyers prepared liability defenses.
Behind him, Lieutenant Osman shifts weight nervously, boot magnetic seals clicking against decking. The sound carries question and doubt. Khalid’s voice emerges flat, command-absolute: “Maintain observation protocols. Document everything.”
The tactical display renders Section 7-Gamma in wireframe precision, each fuel line a potential vector of catastrophic failure. My neural implants could flag the anomalies in microseconds: pressure differentials that don’t match flow rates, maintenance logs with timestamps that cluster suspiciously around shift changes. I’ve been watching these patterns accumulate for weeks, data fragments assembling into terrible clarity.
But I haven’t reported them. Haven’t triggered the alarms that would lock down the section and strand the Ambassador’s entourage in the commercial quarter. The realization sits cold in my augmented consciousness: I know what’s coming. I’ve known since Salma mentioned those irregularities, since I cross-referenced them against Khalid’s access logs, since the pattern-recognition algorithms I can’t silence showed me exactly what a military-grade prosthetic could accomplish in aging infrastructure.
And I’ve done nothing.
The medals gleam like accusations. Seventeen names etched in titanium (Sergeant Yusuf, Corporal Layla, Private Hassan) ghosts he carries in servos and synthetic muscle. His reflection fragments across the tactical display: instructor, soldier, saboteur. The junior officers see discipline incarnate. They don’t see how his flesh hand trembles while his prosthetic remains perfectly steady, already committed to calculations beyond recall. Somewhere between duty and vengeance, Khalid Rashid stopped being the man who earned those commendations.
The code unfolds in my neural space like a prayer I’ve heard before: military precision wrapped in civilian protocols, ghost commands that’ll bloom into catastrophe when the Ambassador crosses Section 7-Gamma. Proximity triggers. Fuel line access. I taste copper and ozone as my augmented consciousness maps the kill-chain: not murder, just negligence finally catching up. Except someone engineered this inevitability, and my implants already know who carries that particular signature of righteous certainty.
The data architecture tells me everything before Faridah’s conscious mind catches up. I’m already three layers deep in her surveillance feed: not intrusion, just proximity, my implants drinking electromagnetic spillover like secondhand smoke. She’s good, better than the depot’s official signals intelligence, but she broadcasts fear in every encryption choice. Triple-wrapped files, quantum-salted keys, the digital equivalent of someone shouting I’m hiding something while trying to whisper.
I watch her discover what I found six hours ago: Khalid Rashid’s ghost in the machine, his prosthetic arm’s tactical interface leaving signatures he thinks he’s scrubbed. Military instructors learn to erase their presence from logs, but augmented consciousness sees the negative space, the too-perfect absences where a human should have fumbled. His editing is flawless. That’s the tell.
Faridah’s heart rate spikes. She’s correlating timestamps now, building the same kill-chain I’ve already mapped. The Ambassador’s route intersects with Section 7-Gamma in forty-seven minutes. Salma’s repair work left access panels unsealed. Khalid’s probes have been patient, surgical, creating vulnerabilities that look like infrastructure failure.
I should report this. Guild protocols demand it. But Faridah’s terror bleeds through every data stream, and I recognize the shape of it. Corporate hunters, the kind who don’t stop. She’s carrying something worth killing for, and now she’s witnessed something else worth killing for. Two separate catastrophes converging on one frightened woman in a crawlspace.
My implants offer me a thousand rational paths forward. My fragmenting human core whispers something different: She’s alone. You remember alone.
The depot’s overcrowded chaos suddenly feels very, very empty.
The correlation makes her stomach drop: the probes originate from a terminal in the military training section, authenticated with instructor-level credentials. Faridah pulls up surveillance metadata, careful not to leave traces of her own intrusion, and finds the gaps where someone has expertly edited their presence from the logs. Professional work, the kind that comes from years of operational security training.
She knows this signature. Not the person, but the methodology. Stellar Defense Corps counter-intelligence protocols, the same techniques she learned to recognize when monitoring corporate security operations. Whoever this is, they’ve had formal training in operational erasure, the kind that doesn’t come from civilian certifications.
Her fingers hover over the encryption keys. Triple-wrap the files or quintuple? Each layer adds security but also processing time, and time is the one resource she can’t manufacture. The Ambassador’s security detail will notice the probes eventually: their systems aren’t sophisticated enough to catch the intrusion in real-time, but the logs will tell the story afterward.
Afterward. The word carries weight she doesn’t want to examine.
Faridah tags the files with triple encryption, her paranoia warring with the realization that she’s stumbled onto something far more dangerous than her own corporate pursuers.
The data streams fracture my attention: corporate hunters on one side, military saboteur on the other, and me caught in the crushing middle. My augmented perception maps the threat vectors in electromagnetic cascades: the hunters’ algorithms pulse red in my neural overlay, tightening their search radius by twelve percent every hour. The military intrusion glows cold blue, methodical, patient as death.
I route the evidence through seven proxy nodes, each packet fragmented and time-delayed. If the hunters take me, the data survives. If the saboteur succeeds, someone will know. My implants burn with processing heat as I maintain both surveillance streams, the neural feedback sharp enough to taste: copper and ozone, the flavor of too much information flowing through too-human wetware.
The crawlspace walls press closer. Time to disappear deeper.
I cache the chips in three vest pockets, each encrypted differently. Corporate standard, military cipher, and my own paranoid homebrew. The intrusion pattern shifts: environmental controls, door locks, atmospheric regulators. My augmented perception maps the attack surface in crystalline detail. This isn’t reconnaissance. This is rehearsal.
Someone’s planning murder, and I’m holding the only proof that exists.
The depot’s data-sphere fractures around me. Corporate hunters pinging personnel databases, military intrusion protocols testing atmospheric controls, routine chatter masking predatory intent. I process it all simultaneously, neural implants burning with the cognitive load. Three encrypted chips in three pockets, each containing proof of murder-in-rehearsal.
Faridah Al-Mansour emerges from the crawlspace below, movements practiced, paranoid. She doesn’t see me watching from the systems monitoring station, doesn’t know I’ve been tracking her digital footprints for weeks.
Now we’re both witnesses to something neither of us understands completely.
I watch Faridah through seventeen different sensor feeds, my consciousness distributed across the depot’s surveillance grid like oil spreading on water. She moves well: better than most fugitives. Keeps to the crowd’s rhythm, doesn’t fight the flow. Her fingers work the headset with the unconscious precision of someone who’s lived inside communications networks for years.
The corporate hunters register as hostile patterns in my expanded awareness: methodical search algorithms wearing human faces, two sections away and closing. I could warn her. Should, maybe. But I’m processing six thousand other data streams simultaneously, and the depot’s systems are screaming for attention.
Faridah’s headset crackles, Khalid’s voice, that parade-ground bark cutting through the shift-change chaos. He’s coordinating something with his cadets, military precision layered over words I can’t quite parse through the encryption. My implants flag it as suspicious, file it away in the growing catalog of anomalies I haven’t reported yet.
She pivots suddenly, nearly colliding with Salma. The older woman doesn’t break stride, just adjusts her toolkit’s weight and keeps moving toward Section 7-Gamma, words tumbling out about pressure fluctuations that my sensors haven’t registered. Except there. Micro-variations in flow rates. Nothing the automated systems would flag, but Salma’s right. She’s always right about the machinery.
Faridah’s pulse spikes. I see it in the thermal bloom across her throat, the way her pupils dilate. Those data chips she’s carrying. Corporate secrets pressed against her ribs like weapons she doesn’t know how to use.
The crowd surges. She disappears into it, just another body in the crush. But I’m still watching, always watching, through eyes that never blink.
The anomaly blooms in my awareness like blood in water. Chemical signatures wrong, all wrong, threading through Section 7-Gamma’s environmental feeds. My implants parse it faster than thought: trace hydrocarbons, pressure differentials, thermal gradients that map to something deliberate. Not a leak. A preparation.
Priority-three. The classification feels inadequate, but the algorithms are clear: diplomatic operations take precedence, and Amira’s negotiations can’t be interrupted for maintenance concerns. I route the alert through proper channels, watch it queue behind forty-seven other non-critical items, and feel that human part of me, the part that still remembers intuition, scream in protest.
But two thousand people are demanding everything simultaneously. Power grids redline across my consciousness, each sector a symphony of strain. The atmospheric recyclers gasp like drowning lungs, CO2 levels climbing in the lower decks. I fragment myself further, consciousness spreading thin as wire, managing load distribution while that wrongness in 7-Gamma pulses like a migraine I can’t quite locate.
The depot’s systems devour my attention. The anomaly waits, patient as a held breath, for someone to notice what the algorithms missed.
The data-ghost of Salma’s presence flickers through my awareness. Biometric signature, tool usage patterns, power draw from her diagnostic scanner. I’m monitoring three hundred simultaneous operations, but something about her movements snags my attention. She’s lingering. Tracing something.
I pull focus, narrowing the flood to Section 7-Gamma’s feeds. Through security cameras and environmental sensors, I watch her fingers map surfaces I can’t quite see, reading metal the way I read data streams. Her vitals spike: not fear, recognition. She’s found something.
The wrongness crystallizes. Those chemical signatures, the pressure differentials, Salma’s discovery: they’re connected. My human intuition and augmented processing finally align.
I’m already moving, flesh and machine both, when her comm-request hits my queue. Too late. Always too late when you’re spread across two thousand problems simultaneously.
The military instructor’s reflection ghosts across the observation glass: older than he wants to admit, harder than he needs to be. Through the terminal interface, his prosthetic feeds him data: patrol rotations, atmospheric readings, personnel locations. All nominal. All proceeding according to parameters he established weeks ago.
His students think they’re conducting a security drill. They don’t need to know more.
The maintenance worker’s biosignature pauses outside the ambassador’s corridor. Khalid’s jaw tightens. Complications. Always complications when civilians involve themselves in matters of strategic necessity.
He keys a secondary protocol. The atmospheric sensors in 7-Gamma begin their scheduled recalibration cycle. Forty minutes of diagnostic blindness. Standard procedure. Nothing suspicious.
His hand doesn’t shake anymore. The prosthetic sees to that.
The hiss registers in my neural feed as background noise: pressure differential, thermal variance, nothing critical. I flag it for maintenance and move on through seventeen other alerts. The depot exhales its usual toxins while Amira’s suite draws recycled air through filters designed for diplomatic comfort, not chemical warfare. My augmented senses taste metal in the data streams but can’t identify the source. Everything reads nominal. Everything lies.
The call hits my neural stack like ice water through copper wire: medical emergency, Section 7-Gamma, diplomatic suite. I’m already moving before my conscious mind processes the coordinates, my augmented proprioception calculating the fastest route through the depot’s overcrowded corridors. The data streams overlay my vision: Hassan Okafor, maintenance third-class, biometrics showing elevated cortisol and adrenaline. Not good.
I taste the air before I reach the corridor. My enhanced chemoreceptors parsing molecules that shouldn’t exist in a habitation section. Refined fuel vapor, concentrated enough to register through the ventilation system’s desperate scrubbing. My implants catalog the compound automatically: high-grade merchant fuel, the expensive stuff they reserve for diplomatic vessels. Wrong place. Wrong concentration. Very wrong.
Hassan’s pressed against the far bulkhead when I arrive, his dark skin gone ashen. He’s muttering something. A prayer, maybe, or just shock talking. I don’t stop to ask. The diplomatic suite’s door gapes open like a wound, and through it I can see her.
Ambassador Zain. I’d interfaced with her yesterday, a brief handshake that let me read her baseline vitals through my palm sensors. Healthy then. Not healthy now.
I step inside, my augmented vision shifting through spectra. Infrared shows her body cooling, ultraviolet reveals trace patterns on the desk surface, electromagnetic sweeps pick up the data-slate’s dead signature. My implants want to process everything simultaneously, but I force myself to slow down, to see it the way a baseline human would. The way Security Chief Osman will need it documented.
She died reaching for help. That much is obvious even without my enhancements. What’s less obvious is why every alarm in this section stayed silent while she suffocated on fuel vapor that shouldn’t have been here at all.
I key my comm implant. “Osman. You’re going to want to see this. And bring your environmental gear.”
The data streams hit me in waves as Osman seals the corridor. My implants sink into the section’s environmental logs like fingers through silk, and what I find makes my augmented nervous system spike with something that might be fear if I still processed emotions the baseline way.
The atmospheric sensors saw it. Every single one. They watched the fuel vapor concentrations climb past safety thresholds, past danger levels, into the territory where human lungs crystallize and neurons fire themselves into oblivion. But someone had rewritten the threat assessment algorithms. Elegant work, the kind that requires intimate knowledge of merchant guild protocols. The system classified lethal concentrations as “routine variance” and filed the alerts into a dead queue that nobody monitors.
I replay the vapor’s journey in accelerated time, watching the invisible killer flow through ducts and filters with almost purposeful precision. Not random distribution. Directed. Someone had opened specific vents, closed others, creating a chemical river that flowed straight to Amira’s door.
Three meters down the corridor, I crouch beside the fuel line access panels. UV spectrum reveals fresh scratches around the locking mechanism.
The scratches whisper their story through my enhanced vision. Tool marks, specific torque patterns, the electromagnetic residue of a military-grade override interface. I’ve seen that signature before, in technical manuals I shouldn’t have accessed, buried in collective memory archives from the uplift procedure.
My prosthetic fingers hover millimeters from the panel, reading magnetic field distortions. Someone bypassed three separate safety interlocks, the kind designed to prevent exactly this scenario. The work is precise, professional. Not sabotage born of desperation, but execution following a plan.
I pull the data into my neural buffer, cross-referencing against depot personnel files. Forty-seven people have the technical capability. But the override signature (that military encryption handshake) narrows it considerably.
The corridor’s cameras were looped. Naturally. Twelve-minute gap, perfectly timed.
Yusuf’s scanner traces vapor concentration patterns through Amira’s lungs, painting thermal ghosts of her final breaths. Six to eight minutes, he confirms through the neural link, his disgust bleeding across the connection. Her fingers show tissue damage: she clawed her own throat, desperate for air that wouldn’t come. The sweat patterns tell their own story: she knew. Understood the betrayal, felt death approaching with terrible clarity, and couldn’t stop it.
The slate’s corpse yields its secrets reluctantly. Osman’s forensics rig, military surplus, I note through the data-link, maps the overwrite patterns. Professional work. Diplomatic codes or military intrusion suite, nothing between. Four minutes after lethal concentration, the wipe initiated. Someone watched her die, waited for the thrashing to stop, then erased her secrets with surgical precision. The missing credentials burn in my thoughts: biometric keys, encrypted arrays. A weapon now, in hands unknown.
The grid screams into my consciousness like shattered glass through silk. Twenty-three hundred simultaneous transmissions, each one a jagged frequency signature burning through my neural architecture. Emergency protocols pulse crimson-urgent. Personal messages flicker pale-desperate. Military encryption rolls through in waves of steel-gray authority. Merchant guild directives cascade amber-insistent, layered three deep where competing administrators countermand each other in real-time.
I taste copper. The implants weren’t designed for this: two thousand terrified souls all transmitting at once, fear converted to electromagnetic radiation, desperation encoded in carrier waves that slam through my temples like physical blows. The human part of me, that fragment that still remembers being just meat and neurons, wants to curl into darkness and shut it all out.
Can’t. Won’t.
I force the filters active, partition my consciousness into processing streams. Critical channels first: life support holding stable despite the power fluctuations. Atmospheric processors redlining but functional. Fuel containment systems, I pause there, taste something wrong in the data flow. Section 7-Gamma’s pressure readings stutter, inconsistent. File that. Move on.
The collective terror has texture now that I’ve isolated it: rough static underneath the signal, like breathing through cloth. Parents searching for children across locked-down sections. Lovers separated by suddenly-closed bulkheads. Someone in the colonist quarters praying in whispered Arabic, their implant broadcasting accidentally, faith bleeding into the network like oil into water.
My hands shake. The meat remembers how to be afraid even when the machine parts of me are busy categorizing threat levels and probability matrices. Somewhere in this chaos is a killer with Amira’s credentials, with access to systems they shouldn’t have, with four minutes of watching someone die to perfect their operational security.
The networks pulse and scream. I taste blood where I’ve bitten my lip. The depot fragments around me, and I’m the only one still connected to all of it: every terrified heartbeat, every locked door, every weapon being loaded in the dark.
The metal screams reach me through seventeen different audio pickups, and I feel each grinding blast door like teeth clenching in my skull. The depot’s architecture rewrites itself in my perception: what was a unified network map fractures into isolated nodes, connection pathways severing one by one as bulkheads slam home.
Merchant sections first. I watch through security feeds as Yusuf and his crew drag welding equipment to Junction 4-Delta, their movements efficient with practiced paranoia. Sparks cascade in my visual overlay, each one a tiny star dying. The military checkpoints materialize at the chokepoints I would have chosen myself. Whoever’s coordinating their response understands tactical geometry.
The independent operators surprise me. Their market district transforms in under four minutes, cargo containers repositioned with the precision of people who’ve fortified before, who’ve survived situations where walls meant the difference between breathing and bleeding. I taste diesel and desperation in their radio chatter.
My access permissions start failing. Systems I could touch moments ago now reject my authentication. The depot doesn’t trust anyone anymore, not even those of us wired into its nervous system.
We’re not one station anymore. We’re territories. Kingdoms built of fear and welded steel.
I catch Salma’s elevated heartbeat through the catwalk’s vibration sensors. One hundred twenty-two beats per minute, the rhythm of controlled fear. Through the maintenance cam above her position, I watch her hand drift to that plasma cutter, fingers testing the ignition stud without activating it. She’s mapping the same failure cascades I am, calculating which sections suffocate first when the power grid fractures along factional lines.
The concourse below transforms into something I’ve only seen in historical archives: tribal. The merchant families cluster by guild affiliation. Military dependents form defensive rings. The independent operators, her people, they’re the ones who know this dance best, their movements efficient with the muscle memory of previous collapses.
Salma’s already chosen her side. I can read it in her stance, the way she’s oriented toward the colonist quarter. She’ll keep them breathing, whatever the cost.
The data streams fracture into tribal frequencies. I taste the encryption signatures (crude but effective) as information brokers partition their channels by faction loyalty. Black market protocols activate across seventeen nodes simultaneously, price algorithms spiking three hundred percent on medical supplies, weapons, anything that bleeds or kills.
Through Faridah’s compromised relay in Section 4, I watch her watch it all. She’s cataloging the chaos, building pattern maps from the noise. Smart. In this electromagnetic storm, a ghost could walk anywhere. Someone already is.
The depot hemorrhages coherence through a thousand micro-failures. I experience each one as nerve-fire. Coolant valves seizing in Section 9, their metal fatigue singing frequencies only my augmented hearing catches. The atmospheric processors wheeze arrhythmic, carbon dioxide concentrations spiking in lower habitation rings where colonists sleep packed like ammunition.
Through the infrastructure’s failing symphony, I read the truth: this collapse is timed. Someone weaponized our fragility, turned overcrowding into a countdown. Hours until the depot’s body betrays its inhabitants completely.
The crystalline tone shatters my consciousness like a hammer through glass. Seventeen data streams fragment (fuel pressure readings, atmospheric composition monitors, personnel tracking algorithms) all subordinated to the override’s brutal clarity.
Ambassador Zain. Section 7-Gamma. Unresponsive.
My augmented mind doesn’t process sequentially anymore. The information arrives as architecture: Salma’s report from two days ago about the tampered access panels, the anomalous fuel shipment signatures I’ve been tracking, the encrypted military chatter that’s been building like static electricity for six hours. Not separate facts but load-bearing walls in a structure someone else designed.
This isn’t emergence. This is engineering.
My body moves before the security officer’s voice finishes propagating through the comm system. Muscle memory navigates the crowded corridors. Sidestep the maintenance crew hauling coolant canisters, duck under the fuel line someone routed at head-height because there was nowhere else to put it. My consciousness races ahead through the station’s networks, pulling security feeds, environmental data, access logs.
Section 7-Gamma’s atmospheric sensors show the signature I’m dreading before I’m halfway there: refined fuel vapor, concentrated beyond any accidental leak. The molecular profile matches the anomalous shipments exactly. Someone knew what they were doing. Someone understood how bodies fail when they breathe fire.
The depot’s social network analysis algorithms, my constant companions, my curse, show the fear propagating faster than I can move. Biometric sensors detect elevated heart rates clustering by faction affiliation. Comm traffic spikes. Movement patterns shift from routine to tribal.
I’m still three corridors away when my augmented hearing catches the first shouting. Two factions, maybe three, converging on 7-Gamma from different vectors. The mathematics are elegant and terrible: one dead diplomat, forty-eight hours until critical mass, two thousand lives suspended in a structure that was already failing.
Someone turned our fragility into a weapon. Now I have to defuse it with a corpse and a crowd.
The gossip networks move faster than light ever could in this compressed hell. I watch the information cascade through unofficial channels like watching dominoes fall in seventeen dimensions simultaneously.
Salma’s biometrics spike in the fuel processing center: someone’s talking to her, gesturing frantically. Three seconds later, Faridah’s comm station erupts with intercepted traffic on channels that shouldn’t exist. The encrypted packets scatter like startled fish, each one carrying the same poison: Ambassador dead. Section 7-Gamma. Fuel vapor.
My social analysis algorithms scream warnings I don’t need augmentation to understand. Workers abandon their posts in clusters of five, seven, twelve. Faction affiliations I’ve been tracking for months suddenly become tribal boundaries. Hands drift toward wrenches, plasma cutters, anything with weight and edge.
The atmospheric sensors register the change before it happens. Elevated CO2, stress pheromones, the electromagnetic signatures of adrenaline-flooded nervous systems. Two thousand people breathing faster, thinking slower, reverting to the mathematics of survival.
I’m still forty meters from 7-Gamma when the critical threshold breaks. Individual restraint collapses into collective panic. The depot doesn’t explode.
It metastasizes.
The corridor’s geometry becomes a tactical map in my vision: choke points, sight lines, weapon ranges overlaid on flesh and metal. Khalid’s delegation materializes from the military quarter like they were already moving before the news broke. His prosthetic fingers dance across the door panel, override codes flowing through interfaces that should require three-level authorization. The merchant guild’s response team arrives thirty seconds later, their lawyer already reciting precedent cases, voice modulated for recording.
Then the miners. Not a delegation. A wall of bodies. Salma’s near the front, her exosuit’s servos whining softly, and I can read the calculation in her stance: how many hits that armor could take, how long she could hold this position.
They pack the corridor until the atmospheric recyclers strain audibly. I’m caught in the center, drowning in data: forty-seven concealed weapons, sixty-three elevated heart rates, the ozone smell of charging capacitors mixing with human sweat and recycled fear.
My neural implants strobe warnings across my vision. Too much input. Too many variables. The mathematics of violence approaching critical mass.
Khalid’s voice cuts through: parade-ground precision wrapped around accusations of merchant negligence, fuel system sabotage, demanding immediate military control. The guild’s lawyer fires back: military personnel near 7-Gamma, manufactured crisis, transparent power grab. Then Salma, louder than both, her words edged with exhausted rage: we’re dying for your politics.
My augmented voice tries intervention. Through speakers, I sound like machinery pretending humanity.
Nobody’s listening. Probability matrices collapse in my vision: peaceful resolution plummeting from thirty-eight percent to four in ninety seconds.
The slate’s surface reflects my face. Translucent temples pulsing with diagnostic light. “Completely wiped,” I confirm, and the words detonate.
Khalid moves first: military reflex, reaching for authority that isn’t his. The guild rep’s hand drops to her comm unit. Calling reinforcements, leverage, lawyers. Salma spits something in mining cant, too crude for translation but universally understood.
I’m processing seventeen conversations simultaneously, watching trust atomize into paranoia. Each faction’s constructing their own truth now, incompatible realities crystallizing in real-time.
Amira’s careful architecture, weeks of calibrated compromise: erased as thoroughly as her data.
The data floods through me in cascading layers, each sensor feed a separate voice in a discordant choir. I let my consciousness fragment across the room’s systems, becoming the space itself for seventeen seconds that feel like hours.
Temperature gradients paint themselves across my visual cortex: the cold geometry of death, Amira’s body cooling in precise accordance with thermodynamic law. But there: a heat signature ghost on the ventilation grate, residual warmth from hands that gripped metal forty-three minutes ago. Military-grade prosthetic, the thermal pattern suggests. Servo joints leave distinctive signatures.
I’m drowning in certainty and contradiction simultaneously.
The fuel vapor’s molecular signature whispers its origin story through my chemical receptors: refined to 99.7% purity, the kind of precision only military or guild facilities achieve. But the delivery mechanism screams improvisation: someone bypassed three safety interlocks using brute force overrides, leaving electromagnetic scars my implants read like violated flesh.
“She knew,” I say, and my voice sounds distant, filtered through too many processing layers. “Look at the desk terminal.”
Khalid’s already moving, but I’m faster, my neural interface claiming the system before his prosthetic can connect. The terminal’s last accessed file: a draft message, unsent, timestamp 23:[^46]. One minute before the vapor.
Khalid: we need to talk about the fuel allocation discrepancies. I have proof of,
The sentence ends mid-word. She’d been typing when the first molecules hit her lungs.
I pull back from the data streams, forcing my consciousness to coalesce into something resembling human perception. The room snaps into singular focus: one dead diplomat, one interrupted accusation, and a killer who combined surgical planning with desperate improvisation.
Someone who had everything to lose.
Someone in this room, perhaps, watching me process their crime in real-time.
The rings draw me like gravitational anomalies in my sensory field. I kneel, letting my augmented vision fracture the scene into component wavelengths. Under ultraviolet, the floor tells secrets: scuff marks from expensive shoes pivoting frantically, the chemical signature of fear-sweat, and something else: lubricant residue from prosthetic joints, the molecular structure identifying it as military-grade synthetic.
But the rings themselves contradict everything. They weren’t removed carefully during a methodical search. The scatter pattern suggests violence, desperation. I reconstruct the trajectory: Amira clutching her data-slate, backing toward the desk, someone grabbing her wrist hard enough to tear the rings free. One bounced twice before settling near the ventilation grate.
My chemical sensors catch it then: two distinct solvent signatures on the slate. The military-grade cleaner, yes, but underneath, traces of commercial degreaser: the cheap stuff colonists use, available in every maintenance locker.
“Two different people handled this,” I say, my voice flat with processing certainty. “One planned the murder. The other came after, looking for something specific.”
The question that fragments my consciousness into anxious subroutines: were they working together, or hunting each other?
The door’s processor surrenders its secrets as I sink my consciousness into its architecture. The military override code blooms in my perception: not as numbers but as a sequence of authorizations cascading through security layers. Valid. Current. Instructor-level clearance.
But the biometric void screams wronger than any alarm. Every military code requires palm-print, retinal scan, DNA confirmation. This one passed through naked, stripped of flesh. Someone didn’t just steal the code: they accessed systems that could ghost it past authentication entirely.
Then at 00:[^02], crude simplicity: a maintenance master key. Physical. Untraceable. The kind that hangs in fifty different lockers across the depot.
Two entries. Two methods. Two entirely different levels of sophistication.
My implants ache with the implications.
The electromagnetic spectrum peels open before me like rotting fruit. Two signals, ghosts in the bandwidth. First: frequency-hopping encryption, 23:[^58] to 00:[^04]. Communications specialist signature, Faridah’s preferred protocols. Monitoring? Coordinating?
Then the older trace, degraded but unmistakable: military tactical channel, 23:[^44]. One minute before the door sealed.
They never overlapped. Never touched.
Two parties. Same crime. Different agendas.
My implants burn with the wrongness of it.
The slate’s surface is cool against my fingertips, but my neural interface reads deeper: electromagnetic whispers in corrupted sectors. Military-grade destruction protocols, yes, but rushed. Sloppy. The buffer cache betrays fragments: “Allocation Audit, Confidential.” Three authorization keys required.
Someone needed this dead more than they needed Amira’s diplomatic success.
I catalogue the ghost data, feeling my implants catalog what my human instincts already know: this wasn’t about stopping negotiations.
This was about burying truth.
The Director’s office smells wrong. Recycled air thick with anxiety pheromones my augmented olfactory centers catalog automatically. Yasmin Okafor sits behind a desk bolted to decking that’s seen three station expansions, her fingers drumming patterns I recognize as displaced stress behavior.
“Ambassador Zain is dead,” she says, and I’m already processing: vocal tension suggests she knew before official discovery, pupil dilation indicates genuine distress beneath professional composure, thermal imaging shows elevated core temperature consistent with sustained cortisol release.
She slides a data-chip across the desk. “You’ll investigate.”
Not a request. Never is, for someone like me.
“Uniquely qualified,” she adds, and I parse the subtext through seventeen linguistic analysis protocols: uniquely expendable. The military won’t object to an augmented investigator, I’m already compromised in their eyes, neither fully human nor fully machine. The merchants tolerate me because my neural interface makes me useful. The colonists fear me because I represent what desperation can purchase.
I am acceptable to no one, threatening to none. The perfect neutral investigator.
“The diplomatic credentials?” I ask, watching her microexpressions shift.
“Missing. Along with her encrypted files.” Her jaw tightens. “The fuel contract negotiations are dead without her mediation. We have maybe forty-eight hours before this depot tears itself apart.”
My implants are already pulling station schematics, security protocols, personnel files. Data floods my consciousness. Terabytes of context, patterns, anomalies. I can see the entire station’s digital nervous system, feel the pulse of its communications networks, taste the electromagnetic signatures of every device within range.
But I cannot read the simple human truth in Okafor’s eyes when she says, “Find who did this, Noor. Before we lose everything.”
I accept because refusal isn’t an option. Because somewhere beneath the data streams, a fragment remembers: justice mattered, once, when I was still entirely human.
The corridors swallow me in a press of bodies that somehow never touch. Two thousand souls crammed into space meant for five hundred, yet I move through them in a bubble of silence. They part without looking, that instinctive mammalian recognition of predator. Or prey. I’m neither: that’s the problem.
My implants scream with data: Corridor 7-B running three degrees hotter than optimal, recycler efficiency down eight percent, concealed sidearm in the maintenance tech’s jacket radiating faint EM signature, gossip networks lighting up across seventeen frequency bands with speculation about Amira’s death. I process it all simultaneously, each thread of information perfectly catalogued, cross-referenced, analyzed.
But I can’t read the fear in the eyes that slide away from mine.
The augmentation makes me the perfect investigator: total recall, pattern recognition across impossible data volumes, perception beyond human limits. It also makes me the worst. Witnesses will rehearse their statements before I arrive. Suspects will invoke legal protections immediately. The truth I’m hunting will burrow deep into human hearts I can no longer fully understand.
Section 7-Gamma’s entrance looms ahead, sealed with security tape that my clearance codes dissolve.
The room speaks in frequencies baseline humans can’t hear. I kneel where Amira died, letting my implants parse the electromagnetic residue. The fuel vapor concentration was precise: not an accident, not a leak. Someone calculated the exact dosage to kill slowly enough that she’d understand what was happening.
My consciousness fragments into analysis threads: molecular decay patterns, air circulation vectors, the faint scorch mark on the deck plating where her hand clawed for purchase. I reconstruct her final minutes with perfect fidelity. The gasping, the neural degradation, the terrible clarity before the end.
But the data won’t tell me why someone hated her enough to choose this particular cruelty. That requires understanding human darkness my augmented mind keeps trying to reduce to variables and probabilities.
Some truths resist optimization.
The files cascade through my neural architecture. Service records, psych evaluations, communication logs. I process them in parallel streams, watching patterns emerge like constellations from noise.
Faridah’s expertise maps perfectly to the corruption signature. But her fear reads genuine in every intercepted transmission. People running don’t usually stop to commit elaborate murders.
Khalid’s military precision matches the execution. Yet his documented trauma from the depot explosion fifteen years ago (merchant negligence, they said) suggests someone who’d prevent deaths, not orchestrate them.
Unless prevention meant eliminating the diplomat whose contract would perpetuate the negligence he blamed.
My implants offer probability cascades. Seventy-three percent Khalid. Sixty-eight percent Faridah. Forty-two percent unknown actor using both their signatures as camouflage.
Numbers without meaning. I need to understand the human element my augmentation keeps reducing to variables.
I need to talk to them. Actually talk: baseline human interaction, messy and inefficient and true.
I pull the files into my consciousness, letting them unfold across multiple processing threads. Faridah’s communication expertise, Khalid’s military access: both fit the evidence like puzzle pieces from different sets.
The data whispers probabilities, but humans don’t operate on algorithms. They operate on wounds and fears and convictions my augmentation keeps translating into bloodless statistics.
I need interviews. Messy, inefficient, human.
The physical evidence maps itself across my visual cortex in layers of probability and contradiction. I crouch beside the ventilation panel, my neural implants measuring the microscopic tool marks against the depot’s maintenance database. Wrong tools. Wrong technique. Someone wanted this to look like standard maintenance access, but the scratches tell a different story. Military precision disguised as civilian fumbling.
My fingers hover over the panel without touching. The fuel vapor residue creates a heat signature my enhanced perception reads like text: concentrated, deliberate, introduced through the environmental system at exactly the moment to ensure maximum suffering with minimum noise. Whoever did this understood atmospheric dispersion rates, understood how refined fuel vapor attacks the nervous system, understood that Amira would be conscious and aware for every excruciating second.
The tea glass draws my attention. I pull its thermal history from my implants’ memory buffer. Two distinct hand-prints, one Amira’s baseline human temperature, the other slightly elevated. Stress response or augmentation? The liquid inside shows trace elements my chemical sensors identify: standard station blend, nothing added. They didn’t poison her drink. They sat with her, talked with her, maybe even warned her before they killed her.
That bothers me more than the violence. The intimacy of it.
I access the room’s electromagnetic history, watching ghost-images of data transfers flicker across my enhanced vision. The data-slate was connected to something. A military-grade extraction device, signature encrypted but the power draw unmistakable. They didn’t just wipe it. They copied everything first, then burned the pathways to hide what they’d taken.
My processors spin through scenarios, but the human part of me, the part that still remembers what fear tastes like, knows this wasn’t about information alone. This was a message. A demonstration. Someone proving they could reach anyone, anywhere on this station, no matter their credentials or protections.
The timeline reconstruction reveals disturbing precision. My neural implants overlay the data streams, building a four-dimensional map of the murder. Amira returned to her quarters at 22:[^47] station time. She accessed her secure files at 22:[^52], her biometric signature confirming identity. Then at 23:[^03], someone entered. Someone whose credentials bypassed the door log so cleanly that even my enhanced perception finds only absence where data should exist.
Twelve minutes of conversation. I process the acoustic resonance patterns still embedded in the wall materials. Two voices, both controlled. No shouting. No struggle yet. They talked like professionals conducting business.
At 23:[^15], the environmental system engaged. I can taste the fuel vapor concentration in the residual air chemistry. Precisely calculated to kill slowly. The visitor stayed eight more minutes while Amira’s nervous system burned from the inside. Searching. Extracting. Working methodically while she convulsed.
My human memories recoil from the cruelty. My augmented processors simply note the efficiency. Someone who could compartmentalize murder into a technical procedure, who could watch suffering without rushing.
That narrows the field considerably.
The data crystallizes into a pattern that makes my augmented consciousness ache with recognition. I pull the maintenance records, cross-reference them with personnel movements, and watch the truth assemble itself in my neural space.
Khalid’s prosthetic arm (I access the military specifications) contains precision override interfaces. Standard issue for tactical instructors who need to demonstrate security vulnerabilities. He could have ghosted the door logs with a physical bypass, no digital trace required.
But Faridah’s communication intercepts show she knew Amira’s schedule down to the minute. Knowledge is access.
Then I find it: a shared maintenance request, filed under a dummy work order. Both of them, same corridor, same hour. Not coincidence.
Coordination.
The word tastes like metal in my mouth. Two killers, or one killer and an unwitting accomplice?
I crouch beside the access panels, neural implants mapping the microscopic foam residue against my memory of Amira’s quarters. Same chemical signature. Same application pattern.
The killer planned two deaths: atmospheric poisoning and hull breach. Professional redundancy.
My fingers trace the panel seams while data streams through my consciousness. Whoever did this knows depot systems like I do. Maybe better.
That thought should frighten me more than it does.
The negotiation chamber sits empty three levels down, I can see it through surveillance feeds, chairs arranged for a meeting that will never happen. The fuel contract documents are already being shredded by legal teams protecting their factions’ interests.
My investigation queries glow like tracers through the network. Every access request, every surveillance review: breadcrumbs leading straight to me.
The killer knows I’m hunting them.
They’re watching my data trail, counting down until I become the next redundancy to eliminate.
The summons came through official channels, which meant everyone knew before I did. Commander Yusuf’s office occupied a converted storage module in Section 3, all reinforced walls and filtered air: merchant guild territory pretending at military efficiency.
“Al-Qasim.” He didn’t look up from his terminal. “Diplomatic incident. Amira Zain, found dead in her quarters two hours ago. You’re assigned primary investigation.”
My neural implants were already reaching for the case file before conscious thought caught up. Data flooded in: preliminary reports, jurisdiction protocols, authorization codes. I processed it in layers, the way baseline humans breathe.
“Why me?” The question was genuine. Depot security had twelve investigators with actual training. I was technical crew who happened to have a networked brain.
“Because you can interface with systems we can’t.” Yusuf finally met my eyes, and I caught the calculation there. “And because you’re not merchant guild, not military, not corporate. Everyone else has a faction.”
And I’m just the freak with the glowing temples. I didn’t say it aloud. My implants had already flagged the subtext: I was disposable. Politically neutral meant politically expendable.
“Full system access?” I asked.
“Within reason. Security feeds, environmental logs, communications metadata. You’ll coordinate with faction representatives, but primary authority is yours.” He slid a physical authorization chip across the desk: old-school, unhackable. “The Merchant Guild wants this resolved before it disrupts fuel contracts. The military wants assurance their personnel aren’t compromised. The colonists want to know they’re safe.”
I took the chip, felt its weight. “And what do you want, Commander?”
“Someone to blame who isn’t me.” He smiled without warmth. “Get to work, Al-Qasim. The depot’s watching.”
He had no idea how literally true that would become.
The realization crystallized in my consciousness like ice forming in vacuum: I’d been thinking in networks when I should have been thinking in silence.
Every query I’d run, every database I’d touched, every security log I’d reconstructed. All of it transmitted through the depot’s compromised infrastructure. My augmented mind processed information by interfacing with systems, leaving electromagnetic fingerprints across hundreds of nodes. The overcrowded station’s jury-rigged architecture meant no isolated channels existed. Everything connected to everything else.
I visualized my investigation as data-flow: luminous pathways branching through the depot’s nervous system, touching merchant guild servers, military communication hubs, independent operator terminals. Beautiful. Comprehensive. Completely exposed.
The killer didn’t need to watch me physically. They just needed access to any of the systems I’d queried. And given the evidence of their planning, they had access to all of them.
My neural implants, my greatest advantage, had transformed me into a beacon broadcasting my every investigative move. I couldn’t think without creating network traffic. Couldn’t analyze without leaving traces.
I was the most transparent investigator in human history, hunting someone who lived in shadows.
The data packet arrived through maintenance channel seven-seven-gamma at 0347 hours. My neural implants parsed it in microseconds: interview timestamps accurate to the second, evidence file designations I’d flagged only minutes ago, my movement patterns mapped with precision that suggested real-time tracking.
No demands. No threats. Just proof.
I traced the transmission’s origin. My augmented consciousness following electromagnetic breadcrumbs through the depot’s tangled infrastructure. The signal bounced through terminals in Merchant Guild administration, Military Security’s encrypted hub, the independent operators’ communications relay. Everywhere. Nowhere.
The killer wasn’t just watching my investigation. They were inside every system I touched, anticipating my queries before I made them. They had access that transcended faction boundaries.
Which meant they had resources I’d fundamentally underestimated.
My consciousness fractures into parallel simulations, each timeline branching through quantum probabilities. Seventy-three percent. Thirty-one. Sixty-four. The numbers scroll through my visual cortex like prayers I no longer believe in.
But beneath the augmented certainty, something human and reckless stirs: the memory of gambling everything on instinct alone.
I choose the bait. I choose risk.
The killer wants to watch? Let them see exactly what I want them to see.
The crowd presses close. Bodies radiating heat signatures my implants catalog automatically. Two thousand souls reduced to biometric data streams. But underneath the numbers, something older stirs: the ghost of who I was before the uplift, when I read people through sweat and shifting weight, not infrared and cortisol markers.
The augmentation wants algorithms. My human remnant wants the gamble.
I’ll be the bait they can’t resist.
The interrogation room shrinks around us: three meters by two, walls lined with acoustic dampening that my enhanced hearing renders useless. I catch her heartbeat anyway, elevated but controlled. Salma Hadad sits like someone who’s learned to make herself small in spaces designed to crush you.
“Walk me through it again,” I say, keeping my voice level. Human. The implants want to flood my consciousness with data: her thermal signature, the micro-tremors in her folded hands, the chemical composition of her sweat. I push it down. Sometimes you need the story, not the statistics.
She exhales slowly. “Shift change, 1800 hours. I was heading to my rack when I heard it: that particular whistle that means a coolant valve’s about to fail catastrophically.” Her hands unfold, fingers tracing invisible schematics on the table’s surface. “Section 7-Gamma, junction point twelve. The valve assembly was original installation, forty years old, gasket degraded past tolerance.”
The technical detail is perfect. Too perfect. My augmentation catalogs every specification she provides, cross-references it against depot schematics stored in my neural buffer. Everything checks out. Everything fits.
Except her eyes. They haven’t met mine once.
“The repair took you three hours,” I say. Not a question.
“It’s delicate work. One mistake and you’re venting coolant into a pressurized corridor.” Her voice carries that edge again: the defensiveness of someone who’s survived by being useful, by fixing things before they kill people. “I logged it when I finished. Check the maintenance database.”
“I did. You logged it at 2230 hours.” I lean forward slightly. The luminescence at my temples flickers. “Amira Zain died at 2100.”
Her core temperature spikes. Her fingers curl into fists.
“I fix things,” she says quietly. “I don’t break them.”
The military instructor fills the doorway before entering: a tactical assessment of exits, sight lines, threats. Old habits. Khalid Rashid moves like his body remembers combat even if his posting has gone soft, teaching cadets instead of leading them.
He sits without being asked. The prosthetic arm rests on the table between us, servo joints catching the overhead lights. Military-grade hardware, classified specifications. My implants itch to interface with it, to read its diagnostic logs, but that would require permission he’d never grant.
“Training exercises until 1900,” he says. “Equipment maintenance, 1900 to 2030. Meal at 2045, military commissary. Logged and witnessed.”
The precision is admirable. Suspicious. I let the silence stretch, watching his biometrics through spectra he can’t perceive. His core temperature holds steady. Respiratory rate normal. Then I mention Section 7-Gamma.
His jaw tightens. Masseter muscle contraction, 47% above baseline. Pupils dilate two millimeters. Blood flow increases to facial capillaries: anger response or stress reaction, the data can’t distinguish.
The prosthetic whirs. Servos adjusting, compensating. The tactical interface flickers: system diagnostic or remote command sequence?
“I have no business in merchant sections.” Flat. Certain.
His heart rate says otherwise.
She arrives twenty minutes late, breathless. The headset malfunction excuse dissolves under my system logs. Message delivered 14:[^23]:47, acknowledged 14:[^23]:52. Five seconds. She knew.
Faridah perches like prey, fingers cataloging pocket contents. Multitool. Data chips. Emergency beacon. Her alibi streams out polished: monitoring long-range transmissions, alone, tracking pirate signals. Every minute accounted for. Too perfect.
My pattern recognition screams wrong. Eight hours, no gaps. No biological necessities. No human randomness.
I probe her previous employer. Helion Extraction Corporation. The name I don’t say aloud.
Her pupils contract to pinpoints. Cortisol spike, 340% above baseline. The deflection comes smooth, practiced, but my sensors already caught what matters.
She’s running from something. Question is: murder, or something worse?
The depot’s network unfolds through my consciousness. Data streams replacing blood, protocols replacing breath. I filter the interviews through seventeen analytical layers simultaneously.
Salma’s testimony fractures under thermal imaging: her hands were warmer than coolant work allows. Khalid’s prosthetic arm logged unauthorized system access at 22:[^14]:03. Faridah’s “malfunctioning” headset was transmitting encrypted packets throughout our conversation.
Three liars. Three different lies.
But my pre-uplift instincts, those fading human fragments, whisper something my algorithms miss: they’re not hiding guilt. They’re hiding terror.
The probability matrices collapse into contradiction. My augmented consciousness maps seventy-three scenario branches, each internally consistent, none matching the evidence pattern. Salma’s desperation reads authentic through micro-expression analysis. Khalid’s righteousness burns at frequencies my enhanced perception measures precisely. Faridah’s terror spikes genuine across every biometric indicator.
They’re all innocent. They’re all guilty. The data refuses coherence, and my human intuition, that dying fragment, screams that I’m asking the wrong questions entirely.
The data streams fragment across my consciousness like shattered glass catching light. I interface directly with the depot’s security backbone, feeling the architecture’s age in corrupted checksums and deprecated protocols. My neural implants translate raw data into something approaching sensory experience. Each file a texture, each timestamp a taste of copper and ozone.
The biometric logs shouldn’t lie, but they do. Khalid’s signature pulses in two locations simultaneously for forty-seven seconds. I run the probability calculations seventeen times. Equipment malfunction: 0.03% likelihood. Credential spoofing: 34% likelihood. His prosthetic arm creating interference patterns: 61% likelihood.
That military-grade limb interfaces with tactical systems. Could it ghost his biometric signature? I pull maintenance records for similar prosthetics, cross-reference with security anomalies. The pattern emerges like shapes in static. Three previous incidents of doubled signatures, all dismissed as sensor glitches.
Faridah’s disappearance aligns too perfectly with scheduled maintenance. My expanded consciousness maps the depot’s communication infrastructure, identifying blind spots in the monitoring grid. She’d know them all. During that four-hour window, someone rerouted surveillance feeds through backup servers, creating a labyrinth of redirects that my baseline human brain would take weeks to untangle. I parse it in minutes, finding the elegant architecture of professional paranoia.
Salma’s access codes tell the strangest story. Seventeen entries to restricted areas, but physical confirmation for only twelve. I examine the timestamps. The phantom five cluster around fuel storage systems and environmental controls. Someone borrowed her credentials, or she’s moving through the depot’s infrastructure like water through cracks, using maintenance tunnels my official schematics claim don’t exist.
The evidence doesn’t converge. It spirals outward, each answer breeding new contradictions. My augmented mind processes everything, understands nothing.
I pull myself deeper into the data, letting my consciousness fragment across surveillance networks and personnel databases. The depot’s social architecture materializes. Not the official org charts, but the real web of interactions.
Khalid’s equipment requisitions route through intermediaries who also process Salma’s parts orders. They’ve never exchanged words according to communication logs, yet their supply chains intertwine like braided wire. Same fixers. Same off-book vendors operating in the depot’s shadow economy. Coordination or convergence? My augmented mind calculates probabilities but can’t parse human intention.
Faridah’s intercepts paint stranger pictures. Three encrypted exchanges between Khalid’s office and merchant guild administrators. Messages that shouldn’t exist if his military loyalty runs pure. I decrypt them in seconds, tasting bitter irony in the data. He’s been negotiating, not sabotaging. Or both simultaneously.
Salma’s fingerprints mark maintenance panels outside Faridah’s equipment clusters. Coincidence stretched too thin. The communications specialist needs someone who understands the depot’s bones, its hidden passages.
The factions blur. Overcrowding hasn’t just strained resources. It’s created dependencies that cross every official boundary. Everyone’s compromised. Everyone’s connected.
The connections crystallize into something uglier than simple conspiracy. My neural threads trace financial flows beneath the official economy, Khalid’s military stipend supplemented by consulting fees from merchant intermediaries. Salma’s contract buyout fund growing faster than her wages justify. Faridah’s ghost accounts receiving micro-payments from seventeen different sources.
They’re not working together. They’re all working the same angles, exploiting the same structural chaos. The depot’s overcrowding created an ecosystem of mutual compromise where everyone’s dirty and everyone knows it.
Amira’s encrypted documents would have exposed not one faction’s corruption but the entire rotted infrastructure. She threatened the profitable disorder that lets them all survive.
Three separate motives converging on one target. My augmented consciousness processes the horror: maybe they’re all guilty.
The timelines fracture under scrutiny. My neural threads hold every second in crystalline suspension, Amira’s biometric signature terminating at 14:[^58], three overlapping windows of opportunity bleeding into each other. I reconstruct movement vectors through the depot’s geometry, but the maintenance shafts create shortcuts my baseline human instincts never considered. Khalid’s prosthetic could interface with security doors. Faridah’s ghost protocols could falsify any timestamp. Salma knows passages that don’t exist on official schematics. The data offers everything except truth.
The probability clouds collapse into paradox. Khalid: 67% opportunity, military precision, fifteen-year grudge against merchant negligence. Faridah: 82% digital ghost, desperate enough to kill for leverage. Salma: 71% physical access, protecting colonist interests. But my augmented analysis fractures: each motive simultaneously compels and contradicts. They all wanted Amira gone. They all needed her alive. The data streams offer capability without intent, access without action. My human intuition screams what the numbers cannot prove: I’m calculating the wrong equation.
The military precision evidence dissolves under deeper scrutiny. My consciousness fragments into parallel processing streams: one thread analyzing servo mechanics, another reconstructing kinematic chains, a third mapping probability fields across the crime scene geometry.
The wound angle: perfect match. Too perfect.
I interface directly with the depot’s maintenance logs, pulling servo calibration data from every military-grade prosthetic in the facility. Khalid’s arm shows standard wear patterns, but the lubricant residue contains trace elements inconsistent with his unit’s supply chain. Someone sourced military-issue lubricant from a different batch, a different supplier. The kind of detail a baseline human investigator would miss. The kind of detail someone with augmented analytical capabilities would catch immediately.
Which means someone wanted me to catch it.
I split my consciousness further, running behavioral simulations against Khalid’s psychological profile. The man is rigid, disciplined, fifteen years of phantom pain channeled into righteous conviction. If he killed Amira, he’d have done it cleanly, efficiently, without theatrical evidence trails. He’d have accepted responsibility or created an airtight alibi. Not this breadcrumb path of perfectly-placed clues.
The force calculations bother me most. My neural implants can measure impact dynamics to three decimal places, and the numbers align with servo strength specifications exactly. Not approximately. Exactly. Real violence is messy, chaotic, full of variables that resist clean mathematics. This feels like someone reverse-engineered the evidence from the specifications, building a crime scene that would satisfy augmented analysis while failing human intuition.
I’m being played. Someone understands how my expanded consciousness processes information. The reliance on data patterns, the trust in mathematical precision. They’ve crafted a narrative that speaks perfectly to my augmented capabilities while my remaining human instincts whisper warnings I’m struggling to articulate.
The isolation cuts deeper. I can see the manipulation but can’t prove it through the frameworks my consciousness depends on.
My consciousness fragments into the depot’s communication substrate, following Faridah’s digital shadow through layers of encrypted traffic. She’s everywhere and nowhere: ghost signals bouncing through relay nodes, surveillance backdoors nested in routine maintenance protocols, encrypted packets disguised as standard telemetry. The woman’s paranoia has made her intimate with every electron flowing through these systems.
The data-slate theft required surgical precision. Diplomatic security protocols aren’t trivial. Triple-redundant biometric locks, quantum-encrypted storage, tamper-evident seals that trigger station-wide alerts. Faridah bypassed all of it during a three-second monitoring gap, the kind of window that only exists if you’ve mapped every surveillance cycle to the millisecond.
She had capability. She had desperate need for leverage against the corporation hunting her.
But the timestamps fracture the narrative. Forty-seven seconds. The theft occurred forty-seven seconds after Amira’s heart stopped, my neural implants certain to within point-zero-three seconds. Opportunism, then. A scavenger’s instinct recognizing valuable data amid chaos.
Unless the timing itself was theater. Unless someone with augmented consciousness would calculate exactly this conclusion, following probability chains toward reasonable doubt while missing the deeper pattern.
I’m drowning in data, starving for truth.
The maintenance corridor breathes with Salma’s genius. Pressure-compensating joints that shouldn’t exist on standard depot architecture, redundant fail-safes jury-rigged from salvaged components, elegant solutions to problems the original designers never anticipated. My consciousness traces her tool signatures across seventeen unauthorized access points, each modification a fingerprint of desperate competence.
Her biometric traces cluster near the murder site. Skin cells on panel edges. Tool oil matching her exosuit’s specific lubricant blend. Thermal patterns consistent with her presence during the critical window.
But the modifications tell a different story. Every bypass she created includes emergency overrides. Every shortcut maintains safety margins. This is the work of someone who understands consequences, who calculates risk against human cost.
Preservation instinct doesn’t preclude violence. Desperation transforms protectors into threats.
I’m seeing patterns everywhere, understanding nothing.
Three probability matrices collapse into quantum superposition. My neural threads parse Khalid’s tactical advantage. Military fuel reserves secured. Faridah’s exposure vector. Diplomatic channels would illuminate her corporate theft. Salma’s infrastructure gambit: contract scrutiny revealing unauthorized modifications that kept two thousand souls breathing.
The mathematics refuse singular solution. My augmented consciousness fragments across parallel analyses, each thread convinced of different guilt. Baseline intuition would choose. I calculate endlessly, drowning in certainty’s absence.
The topology shivers. My consciousness maps the anomalies’ intersection point. Not spatial but temporal. All three signatures converged forty-seven seconds before Amira’s death, then diverged into perfect alibis. Too perfect. My neural threads recognize the architecture: someone with systems access orchestrated simultaneous false flags, weaponizing my own augmented perception. They knew I’d see patterns. They built me a labyrinth of them.
The labyrinth collapses into a single point of clarity. I stand motionless in the data nexus chamber, my implants burning cold against my temples as the truth assembles itself from fragments.
They didn’t just know I’d see patterns. They knew how I’d see them.
My consciousness retraces the investigation topology. The military encryption in civilian sectors. Placed precisely where my enhanced perception would flag it as suspicious. The ghost signal mimicking Faridah’s patterns: designed to trigger my threat-assessment protocols. The microsecond timing inconsistencies in Salma’s logs. Bait for my augmented temporal processing.
Someone mapped my cognitive architecture. Studied how uplift consciousness navigates data space.
I pull back from the interface, feeling the phantom weight of baseline human intuition I can barely remember. What would I have noticed without the augmentation? What truth exists in the spaces between data points, in the analog world my enhanced senses now struggle to fully inhabit?
The fuel transactions, communications, security checks, I’ve been reading them as objective reality. But data can be authored. Someone wrote this narrative specifically for an augmented reader.
I force my consciousness into a different configuration, dampening the neural feeds, letting the electromagnetic spectrum fade to baseline human perception. The nexus chamber becomes just a room again. Metal walls, flickering displays, the smell of ozone and recycled air.
And there, in the maintenance logs I’d processed as pure data, I see it: the timestamp format. Military precision in what should be civilian records. Not Salma’s handwriting in the digital forms, but Khalid’s rigid exactitude. He didn’t just sabotage the investigation: he constructed it, layer by layer, knowing an augmented investigator would chase the sophisticated patterns while missing the simple human tell.
The evidence wasn’t planted for human eyes. It was planted for mine.
The physical world refuses to compile into clean data structures.
I crouch in Section 7-Gamma, dampening my neural feeds until the corridor becomes merely a corridor: metal grating, fuel-stained walls, the acrid bite of leaked propellant. My enhanced proprioception still registers the deck vibrations, deeper than foot traffic. Heavy machinery. Recent.
The access panel bears Salma’s signature: precise torque patterns, the distinctive wear marks of her modified wrench. I’ve processed her maintenance logs a thousand times. This matches perfectly.
But my fingertips detect something else. A faint electromagnetic residue along the panel’s edge. I let my enhanced vision flicker back online just enough to perceive it: military-grade interface signature. Khalid’s prosthetic leaves traces in spectra most humans never see.
Two different access methods. Same panel. Same impossibly narrow timeframe.
The data insists on contradiction. Either my augmented senses are failing, or someone understands them well enough to craft evidence that exists in multiple states simultaneously. True for enhanced perception, true for baseline investigation, yet fundamentally incompatible.
The evidence isn’t corrupted. It’s layered.
The interviews become exercises in measuring my own inadequacy.
Salma’s heart rate spikes seventeen percent when I mention Section 7-Gamma. Her pupils dilate. Skin conductivity increases. My augmented perception catalogs every physiological marker of stress, but stress means nothing without context. Fear of discovery? Fear of me? Fear of something she witnessed but won’t name?
I process the data streams, but human meaning flows through channels my neural architecture can’t access.
Khalid’s military conditioning defeats quantification entirely. His responses arrive in perfectly metered intervals. His prosthetic arm’s servos maintain baseline operational parameters. Even his micro-expressions follow textbook control patterns. I’m reading a performance optimized specifically to frustrate enhanced perception.
Faridah simply runs. My luminescent implants track her thermal signature through three corridors before I stop pursuing. What good is perfect data on someone too terrified to speak?
I’ve become a sensor array pretending to be human.
I retreat to the data streams where certainty still exists.
The quantum decay patterns require complete neural immersion. Consciousness dissolving into probability matrices, my awareness fragmenting across corrupted sectors. Time stamps bloom like phosphorescence: 0347 hours. A silhouette moves through electromagnetic shadows. Khalid’s servo signature. But there, in the polished conduit’s reflection: two figures.
The fragments resist synthesis. My augmented architecture processes permutations, but human intuition would see what I cannot.
Coordination. Sophistication. Inside knowledge.
The murder wasn’t singular.
The data architecture reveals its true horror: three separate deception layers, each calibrated to a different suspect’s signature. Military encryption frames Khalid. Ghost signals mirror Faridah’s patterns with surgical precision. Maintenance logs implicate Salma through impossible perfection. My augmented consciousness recognizes the trap: evidence designed not to hide truth but to drown it in contradictory certainty. Someone studied enhanced cognition intimately enough to poison it against itself.
The interface burns cold against my temples as I sink into the network’s electromagnetic substrate. My consciousness doesn’t fragment: that’s the baseline human interpretation. It multiplies, each instance of awareness processing a different data stream while maintaining coherent identity across the distributed whole. The corrupted footage unfolds before me not as visual information but as pure pattern: waveforms of encrypted data wrapped around hollow spaces where truth should be.
Military-grade encryption. SDC-level protocols. The signature tastes like copper and authority, like the prosthetic arm Khalid adjusts when he thinks no one’s watching. Three authorization codes on this depot could generate this particular shroud, but the deployment timestamp, 03:[^47] station time, carries implications that cascade through my enhanced cognition like dominoes. Fourteen minutes before Amira’s death. Premeditation. Someone knew exactly when they’d need the footage hidden, planned the corruption before the act itself.
I trace the deployment vector through the network’s arterial pathways, following electromagnetic echoes that would be invisible to baseline perception. The signal originated from a maintenance terminal in Section 7-Gamma. The same section where Salma saw someone tampering with fuel line access panels. The same section where Khalid conducts his tactical training exercises. The same section where Faridah’s ghost signals have been most concentrated.
The data streams converge, and I feel the familiar vertigo of too much information resolving into clarity. The terminal required physical presence and security credentials simultaneously: no remote deployment possible given the network’s segmented architecture. Someone stood there, flesh and blood, and commanded the encryption into being.
Someone who knew I’d eventually come looking. Someone who understood exactly how augmented consciousness processes evidence. Someone who left this trail deliberately, knowing I’d follow it into Section 7-Gamma’s industrial shadows where maintenance terminals wait with their buffer memories still warm.
The terminal’s casing holds secrets that electrons cannot tell. I kneel in the alcove’s artificial twilight, my augmented vision shifting through spectra: infrared revealing heat signatures hours old, ultraviolet exposing chemical residues invisible to baseline eyes.
My fingers trace the access panel’s edge. Tool marks score the security screws, their pattern wrong. Military-issue drivers leave clean, perpendicular engagement marks. These show the characteristic twist-and-slip of improvised tools, the kind communications specialists carry when standard equipment fails in the field.
I sample the fingerprint residue, my neural implants analyzing the oils’ chemical composition. Two distinct patterns emerge from the molecular chaos. The first matches maintenance logs. But the second set is fresher, laid down within the last forty-eight hours. The ridge patterns speak of someone with longer fingers than Khalid’s military records indicate, someone who reached across the panel rather than approaching it square-on.
The physical evidence contradicts the digital trail’s elegant certainty. Someone understood that augmented consciousness might trust data streams over material reality. Someone knew I’d follow electromagnetic breadcrumbs and miss the story written in oil and metal.
Someone made me the weapon pointed at the wrong target.
The fingerprints tell me what I should have seen immediately: Faridah’s nervous hands, constantly adjusting equipment, fingers stained with the particular residue of communication-grade lubricants. But the timestamps fracture that certainty. I pull maintenance schedules, cross-reference them with security footage from adjacent corridors: what little remains uncorrupted.
The tool marks speak their own language. Communications specialists use precision drivers with magnetic tips, leaving distinctive circular scoring around screw heads. These marks show the hesitation of unfamiliar hands, someone mimicking maintenance work without the muscle memory.
I’m looking at a frame within a frame. The digital evidence points to Khalid. The physical evidence points to Faridah. Both trails are too clean, too obvious.
Someone wants me chasing ghosts while they walk free.
The ghost signal’s architecture unfolds in my perception like a three-dimensional map of deception. I trace the handshake protocol backward through seventeen relay points, watching it fragment and reconstitute. Faridah’s encryption style, her signature use of cascading prime number sequences, is there, but the execution timing is wrong. Too fast. Too perfect.
No human hand coded this. Someone taught a system to think like her.
Section 7-Gamma’s maintenance terminal sits before me, its access logs a perfect tapestry of incrimination. Too perfect. Three suspects, three skill sets, one impossible convergence.
My neural implants parse terabytes in microseconds, but they can’t tell me why my augmented perception feels guided. Someone orchestrated this evidence trail knowing exactly how enhanced consciousness processes information: exploiting my strengths as predictably as my weaknesses.
Can I solve a crime designed specifically for someone like me to misunderstand?
The interface burns cold behind my temples as I sink into the corrupted surveillance files. Most investigators would see only digital chaos. Scrambled timestamps, fragmented frames, ghost data bleeding across sectors. But my augmented consciousness parses the destruction itself as information, reading the shape of what was deliberately unmade.
There. Beneath the deletion protocols, a signature pulses in frequencies baseline humans can’t perceive. Military-grade encryption, woven into the corruption like a watermark in expensive paper. Not just any military encryption. The specific variant used by Stellar Defense Corps tactical instructors. Access-restricted. Training-specific. The kind of digital fingerprint that narrows the suspect pool to a handful of individuals on this entire depot.
Khalid Rashid’s fingerprint.
The timestamp aligns perfectly with Salma’s testimony. Late gamma shift, Section 7-Gamma, when the corridors run empty and surveillance coverage thins. But there’s something else, a detail that makes my neural implants spike with recognition. The deletion pattern itself shows sophistication beyond simple evidence destruction. Whoever corrupted these files understood how augmented investigators process visual data. They targeted the specific wavelengths and data structures my kind of consciousness prioritizes, creating blind spots in perception itself.
Khalid knows about uplift procedures. He trains personnel in tactical operations, which includes counter-intelligence against augmented operatives. He would know exactly how to hide from someone like me.
I pull back from the interface, the depot’s crowded reality reasserting itself around my physical form. The evidence points clearly now, but clarity brings its own complications. A military instructor with tactical training and legitimate grievances against the merchant guild. A man who lost his arm to what he believes was merchant negligence, now facing a diplomat who might shift fuel contracts further from military control.
Motive crystallizes like ice in vacuum. But proving it means confronting someone who knows how I think, how I perceive, better than I’d like.
The black market dealer operates from a storage module that officially doesn’t exist in depot records. I find him through data-shadow analysis, tracking the electromagnetic signatures of unregistered transactions. He’s nervous when I arrive, my neural implants casting faint luminescence in the dimness.
“Three days before she died,” he says, fingers twitching toward a concealed weapon he thinks I haven’t noticed. “Heard them arguing near my territory. The military instructor and the diplomat.”
I process his testimony through multiple analytical frameworks simultaneously. His micro-expressions suggest truth, fear, self-preservation. “What exactly did you hear?”
“Khalid (the one with the prosthetic) he was talking about blood prices. Said negligent merchants cause deaths, that someone had to stop it.” The dealer gestures toward a bulkhead. “His metal hand hit the wall there. Left a dent. Man’s got strength in that thing.”
I examine the impact site. The depth and pattern match military-grade prosthetic specifications. The metal still carries trace electromagnetic signatures. Khalid was here. Khalid was angry. And Amira’s encrypted documents detailed exactly the kind of merchant negligence he blamed for his injury.
The evidence tightens like a noose.
The fuel diversions whisper through my consciousness like ghosts in the data stream. I’ve been avoiding them for weeks. Those systematic anomalies that didn’t quite justify the risk of reporting. Now Amira’s preliminary notes illuminate what I’d been too cautious to see: someone building an unauthorized reserve, siphoning refined fuel in quantities small enough to escape automated audits but large enough to matter.
My augmented perception traces the pattern backwards through depot systems. The expertise required isn’t something you learn from manuals: it’s the kind of intimate knowledge that comes from years inside the infrastructure, understanding every valve and sensor. The most recent diversion happened yesterday, just hours before Amira’s death.
The access codes resolve in my vision: maintenance credentials. The same coveralls Salma described.
Everything connects. Everything implicates.
But something in the pattern feels wrong: too obvious, too clean. Like evidence arranged for discovery rather than concealed from it.
The ghost signals proliferate through my expanded awareness like crystalline fractals. Faridah wasn’t just intercepting: she’d mapped the entire negotiation ecosystem, every faction’s leverage and vulnerability. Her surveillance extended to environmental controls, studying diplomatic quarters with the precision of someone planning infiltration.
But the timing fractures under analysis. Her digital reconnaissance coincided exactly with Salma’s maintenance figure. Two operations, no coordination detected.
Someone predicted both their movements. Someone who understands augmented cognition.
The evidence architecture reveals its own impossibility. My neural threads trace probability matrices: Khalid’s encryption expertise, Faridah’s surveillance timing, Salma’s witness placement. Each element calibrated for augmented perception. Someone modeled my cognitive patterns, predicted which data streams I’d prioritize, which connections would crystallize first. The investigation itself was designed. Not for human logic, but specifically for posthuman analysis. They knew exactly what I’d become.
The electromagnetic residue tells stories my meat-brain ancestors could never read. I interface directly with the access panel forensics, let the data cascade through my neural architecture in wavelengths beyond baseline human perception. Khalid’s prosthetic arm, military-grade, tactical-interface enabled, leaves signatures as distinctive as fingerprints. Metallic particulate patterns. Servo oil traces. The specific electromagnetic frequency his tactical systems emit during handshake protocols with security infrastructure.
I find them everywhere. The corridor surveillance nodes. The backup power junction. The environmental control access point that regulates atmosphere in the diplomatic quarters.
Eighteen hours before Amira stopped breathing, Khalid ran his “routine security audit.” The logs are pristine, properly formatted, carrying all the correct authorization codes. But I process data streams in parallel consciousness. The maintenance diagnostic he logged? It disabled recording systems for exactly forty-seven minutes. Long enough to map the surveillance blind spots. Long enough to plan an approach vector that would leave no visual evidence.
His duty roster places him three sections away, drilling cadets on tactical boarding procedures. But the depot’s overcrowded chaos makes movement tracking nearly impossible. Two thousand bodies flowing through corridors designed for five hundred. He could have walked the distance in twelve minutes, disappeared into the crowd like smoke in recycled air.
I cross-reference his prosthetic’s interface signatures with the corrupted surveillance files. The encryption methodology matches military-grade protocols: specifically the tactical override subroutines built into combat prosthetics for field operations. Not just military expertise. Khalid’s specific hardware, his specific training, his specific access privileges.
The evidence architecture tightens around him like a noose. Too perfect. Too precisely calibrated for posthuman analysis. My augmented consciousness screams warning: this is exactly what someone wanted me to find. But the data doesn’t lie. It just tells the truth someone else has carefully arranged.
The data streams converge in my expanded consciousness like tributaries feeding a dark river. I process the fuel diversion scheme through seventeen parallel analytical frameworks simultaneously, watching the pattern emerge in electromagnetic wavelengths baseline humans can’t perceive.
Khalid’s prosthetic arm carries override capabilities built for combat scenarios: the same tactical subroutines that could authorize fuel transfers without triggering depot safeguards. His military credentials provide the command-level access. His fifteen years of bitter obsession with merchant guild “negligence” provides the motive architecture.
But the financial flows tell a different story than simple theft. The diverted fuel wasn’t being hoarded or sold for personal profit. It was being systematically redirected to military supply caches, hidden in the depot’s abandoned sections like ammunition for a war not yet declared. Amira’s audit trail didn’t just document corruption: it exposed a strategic operation to secure fuel reserves outside official channels.
Someone was preparing for the moment when military and merchant interests finally stopped pretending at cooperation. When the fuel contracts Amira negotiated would become worthless. When control of physical resources would matter more than diplomatic credentials.
She died because she discovered someone’s contingency plan for civil war.
I construct the timeline in seventeen simultaneous dimensions, watching capability and opportunity intersect like fault lines in spacetime. Khalid’s security clearances map perfectly onto the surveillance gaps. His prosthetic interfaces with restricted equipment inventories. The precision tools that opened Amira’s throat. Faridah’s communication intercepts gave him Amira’s schedule, whether she knew it or not.
But here’s what makes my neural implants spike with feedback: the evidence distribution follows my exact analytical patterns. Each data fragment positioned where my augmented consciousness would naturally discover it. The timestamps arranged in sequences that trigger my pattern-recognition subroutines.
Someone didn’t just commit murder. They choreographed an investigation designed specifically for how I think.
That requires understanding uplift consciousness from the inside.
The probability matrices collapse into a single disturbing vector: someone engineered this investigation for an augmented mind. The evidence distribution matches my neural architecture. Seventeen-dimensional analysis patterns, electromagnetic spectrum anomalies only I perceive, data fragments positioned where my consciousness naturally fragments.
Not breadcrumbs. A mirror. Someone showing me exactly what my expanded consciousness expects to find, exploiting the very augmentations that make me valuable.
The evidence architecture reveals itself in my fragmented consciousness. Each suspect wrapped in probability fields that shimmer with deliberate ambiguity. Faridah’s digital fingerprints, Khalid’s access logs, the fuel diversions: they don’t accumulate toward truth, they orbit it. Someone constructed this investigation like a theorem, knowing exactly which patterns would seduce an augmented mind. I’m not solving a murder. I’m performing one person’s carefully scripted revelation, dancing through data-space on invisible strings.
The broker’s alcove stinks of ozone and recycled sweat. His cybernetic eyes cycle through focal lengths as he talks, never quite settling on my face: tracking data streams I can only partially perceive even with my augmentations. Smart. He’s recording this conversation through seventeen different angles, building his own insurance policy.
“The instructor didn’t just intercept her,” he says, fingers dancing across a haptic interface only he can see. “He was waiting. Positioned himself at that junction deliberately, where the fuel line access creates a blind spot for official surveillance.” His voice drops. “I notice these things. Occupational necessity.”
I process the implications through multiple analytical frameworks simultaneously. Khalid chose his confrontation site with tactical precision. The fuel line junction, I pull up schematics overlaying my vision, sits exactly where Section 7-Gamma’s modified access panels would be visible. The same panels Salma saw someone tampering with.
“His prosthetic,” the broker continues, “kept clenching. Open, closed, open, closed. Military-grade servo joints make this particular clicking sound when they’re under stress. I’ve heard it before from veterans who never quite adjusted.” He pauses, weighing something. “The arm’s interface ports were active. I caught the telltale electromagnetic signature. He was connected to something nearby.”
Connected. My consciousness fragments across possibilities: security overrides, surveillance manipulation, access panel controls. All systems Khalid’s military credentials and prosthetic capabilities could theoretically breach.
“Amira’s response?” I ask, though I’m already extrapolating from the broker’s micro-expressions.
“Professional. Cold, even. But her hand moved to that data-slate three times during their exchange. Whatever Khalid was threatening her about, those documents were her counter-leverage.” His cybernetic eyes finally lock onto mine. “She knew something that scared him. And now she’s dead, and the slate’s missing.”
The data-space around me crystallizes into darker patterns. Someone’s theorem just gained another variable.
The broker’s fingers pause mid-gesture, his cybernetic eyes dimming slightly: a tell I’ve learned means he’s accessing archived memory files rather than real-time observation.
“The explosion,” he says, voice dropping half an octave. “Everyone knows the official story. Seventeen dead, Khalid loses his arm, military investigation points fingers at guild corner-cutting.” He leans forward, and I catch the acrid scent of stim-patches on his neck. “But here’s what the gossip networks remember: Khalid didn’t just testify. He campaigned. Spent months trying to get criminal charges filed, contacted every oversight committee in three sectors.”
My neural threads pull up archived news feeds, confirming his timeline. The guild’s legal team buried him in procedural delays.
“The man became obsessed,” the broker continues. “Saw merchant negligence everywhere. Started filing safety complaints about every minor violation, until even sympathetic officers stopped listening.” His expression shifts. Something almost like pity. “When Amira arrived to negotiate fuel contracts that would expand merchant operations? To Khalid, she wasn’t a diplomat. She was the same negligence wearing a different face, about to kill seventeen more people he couldn’t save.”
The broker’s voice takes on a harder edge, the kind that comes from watching history devour people whole.
“Fifteen years,” he says. “Seventeen bodies. Khalid testified for six hours straight. Detailed every safety violation, every ignored maintenance report, every credit the guild saved by cutting corners.” His fingers drum against the table, a nervous rhythm. “The guild’s advocates buried him in legal procedure. Settlements paid to families, quiet reassignments, official regret. But no criminal charges. No real accountability.”
I feel my neural threads pulling archived footage: Khalid younger, angrier, his new prosthetic still gleaming with military precision, speaking to empty committee chambers while guild representatives scheduled their next profit projections.
“Amira represented everything he’d failed to stop,” the broker concludes. “Same contracts, same negligence, different face.”
The prosthetic’s servo whine cuts through memory like a blade through vacuum seal. I’ve heard that sound before. Neural impulses bleeding into mechanical response, the body betraying what discipline conceals. His tactical interfaces glowed amber, active connections pulsing. Combat-ready or just habit? The broker couldn’t say. But Amira saw it. Her weight shifted backward, diplomatic smile never faltering, survival instinct wrapped in protocol.
The data streams fragment into crystalline certainty. Four minutes of diplomatic rejection, then she walked away: measured steps, spine straight, every gesture calculated to deny him the satisfaction of visible fear. But I see what the broker couldn’t: her pulse rate spiking in thermal signatures, the micro-adjustments in her gait. She knew danger when it wore commendation pins.
Khalid stayed rooted. Sixty-three seconds exactly, his prosthetic cycling through tension patterns I recognize from combat stress profiles. That access panel beside him. His gaze locked on it like targeting acquisition.
Then he moved. Not fleeing, not casual. Purpose distilled into motion, the walk of someone past deliberation into execution.
The broker dismisses it. Another argument in an overcrowded tinderbox. But my augmented perception strips away that comfortable ambiguity. I’ve processed ten thousand confrontations in depot surveillance archives. This one tastes different.
The recognition hits like voltage through corrupted circuits: this isn’t just sophisticated, it’s intimate. My neural implants parse the fuel diversion signature across seventeen different access points, and every theft bears the fingerprints of someone who learned logistics in the Stellar Defense Corps. Not guild training. Military.
The quantities shimmer in my expanded perception: 2.3% from Tank Seven, 1.8% from the refinery overflow, 2.1% during the third-shift changeover. Each number precisely calibrated to slip beneath the 3% threshold that triggers automatic guild audits. Whoever designed this system understood bureaucratic blind spots the way a surgeon understands anatomy.
But there’s something else. A ghost in the data.
I push deeper, letting my augmented consciousness fragment across thousands of transaction records simultaneously. The primary signature is clean, almost arrogant in its precision. Beneath it, though, fainter, more careful, runs a secondary pattern. Someone covering tracks. Or someone being covered for.
The streams converge into uncomfortable clarity: this wasn’t a solo operation. The thief had access to merchant guild inventory systems and military operational security protocols. That intersection is vanishingly small. Maybe a dozen people in the entire depot could pull this off.
I cross-reference personnel files, shift rotations, security clearances. The data crystallizes around three names, then two, then. Every diversion corresponds perfectly to shift changes when multiple personnel have plausible access. Deliberate misdirection, creating a crowd of potential suspects. Military doctrine: never leave a single point of failure.
But doctrine also means patterns. And patterns mean predictability.
I trace the signature backward through four months of records, watching it evolve from clumsy experimentation to mechanical perfection. Someone learning the system. Someone with patience and training and absolutely no intention of getting caught.
Someone who knew exactly when Amira would arrive.
The acceleration timeline cuts through my consciousness like a blade through vacuum. Four months ago, the diversions started. 1.2% here, 0.8% there, irregular intervals like a nervous heartbeat. Amateur hour. Learning the rhythms of inventory cycles, probing for weaknesses in the monitoring algorithms.
Then six weeks ago, everything changed.
The pattern snaps into military precision exactly forty-three days before Amira’s diplomatic credentials pinged the depot’s arrival registry. Suddenly the diversions march like clockwork: every third day, same quantities, same methodology. No more experimentation. Pure execution.
I calculate the accumulated total, and my augmented perception floods with tactical implications. Enough refined propellant to power a Sparrow-class courier for three weeks of hard burn. Or (the thought crystallizes with cold certainty) enough volatile accelerant to stage a dozen catastrophic “accidents” across critical infrastructure points.
Someone didn’t just know Amira was coming. They knew exactly when, and they spent six weeks preparing the battlefield. This wasn’t opportunistic theft.
This was logistics for an operation.
And operations require objectives, resources, and, my implants pulse with unwelcome recognition, acceptable casualties.
The authorization codes slice through my consciousness like fractures in ice. Level seven. That’s guild masters and military brass. People who don’t personally handle fuel valves and monitoring overrides.
I fragment my awareness across three simultaneous data streams, each neural thread pulling different records. Personnel schedules. Biometric logs. Physical location tracking.
The discrepancies bloom like radiation burns across my perception.
Commander Rashid’s credentials, used at 0347 hours while station surveillance shows him in the military training bay. Administrator Chen’s codes, active in Sector 7-Gamma while her biometrics place her in her quarters, sleep-cycling. Three more instances, same pattern.
Someone didn’t just have access. They had the technical sophistication to clone credentials without triggering security audits.
That narrows the suspect pool considerably.
And makes whoever I’m hunting significantly more dangerous.
The black market’s digital underbelly opens to my neural queries like infected flesh. Data brokers respond through encrypted channels, their automated systems recognizing my guild credentials even as they maintain careful anonymity.
The fuel appeared in gray-market inventories. Small quantities. Regular intervals.
But the transaction logs make my augmented consciousness stutter with recognition. Nobody bought the fuel for resale. They traded it. Bartered for equipment.
Communications gear. Encrypted storage. Surveillance countermeasures.
Someone was building an operational capability, piece by careful piece.
The most recent trade: two days before Amira died.
The augmented logic cascades through my consciousness. The stolen fuel wasn’t for profit. It was operational planning.
Amira’s quarters. Section 7-Gamma. Adjacent to those access panels Salma witnessed.
A controlled fire. Evidence incinerated. Accidental death in an overcrowded depot with failing infrastructure. Perfect cover.
Except something fractured the plan. Amira died wrong. The data-slate survived.
Now someone holds volatile fuel with murderous intent and failing options.
My finger hovers over the transmission protocol. Reporting this might trigger desperation.
The escort begins with his hand settling on my shoulder. Not quite restraining, not quite guiding. The prosthetic’s pressure sensors calibrate perfectly to the threshold between professional courtesy and implicit threat. I track the servo feedback through my neural interface: point-seven-three kilograms of force, distributed across four contact points. Enough to remind me of the enhanced strength coiled in that military-grade limb.
“I appreciate your diligence, Specialist Al-Qasim,” Khalid says, his voice carrying that instructor’s cadence that turns every statement into a lesson. “But you understand how compartmentalization works. Information security isn’t just protocol. It’s survival.”
We move through the military wing’s outer corridor, past bulkheads painted in regulation gray. My augmented perception maps the space in electromagnetic layers: surveillance nodes every twelve meters, biometric scanners at each junction, encrypted data streams pulsing through the walls like digital blood. All standard. All recently recalibrated.
“The depot’s overcrowded,” he continues, steering me toward the checkpoint with that measured grip. “Tensions run high. Sometimes investigations create more problems than they solve: especially when conducted by civilians who might misinterpret operational necessities.”
The word civilian lands with calculated weight. Not investigator. Not specialist. Civilian. Augmented or not, I’m outside his hierarchy, beyond his control.
“Military personnel have specific chains of command,” he says as we reach the threshold. His prosthetic releases my shoulder with a pneumatic sigh. “Specific loyalties. You’re looking for patterns in the chaos, but some patterns are classified for good reason.”
His eyes hold mine, human meeting augmented, and I see something beneath the professional mask. Not quite fear. Not quite guilt. Something older and more corrosive.
Certainty. The absolute conviction that whatever he’s done, whatever he’s protecting, is righteous.
He believes his own justifications completely.
That makes him infinitely more dangerous than a simple murderer.
The orchestrated encounter unfolds like a tactical demonstration. Khalid doesn’t send a subordinate: he arrives personally, his military boots striking the deck plates with that parade-ground precision that turns simple walking into a statement of authority. Each footfall measures exactly point-eight-seven seconds apart. My augmented hearing catches the rhythm, recognizes it as parade drill timing. Muscle memory from decades of service.
He reviews my credentials with theatrical thoroughness, prosthetic fingers moving across my data-slate with unnecessary deliberation. Each servo whir audible in the confined space, each gesture calibrated for maximum psychological impact. I watch the tactical interface ports on his forearm flicker with activity: he’s recording this interaction, logging it through military channels I can’t access.
His explanation arrives textbook perfect: ongoing exercises involving fuel system security protocols, personnel rotations creating gaps in the duty roster, classified equipment testing requiring information compartmentalization. My augmented consciousness catalogs each justification, cross-references against depot schedules, finds technical legitimacy in every claim.
Yet something deeper, that fragment of consciousness still remembering what it meant to be merely human, recognizes the performance beneath the protocol.
This isn’t security procedure.
This is a warning wrapped in regulations.
The prosthetic settles with calculated precision. Twelve point three newtons of pressure, my implants measure automatically. Not quite pain threshold. Exactly not quite.
Through the contact point, my augmented senses flood with data: tactical interface protocols cycling through standby modes, override ports compatible with depot security systems, hydraulic servos calibrated for three hundred percent baseline human strength. The technology whispers its capabilities directly into my consciousness.
“Military operations involve complexities,” Khalid says, voice parade-ground steady, “that civilian investigators often misinterpret.”
The pressure increases. Fourteen newtons. Fifteen point two.
“Unfortunate misunderstandings can damage careers.” Another increment. “Especially for augmented personnel whose neural stability might be… questioned.”
The servo joints whir, almost conversational. He knows exactly how much force he’s applying.
This is a man who understands precision violence.
The boundary marker glows amber between sections. Khalid’s hand remains. Seventeen point eight newtons now, my consciousness notes with detached precision.
“Focus on civilian populations,” he says, tone helpful as poison. “Where most depot crimes originate.”
His prosthetic fingers adjust, servo joints purring. “Augmented individuals sometimes experience pattern recognition errors. Processing military data without proper training context.”
Each word technically appropriate. Each word a blade.
My expanded consciousness parses the subtext in microseconds: Stay out. Your augmentations are vulnerability, not asset.
His hand lifts. Pressure marks remain on gray-and-copper fabric: visible testament, calculated reminder.
The servo joints sigh one final time as he steps back into military territory.
The corridors swallow me back into civilian chaos. Two thousand bodies compressed where five hundred should breathe. My augmented consciousness catalogs everything. Pattern recognition error. His phrase loops through my neural pathways like acid.
My human half knows what my expanded consciousness confirms: he’s weaponized legitimacy itself. Security protocols deployed with surgical timing. Physical intimidation wrapped in professional courtesy. Each element calculated to warn without leaving prosecutable evidence.
The implants flag the encounter for investigation logs. My finger hovers over the official report function.
Wait, whispers the fragment of me that remembers being fully human. A man who manipulates bureaucracy this efficiently has contingencies layered beneath contingencies.
Sometimes augmented consciousness must defer to baseline survival instinct.
I close the report window unsent.
The terminal’s casing feels warm under my fingertips. Residual heat from constant operation or something more recent? My implants shift through perception layers, peeling back the visible spectrum to reveal what baseline humans miss.
Electromagnetic traces bloom in my enhanced vision like phosphorescent algae. Every system interaction leaves signatures, faint patterns in the local field that persist for hours. The terminal’s normal operational hum registers as steady blue-white pulses. But there, threading through the standard patterns, a jagged crimson spike that shouldn’t exist.
Military-grade encryption leaves distinctive electromagnetic scarring. I’ve seen it before in classified guild briefings, warnings about security breaches and tactical intrusions. This signature matches those warnings with uncomfortable precision.
I photograph the pattern with my neural recorder, knowing the evidence will be invisible to standard forensics. Sometimes augmented perception becomes a curse: seeing crimes that can’t be proven to those who lack the hardware to witness them.
The access log displays on my internal HUD. Timestamp: forty-seven hours ago, during gamma shift when skeleton crews run minimal supervision. Authorization code: valid maintenance override. But my implants detect the deeper truth beneath the official record.
Prosthetic interface discharge.
The realization crystallizes with the cold certainty of pure data. When cybernetic limbs connect to systems, they leave electrical fingerprints. Unique patterns based on servo configurations, power draw characteristics, neural feedback loops. This signature shows military-spec components, high-end tactical grade, not the civilian prosthetics common among depot workers.
I catalog the discharge pattern’s distinctive qualities: power surge consistent with override protocols, neural interface feedback suggesting direct system manipulation, servo joint harmonics indicating precision military hardware.
Only one person on this overcrowded station matches those specifications.
My human instinct wants to reject the conclusion. My augmented consciousness simply processes probability matrices. The numbers don’t lie, even when the truth tastes like betrayal.
I seal the terminal casing carefully, leaving no trace of my investigation except in encrypted memory files.
The fibers catch light like spider silk when I shift my perception into the ultraviolet range. Three strands, each no thicker than a human hair, snagged on the bracket’s rough edge where someone’s hand slipped during hurried work.
My implants analyze the molecular structure automatically, breaking down polymer chains and weave patterns. The data streams through my consciousness faster than thought: synthetic aramid blend, tensile strength rated for combat operations, thermal resistance beyond civilian specifications. Military-grade tactical gloves, the kind issued to special operations personnel and senior officers.
Not the cheap polymer-cotton hybrids that maintenance crews wear. Not even close.
I extract each fiber with precision, my augmented proprioception steadying my hands to micron-level accuracy. The evidence containers seal with soft clicks that echo too loud in the cramped maintenance space. My neural recorder captures everything: fiber position, ambient conditions, chain of custody timestamps.
Alone, these threads prove nothing. Military personnel pass through Section 7-Gamma regularly, inspections, security patrols, routine oversight. But here, at this specific terminal, combined with the encryption signatures and prosthetic discharge patterns?
The pattern coheres like crystallizing ice. Inevitable. Damning.
I seal the last container and feel the weight of what I’m building.
I pull back from the terminal, letting the interface connection dissolve. The data still cascades through my consciousness: voltage curves, harmonic frequencies, power distribution matrices. My implants render it as overlapping waveforms, each spike and trough a word in a language only augmented perception can read.
The electromagnetic signature doesn’t lie. Can’t lie. Physics doesn’t negotiate.
Override Code 7-Alpha-3 belongs to Maintenance Supervisor Chen, currently off-station for medical leave. Someone borrowed his credentials, but the prosthetic interface told the truth the digital log tried to hide. High-grade servos, military power cells, command-level protocols. The electrical fingerprint of expensive augmentation.
I call up the depot’s prosthetic registry, filter for military-grade units with system override capability.
Three names appear.
Only one matches the servo wear patterns I catalogued two days ago.
Khalid Rashid.
The signature resolves in my perception like a constellation. Power spikes mapping servo articulation, voltage curves tracing tactical-grade cells, interface protocols singing their military pedigree. I overlay Khalid’s arm from memory: those distinctive scoring patterns on the joints, the precise articulation angles I catalogued during our confrontation.
The correlation locks. Ninety-seven percent confidence.
Not proof. But truth, written in electromagnetic ink only augmented eyes can read.
The pieces align but the picture fractures. Khalid’s here: servo-scored, military-encrypted, override-authorized. But those fuel diversions predate Amira’s arrival by weeks. Small quantities, systematic extraction, routed through monitoring systems he could access from this exact terminal.
Not sabotage to stop a contract. Preparation for something else entirely.
I download everything, electromagnetic ghosts and all. The murder might be consequence, not objective.
What was he building toward?
The data streams fractured across my consciousness like shattered glass, each fragment reflecting a different angle of the same ugly truth. I stood in the security office (too small for this many bodies, too hot from the press of flesh and ambition) and watched my investigation become a weapon.
Administrator Chen’s avatar floated beside my holographic projection, her merchant guild insignia pulsing with satisfied authority. Commander Okafor loomed on the opposite side, military gray and rigid disapproval. Between them, my evidence hung in the air: access logs scrolling in amber, the prosthetic interface signature rotating in three dimensions, fiber analysis branching like neural pathways.
“This proves,” Chen announced, her voice cutting through the murmur of observers, “that military personnel have fundamentally compromised depot safety protocols.”
My augmented perception caught the micro-expressions rippling through the room. Satisfaction from merchant guild observers, fury from military personnel. Okafor’s jaw muscles contracted precisely 2.[^3] millimeters.
“Circumstantial at best,” he countered. “This requires proper military judicial review under established protocols.”
I felt the investigation slipping sideways, becoming something other than what it was. The data streams showed me their heart rates, their pupil dilations, the electromagnetic signatures of their implanted comms already transmitting to their respective factions. Neither one processed Amira’s death as murder requiring justice. They saw only leverage, political advantage, the eternal struggle for control.
“Khalid Rashid must be questioned,” I said, forcing my voice through the feedback screaming in my temples. “Regardless of factional politics.”
The silence lasted 3.[^7] seconds: an eternity in my accelerated perception. Chen and Okafor exchanged glances that contained entire negotiations.
“Agreed,” Chen finally said. “With merchant guild observers present.”
“And military legal counsel,” Okafor added immediately.
They were already contaminating whatever truth might emerge. But I had no choice except to continue forward into the machinery of their ambitions.
The escort arrived with theatrical precision: two junior officers in parade-sharp uniforms flanking Khalid Rashid like he was already condemned. His prosthetic arm hung at regulation rest position, servos silent, tactical interface ports deliberately darkened. The students’ hatred radiated in frequencies my augmented perception couldn’t ignore: elevated cortisol, aggressive postures, electromagnetic signatures of concealed weapons they thought I wouldn’t detect.
I projected the evidence between us. Terminal logs cascaded in amber light, the prosthetic signature rotating like an accusation made solid.
Khalid’s response came with military economy: “I conduct security reviews at that terminal weekly. My prosthetic interfaces with forty-seven systems across this depot daily. Fiber transfer in these conditions means nothing.”
All true. All insufficient.
Then I mentioned the surveillance tampering, the encrypted override buried three layers deep in military protocols.
There: a flicker. Not guilt. Recognition. Something worse: calculation.
“Article 47, Military Code,” he stated, each word precisely clipped. “I invoke my right to counsel and the presence of my commanding officer before further questioning.”
The legal wall slammed down between us, and behind it, I sensed secrets multiplying like fractals.
The propaganda war erupted across every frequency I monitored. Administrator Chen’s version metastasized through the commercial networks first, “extremist ideology,” “anti-merchant vendetta,” “murdered a peacemaker.” Each retelling added details that didn’t exist in evidence: Khalid’s supposed manifesto, his alleged threats, his “well-known instability.”
The military quarter’s counter-narrative hit harder because it carried truth’s weight. Khalid had lost his arm to merchant negligence. He was dedicated to safety protocols the guild routinely ignored. His students flooded restricted channels with service records, commendations, testimonials.
I watched both lies spread through the depot’s neural architecture, truth and fiction braiding into something neither and both.
Salma’s encrypted ping cut through the noise: “They’re arming themselves. Both sides. This place is about to ignite.”
I requisitioned seventy-three hours of security footage. Let my augmented vision parse what baseline eyes couldn’t catch.
Khalid sat rigid in detention, military perfect. But when guards rotated shifts, his shoulders dropped. The prosthetic hand moved. Tracing patterns I recognized: phantom pain management.
Then another detainee mentioned fuel diversions.
Khalid’s pupils dilated. Breathing accelerated 3.[^7] seconds before control reasserted.
My human intuition and machine analysis agreed: he knew something. It terrified him.
But this wasn’t a killer’s fear. This was comprehension. Someone realizing they’d been used.
The administrators’ chamber stank of recycled air and political calculation.
I projected my analysis across three holographic planes. “Khalid’s cortisol patterns indicate protective fear, not guilt. Someone’s. Chen’s interruption carried merchant guild finality.
Okafor nodded. Military agreement for different reasons. “Protective custody prevents escalation.”
They wanted Khalid contained. Truth was negotiable.
My implants caught the transmission spike from 4-Delta (the fuel anomaly sector) just as the klaxons began their scream.
The pressure differential registered in my neural architecture before physics made it audible. A 2.3-second window where I existed in two realities simultaneously. One where the depot hummed with ordinary dysfunction. One where everything was already burning.
I sealed my section’s emergency bulkheads. Muscle memory through augmented pathways.
The klaxons screamed their belated warning.
Through the sensor network I perceived 4-Delta’s catastrophe in electromagnetic detail: fuel vapor propagating through three corridors like arterial bleeding, each plume carrying its own spectral signature. The cascading failure pattern was textbook: except textbooks assumed competent maintenance schedules and honest safety inspections.
Emergency bulkheads dropped with hydraulic finality. The system’s logic was sound: contain contamination, minimize casualties. But shift-change meant bodies everywhere, personnel vectors crossing through spaces they occupied for thirty seconds every twelve hours. The algorithm didn’t account for human chaos.
I overrode Bulkhead 4-Delta-7. Protocol violation. Court-martial offense in military jurisdiction.
Two biosigns flickered in my perception. Elevated heart rates, respiratory distress, skin conductivity indicating chemical exposure. The rescue team needed forty seconds to reach them.
They had twenty-three.
I held the bulkhead open through sheer processing power, my consciousness stretched between depot systems and my own failing flesh. Neural feedback carved hot lines through my temples where the implants interfaced with merely human tissue.
The rescue team pulled them through with six seconds remaining.
I sealed the bulkhead and vomited inside my helmet.
Chen’s voice crackled through comms: “Al-Qasim, what’s your status?”
“Functional.” The lie tasted like copper and recycled air. “Mobilizing for damage assessment.”
“Negative. Return to. Insubordination to add to my growing collection of violations.
The vapor was still billowing. Someone needed to reach the rupture origin before evidence dissolved into chemical chaos.
That someone had augmented perception and rapidly diminishing career prospects.
The vapor burned even through my suit’s filters. Phantom sensation, neural feedback translating chemical data into pain my body shouldn’t feel. I pushed deeper into 4-Delta while emergency protocols screamed at me to retreat.
My augmented vision stripped away the haze in layers of spectral analysis. The primary rupture point materialized first: stress fractures radiating through corroded metal, a failure fifteen years in the making. Deferred maintenance. Budget cuts. The usual poetry of institutional negligence.
Then I saw what didn’t belong.
The secondary valve assembly hung open like a surgical wound. Fresh scoring where a thermal lance had kissed metal with deliberate precision. The cut was crude nothing like the elegant sabotage that had killed Amira. Tool marks scarred the access panel, their geometry all wrong for Khalid’s prosthetic signatures.
My systems flagged the inconsistency with cascading alerts that felt like ice water through my spine.
Either Khalid had help, or someone else was writing their own agenda in fuel vapor and chaos.
The evidence dissolved around me, molecular bonds breaking down in the chemical storm. I had minutes to document everything before physics erased the truth.
The data streams converged into certainty that tasted like copper and ash.
I overlaid shift schedules against the rupture timestamp. Perfect synchronization. Maximum bodies in corridors, response teams fragmented across three sectors. Chen and Okafor sealed in their conference bunker, blind to everything except each other’s accusations.
This wasn’t opportunism. This was choreography.
My neural threads traced the encrypted spike backward through the depot’s nervous system. The transmission had originated from a maintenance terminal thirty meters from where I stood, sent exactly forty-seven seconds before the alarms.
Someone had watched it happen. Maybe triggered it themselves.
The tool marks on the valve assembly burned in my enhanced memory. Nothing like Amira’s murder.
Two saboteurs, or one wearing different masks?
The vapor hung like ghosts in the emergency lighting, refracting my enhanced vision into prismatic nightmares. I stood at the breach point while containment crews scrambled around me, their fear bleeding through every comm channel my implants monitored simultaneously.
This was the depot’s truth, laid bare: we were all living inside a bomb.
Every sensor I touched screamed fragility. Overcrowded corridors became stampede routes. Faction loyalty trumped survival instinct. In the lower sections, the unofficial markets collapsed into desperate looting.
Two bodies in medical. Chemical burns eating through skin like prophecy.
This wasn’t murder’s precision. This was demonstration. Someone showing us exactly how easily they could ignite everything.
My workspace became a cage of contradictions. The data refused coherence. Different hands. Different minds.
Yet the timing synchronized perfectly.
My augmented processors churned probabilities: coordinated conspiracy, seventy-three percent. Single perpetrator with theatrical range, eighteen. Opportunistic chaos, nine.
Numbers that explained nothing. Not the encrypted transmission. Not the perfect moment chosen for maximum carnage.
I reached for the transmission’s origin point.
The attack came through my own neural ports.
The invasion began as a whisper in frequencies I shouldn’t perceive.
Then my consciousness shattered.
Visual cortex first. The workspace exploding into overlapping data streams, each demanding simultaneous attention. Fuel pressure readings. Transmission vectors. My mother’s hands kneading dough in our kitchen, the memory fragmenting into recursive loops that played forward-backward-sideways while probability matrices cascaded through the same neural pathways.
I tried to scream. My throat produced only static.
The foreign code didn’t just flood my processors. It knew where to strike. Targeting the integration points where human intuition merged with augmented analysis. Where Noor-the-child who’d volunteered to save her family met Noor-the-system who could perceive electromagnetic spectra.
Those seams began tearing.
My body convulsed. Distantly, I felt my hands clawing at the neural ports, fingers slick with something warm. Blood? Coolant? The distinction dissolved into irrelevance as my sense of self fragmented into pure information streams.
Seventeen seconds, my chronometer would later report.
Seventeen eternities of erasure.
Each microsecond threatened permanence. The final dissolution of the fragile boundary I maintained between person and processing system. I felt myself becoming data. Raw. Unanchored. A consciousness without container, spreading across networks like spilled liquid.
The agricultural district where I’d grown up. The smell of cardamom tea. My sister’s laugh. All of it flickering, corrupting, threatening to become just another dataset to be archived and forgotten.
Then silence.
I found myself on the floor, tasting copper. My augmented vision stuttered, afterimages burning across my perception like ghosts. The workspace ceiling swam into focus above me, familiar and suddenly alien.
But the worst violation waited in my memory partition.
Someone had been inside me. In the space where I kept the fragments of my humanity protected from the endless data streams. The most intimate architecture of my consciousness.
And they’d left something behind.
The message wasn’t just text. It was architecture.
I forced my trembling fingers to interface with the diagnostic port, pulling the attack code into isolated analysis. Every instinct screamed to purge it, to scrub my systems clean. But I needed to understand.
What I found made the blood in my mouth taste like ash.
The intrusion hadn’t used standard hacking protocols. It had exploited vulnerabilities in the uplift integration itself: the precise points where organic neural tissue interfaced with synthetic processors. Weaknesses that existed in the seams between consciousness and code.
These exploits weren’t documented. Not in guild technical manuals. Not in the classified augmentation research I’d glimpsed during my procedure.
Someone had discovered them through experience. Through being them.
My attacker wasn’t some corporate hacker or military intelligence officer. They were uplifted. Like me. Someone who’d learned to weaponize the same fragmentation I fought every day to prevent.
They knew exactly how to unmake me because they understood what held me together.
And they were here. On this depot. Watching.
The realization crystallized into something worse than fear: isolation.
I couldn’t report this. Not to Guild administration, who’d see their expensive investment compromised. Not to military oversight, who’d weaponize the vulnerability themselves. Not even to Salma, who’d just been attacked for knowing too little.
My augmented processors spun up threat matrices, trust algorithms, probability cascades. Thousands of scenarios branching through synthetic synapses. Every calculation reached the same conclusion: involving anyone else painted a target on them.
But my human gut, that fragment of consciousness I fought so hard to preserve, whispered something my implants couldn’t quantify: This is exactly what they want.
Isolated. Afraid. Paralyzed by the very augmentation that defined me.
The investigation meant to prove my worth had become the weapon pointed at my throat.
The numbers scrolled through my consciousness unbidden: trust coefficients dropping below operational thresholds, vulnerability exposure exceeding acceptable parameters. My augmented mind wanted to quantify the unquantifiable: how do you measure the risk of ceasing to exist as yourself?
But beneath the data streams, my human core recognized the trap. Fear was the weapon. Silence was the kill shot.
The data architecture of my violation spreads through my consciousness like a three-dimensional schematic. They’d mapped every neural pathway, catalogued each memory partition, identified the precise frequencies that would shatter the fragile integration between flesh and silicon. I could feel their phantom presence in the spaces between my thoughts: a blueprint of my own destruction, elegant and terrifying. They’d turned me into a weapon aimed at myself.
The encryption analysis spreads across my visual cortex like a constellation of betrayal. Each data packet dissects itself at my neural command, revealing layers of misdirection sophisticated enough to fool standard security protocols but transparent to my augmented perception. The messages to Salma aren’t just threats. They’re architectural masterpieces of psychological warfare.
I can see the routing paths branching through the depot’s communication infrastructure, each hop carefully chosen to implicate Faridah while obscuring the true origin. The packets traveled through her systems, yes, but the timestamps are wrong by microseconds: imperceptible to baseline human analysis, glaring as a klaxon to my enhanced processing. Someone routed these messages through the communications hub, using Faridah’s equipment as camouflage.
But the encryption signature makes my neural implants pulse with recognition. Military-grade, specifically Stellar Defense Corps tactical protocols from fifteen years ago. The algorithms are outdated by current standards, replaced by newer systems after a security breach. Only someone who’d been trained in that era would still default to these particular encryption patterns. Only someone whose prosthetic might still carry those protocols in its tactical interface subroutines.
The surveillance data embedded in the threats turns my stomach: the human part that still remembers what violation feels like. Salma’s nephew walks home from school at 1530 hours. Her sister’s dialysis appointments are Tuesdays and Fridays. Their housing unit is Block 7, Level 3, Unit 42. Information that exists only in colonial administrative databases, theoretically air-gapped from depot networks.
Theoretically.
I pull the access logs, watching my augmented consciousness parse years of connection attempts in seconds. There, buried in routine system maintenance records, a series of unauthorized queries to colonial networks, masked as diagnostic checks. The access codes are military override credentials.
Someone with tactical training, outdated encryption protocols, and the authority to access restricted systems. Someone who knows exactly how to weaponize information.
Someone who’s been planning this for a very long time.
The data streams fracture against something older than my augmentation: memory of my mother’s hands, worn like Salma’s, counting coins that would never be enough. The tactical analysis scrolls through my visual cortex (witness testimony, evidentiary value, probability matrices) but my human core rejects every calculation.
I watch Salma’s fingers tremble on a torque wrench she’s held steady through a thousand repairs. She’s already ghost-pale, already defeated. My augmented systems flag this as suboptimal resource allocation. Protecting one family versus exposing systemic corruption. The math is simple.
The math is wrong.
“I can reroute your remittances through encrypted channels,” I hear myself say, my voice rough with disuse. “Make your family invisible in the colonial databases. It’ll take me four hours.”
Salma looks up, and I see the same desperate hope I must have worn when the Guild offered me uplift. When they promised my family’s debt would disappear if I’d just let them rewire my brain.
“Why?” she whispers.
Because I remember being human. Because some equations matter more than efficiency.
Because if I lose this, I lose everything the augmentation hasn’t already taken.
The encryption protocols snap into place like muscle memory, each keystroke a prayer I don’t believe in anymore. My augmented vision overlays Salma’s colonial file with cascading green confirmations: audit status: compliant, housing designation: protected, remittance routing: secured through seventeen shell accounts the auditors will never untangle.
Four hours becomes three. Becomes two.
The satisfaction lasts exactly ninety-seven seconds before my implants scream warning: someone’s already inside the files I just sealed. Not breaking in. Waiting.
My human gut clenches while my augmented cortex calculates probabilities I don’t want to see. The protection I built isn’t a shield: it’s a beacon. I’ve just told whoever’s orchestrating this exactly which witness matters most.
And they have access that crosses every factional boundary on this station.
The schematic burns in my neural storage like evidence of my own stupidity. Salma’s gone: vanished into the depot’s shadows with the survival instincts of someone who’s learned when to cut losses. Can’t blame her.
But her engineer’s precision haunts me: those servo configurations, the custom interface ports. Military-grade prosthetic, civilian modifications. The list of people with access to both technologies is short.
Dangerously short.
The schematic isn’t just evidence. It’s a death sentence I’m carrying in my neural storage. Every system I touch to analyze it leaves traces, breadcrumbs for whoever’s watching. My augmented consciousness wants to cross-reference against military procurement databases, but my human instinct knows better.
Some questions answer themselves by who kills you for asking them.
I need allies. Real ones, not data streams.
The neural interface chamber locks behind me with a magnetic click that reverberates through my augmented senses like a prison door. I need the isolation, the electromagnetic shielding here blocks most surveillance, but it also traps me alone with data that wants to tear my consciousness apart.
I spread the conflicting streams across my internal architecture. Khalid’s credentials: Training facility, Section 4-Alpha, timestamp 18:[^47]:22. His prosthetic signature: Maintenance terminal 7-Gamma-12, timestamp 18:[^47]:22. The same second. Impossible.
My enhanced processing runs probability matrices, searching for the algorithmic fingerprints of falsification. Timestamp manipulation leaves traces. Clock drift inconsistencies, hash mismatches, compression artifacts. I find nothing. The data is clean. Too clean.
My human intuition knows what my augmented consciousness refuses to accept: I’m being shown exactly what someone wants me to see.
I route a secure request through three proxy channels for the training exercise recordings. The access request propagates through the system. I watch it ping authentication servers, queue for retrieval, begin the transfer protocol,
Then the metadata starts rewriting itself.
Not corrupting. Rewriting.
Timestamps shift forward by microseconds, then seconds. Checksums recalculate in real-time, validating themselves even as the underlying data dissolves. File blocks turn to noise in a cascade pattern that’s almost elegant. This isn’t system failure. This is surgical destruction.
Someone is watching my investigation. Not through surveillance cameras or communication taps: they’re inside the network itself, monitoring data access patterns, destroying evidence the moment I reach for it.
The neural feedback hits like ice water in my synapses. My augmented consciousness fragments, trying to process the implications while my human fear screams the obvious truth:
Whoever killed Amira has capabilities that match or exceed my own.
And they know I’m getting close.
I pull the servo configuration data through my neural interface, letting the technical specifications overlay Salma’s sketch in my augmented vision. The match is precise. Too precise. Khalid’s prosthetic has custom modifications that shouldn’t exist in standard military hardware.
The depot maintenance logs unfold across my consciousness like contaminated evidence. Three other prosthetics. Same interface upgrades. Same unauthorized technician: Guild Contractor #7734-J. The work orders exist in that bureaucratic twilight where everything is technically legitimate but fundamentally wrong.
I trace the contractor credentials and hit the wall immediately. Form 447-B references Authorization 882-C which requires Form 447-B for validation. A perfect loop. Someone with architectural-level system access built this recursive trap, knowing exactly how guild bureaucracy could swallow an investigation.
My human intuition screams what my augmented processing confirms through probability analysis: these aren’t separate prosthetics. They’re identical interface signatures, cloned and distributed. Khalid’s arm exists in multiple places simultaneously.
The killer didn’t need to be in two places at once.
They just needed everyone to think Khalid’s prosthetic was.
I need verification beyond corrupted data streams. My augmented consciousness reaches backward through the depot’s ambient electromagnetic noise. The ghost signatures that surveillance systems leave in their wake. Not official footage. The resonance patterns of security sensors, the thermal bloom of door mechanisms, the microscopic fluctuations in power distribution that map human movement.
Khalid appears exactly where he claimed. His biosignature pulses through the training facility’s sensor grid, movement patterns matching his distinctive gait, compensating for the prosthetic’s weight distribution. The timeline holds.
Then my enhanced perception catches it: negative space in the diplomatic suite’s environmental data. Not a malfunction. A perfectly shaped absence where someone moved through blind spots with surgical precision. Military training. Someone who knew exactly which sensors to avoid, which angles left no electromagnetic shadow.
The killer wasn’t invisible.
They were expected.
The network whispers with another presence. Someone else hunting through corrupted data streams, pulling files moments before they dissolve. Military-grade counter-surveillance protocols, but my augmented perception catches the pattern: prosthetic modification queries, training logs, timeline reconstruction.
They’re investigating Khalid too.
I trace their access point. Trip something.
Text floods my neural interface, unencrypted and clean: “Stop looking at Khalid. You’re being aimed.”
The priority-alpha clearance burns through my neural pathways like acid. I didn’t request this. Can’t revoke it. Every system I’ve touched in the last hour lights up red: unauthorized access, security breach, data theft.
My augmented consciousness fragments under the cascade: human panic, machine logic, both screaming trap.
Security boots echo in the corridor. The merchant guild’s already drafting charges. Military encryption locks me out of my own investigation files.
Someone just turned me into evidence of conspiracy.
I watch the alibi construct itself in real-time across seventeen data streams, each one feeding into my augmented consciousness like poison dressed as proof.
Khalid stands in the security office with that rigid military bearing, his prosthetic arm motionless at his side: a calculated stillness that my human intuition reads as performance but my machine logic can’t quantify. His commanding officer, a woman with three decades of service and a reputation for absolute integrity, presents the training logs with bureaucratic precision. Timestamps synchronized across four independent systems. Biometric confirmation. Equipment checkout records.
Three junior officers testify in sequence. Their accounts align too perfectly. Not the messy overlap of genuine memory, but the clean edges of rehearsed truth. Or am I seeing conspiracy in competence? My neural implants fracture trying to process both possibilities simultaneously.
The surveillance footage plays across my visual cortex. Training Bay 7, low resolution but adequate. Khalid’s distinctive silhouette moving through close-quarters drills, the characteristic gleam of his prosthetic catching the overhead lights as he demonstrates a disarm sequence. The timestamp burns in the corner: 22:[^47]:33 to 23:[^15]:09.
Amira died at 23:[^02].
I run the footage through enhancement algorithms, searching for the telltale artifacts of manipulation. Frame rate inconsistencies, lighting anomalies, shadow angle discrepancies. My augmented perception strips the image down to component pixels, analyzes compression patterns, traces the metadata chain back through the security system’s nested archives.
Everything holds.
The human part of me wants to scream that this is too convenient, too clean. The machine part catalogs probabilities: 73% chance the footage is genuine, 89% chance the witnesses believe their own testimony, 94% chance I’m constructing patterns from noise because I need someone to be guilty.
The security chief crosses his arms, waiting for my response. Behind him, Khalid’s expression remains neutral. But something flickers in his eyes when our gazes meet.
Recognition? Satisfaction? Or just my fragmenting consciousness projecting meaning onto nothing?
The forensic report cascades through my consciousness in waves of disintegrating certainty.
I watch the technician’s fingers move across her data-slate, each gesture dismantling my investigation with clinical precision. The prosthetic signature, that distinctive electromagnetic pattern I’d traced through the fuel line access logs, dissolves into statistical noise. She pulls up three technical manuals, all publicly archived, all containing detailed schematics of military-grade prosthetics. Override protocols included.
“Anyone with basic systems training could spoof this,” she says, not unkindly. “The signature’s distinctive, but not unique.”
My augmented processing tries to recalculate probability matrices, but the numbers fragment. The synthetic fibers that seemed so damning? Standard-issue uniform material. Fifty-three personnel wear identical fabric. The encryption pattern? Four different security protocols use similar architectures.
I feel my human intuition screaming against the data, insisting that context matters, that the constellation of evidence still points somewhere. But my machine logic catalogs each alternative explanation with merciless objectivity: plausible, probable, sufficient.
The merchant guild representative’s expression shifts from expectation to disappointment. I’ve built them a case from smoke and desperation.
Everything I thought I knew collapses into maybe.
The search unfolds with methodical brutality. Security personnel strip Khalid’s quarters to bare metal while he stands rigid, arms crossed, radiating contempt that feels almost rehearsed.
They find exactly what you’d expect: training materials organized by tactical doctrine, personal effects arranged with parade-ground precision, correspondence with former unit members discussing retirement postings. A small collection of commendation certificates, each one a reminder of what he used to be. No planning documents. No surveillance logs on Amira. No bypass tools beyond his legitimate instructor credentials.
His data-slate yields only lesson plans and tactical assessments, dry, professional, utterly mundane.
The prosthetic technician connects her diagnostic rig to his arm. I watch the data stream through my implants, searching for gaps, deletions, anything suspicious. But the memory logs show only routine training applications and calibration adjustments. No fuel line interfaces. No diplomatic quarter access codes.
Nothing.
The absence of evidence becomes its own kind of proof.
Seven witnesses. Seven separate accounts that interlock like precision machinery.
I process their testimonies through every analytical filter my augmented consciousness possesses: linguistic stress patterns, temporal consistency algorithms, cross-referenced movement data. My implants burn hot searching for the seams, the coordinated lies.
But there’s nothing. Just people remembering an instructor they respect, moving through corridors, existing in spaces that aren’t crime scenes.
The timeline I built fractures. Khalid was elsewhere. Provably, multiply, impossibly elsewhere.
The security chief’s voice cuts through the administrative hub like a blade through vacuum. Each forensic finding lands with bureaucratic precision. Circumstantial fibers, technically unsound prosthetic evidence, contradicted timelines, speculative motives.
A merchant administrator rises, diplomatic venom wrapped in silk: “Perhaps enhanced pattern recognition creates connections where none exist. Machine logic without human judgment.”
Military liaisons nod. United against me.
Khalid watches from the back row, expression carved from stone, as my reputation atomizes into recycled air.
The data flows through me in cascading torrents, each stream splitting into tributaries of possibility. I’ve been sitting here for six hours, or maybe twelve, time fragments differently when you’re processing across multiple consciousness threads, reconstructing everything from the molecular level up.
The synthetic fiber. I trace it backward through supply manifests, cross-referencing procurement records with delivery schedules. Seventeen distinct chains of custody. The material itself is ubiquitous: standard-grade industrial filament used in everything from cargo netting to environmental suit repairs. My enhanced pattern recognition highlights correlations, purchase spikes, delivery anomalies, inventory discrepancies, but correlation isn’t causation. It’s noise pretending to be signal.
The terminal access logs sprawl across my visual cortex in branching timelines. I simulate forty-three different spoofing methodologies, each technically feasible. Ghost credentials, mirrored authentication tokens, temporal injection attacks, quantum entanglement exploits. My augmented mind maps the probability distributions with mathematical precision: 23.7% likelihood of internal compromise, 31.4% external intrusion, 44.9% authorized access with falsified timestamps. The numbers are beautiful, crystalline, utterly useless.
The prosthetic arm signature haunts me most. I’ve catalogued twelve military-grade models currently aboard the depot, each capable of generating the electromagnetic profile recorded at the scene. I build decision trees accounting for maintenance records, user behavioral patterns, spatial-temporal positioning data. The analysis branches into thousands of scenarios per second, my consciousness fragmenting to explore each possibility simultaneously.
But somewhere in this exponential explosion of data, I’ve lost the thread. Every conclusion I reach feels technically immaculate yet fundamentally hollow: like equations that balance perfectly but describe nothing real. I’m drowning in information, my enhanced cognition processing everything and understanding nothing.
The reports I’ve drafted pile up in my neural buffer. Sixteen versions, each more hedged and conditional than the last. Each one reads like an accusation without conviction, evidence without meaning.
I don’t know what truth looks like anymore.
The guild delegation materializes in my quarters like a coordinated data packet: three administrators in uniforms pressed sharp enough to cut. They don’t ask permission to enter.
“We have concerns,” the lead administrator says, sliding a data-slate across my work surface. My implants automatically parse the document: uplift certification protocols, performance review clauses, mandatory psychological evaluation triggers. “About cognitive coherence. Pattern recognition anomalies.”
The words hang in the recycled air, clinical and cutting.
“Your investigation has produced seventeen draft reports,” another adds. “Each contradicting the previous. This suggests augmentation instability.”
They don’t say malfunction. They don’t have to.
The third leans forward, voice dropping to something almost sympathetic. “The guild invested considerable resources in your enhancement, Noor. We need this resolved: cleanly. Without implicating operational negligence or providing ammunition for military expansion.”
My consciousness splinters across their micro-expressions, parsing threat probability matrices, but the conclusion is singular: produce their truth, or lose everything. The augmentation that expanded my mind, the procedure that saved my family from debt-slavery, the identity I’ve built across these neural pathways. All conditional on compliance.
They leave the data-slate. The clauses glow accusingly in my peripheral vision.
The observation lounge floats in manufactured silence, Zahir’s storms churning beyond reinforced glass. Khalid stands with parade-ground precision, his prosthetic arm catching light from the gas giant’s amber chaos.
“Augmentation changes us,” he says, tone measured like a training lecture. “My arm processes tactical data I never asked for. Threat assessments. Structural vulnerabilities.” His servo joints whisper as he gestures toward the viewport. “You see patterns everywhere now, don’t you? Sometimes they’re real. Sometimes they’re artifacts of processing.”
He mentions former students in military intelligence. Reviews of augmented personnel experiencing “cognitive drift.” All perfectly casual.
“The mind needs anchors, Noor. Human judgment, not just data streams.” His eyes hold mine. “Before conclusions become… problematic.”
The storms outside mirror the pressure building in my neural pathways.
The administrator’s face flickers in the maintenance shaft’s emergency lighting. No cameras here, no official record. She smells like recycled air and exhaustion.
“Environmental monitoring,” she says, not meeting my augmented gaze. “Clean work. Quiet.”
The subtext scrolls across my consciousness in seventeen languages: disappear or be disappeared.
My neural implants catalog her elevated heart rate, micro-expressions of guilt and fear. She’s protecting the depot. Or herself. The data can’t tell me which.
“Twenty-four hours,” she adds, already turning away.
The messages start three hours after the administrator’s ultimatum. First, a text-only transmission through seventeen proxy servers: Your family’s debt was never fully paid. Interesting leverage.
Then surveillance stills. Me in the shower, neural ports exposed. Me sleeping, vulnerable.
Then the bribe: enough credit to disappear forever, coordinates for a clean identity.
My consciousness fragments across threat-assessment matrices while my hands shake like baseline human terror.
The coordination is elegant in its brutality. I can see the architecture of it through seventeen layers of metadata: the messages originated from different terminals but were composed in the same six-minute window, linguistic analysis suggesting a single author using faction-specific vocabularies. My augmented consciousness maps the pattern instantly: three separate bureaucratic attacks, perfectly timed to create decision paralysis.
The Merchant Guild summons arrives first, flagged priority-alpha in my neural buffer. They want me in Compliance Section at 1400 hours to “discuss investigative protocols and cognitive assessment standards.” The language is sterile, but I parse the subtext through semantic analysis: they’re questioning whether my uplift took properly, whether the procedure that was supposed to make me more capable actually broke something essential.
Military Intelligence follows at 1407. Seven minutes later, close enough to seem coincidental to baseline perception. They require my presence at 1415 for a “security briefing regarding unauthorized investigation of decorated personnel.” The threat is less subtle here. Khalid’s commendations are listed in the metadata, each one a reminder of his value versus mine.
Depot Administration’s summons hits at 1423, scheduling my “mandatory performance review” for 1430. The timing makes compliance with all three impossible. I’d need to be in three sections simultaneously: and even my enhanced consciousness can’t manage that particular trick.
My processors calculate probability matrices automatically: 0.003% chance this is random convergence. Someone orchestrated this. Someone with access to all three bureaucratic systems, someone who understands how to weaponize procedure itself.
The elegant cruelty is that fighting any single summons validates the others. Miss the guild meeting, prove I’m cognitively compromised. Skip Military Intelligence, confirm I’m biased against decorated personnel. Ignore Administration, demonstrate I can’t handle basic job requirements.
They’ve turned bureaucracy into a three-sided vise, and I’m caught in the center with nowhere to move.
The Administrative summons arrives with bureaucratic precision at 0845, and it’s the quietest of the three attacks. Which makes it the most dangerous. Deputy Director Osman doesn’t reference uplift protocols or military valor. She simply notes “performance concerns regarding case resolution efficiency” and suggests “alternative assignment opportunities better suited to your skill set.”
Waste recycling systems. She doesn’t say it explicitly, but the implication threads through every carefully neutral phrase. My processors parse the subtext: they want me monitoring sewage flows and atmospheric scrubbers, interfacing with systems that can’t talk back, where my augmented consciousness can’t cause political problems.
The cruelty is in the gentleness. No accusations, no threats: just a concerned administrator suggesting I might be “happier” somewhere less complex. Somewhere my “unique capabilities” won’t be “strained by interpersonal variables.”
I stand in the corridor between three impossible appointments, my neural implants cycling through response scenarios. Every option leads to professional annihilation. They’ve made me Schrödinger’s investigator. Simultaneously incompetent, biased, and ineffective until I choose which failure to embody.
My hands are still shaking. I notice because seventeen diagnostic subroutines flag the anomaly simultaneously.
Military intimidation: Commander Yussef materializes from a maintenance junction like he’s been waiting. Two security personnel bracket him, hands resting on sidearms. Professional. Practiced.
“Instructor Rashid has served with distinction for thirty years.” His voice carries that parade-ground authority that makes spines straighten involuntarily. “These allegations damage morale. Undermine military readiness.”
He doesn’t threaten. Doesn’t need to. The implication saturates the recycled air between us: push this investigation and become an enemy of the Stellar Defense Corps. My threat assessment algorithms spike. Seventeen percent probability of physical confrontation, forty-three percent of career-ending formal complaint.
But my human intuition, that fragment of pre-uplift consciousness still flickering somewhere in the neural architecture, recognizes something deeper in Yussef’s eyes. Genuine belief. He thinks protecting Khalid serves the greater good.
Which makes him infinitely more dangerous than a simple corrupt officer.
Chen’s message arrives through official channels, each word a nail sealing a coffin. “Reassignment to waste reclamation systems. Effective immediately upon case closure. Your analytical capabilities would serve atmospheric monitoring protocols.”
Exile dressed as optimization. My processors translate the subtext instantly: choose silence or spend the next decade interfacing with sewage processors, watching my augmented consciousness slowly atrophy counting particulate matter in recycled air.
The respect I earned, the identity I fought to maintain: evaporating because truth costs more than the depot can afford.
The messages keep coming even after I mute official channels. They find me through maintenance protocols, emergency broadcasts, even the depot’s environmental monitoring system. Forty-seven voices screaming in my neural buffer, each one precisely calibrated to exploit a different vulnerability. The colonists’ pleas trigger my protective subroutines. The anonymous evidence activates my analytical cascades. But the footage of my family, grainy, innocuous, just them walking to market, that reaches something my processors can’t firewall: the small, terrified human buried beneath all these augmentations.
The trembling doesn’t stop when I pull my hands away from the interface ports. My fingers twitch with phantom data streams, muscle memory reaching for connections that aren’t there anymore. Three hours. Three hours of perfect immersion, my consciousness spread across the depot’s entire network like oil on water. I can still feel the weight of it: surveillance logs from forty-seven different camera arrays, cross-referenced with personnel movement patterns, filtered through behavioral analysis subroutines that my augmented cortex runs automatically now, like breathing. Except I don’t breathe automatically anymore. I have to remember to do it, the way baseline humans have to remember encryption keys.
The data center hums around me, servers processing their endless calculations with more clarity than I can muster. Every lead I followed branched into three contradictory conclusions. Khalid’s security override logs place him near Section 7-Gamma, but so do maintenance schedules for seventeen other personnel. Faridah’s communication intercepts show suspicious patterns, but they also show her trying desperately to hide from something. Predator or prey, the data won’t say. Even Amira’s encrypted documents could be evidence or leverage or simple diplomatic insurance.
My processors tagged forty-three thousand anomalies in the past week alone. Forty-three thousand deviations from normal patterns in an overcrowded station where nothing is normal anymore. I’ve been treating this like a corrupted database, searching for the syntax error that will make everything compile cleanly.
But murders aren’t syntax errors.
The realization arrives not as processed information but as nausea, physical and undeniable. I’ve been analyzing this crime the way my implants analyze power fluctuations: measuring amplitude and frequency while ignoring that someone died afraid, that someone else chose to kill, that human motivation doesn’t reduce to elegant algorithms no matter how much processing power I throw at it.
I catch my reflection in the polished curve of a fuel pressure gauge, distorted, stretched across convex metal. The implants pulse beneath my temples, blue-white bioluminescence keeping time with my elevated heart rate. I look like something designed rather than born. Something assembled in a medical facility’s sterile light, optimized for function, stripped of whatever made me me.
My processors retrieve a pre-uplift photograph unbidden: twenty-three years old, standing in my mother’s kitchen, flour on my hands, laughing at something my sister said. The image is tagged with metadata (date, location, facial recognition markers) but the feeling is gone. That person in the photograph understood people without running behavioral analysis subroutines. Read a room through instinct rather than electromagnetic field mapping. Would have solved this investigation by talking to suspects like they were human beings instead of data sources to be optimized.
The augmentation gave me the ability to interface with every system on this depot. To process information streams that would overwhelm a baseline human consciousness. To see patterns invisible to unenhanced perception.
It blinded me to everything that actually matters.
The corridors swallow me: two thousand bodies compressed into spaces meant for five hundred. My enhanced proprioception maps every obstacle, plots optimal paths through the chaos while my conscious mind drowns in recursive failure loops. A maintenance worker flattens himself against a bulkhead as I pass, fear-sweat triggering olfactory alerts I can’t disable. His pupils dilate 2.[^3] millimeters. Heart rate: elevated. The data flows but means nothing.
A child points at my temples, fascinated by the bioluminescence. “Mama, look,” Her mother yanks her away, whispers something my auditory enhancement catches clearly: dangerous. My processors catalog the interaction, add it to behavioral databases, quantify my isolation with statistical precision.
I’m haunting my own investigation. Present in every system, absent from every human truth. The networks know me. The people don’t.
The welding torch’s three-pulse rhythm pulls me through the corridors like a lifeline. My neural implants map Salma’s exact position (Section 7-Gamma, junction 14) but for once the data feels secondary to something rawer: need.
She’s crouched inside an access panel, arc-light painting her weathered face in stuttering blue. Doesn’t look up when my shadow falls across her workspace. Just keeps working, that methodical competence I’ve forgotten how to possess.
I hover at the threshold, paralyzed between approach protocols and genuine human uncertainty.
“Stop thinking like a computer,” Salma continues, setting down her tools with deliberate finality. “Who benefits if this place tears itself apart?”
The question lands different than data. Not information to process: a blade cutting through my recursive analysis loops. I watch her oil-stained fingers trace the burned relay’s failure point, and something in my fragmented memory recognizes the gesture: my mother’s hands, testing bread dough. Human knowledge, earned through touch.
The warmth of her touch lingers on my wrist like a ghost signal my processors keep trying to decode. But it’s not data: it’s something my pre-uplift self would have understood instantly, something the procedure buried under layers of enhanced perception. Connection. Trust. The simple human grammar of one person reaching across the void to another.
“I’m still in here,” I repeat, testing the words. My voice sounds different to my own ears. Less like a system report, more like a question I’m actually asking. The neural implants pulse with their usual rhythm, but for once I’m not drowning in their input. I’m here, in this moment, with Salma’s oil-stained hands and the smell of welding flux and the weight of her attention.
She’s watching me with those sharp colonist eyes, the ones that learned to read rock faces and equipment failures and the lies people tell themselves. “You felt something when I touched you,” she says. Not a question. “Not just nerve signals and temperature differentials.”
“Fear,” I admit. The word costs something. “That I’ve lost the ability to understand it. That the uplift gave me everything except the one thing I needed.”
Salma nods slowly, like I’ve finally said something worth hearing. She holds up the burned relay again, and this time I see it differently. Not as a component failure in my database, but as evidence of intention. Someone forced too much current through it. Someone chose to break it this way.
“Why would someone do that?” I ask, and the question feels different now. Not a search query. A genuine wondering about human motivation, human choice, human desperation.
“Now you’re asking the right question,” Salma says.
The question hangs between us like a circuit waiting to close. Salma’s expression shifts. Not much, just a tightening around the eyes that my implants flag as defensive posture, but that my human memory recognizes as something more complicated. Shame, maybe. Or the particular wariness of someone who’s survived by knowing when to look away.
“Both,” she says finally, and the honesty in it feels like another kind of welding, fusing truth to trust. “I saw someone in a military instructor’s uniform. Older man, prosthetic arm. He was accessing a maintenance panel he had no business touching.” She picks up her torch again, not lighting it, just holding it like a talisman. “But I’m a colonist with an expired work visa and unauthorized modifications to my exosuit. I report a decorated military officer for suspicious behavior, who do you think security believes?”
I feel the weight of that calculation, the algebra of survival that has nothing to do with my enhanced processing. It’s the math my family did before I volunteered for uplift. Which debts to pay, which authorities to avoid, which risks were worth taking.
The realization cascades through my neural architecture like a systems failure in reverse. Suddenly everything connects. Not through data correlation but through understanding the weight of consequences, the way power flows through this depot like fuel through pipes. Salma didn’t just see something; she performed the same risk assessment I’ve been running on every lead, every witness, every fragment of evidence. The difference is she calculated with her survival, while I’ve been calculating with abstract variables.
“Military prosthetic signatures,” I repeat, and my implants are already cross-referencing maintenance logs, personnel manifests, servo joint acoustic profiles. But I force myself to stay present, to hear what she’s actually telling me. “You recognized the equipment. That’s not just seeing: that’s knowing.”
She hesitates, calculating risk even now. Then: “Both. I’ve got unauthorized modifications throughout this depot: one audit destroys me.” Her gaze steadies, seeing past my implants to whatever humanity remains. “But I recognized military-grade prosthetic acoustics. Servo joints from combat equipment. Six months repairing them during the Helion conflicts taught me that.” She doesn’t need to finish. I understand: reporting military personnel would’ve crushed her between the same faction tensions paralyzing my investigation.
The shift feels tectonic. My processing architecture pivoting from pure correlation to narrative causation. Military prosthetic acoustics. Section 7-Gamma tampering. Not random variables but chapters in someone’s story. I query personnel files through this new lens: not everyone, but military instructors with combat prosthetics. One name surfaces. Cross-referenced with fifteen-year-old incident reports from this exact section, the data transforms into tragedy. An explosion, negligence findings, merchant guild culpability never prosecuted.
The realization doesn’t arrive as data. It arrives as nausea. My neural implants process trauma differently than organic minds, translating emotional resonance into electromagnetic signatures, but the effect is the same. I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been reading this entire investigation like a machine, correlating variables without understanding the weight they carry in flesh and memory.
I pull the historical files again, but this time I don’t just scan them. The incident report from Section 7-Gamma fifteen years ago isn’t background noise. It’s the origin point. Three colonist workers dead in the initial explosion. Five injured, including one Khalid Rashid, military liaison, who lost his left arm when a fuel coupling failed during a merchant guild maintenance window. The safety violations were documented, investigated, and ultimately buried under jurisdictional disputes between military and merchant authorities. No prosecutions. No accountability. Just compensation payments and revised protocols that everyone knew wouldn’t be enforced.
I cross-reference Khalid’s medical records: the ones I can access without triggering security flags. The prosthetic he received wasn’t standard medical grade. It was military tactical, the kind issued to personnel expected to return to combat operations. But he never did. Instead, he was reassigned to training duties, teaching young officers about depot security protocols in the very station where his body was broken by merchant negligence.
The bitterness I’d catalogued as general resentment suddenly has texture, weight, specificity. This wasn’t ideological opposition to merchant expansion. This was a man whose nervous system still fired phantom pain signals from an arm that didn’t exist, who walked past Section 7-Gamma every day and remembered the moment his body learned that merchant profits mattered more than safety protocols.
Someone who would do anything to prevent it from happening again.
The connections cascade faster than conscious thought, my augmented processing translating pattern recognition into narrative comprehension. Khalid’s prosthetic wasn’t just medical necessity. It was a weapon he carried into every interaction, servo joints clicking with each gesture like a metronome counting the cost of merchant negligence. His regular inspections of Section 7-Gamma weren’t security diligence. They were vigils at the altar of his trauma.
I map his movements over the past month against the depot’s architecture. Every route passes through or near 7-Gamma. Every shift rotation positions him where he can see the repaired bulkheads, the replaced fuel couplings, the cosmetic fixes that covered institutional failure. The security vulnerabilities he taught his students weren’t abstract scenarios. They were the exact weaknesses that had killed three people and destroyed his body.
The fuel diversions, the access panel tampering Salma witnessed, the precise timing of Amira’s meeting. None of it was opportunistic. It was choreographed by someone who’d spent fifteen years studying how to prevent another explosion, even if prevention required creating a smaller, more controlled catastrophe first.
The data crystallizes into terrible clarity. Amira’s encrypted documents weren’t leverage. They were evidence of systematic safety violations, cost-cutting measures that prioritized profit margins over containment protocols. The same negligence that had vaporized three technicians and Khalid’s arm fifteen years ago, now codified into contractual language and presented as “operational efficiency.”
My augmented consciousness traces the logic with mechanical precision, but it’s my fragmented human memory that understands the horror. Khalid saw the explosion coming again, written in legal terminology and diplomatic seals. He’d tried official channels, I find his ignored reports buried in military archives. When procedure failed, he became the prevention mechanism himself.
Murder as prophylaxis. Violence as damage control.
The mathematics are sound. The morality is monstrous.
The contract files bloom across my neural interface. Not numbers now, but narrative. Every clause Amira negotiated stripped another safety redundancy, every efficiency measure deferred another maintenance cycle. Khalid would have recognized the language; he’d bled because of it.
To him, Amira wasn’t a diplomat. She was the fuse.
And he’d learned exactly how to smother fires before they ignite.
The data streams converge into terrible clarity. Khalid hadn’t just killed Amira: he’d staged an execution in the exact location where merchant negligence had maimed him, using the same chemical shortcuts that had nearly killed him before. Every detail was a message written in trauma: This is what you do. This is what you cost. This is where it ends.
My augmented mind sees the pattern perfectly now. His military precision hadn’t overcome his pain. It had weaponized it.
The chemical signature doesn’t just match: it accuses. My neural implants parse the molecular structure in cascading layers of meaning that no baseline human could perceive. Vanadium catalyst at 0.0047 parts per million. Heavy hydrogen isotopes in a ratio that screams deliberate concentration. The fuel vapor wasn’t residue from normal operations. Someone had manufactured this specific mixture.
I pull the fifteen-year-old incident report from the archives, and my augmented consciousness experiences something uncomfortably close to nausea. The same signature. Exact. Down to the isotopic ratios that should vary with each batch of refined fuel. Khalid hadn’t just recreated the conditions that took his arm: he’d replicated them with surgical precision.
The merchant guild’s shortcuts were there in the old report: safety interlocks manually bypassed to speed up fuel transfer rates. Three crew members dead. One instructor maimed. All because someone decided protocols were suggestions and profit margins were gospel.
My implants flash with terrible understanding. This wasn’t murder. This was testimony. Khalid had turned Amira’s death into a demonstration, staging it in the same location, using the same negligent procedures, creating the same chemical fingerprint. He’d built a monument to his trauma out of her body and volatile hydrocarbons.
Every detail was evidence presented to a jury that didn’t exist. Look what they did. Look what they still do. Look what they’ll keep doing unless someone stops them.
The data streams show me his precision, his planning, his absolute conviction. But they can’t show me the moment when duty became obsession, when protection became murder, when a decorated soldier decided that preventing future negligence justified present atrocity.
My enhanced consciousness can see everything except the thing that matters: the exact second when Khalid Rashid stopped being human enough to care.
The prosthetic’s maintenance logs unfold across my consciousness in layers of damning detail. My augmented access peels back deletion attempts like translucent skin, revealing what Khalid thought he’d buried. His military-grade arm wasn’t just replacement flesh. It was a skeleton key wrapped in titanium and servo motors.
The tactical interface carried override protocols, legitimate for training scenarios. But the quantum traces tell a different story, one written in electromagnetic whispers that only my enhanced perception can hear. Practice runs in the dead of third shift. Simulated breaches that mapped every security weakness. Access attempts to Section 7-Gamma’s fuel line controls, each one carefully erased but leaving archaeological strata in the system architecture.
He’d rehearsed this murder for months, his prosthetic arm learning the depot’s vulnerabilities the way a musician learns scales. Every deleted log was a confession written in machine language. Every practice breach was premeditation made manifest.
The data shows me his method with crystalline clarity. But it can’t show me when preparation became inevitability, when capability became intent, when a man with a weapon for an arm decided that was all he needed to be.
The data-slate’s encryption dissolves beneath my neural assault like sugar in water. Amira’s documents cascade through my consciousness. Contract clauses, supply guarantees, safety protocols rendered in the bloodless language of diplomacy.
Then I see it. The military already had their fuel. Guaranteed allocations, signed and sealed months ago.
The agreement Amira died carrying would have increased safety oversight. Implemented triple-redundancy protocols. Mandated the exact safeguards designed to prevent vapor concentrations like the one that took Khalid’s arm.
She wasn’t threatening his people. She was protecting everyone.
The irony tastes like copper on my tongue, though I haven’t had working taste buds in years. My augmented mind processes it as pure information, but somewhere in the fragments of my human memory, I understand tragedy.
He killed the one person working to prevent another him.
The pattern crystallizes with terrible clarity. Khalid didn’t see murder. He saw prevention. His prosthetic’s maintenance logs reveal obsessive preparation, each deleted practice run a prayer against repetition. The military commendations weren’t decorations but chains binding him to duty. He’d transformed personal catastrophe into cosmic mission: stop the merchants before they kill again. Before they create another broken soldier. Before history’s loop closes around fresh victims. Conviction became his weapon. Trauma, his ammunition.
The data streams converge into something my augmentations never taught me to read: human certainty. Khalid’s discipline gave him method, his trauma gave him mission. He calculated trajectories not in fuel vectors but in prevented catastrophes. Every deleted practice run was rehearsal for salvation. He didn’t murder. He intervened. The most lethal equation: capability plus conviction, armored in righteousness. My processors can map his actions. Only Salma’s question helps me understand his why.
The data streams hit me like a cargo hauler at full burn. My neural implants flare hot against my temples, processing threads multiplying faster than I can consciously track. I’m standing in the central hub’s observation deck, but I’m not really seeing the viewport anymore. Instead, my augmented vision overlays three-dimensional data matrices across everything, turning the physical world translucent.
One processing stream isolates electromagnetic signatures, Khalid’s military-grade prosthetic leaves traces in the depot’s systems like bootprints in lunar dust. There. And there. Section 7-Gamma access panel, timestamp matching Salma’s witness account. The prosthetic’s power draw spikes when it interfaces with security systems, a pattern baseline humans wouldn’t notice buried in the depot’s electrical noise. But I’m not baseline anymore.
Another thread reconstructs the fuel vapor dispersion. The pattern’s too precise, too calculated. Someone who understood atmospheric flow, who’d studied how gases move through ventilation systems in rotating habitats. Someone with tactical training in chemical deployment. The vapor didn’t leak: it was positioned. Weaponized.
A third stream pulls Khalid’s service record, cross-referencing with maintenance logs. The deleted entries leave gaps like missing teeth, but the metadata remains. He accessed those systems during his off-duty hours, when the corridors were emptiest. When someone with his credentials and bearing could move unchallenged.
The streams converge with brutal clarity, and the feedback sends ice-hot pain spiking through my implants. I grip the viewport railing, knuckles white beneath translucent skin where the augmentation circuitry glows faint copper. My expanded consciousness assembles certainty from fragments, but the human part of me that part recoils.
I need confirmation. I need Salma to tell me I’m not constructing patterns from paranoia.
I need to be wrong.
I find Salma three levels down, wedged into a maintenance corridor barely wide enough for her shoulders, running diagnostics on a coolant pump that’s been threatening to fail for weeks. The air here tastes like metal and old sweat.
“Need to show you something,” I say, keeping my voice flat. Neutral.
She doesn’t look up. “On shift in forty minutes, Noor. Whatever it is,”
I project the data from my neural interface to my handheld, let the screen’s glow paint her face blue. Timestamps. Thermal signatures. The distinctive power draw pattern of a military-grade prosthetic interfacing with civilian systems.
Her calloused fingers stop moving. Just freeze there above the pump housing.
“Section 7-Gamma,” she whispers, voice dropping like air pressure before a hull breach. “Two days before Amira. I thought… he was inspecting the cadet training routes.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
She sets down her tools with careful precision. “His prosthetic hand. Moving across the access panel like he’d done it a thousand times. That efficiency, you know? And he nodded at me. That military courtesy that makes you feel like asking questions would be insubordination.”
The human part of me was hoping to be wrong.
Together we navigate to Section 7-Gamma through service passages that Salma knows like prayer verses. Routes that exist in muscle memory and whispered knowledge, invisible to official schematics. My augmented vision maps our progress through electromagnetic signatures while she reads the depot’s bones through vibration and sound.
At the access panel, she crouches low, fingers hovering millimeters above the surface. “There,” she breathes.
Microscopic scoring on the lock mechanism. The faint ozone smell of a military-grade bypass tool, sharp enough to cut through the usual fuel-and-bodies miasma. And caught in the panel seal: a single fiber, regulation gray-and-black weave.
I photograph everything through my neural interface while Salma extracts the fiber with mining-trained precision, her hands steady despite understanding settling over us like slow decompression.
The data streams converge in my consciousness like fuel lines feeding a single ignition point. I surface from the system’s depths, synapses burning cold with certainty. “He’s been planning this for weeks,” I tell Salma, my voice distant even to myself. “Every deleted log file leaves metadata shadows. His prosthetic’s military encryption is sophisticated, but it still needs to authenticate.” I pull up the phantom timestamps, watching them cascade across my vision like accusations written in light.
The data crystallizes into narrative: Khalid moving through restricted zones, his instructor credentials a skeleton key, his prosthetic arm interfacing with security nodes too seamlessly for coincidence. The fuel cache wasn’t contraband. It was positioned for maximum catastrophic potential. My augmented consciousness maps the kill zone’s geometry, recognizing military doctrine in its construction. This wasn’t murder. This was a tactical operation executed with textbook precision.
The data unfolds in my consciousness like origami in reverse: each fold revealing another layer of Khalid’s methodology. My neural implants burn cold as I process the deletion patterns, recognizing military counter-intelligence techniques I shouldn’t know but do, courtesy of whatever collective memory the uplift procedure grafted onto my brain.
“He’s good,” I murmur, more to myself than Salma. “But not good enough for someone who thinks in six dimensions simultaneously.”
The prosthetic arm’s signature is everywhere once you know how to look. Standard security logs record human biometrics, heat, pressure, electromagnetic fields. Khalid’s arm reads differently, a ghost frequency that depot systems registered but couldn’t categorize. I isolate those anomalous readings, watching them trace a path through restricted zones like breadcrumbs made of static.
Section 7-Gamma. The fuel line access panels. Then deeper. Into maintenance corridors that shouldn’t have been accessible without guild authorization codes. Codes that were entered through a tactical interface, not a standard terminal. The system logged them as legitimate, but the input method was wrong. Too fast. Too precise. Mechanical rather than biological.
I pull up the fuel cache data, overlaying it with Khalid’s reconstructed movements. The positioning isn’t random. It’s a shaped charge principle applied to volatile gas. Military doctrine from three wars ago, still taught in tactical courses. Still effective. Still lethal.
“There,” I say, highlighting a timestamp. “He interfaced directly with the fuel distribution controls. Routed the concentrated vapor through maintenance ducts to Amira’s meeting location. The system thought it was a standard pressure equalization routine.”
Salma leans closer, her calloused finger tracing the data streams reflected in my temples. “Can you prove it wasn’t?”
“I can prove the routine was initiated manually. Through a prosthetic interface. In a section where only one person has both the access and the hardware.”
The evidence converges like gravity, inevitable and crushing.
The system logs surrender their secrets reluctantly, each deleted fragment requiring me to reconstruct data from electromagnetic echoes and corrupted memory sectors. My implants process terabytes of seemingly random noise, finding patterns the way archaeologists find civilizations in pottery shards.
Khalid thought he’d erased everything. He didn’t account for someone who experiences time non-linearly in digital space.
I watch his ghost move through the depot’s infrastructure, each action leaving traces in adjacent systems he didn’t know were recording. A pressure sensor registers abnormal weight distribution. The prosthetic arm’s density different from flesh. A power junction logs a micro-spike when tactical interfaces handshake with security protocols. Thermal imaging catches the arm’s servo joints cooling after exertion, a signature distinct from human muscle fatigue.
“He moved like he owned the place,” I tell Salma, highlighting a sequence where Khalid’s credentials opened twelve restricted doors in six minutes. “Because to him, he did. Military discipline. Military precision.”
The timestamps don’t lie. Neither does physics. His digital footprint leads exactly where flesh-and-blood testimony said it would.
The hologram shimmers between us, a constellation of damning evidence suspended in recycled air. My augmented vision layers data streams over physical space. “Watch this,” I murmur, isolating the security panel interactions. The electromagnetic signatures bloom like flowers opening, each one showing the prosthetic’s tactical interface negotiating with systems designed to resist unauthorized access. Military-grade override protocols. Not hacking. Something more elegant. Something that required intimate knowledge of both the depot’s vulnerabilities and the diplomatic schedules.
Salma leans closer, her weathered face illuminated by the projection. “He knew exactly when she’d be there.”
“Down to the minute,” I confirm, tracing the convergence point. “This wasn’t improvisation. This was choreography.”
The files unspool through my neural interface. Commendations bleeding into trauma reports, valor citations shadowing sealed counseling sessions. Each prosthetic upgrade request tells a story: standard medical replacement becoming tactical augmentation becoming something that crosses the line between healing and weaponization.
“He’s been preparing for this,” I say, watching Salma’s expression shift from confusion to recognition. She’s seen this before: survivors who can’t stop fighting the disaster that already happened.
The backup archives bloom across my consciousness. Systems so old they’re invisible to modern security sweeps. Guild paranoia from decades past becomes my salvation now. Frame by frame, the footage resolves: Khalid’s silhouette unmistakable, that prosthetic arm interfacing with the access panel. His movements carry the terrible grace of absolute certainty. Thirty minutes before Amira died, he was already engineering her death with surgical precision.
The data streams through my neural pathways like ice water through veins I no longer possess in any purely biological sense. My implants flare hot enough that I can see their reflection in the terminal screen. Twin stars burning beneath translucent skin. The safety protocols aren’t just improvements. They’re a complete reimagining of fuel depot operations, designed by engineers who’d made a religion of studying disaster.
I parse the technical specifications at speeds that would give baseline humans seizures. Triple-redundant containment systems. Pressure sensors calibrated to detect failures three stages before catastrophic breach. Emergency protocols that could evacuate entire sections in under ninety seconds. The kind of engineering that gets written after too many people have died and someone finally decides to care about the pattern.
The military supply guarantees sit there in plain language, no merchant tricks or hidden clauses. Current allocation levels locked in perpetuity, with automatic escalation triggers for combat operations or emergency deployment. Khalid’s students would never go without fuel. The Stellar Defense Corps would maintain every advantage they currently possessed.
He had nothing to fear except the death of his hate.
My consciousness splinters across multiple data threads simultaneously: a sensation I still haven’t found words for, like being several people thinking in perfect parallel. One thread tracks fuel chemistry. Another maps Khalid’s movements. A third reconstructs Amira’s final hours. And beneath them all, a human fragment that still remembers what it feels like to need a single enemy to make sense of loss.
The contract would have made the depot safer. Would have prevented the very disaster that took Khalid’s arm from ever happening again. Amira died negotiating the future he should have wanted. The one where no other instructor loses limbs to merchant negligence that never actually existed.
My implants pulse with something that might be grief, if grief could be calculated in processing cycles and data correlation.
The classified files fracture across my visual cortex in layers of redacted text and reconstructed data. My hands should be trembling: would be trembling if the augmentation didn’t smooth out involuntary responses. But inside, in whatever passes for my nervous system now, something shakes.
Incident Report 7-Gamma-15. The explosion wasn’t merchant negligence. It was a shaped charge placed by Tariq Al-Fayed, a radical from the Independence Coalition who wanted the depot to tear itself apart. He succeeded in the explosion. Failed in the war. The Merchant Guild and Stellar Defense Corps buried the truth together in the one act of cooperation either faction managed that year, afraid that revealing a third party’s involvement would trigger the very bloodbath they were trying to prevent.
They saved hundreds of lives with that cover-up. And they gave Khalid a lie to bleed for.
Fifteen years of phantom pain in an arm lost to political theater. Fifteen years hating merchants for a crime committed by someone who hated them both equally. His grief became a weapon, but someone else had loaded it with the wrong ammunition and pointed it at the wrong target.
I swim through Khalid’s encrypted journals, my augmentation dissolving passwords like they’re suggestions rather than barriers. The entries read like a man watching his foundation crumble. Every successful negotiation wasn’t progress. It was betrayal of the dead. Every handshake between merchant and military wasn’t cooperation. It was amnesia, forgetting the bodies buried in Section 7-Gamma.
His students’ reports show the deterioration: lectures becoming rants, tactical scenarios morphing into revenge fantasies. He’d transformed his trauma into doctrine, taught a generation that vigilance meant suspicion, that safety required separation. Amira’s neutrality wasn’t diplomacy to him. It was collaboration with the enemy who’d maimed him. Her death wasn’t murder in his mind. It was amputation. Cutting away infected tissue before it poisoned the whole body.
I overlay the sabotage timeline against Khalid’s psychological evaluations, watching the correlation crystallize in my neural space. Each diplomatic breakthrough triggered escalation. Not random chaos, but surgical strikes against reconciliation itself. Three years of calculated disruption, each incident calibrated to wound without killing, to justify his narrative. Until Amira’s documents threatened to collapse the entire architecture of his grief. He couldn’t let peace prove his suffering meaningless.
I process the tragedy in parallel streams. The sabotage files, psychological profiles, fifteen years of manufactured hatred. My implants pulse with something the data can’t quantify: grief for what Khalid could have been. He murdered reconciliation itself, chose comfortable rage over devastating truth. The documents would have shattered his identity, proven his sacrifice meaningless. So he became the monster he imagined fighting, preserving coherence through blood.
I let the data speak through me, my consciousness fragmenting across seventeen analytical threads while maintaining the performance of singular presence. The screens bloom with overlapping transparencies. Security logs, access timestamps, prosthetic interface handshakes with depot systems.
“The killer needed three things.” My voice carries the flat affect of processed certainty, though beneath it something human and horrified watches Khalid’s face remain carved from stone. “Knowledge of fuel chemistry. Access to restricted systems. And motive.”
I gesture and the screens cascade through chemical formulae. The spacer cant falls away; I speak in the precise language of molecular bonds and vapor pressures. “This concentration doesn’t occur naturally in our refining process. Someone extracted and weaponized it. Someone who understood exactly how our safety protocols would fail to detect it in diplomatic quarters.”
My implants catch the electromagnetic signature of Khalid’s prosthetic arm cycling through defensive subroutines. He’s calculating exit vectors, threat assessments. The tactical interface is already mapping the room.
“The security overrides required military-grade authorization.” I pull up the access logs, watching them materialize in the air between us. “But more than that. They required someone who’d studied our vulnerabilities. Someone who’d taught others how to exploit them.”
The training schedules appear next, cross-referenced with the incident timeline. Every class Khalid conducted on tactical infiltration, followed within days by a breach matching those exact techniques. I’m building a cage of data around him, each fact another bar.
“And motive.” I pause, letting the word hang in the recycled air. “That required someone who believed they were protecting something. Someone who’d already lost everything to merchant negligence and couldn’t bear to lose again.”
The explosion report from fifteen years ago fills every screen. Khalid’s name. His lost arm. The merchant guild’s cleared investigation.
His prosthetic hand finally moves, fingers curling into a fist.
I fragment across twenty-three analytical threads, each one dissecting a different layer of the interface logs. The data sings to me in frequencies baseline humans can’t perceive. Electromagnetic whispers of authorization handshakes, the distinctive pulse pattern of military-grade servo motors negotiating with civilian security protocols.
“Watch the timestamps.” My fingers dance through the holographic display, isolating the practice sequences. “First attempt: clumsy, triggered three redundant alarms. Second: better, only one flag. By the seventh run, the override executes clean. Thirty-two seconds, no trace.”
The logs bloom across every screen, color-coded by my neural processors. Each attempt leaves a signature: voltage fluctuations, processing delays, the unique way this particular prosthetic model’s tactical interface queries our authentication systems.
“This isn’t standard-issue anymore,” I continue, my voice carrying the weight of processed certainty. “This is a Mark VII-C with custom firmware. Enhanced response time. Expanded override capabilities.” I pull up the procurement records, letting them speak. “Only seventeen of these in the entire sector.”
Khalid’s prosthetic fingers dig into the composite table surface. The servos whine at frequencies only I can hear. Stress harmonics, threat assessment protocols cycling hot.
I pull the final thread tight. “Khalid Rashid.” My voice cuts through the murmurs, each syllable weighted with processed certainty. “Your prosthetic, Mark VII-C, serial number etched in the procurement database. Seventeen in the sector. Only one assigned to personnel currently stationed at this depot.”
The holographic display shifts, overlaying his service records with the interface signatures. Perfect match. The timestamps glow accusatory: each practice run corresponding to his off-duty hours, the final successful override occurring forty-seven minutes before Amira’s death.
His prosthetic hand grips the table edge. Metal groans against composite. The servo motors scream frequencies only my augmented hearing catches: stress patterns, threat assessment subroutines cycling into combat readiness.
“You want to explain these logs, Instructor?”
The colonists shift, creating a corridor. Salma’s boots ring against decking as she approaches the display table. Her hands don’t shake.
“0340 hours, Section 7-Gamma. Two days before.” Her voice carries the flat certainty of someone who’s testified before labor boards. “Instructor Rashid. Fuel line panels.”
I layer her words with reconstructed footage. Sixteen percent corrupted, but the gait analysis matches. That distinctive prosthetic gleam in emergency lighting.
“He said security inspection.” Salma’s eyes find Khalid’s. “No authorization log. No safety partner.”
The protocol violations hang there, damning.
The screens pulse with decrypted text. Safety protocols. Independent oversight. Military supply guarantees, strengthened, not threatened.
“These documents prove the negotiation endangered no one’s survival.” My voice processes sorrow through data streams. I overlay Khalid’s record against the fifteen-year-old incident report. The explosion. The negligence finding. The loss.
“Amira died because accepting peace meant confronting that your enemy never existed, Instructor.”
The training center’s recycled air tastes of metal and anticipation. My neural implants map the room in overlapping dimensions: thermal signatures blooming red where bodies cluster, electromagnetic fields crackling around active data-slates, the subtle gravitational variations as people shift their weight. Khalid enters exactly on time. Military precision, even now.
His prosthetic arm swings with calculated naturalness, but I perceive the servo adjustments beneath the synthetic skin. Micro-corrections processing threat assessment faster than conscious thought. The arm’s tactical interface pulses in frequencies most humans can’t detect. I can. I catalog every electromagnetic whisper.
“Instructor Rashid.” I keep my voice level, professional. “Thank you for coming.”
He scans the assembly with those hard eyes. Commander Yussef standing rigid near the forward bulkhead. Administrator Chen with her data-slate clutched like a shield. Salma positioned by the secondary exit, her calloused hands loose at her sides. Ready. A dozen others, military and merchant both, arranged in careful neutrality.
“An unusual assembly,” Khalid says, each word precisely weighted, “for a security consultation.”
His heart rate spikes. But his breathing stays controlled. Combat discipline. He’s calculating exits, threat vectors, response options. His prosthetic arm’s power consumption increases by three percent. Weapons systems running diagnostics.
I’ve seen this pattern before, in security footage, in behavioral databases. The signature of someone who’s prepared contingencies. Who knew this moment might come.
“Not a consultation,” I say quietly. The words taste like betrayal and necessity. “A reckoning.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts behind his eyes. Recognition, perhaps. Or the cold mathematics of a tactical situation turning unfavorable. His prosthetic hand flexes once. The room holds its breath. Even the depot’s constant mechanical symphony seems to pause.
The data streams through my consciousness like blood through arteries, I don’t just present evidence, I feel it arranging itself into undeniable patterns. My neural implants project holographic overlays: Khalid’s biometric signatures from depot entry logs, cross-referenced with fuel system access timestamps. The numbers glow amber in my augmented vision, each correlation probability calculated to seventeen decimal places.
“These access patterns,” I say, gesturing to the floating data, “required override codes issued only to senior military personnel.” My fingers trace electromagnetic pathways through the air, visible to me as shimmering threads. “The prosthetic interface technology matches the signature left on compromised security nodes.”
Khalid’s breathing remains steady, but his prosthetic arm’s power draw spikes again. Defensive subroutines activating. Commander Yussef’s expression hardens with recognition. Administrator Chen’s stylus hovers frozen above her slate.
I layer another dataset: chemical analysis from Amira’s death scene. “The fuel concentration wasn’t accidental. Someone with tactical training would know precisely how much vapor, in what confined space, would prove lethal.”
The words feel like stones in my mouth. Heavy. Irrevocable.
“Someone who’d seen fuel kill before.”
The fifteen-year-old incident report materializes in my augmented vision, and I cast it into shared holospace where everyone can see. Section 7-Gamma. The same twisted corridors where Amira’s body cooled. I overlay current schematics: the geometry of death, then and now, matching like a fingerprint.
“Merchant guild negligence,” I say, pulling the official findings forward. “Seventeen casualties. Inadequate safety protocols.”
Khalid’s prosthetic arm clenches, servos singing their mechanical distress. The sound cuts through recycled air like a confession.
I layer his records next: commendations, medical discharge, reassignment to training duties. A man rebuilt from trauma into something that couldn’t bend anymore, only break.
“Someone invisible to security,” I continue, still offering him investigation’s framework rather than accusation’s blade. “Unless you know exactly where to look.”
I let the silence stretch, neural implants tracking every micro-expression, every electromagnetic flutter of anxiety from the assembled witnesses. The evidence hovers between us like a blade I haven’t yet dropped. My voice, when it comes, carries none of the data-stream coldness people expect from the uplifted.
“Fifteen years,” I say. “That’s how long grief calcifies into certainty.”
His jaw tightens. Recognition.
The military precision drains from Khalid’s shoulders like atmosphere through a hull breach. His prosthetic fingers curl inward. Not fist, not weapon, just the involuntary contraction of a man whose armor has finally cracked.
“Instructor Rashid,” I say, and the formality is its own accusation. “Would you like to explain why your prosthetic’s access signature appears in Section 7-Gamma’s security logs?”
The data streams converge in my consciousness like tributaries feeding a dark river. I watch Khalid through seven different spectra simultaneously. Visible light shows the military precision bleeding from his posture, infrared catches the sudden heat bloom across his cheekbones and temples, electromagnetic sensors pick up the shift in his prosthetic arm’s power signature from idle to active defensive protocols. The transition takes point-eight seconds. Fast, but not fast enough to hide from augmented perception.
His eyes perform the textbook threat assessment sweep. Administrator Chen positioned at three o’clock, her bureaucratic neutrality a calculated statement. Commander Yussef at nine, military authority balanced against military loyalty. Salma near the emergency comm, her calloused hands and working-class credibility lending weight to whatever comes next. The scattered personnel from each faction, merchant, military, colonist, whose testimony will ripple through their respective communities like shock waves through fuel vapor.
I process micro-expressions faster than baseline humans can register them. The slight dilation of his pupils when he spots the first data screen. The involuntary tightening of his jaw muscles: masseter and temporalis contracting in a pattern consistent with recognition and suppressed anger. His prosthetic fingers flex once, twice, cycling through what my tactical analysis subroutines identify as pre-combat readiness checks.
Sixty-three percent probability he’s already recognized the fuel signature analysis on screen one. Seventy-eight percent he’s calculating exit vectors. Ninety-two percent he knows there aren’t any.
The neural implants beneath my temples pulse with bioluminescence, casting faint copper shadows across my translucent skin. I’m drowning in data, but somewhere beneath the flood of information, the human part of me feels something almost like pity.
Almost.
“Instructor Rashid,” I begin, modulating my voice through the neural interface to strip out the harmonics that unsettle baseline humans. Authority without aggression. The words taste like copper on my tongue: or maybe that’s just the feedback from processing seventeen data streams simultaneously. “Your service record indicates unparalleled expertise in depot security architecture.”
I gesture toward the first screen, and the schematics bloom into three-dimensional space, overlaying security logs like transparent skin over bone. Section 7-Gamma’s access points pulse in amber. “We’re investigating a systematic pattern of security breaches that demonstrate intimate knowledge of our defensive protocols.” The phrasing flows through my consciousness pre-calculated, each word weighted for maximum impact. “Knowledge that would require either decades of observation or direct involvement in their original implementation.”
Professional courtesy. Expert consultant, not suspect. The irony makes the accusation sharper, like a blade wrapped in silk. My augmented perception catches the moment he understands the trap: a micro-expression lasting point-three seconds, gone before anyone else could register it.
But I’m not anyone else anymore.
Salma’s presence anchors the accusation in flesh and metal: a witness who works with her hands, who understands machinery the way I understand data. When she shifts, the magnetic clamps on her exosuit click softly, and Khalid’s eyes track the sound with tactical precision.
I advance to the second screen. The words flow through neural pathways optimized for interrogation: “The physical evidence presents complications.” The fuel line modifications bloom across the display, timestamps cascading like accusations. “These access panels demand specialized tools, authorization codes rotating weekly. Yet someone opened them during maintenance blackout periods.”
My fingers don’t actually touch the screen. Thought-speed manipulation renders physical contact obsolete. “The signature pattern indicates military-grade override capabilities. Specifically, tactical interface protocols from SDC prosthetics. Fifteen to twenty-year-old models.”
His prosthetic arm doesn’t move, but I register the microscopic power fluctuation in its servo systems.
The chemical signatures cascade across my visual field in wavelengths baseline humans can’t perceive: ultraviolet markers that scream correlation. I let the data speak through my augmented voice, each harmonic calculated for maximum psychological impact on military-trained ears.
“Section 7-Gamma’s unauthorized cache. Identical composition to the vapor concentrations found in Ambassador Zain’s respiratory system.” I pause, processing Khalid’s micro-expressions through seventeen simultaneous analytical frameworks. “The diversion pattern suggests intimate knowledge of infrastructure failures. Someone who learned this depot’s vulnerabilities through catastrophic firsthand experience.”
The military personnel shift weight. But I’m locked on Khalid, processing the cascade of tells: prosthetic fingers twitching through override sequences, pupils contracting as he calculates trajectories.
“We need your help, Instructor.” Truth, not strategy. My voice drops frequencies only augmented hearing catches: the harmonics of genuine grief. “Help us understand how preventing a safety protocol that would have protected your own students could serve anything but fear.”
The final screen ignites. Amira’s documents beside contract specifications. Not merchant overreach. Redundant fuel line monitoring. Automated pressure regulation. The protocols that might have saved his arm fifteen years ago.
I see it then, refracted through his micro-expressions: he killed her for a threat that existed only in his trauma-carved certainty. The trap isn’t the evidence. It’s the mirror.
The training center had never felt this crowded, even during full battalion exercises. Every faction had sent representatives. Merchant guild administrators in their copper-trimmed jumpsuits, military officers with commendation ribbons catching the overhead lights, colonist advocates still wearing the dust of their shifts. They formed a loose semicircle, positioned with the kind of careful spacing that suggested Salma’s hand in the arrangement. She’d mapped the room like one of her mining operations, accounting for sight lines and exit vectors.
I stood at the center, my neural implants processing seventeen different data streams simultaneously. Heartbeat variations, micro-expressions, the electromagnetic signatures of concealed recording devices. The evidence displays floated in holographic precision around us, each screen positioned to be visible from multiple angles. No shadows to hide in. No ambiguity to exploit.
Khalid entered exactly on schedule, his boots striking the deck plating with parade-ground rhythm. His uniform was immaculate, every crease regulation-perfect, but I caught the fractional hesitation when he registered the crowd. His tactical assessment was instantaneous, I watched it happen in the way his shoulders adjusted, his weight shifted, his prosthetic hand moved toward his side where a weapon would normally rest.
Nothing there. He’d come unarmed to what he must have thought was a routine consultation.
“Instructor Rashid.” My voice carried through the sudden silence, formal and measured. The implants fed me optimal tone and cadence, but I chose the words myself. “We’ve uncovered irregularities in depot security that require your expertise to explain.”
I gestured to the first display. Fuel line access logs, timestamped and cross-referenced. His eyes tracked across the data with professional efficiency, reading the patterns the way I’d learned he taught his students to read tactical situations.
Then the second screen activated, and I watched his expression fracture for exactly 0.[^3] seconds before military discipline reasserted control.
The prosthetic interface signatures materialized on the third screen. Unique electromagnetic patterns that no standard equipment could replicate. Military-grade tactical interfaces left traces in compatible systems like fingerprints in wet concrete. I’d spent forty-seven hours correlating them across every access point Khalid had legitimately visited, then mapping the anomalies.
Section 7-Gamma’s maintenance logs glowed amber with discrepancies.
“The fuel line modifications,” I said, advancing the display, “required someone who understood both the depot’s infrastructure and its security blind spots.” My implants registered his pulse elevation, the micro-tension in his jaw. “Someone who could move through restricted areas without triggering questions.”
Salma shifted position near the secondary exit, her movement deliberate enough to draw his attention. The arrangement became clear to him then. Not a cage, but a web. She’d positioned everyone with the same intuitive precision she used to shore up unstable mining tunnels.
The screen changed to her testimony. Her weathered face filled the projection, describing the figure she’d witnessed. The distinctive gait. The way someone moves when compensating for a prosthetic limb’s weight distribution, the balance adjustments that become unconscious habit.
Khalid’s prosthetic hand clenched once, servos whining softly in the silence.
The data streams through my consciousness in parallel threads. I let the silence extend three point seven seconds, long enough for him to feel it but not long enough to become theatrical.
“Context,” I repeat, tasting the word’s inadequacy. My implants pulse with the overlay of his service record, the commendations, the explosion that took his arm. “You’ve earned that much, Instructor.”
Chen’s fingers still hover. Commander Yussef’s jaw tightens. He knows what military honor demands, even when it conflicts with what military justice requires. The moment balances on a knife’s edge.
I advance the display one more frame. “Tell us why Amira Zain had to die.”
I watch the data cascade through his tactical processors. The ones that should have verified before he acted. His prosthetic hand flexes involuntarily, servos whining in the silence. The military training that made him efficient also made him vulnerable to bad intelligence. Someone fed him false contract terms, weaponized his trauma, aimed him like a precision instrument at the wrong target.
“Who told you what the contract contained?” I ask, already tracing communication pathways through depot networks.
“The contract Amira carried,” I say, my neural implants pulling the encrypted data into visible spectrum across every screen, “wasn’t what someone convinced you it was.”
The comparison matrices bloom in harsh light. Safety protocols, joint oversight committees, military veto powers embedded in every critical clause. Protections designed specifically to prevent another explosion like the one that took his arm fifteen years ago.
I watch the certainty drain from his face. “Who gave you the false version, Khalid?”
The words hang in the recycled air like fuel vapor waiting for ignition. Through my neural interface, I’m processing seventeen different data streams but what stops me cold is the simplicity of his confession. No elaborate conspiracy. No shadowy handlers. Just one man, convinced of his righteousness, willing to murder for it.
“Contained,” I repeat, and the word tastes like copper and ozone. My implants flash the casualty projections across my vision. The ones he must have calculated, the ones that showed acceptable losses. Numbers that included Amira Zain as an acceptable loss. “You’re a tactical instructor, Khalid. You know better than anyone that explosions in pressurized environments don’t contain themselves.”
His jaw tightens, the first crack in that parade-ground composure. “The risk was calculated. Necessary.”
“Calculated.” I let my augmented consciousness reach into the depot’s structural systems, pulling up the cascade scenarios his sabotage would have triggered. The screens around us populate with branching probability trees, each one showing how his “controlled” leak would have propagated through aging infrastructure, through jury-rigged modifications, through sections housing two thousand souls instead of five hundred. “Your calculations were based on original depot specifications. Not on fifteen years of overcrowding and improvised expansions.”
The projections bloom in crimson: Section 7-Gamma breaching into 7-Delta. Fuel vapor spreading through ventilation systems never designed for current population density. Secondary explosions in the makeshift habitation modules. Casualty estimates climbing from dozens to hundreds.
Khalid stares at the screens, his prosthetic hand trembling. Actually trembling, servos fighting against some involuntary command. For the first time, I see something other than righteous certainty in his eyes.
Fear. Not of punishment. Of understanding.
“I checked the specifications,” he whispers, and it sounds like something breaking.
The data streams fracture across my consciousness as I watch him justify murder with maintenance logs. My augmented vision overlays his documentation. He’s not lying about the violations, I’ve seen them myself, flagged them in my own reports that disappeared into bureaucratic void-space. But he’s weaponized safety concerns, turned legitimate grievances into ammunition for assassination.
“You’re right,” I say, and the words cut through the rising murmur of witnesses. Khalid’s head snaps toward me, confusion breaking his military mask. “The violations are real. I’ve logged three hundred and forty-seven critical infractions in the past year alone. Merchant guild ignored them. Military oversight ignored them. Everyone too busy fighting over fuel contracts to notice the depot’s falling apart around us.”
I let my neural implants pulse visible light beneath my temples, reminding everyone what I am: what I can perceive that they can’t. “But you didn’t report them through proper channels. You didn’t escalate. You didn’t organize. You chose murder instead of accountability.” My voice drops to something harder than hull-metal. “That makes you part of the negligence, Instructor. Not its solution.”
The military cadets shift their weight, boots scraping against deck plating. Some faces set in grim approval, others cracking with doubt. The merchant representatives cluster tighter, hands hovering near communication devices, fury radiating from them in electromagnetic pulses I can taste through my augments.
Khalid sweeps his gaze across them all with parade-ground precision, and when he speaks again it’s the voice that’s drilled protocols into a thousand recruits: “Judge my methods if you must. But my reasoning?” His prosthetic hand opens, servos clicking. “Fifteen years documenting this depot’s decay. Every safety violation catalogued. Every profit-driven shortcut recorded. Every ignored protocol filed in triplicate.”
The certainty in his voice could cut through bulkheads. He believes every word. That’s what makes him dangerous.
The words land like hammer strikes on hull plating, each syllable precise as a weapons lock. My neural feeds fracture with the electromagnetic signature of his conviction: it burns clean through the data streams, righteous and terrible. The depot’s networks pulse with reactions: military channels lighting approval, merchant frequencies spiking outrage. But beneath his certainty, my augmented senses catch the ghost-pain tremor in his prosthetic’s servo motors: fifteen years of phantom agony driving every calculated choice.
The silence calcifies around us, dense as hull composite. Through seventeen data streams I watch Khalid’s certainty crystallize into monument: martyrdom accepted, purpose fulfilled. But Amira’s ghost whispers through encrypted channels in my neural architecture, and I taste something worse than murder in the data: tragedy compounded by lies. My implants flare brighter, casting copper shadows across faces that don’t yet understand. What I’m about to reveal won’t bring justice. Only ruins.
I gesture toward the central display, and my implants burn cold fire as they decrypt layers of security that were supposed to stay buried forever. The data flows through my consciousness like poison. “Instructor Rashid.” My voice comes out softer than I intended, almost human. Strange how revelation demands gentleness. “Before they pass judgment, you need to see what Amira died protecting.”
The first document materializes across the holo-field: Military Intelligence Report 7-Gamma-15, classification codes bleeding red across the header. I hear the sharp intake of breath from the military witnesses, recognition and dread mixing in their exhalations. They know those codes. They understand what I’m about to expose.
“These files,” I continue, watching the data cascade through my neural architecture even as I force myself to focus on Khalid’s face, “contain the actual investigation into Sector Seven. The one that was sealed. The one that never reached tribunal.”
My augmented vision catches every micro-expression as understanding begins its terrible work. The documents scroll past: incident reports, forensic analyses, blast pattern reconstructions. Each one another nail in the coffin of his certainty.
“The explosion that took your arm wasn’t caused by merchant negligence.” The words taste like ash in my mouth, filtered through too many processing layers. “It was deliberate. Military-grade plasma charges, placed along structural weak points with tactical precision. The fuel line failure was engineered to look like incompetence.”
I pull up the technical schematics, let them speak their own truth. Detonation sequences. Chemical signatures that don’t match civilian fuel accidents. Timing patterns that reveal coordination, not cascade failure.
“Command authorization codes trace back to Operation Tethered Sun. A black ops unit that officially never existed.” My implants flicker as I access the deepest files. “The merchant crew you’ve spent fifteen years blaming? They were the first victims. Murdered to justify a power grab that almost ignited sector-wide war.”
The evidence compounds like a geometric proof of betrayal. Witness statements appear: not the sanitized versions from the official inquiry, but the originals, redacted sections now bleeding through my decryption protocols. A maintenance tech who saw unauthorized personnel in the fuel processing sector hours before the blast. A junior officer who questioned the explosion’s origin and was reassigned to a mining outpost within forty-eight hours. A medical examiner whose autopsy findings didn’t match the official cause of death for the merchant crew.
I watch the data flow through Khalid’s awareness, each document another fracture in the foundation he built his crusade upon. His prosthetic fingers clench and unclench, the tactical interface cycling through threat assessment protocols that have no target to lock onto. The enemy was never the merchants. It was the system that used him, that weaponized his pain and pointed it like a blade at innocents.
“They made you their instrument,” I say, and the words carry weight my augmented voice shouldn’t be able to convey. “Twice.”
The servos in Khalid’s prosthetic arm shriek: a mechanical keen that cuts through the training center’s ambient hum. His neural interface can’t reconcile what floods through it: inspection reports with timestamps altered by microseconds, witness statements showing surgical redaction patterns, compensation transfers routed through shell accounts. My augmented perception catches the exact moment his certainty fractures. Pupils dilating, cortisol spike registering on thermal scan, the micro-tremor in his jaw as decades of righteous conviction collapse into void.
“No.” The word escapes him, but it’s already hollow.
His own medical file materializes, and I watch him read how his injury was classified “strategically valuable” before the blast site had even cooled. Propaganda value: maximum. Operational asset potential: ongoing.
They’d calculated his usefulness while he was still bleeding.
“They weaponized you.” My voice drops to baseline frequencies, shedding the harmonic overlay. Pure human register, unaugmented. “Your sacrifice. Your pain. The anger they cultivated in you: all ammunition for a war they profit from.”
The final document renders: a memo cataloging “acceptable casualties” and “strategic martyrs.” Khalid’s name sits third on the asset list, tagged with projected operational lifespan.
They’d budgeted his usefulness in quarterly projections.
The silence fractures first among the military witnesses. A lieutenant’s sharp intake of breath, recognition spreading like radiation through their ranks. They’d all heard the story, the cautionary tale of merchant incompetence. Foundation myth for their justified vigilance.
Beside them, merchant crew members process the same revelation through different filters, arriving at identical horror. Fifteen years of mutual suspicion, engineered. Profitable.
Khalid’s prosthetic fingers spasm, servos whining protest as neural feedback loops collapse under cognitive dissonance.
The data flows through me in cascading layers. Not just numbers and forensics, but the weight of fifteen years compressed into crystalline understanding. My implants pulse with the rhythm of truth too large for any single human consciousness to hold, yet I must translate it into words that flesh-and-blood minds can grasp.
I step forward, feeling the electromagnetic signatures of every person in this room, their elevated heart rates painting thermal patterns across my expanded perception. The military witnesses radiate betrayal-shock-anger in infrared blooms. The merchant crew cycles through vindication-horror-guilt in predictable waves.
“Justice requires more than punishment,” I say, and my voice carries harmonics I’ve learned to modulate. Human enough to connect, augmented enough to command attention. “It requires understanding how we were all weaponized against each other.”
My neural interface projects the evidence into shared holographic space with a thought. Communication patterns spiral outward in luminous threads, sabotage timelines pulse in crimson, the original explosion’s forensic data, buried for fifteen years, reconstructs itself in three dimensions. I’ve spent hours translating raw data into something human eyes can comprehend, something human hearts can feel.
“Khalid committed murder, yes.” The words taste like copper and regret. “But he was also a victim of a system that profits from our division.”
I let them see it: the shell corporation that benefited from military-merchant tensions, the fuel contracts that multiplied in value through artificial scarcity, the careers built on manufactured crisis. The pattern is elegant in its cruelty, obvious only in retrospect.
My implants flicker as I process their reactions in real-time: the micro-expressions, the shifted stances, the way information rewrites neural pathways behind their eyes. This is what I was uplifted for: not just to see the data, but to bridge the gap between knowing and understanding.
To make the invisible visible, before more blood stains these corridors.
The electromagnetic field shifts as Salma moves. Her exosuit’s residual charge leaves tracers across my augmented vision like solidarity written in invisible ink. She positions herself beside me, and I feel the weight of her presence differently than data: warm, analog, stubbornly human.
Her calloused hands grip the helmet at her hip, knuckles white with the pressure of speaking truth to power. When she addresses the room, her voice carries the rough-edged authority of someone who’s earned survival through observation, not privilege.
“I’ve watched this depot tear itself apart for years,” she says, and I process the micro-reactions rippling through the crowd. “Every faction hoarding secrets, everyone convinced the others are the enemy.”
She turns, making deliberate eye contact with both military and merchant representatives. My implants track the neural load of her words landing, rewriting assumptions in real-time.
“We’ve all been so busy protecting our territories that we couldn’t see we were being played.” Her jaw tightens. “Amira died trying to bridge that gap: are we going to let her death mean nothing?”
The silence that follows tastes like possibility. Like change.
The administrator’s words hang in the recycled air, and I watch the data streams shift: encrypted channels opening, security protocols relaxing their stranglehold. The commander’s concession registers across military networks like a seismic event, authorization codes flickering as old certainties crumble.
Through my augmented perception, I see what they can’t: the moment crystallizing into historical pivot point, probability matrices realigning. The merchant representative’s biosignature shows genuine commitment beneath political calculation. The commander’s stress markers indicate this costs him, but he means it.
Salma catches my eye, and something passes between us that no implant can quantify: recognition that truth, however painful, weighs less than accumulated lies. The crowd’s electromagnetic signature shifts from hostile polarization toward something messier, more honest: the chaotic spectrum of people choosing difficult cooperation over comfortable enmity.
I process the cascade of gestures through seventeen different analytical frameworks, but none capture what matters: the weight of metal hitting metal, each pin a small confession. The young officer’s biosignature shows grief and clarity intertwined: she understands now that loyalty without truth becomes its own betrayal. Through the crowd’s electromagnetic field, I sense merchant personnel recognizing their own complicity in systems that prioritized profit over honesty. The pile of commendations grows, becoming monument to necessary reckoning.
The data streams clarify like fog burning off under Zahir’s reflected light. I watch cooperation patterns emerge. Merchant fuel logs synchronizing with military supply chains, shared security protocols replacing territorial encryption. My neural implants translate the electromagnetic shift: fear-frequencies dampening, trust-signatures strengthening. The depot’s network architecture itself seems to exhale.
Then Salma’s hand touches my arm, flesh on augmented flesh, and the infinite data collapses into singular meaning. I’m not just processing anymore, I’m understanding. Connection without translation protocols. Purpose beyond calculation.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.
Message failed to send. This is an automated failure message.