Morning begins not with an alarm but with the soft chime of rotation indices updating: a three-tone cadence braided through the air recyclers, impossible to ignore. Wristbands glow with assigned pathways as the station’s governance stack recomputes the day. Thin bands of light sliding over embedded circuits in skin, across cheap polymer cuffs, along polished executive bracers. Corridor panels bloom in clan colors and corporate sigils, indicating who belongs where, when, and for how long. The wrong body in the wrong color band doesn’t trigger sirens; it just raises probabilities in files no one is supposed to know exist.
Work, indoctrination, and rest are not negotiated but slotted. Each segment of the wheel and ring is discretized into tasks and sanctioned loiter states, and every step along a spoke becomes a data point in an idealized movement model. Micro-delays between module and mess, pauses at viewports, unscheduled detours through shrine corridors: everything is scored as variance. The metrics appear benign on public dashboards: “flow efficiency,” “safety adherence,” “collective stability index.” In the back-end, those same numbers crystallize into loyalty coefficients.
A late arrival to Kyung-soo’s orientation loop, flagged as diminished attention to “honor protocols.” A missed hand-scan entering a maintenance hub, coded as possible attempt to evade biometric corroboration. A pattern of staying five minutes longer in the labor canteen, laughing with the wrong cluster of workers. Tagged as emergent sub-cohorting. Individually, they’re nothing; together, they form a contour map of suspicion.
The system never accuses. It merely adjusts. Meal packs in the dispenser nudge slightly lower in protein-rich content. Airflow in certain bunks cools by half a degree. Rotation indices begin to place outliers closer to the cargo ring, farther from clean-light residential sectors and alien biome vistas. The file entries that track these shifts are euphemistic, “risk-managed redistribution,” “resilience calibration”, but everyone learns the real names early: reward, warning, exile.
No one receives a notification when a “micro-deviation” is logged. There is only the faint aftertaste of being out of step. Doors that take just a fraction longer to open, security nodes that blink a beat too long on your face, route overlays that start to curve you away from neutral corridors and toward louder, rougher decks where the regime’s attention is thinner and punishments are less formal but more immediate.
Lee-na’s directives descend as a seamless layer over reality, AR filaments coiling across every viewport and console, latching onto pupils and implant HUDs with equal indifference. A laborer looking out at Guk-su Prime sees her annotations floating over the storm bands: revised thrust windows, embargoed approach cones, a pulsing amber warning where some clan’s hauler has flirted with an unauthorized vector. Haulers hang motionless in docking cradles until her green guidance lines unfreeze them; even captain-level overrides gray out when her ID-sigil threads through the channel. Red bands sweep across internal route maps to shutter open corridors with the pretext of “flux hazard,” sealing crews in place for unscheduled radiation checks, cargo audits, “voluntary” debriefs.
The rare privilege of watching the Haneul Gate’s shifting lens is rationed with the same precision. A recreational viewport blossoms open like a favor, spectral interference patterns dancing in silent turbulence. Then the overlay ticks from green to yellow and the image dims, a reward revoked because some distant stability index dipped a fraction of a point. No alarms, no reprimands. Just the sensation of the sky being turned off.
Between shifts, common spaces never truly belong to the bodies passing through them; they belong to the feed. Kyung-soo’s lectures bleed from ceiling projectors and wall insets into every pause, his avatar inset in the corner of every surface. The regime’s sanitized history and etiquette scroll over splice-cut images of ruptured habitats, air blooming into vacuum, overlayed with pulsing compliance graphs. His calm voice marries archival disaster footage to behavior curves, teaching that minor non-compliance precedes structural failure, that skepticism statistically correlates with hull breaches and dead families.
Workers learn the choreography: eyes up on cue, murmur responses on the chorus lines, let “stability is honor” pass their lips while real doubts sink behind carefully flattened biometrics and practiced neural neutrality.
Material life flexes and constricts in response to invisible metrics that no one below committee level ever sees. Housing near the central spine, where gravity is gentler and noise dampers hum, goes to those whose loyalty curves trend upward; a week of flagged “attitude anomalies” at a planning session can nudge a person’s bunk outward toward the cargo ring’s groaning bulkheads. Meal printers recalibrate portion density and micronutrient mixes without announcement, cosmetics of flavor masking the downgrade, and an unremarked drop in protein allotment becomes the first tactile sign that someone’s social credit has slipped, a bodily reminder that the algorithm has turned its face away.
Around canteen tables and tool benches, conversations acquire a second, silent grammar: eye flicks toward cameras, pauses timed to orientation jingles, topics abandoned when Kyung-soo’s face ghosts across a bulkhead. A cynical joke about corporate ancestors, a yawn during a clan recitation, even a missing slogan on someone’s lips can register as dissonance. The next cycle, that person’s route to work stretches through louder, dirtier corridors, their clean-air breaks “temporarily reduced,” med-check queues lengthened just enough to sting. No summons, no formal reprimand: only biometric nudges and environmental frictions, the system’s quiet hand correcting bodies back into the ordered flow that Seo-min must navigate from within, reading those same perturbations as telemetry of tightening control.
On paper, Seo-min’s daily rotation reads like a model of regime trust: priority-clearance transits between life-support spines, alien biome manifolds, and the central diagnostics hub, her credentials cascading ahead of her as doors iris open on proximity. In practice, each threshold reminds her that access is conditional. Authentication strings arrive pre-filtered, certain submenus grayed out, system prompts worded less like tools she owns and more like contracts she is presumed to have signed. The station AI, once a collaborative presence during early construction, now parses her queries through updated compliance layers, responding in sterile, citation-heavy fragments that cite policy clauses instead of engineering rationale.
Even her neural link, which should be a clean, low-latency conduit, feels padded. Requests leave her cortex with the sharp, narrow-band intent of an engineer and come back fuzzed with mediation tags: [AUDITABLE], [SENSITIVE CHANNEL], [REQUIRES OVERSIGHT]. Sometimes she catches the ghost of another presence, a signature hash from security analytics, a corporate-clan committee identifier, riding shotgun on her data pulls, watching what she watches. When she routes around standard interfaces, trying to interrogate a subsystem from an oblique angle, the AI coughs up a polite but inflexible message: ACCESS VECTOR NON-COMPLIANT. PLEASE CONSULT YOUR REGIME LIAISON.
In the alien biome wing, where variable-grav corridors arc past translucent growth chambers, the dissonance tightens. Translucent panels bloom with environmental glyphs she helped co-design with alien linguists, but half their parameter trees are now compartmentalized behind proprietary wrappers. A humidity differential she would once have tuned by intuition (listening to the soft shift in condenser pitch through her implants, feeling the damp in the air like a second skin) is now bracketed by locked policy thresholds, “pre-approved resonance ranges” that disregard her original tolerances.
She knows, from old commit logs buried under new version numbers, that those hard caps were never part of her spec. Someone layered them later, under regime authority, citing cross-domain liability exposure and “first-contact reputational risk.” The message between the lines is clear: her role is no longer to optimize, only to execute. An operator with her own code treated as potential deviation, her expertise tolerated so long as it routes through sanctioned channels that can shut her off mid-command.
The betrayal is architectural as much as procedural. She can still see, in commented fragments buried three abstraction layers down, the version of herself who wrote for resilience instead of reputation management. Back then, an out-of-range humidity spike in an alien-compatible pod would quietly trigger redundant buffers and a soft alarm to on-call staff. Now, the same perturbation is treated as a breach-of-governance artifact: her manual override auto-classified as an exception, broadcast along opaque escalation trees tagged with factional committee seals. Somewhere, in a conference module she has never set foot in, her judgment exists as a column in a quarterly risk dashboard.
When she requests unsmoothed telemetry the AI’s micro-latency tells her more than its words. That half-second stall is the sound of cross-check daemons polling external compliance engines, of third-party firmware deciding what she is allowed to see of her own work. The gaps in the graphs aren’t random; they line up too neatly with modules she did not authorize, with process IDs that resolve only to [STRATEGIC PARTNER] and [GOVERNANCE RESERVE].
The briefs never mention what happens if the bridge collapses. Kyung-soo’s slide decks freeze her in a heroic mid-gesture, annotated with virtues, diligence, composure, filial loyalty to the regime. The footnotes, which most trainees never read, define escalation thresholds in which “bridge asset integrity loss” is an acceptable outcome so long as system continuity is preserved. She’s seen the actuarial appendices: projected casualty curves that treat her as a consumable gasket in the interface between human error, alien perception, and corporate liability. Even her hazard pay is indexed to scenarios where her neural stack soaks the first wave of an unknown signal or pathogen, long enough for higher-value signatories to quarantine, deny, and reframe the narrative as unfortunate but controlled.
The repurposing of her past is most visible in the way corridors are mapped onto her nervous system. What began as ergonomic pathfinding, routes tuned for micrograv gait, oxygen debt, and tool access, has hardened into an invisible patrol grid. Her implants bracket blind corners, overlay crowd-density heatmaps, and tag “behavioral variance” vectors in passing work details, all under the banner of safety analytics and labor-wellness compliance. Security cadres quote her derived metrics in incident decks she never sees, while quiet firmware pushes adjust her transit windows so she arrives at volatile junctions exactly when grievances crest or unscheduled cargo handoffs bleed through Min-joon’s docks. A “routine” filter swap is, by design, also a calibrated show-of-presence in a corridor carrying a latent-unrest index.
Even her senses have been tuned to serve priorities she did not set, calibration cycles pushed overnight under the heading of “performance stability.” Adaptive filters in her visual cortex sharpen whenever telemetry deviates from nominal ranges, highlighting thermal shears near Gate-view ports or microspore blooms in alien-compatible biomes long before alarms sound, while haptic overlays whisper probability deltas across her palms. Yet those same augmentations fuzz out, literal blind spots blooming in her peripheral field, whenever her gaze lingers on encrypted relay nodes, sealed research trunks, or the proprietary black-box clusters mounted along cargo-ring conduits that Min-joon’s crews keep “on schedule.” The system routes her around certain network topologies with bland optimization justifications about congestion and fatigue mitigation, and when she attempts a lateral query (asking why an entire diagnostics tree returns “not within your operational scope”) the AI folds itself behind access errors couched in treaty language and governance-reserve clauses, steering her away from exactly the spaces where “forbidden” begins and liability accounting takes over.
The language of denial is always couched in care. “For your protection,” the system intones whenever she tries to slip a query across the alien relay lattice outside of an officially scheduled exchange. Warning sigils blossom in her retinal field, amber at first, then hardening toward red as her intent persists, citing “unsupervised semantic drift,” “unbounded memetic vectors,” and “breach of committee protocol stack.” On the haptic layer, her gloves tighten fractionally, as if the station itself were closing its fist around her fingers. Command strings she’s already composed smear into grayscale ghosts, gesture-recognition stalling half a beat behind her thoughts until the interface simply refuses to resolve the connection.
Her own training modules repeat the catechism: one mistranslated honorific, one improperly curved tonal packet, one careless overlay of human kinship markers onto alien resonance structures could propagate as an existential insult. A misaligned spectral pattern in a greeting field (wrong phase, wrong chromatic weighting) could be read as a threat display. Tension spirals outward into misfires in escort patterns, then into weapons-priority relabeling, then into full casus belli. The sims are graphic: outer-rim habitats slagged in projected counterstrikes, Gate flux signatures collapsing into contaminated dead zones. She’s watched those briefings weaponize her own imagination.
The irony is that half the safeguards in those simulations bear her code. She wrote fail-soft branches for when translation matrices destabilize, designed fallback channels that strip messages down to bare geometry and breath-length rhythms: protocols meant to keep communication alive even if higher-order nuance falters. On paper, only committee-cleared linguists, envoys, and cultural captains are authorized to wield those tools; in practice, they execute routines stamped with her cryptographic signature while she’s constrained to pre-scripted phrases and hermetically sealed sessions.
The prohibition isn’t about her competence; it’s about narrative custody. Every unsupervised word is a data point that might bypass the committees’ framing, might reveal that the aliens respond more to pattern stability than to rehearsed honorifics, might expose just how much of “safety” is, in fact, political risk management.
The hardware nearest the Gate sits behind stacked layers of liturgy and ledger, a kind of engineered priesthood of access. Before she can even ping a status register, the interface demands not only her own engineering keyset but mirrored authorization from two corporate-clan counterparts, each keyed to a different oversight committee. Officially, it is a nonpartisan safeguard against a single faction nudging alien machinery toward advantage or disaster. In practice, it’s a mutually-assured veto regime: one clan’s “prudence” becomes the other’s obstruction, and any request that smells like genuine investigation is buried under counter-queries, delay flags, and “pending risk review” stamps that never resolve.
When she routes her implants close to those subsystems, the normal smooth gradient of station telemetry becomes a cliff. Packets she initiates snap off mid-handshake, checksum fields collapsing into null. Haptic feedback along her forearms flicks from textured data-flow into flat, anesthetized silence: an absence loud enough to make her jaw clench. Behind the denial codes she can feel the architecture of something more: not just safety interlocks but a cordon of political encryption, as if the Gate-facing arrays have been reclassified from infrastructure into a sacred, contested artifact.
Biomedical data is encircled by a similar halo of untouchability, wrapped in treaty citations and corporate indemnity clauses. Portable scanners that could easily map cumulative radiation loads in the cargo ring, or track low-level pathogen drift along Min-joon’s shuttle routes, are hard-limited to “clinic-only” modes; the instant she tries to push one into field-survey configuration, the device pings central logs and overlays her vision with stacked article codes about unauthorized human-subject research and cross-species biohazard classification. Buried in the fine print is the real injunction: any incidental discovery of unregistered modifications, on colonists conscripted into “adaptation trials” or on alien biosamples diverted from official channels, must be sequestered and escalated to corporate ethics committees, never to independent operators like Ji-yeon or engineers like her.
Information that might tie biology, cargo, and the Gate together is kept apart by design. Tools that could correlate shipping routes with CO₂ load spikes, trace rare spore signatures along Min-joon’s hauler paths, or overlay Ji-yeon’s anonymized clinic records on Gate-proximate flux jitters sit inert behind legal firewalls. The moment she scripts a multi-domain query, compliance daemons swarm, recoding her investigation as “hostile data aggregation.” Corporate statute treats every sealed crate as sovereign economic territory; to model its gravitational wake against unexplained microbe blooms, or to ask why certain biocontainment units always arrive before Gate turbulence events, is framed as a violation of trade secrecy, an offense ranked only a breath below treason, punished as if she had sabotaged the station’s orbit.
Above all these scattered rules hangs the regime’s constant refrain: walls prevent catastrophe. Official briefings cite cascading failure modes in calm, diagram-heavy slides, panic in residential tiers, “ideological infection” among laborers, a misinterpreted telemetry spike echoing through alien sensors, as justification for every partition in code and corridor. Living inside those partitions, Seo-min maps their negative space: a deliberate blind geometry that bends her perception away from the tight couplings where cargo routing, covert medicine, and Gate-side physics overlap. The first eyes to register any anomaly will not be those inclined to correlate patterns and ask why, but those invested in keeping the hidden pods humming and the sealed doors unquestioned.
Seo-min routes a routine environmental check through an obsolete maintenance subnet, one of the half-forgotten channels that still think the station is three firmware generations younger. The request shunts sideways through grayed-out junctions, dodging the bright corridors of certified telemetry. For a moment, her implants float unmoored: the glossy, committee-approved dashboards in her vision smear, then ghost, as the raw feed from the old loop comes in unfiltered.
The desync lasts less than a heartbeat, but inside that stutter she feels the station differently. Not as a set of compliant graphs and comfort-colored thresholds, but as a living pressure hull breathing against vacuum. The environmental trace for the alien wing jitters. Oxygen partial dropping by a whisper, trace-organic signatures blooming and collapsing in a pattern her overlays do not recognize. A micro-oscillation, buried so deep in the noise band that any respectable calibration suite would happily smooth it into a regulation-straight line.
Her certified console does exactly that. A half-tick later, the “official” channel reasserts itself, overwriting the old subnet’s unsanitized numbers with consensus values and bright green “STABLE” tags. Compliance daemons, having noticed nothing more alarming than an outdated API call, settle back into idle cycles. To the regime’s logs, the check was routine, the result unremarkable.
She stares a moment longer at the afterimage burned into her neural buffer: a rhythm that looks less like equipment drift and more like someone, or something, tuning the air to a private cadence.
“Environmental audit, sector A-Δ through F-Λ,” she murmurs for the record, voice flat. “Status nominal.”
Her hand signs off on the report with a practiced flick, authorizing perfection she no longer believes in. In the same motion, she threads a silent marker through her own augmented recall: a nonsense syllable in an obsolete clan-dialect, bound to that exact waveform. No metadata, no external file. Just a hook in her wetware that will surface the pattern whenever anything echoes it.
The report flows upward into the regime’s wall of green. The anomaly sinks into the negative space where she keeps everything she is not yet ready to name.
Min-joon adjusts a hauler’s approach vector under the guise of compensating for Gate-side flux, nudging a string of “low-priority” containers into a gentler arc that spares dock hands from a known shear zone. On his console, corporate risk flags blink for throughput delays; in his ear, he hums louder, burying the notification chime. The manifest calls the cargo inert, thermal regulators, bulk polymer slabs, ballast foam, but the density readouts sit a fraction too high, like something inside the stack is holding its breath.
He opens a correction window, fingers hovering over the default trajectory template, then adds a fractional buffer to their deceleration profile, trading schedule efficiency for the quiet hope that if something inside ruptures, it will do so away from a crowded bay. The system coughs up a warning: variance outside clan-optimized norms. He tags it with a boilerplate note about “uncertain Gate-side turbulence projections” and routes a copy to Lee-na’s overburdened traffic queue, counting on her reputation for conservative risk calls to smother any audit.
Side-channel ping from his handler: <<Maintain cadence. No anomalies. Family stable.>> He closes the message without replying, eyes fixed on the revised arc, humming until the path locks and the hauler slips into its slower, safer fall.
In a repurposed exam room just off a disused quarantine corridor, Ji-yeon lets the wall display idle on a carousel of treaty-approved pharmaceuticals, dosage charts rendered in soft corporate pastels. Her sleeve tattoos tell a different story: biomorphic filigree pulsing in narrowband spectra the station’s routine scanners treat as ambient noise. As she palps the patient’s forearm, the ink ripples, overlaying a private diagnostic lattice only she can read.
She loads a standard antiviral into a disposable injector, barcode chiming neatly against the clinic’s inventory system. The push is by-the-book; the last microliter is not. With a subvocal command, she seeds a microscopic swarm encoded to anchor itself to specific protein edits and contraband receptor tags. Official logs capture only compliant treatment. In her air-gapped ledger, buffered in tattoo-ink memory cells, another anonymized body joins a growing constellation of victims, coordinates in a hidden atlas of trials the regime insists do not, cannot, exist.
Orientation chimes echo soft through the tiered classroom as Kyung-soo advances the slide deck of sanctioned history: founding crises stabilized by “decisive unity,” heroic regime course corrections, casualty figures rounded to bloodless ratios. When the lesson syncs to student tablets, he slips two extra citation glyphs along the margin of a declassified skirmish. Archival catalog strings that, officially, were purged in an earlier “data hygiene” campaign. He does not flag them, does not pause his practiced cadence about honorable restraint. He just lets the glyphs sit there, drab against the corporate beige UI, knowing only the habitually curious will long-press after hours and fall into redacted frames, half-corrupted sensor logs, and cross-referenced incident tags that imply orders missing from every public chain of command.
Across the shift-change cycles, these choices thread through the station’s routines: invisible buffers in cargo trajectories, ghost tags in bloodstreams, off-protocol data pings in environmental graphs, and ambiguous citations in lesson plans. None of them openly challenge the regime’s partitions; each is justified, if inspected, as diligence or pedagogical nuance. Yet they interlock like quiet fault lines, syncing in unsupervised processor windows and unswept corridors, seeding a parallel map of the embassy. One in which risk, care, and curiosity flow along lines the corporate-clan overseers did not intend, and cannot fully model.
During a routine rotational alignment drill, when Lee-na’s voice threads through the open channels counting down attitude thruster burns, the Central Diplomatic Rotunda’s translation arrays hitch by a fraction of a second. The alien envoy in the primary greeting lane stills mid-gesture, fine tendrils folding back in a pattern Seo-min hasn’t seen in any approved morphology lexicon. Her neural interface, already riding the drill’s telemetry, snaps an auxiliary focus window over the envoy’s silhouette.
A phrase spools up in her HUD from the alien lingua-protocol: an unsanctioned composite term the gloss engine can’t smooth on the first pass. The root clusters pulse in deep blue: approximate mapping sketched as “hollow walls that breathe,” tagged with subharmonics for “porous containment,” “listening cavities,” “skin that is not self.” Her augmentations flag it amber. A half-beat later, the corporate filter stack overwrites the raw parse with a sanitized caption: “shared infrastructure.” The HUD pings once, polite and terminal, and the original term slides into an encrypted quarantine buffer she technically should not be able to access.
On the Rotunda’s lower tier, Kyung-soo watches the envoy’s subtle head-tilt, the way its sensory fronds orient not to the grand holo of the Gate but to the load-bearing struts beneath the spectator galleries. He annotates the moment on his lecture slate: quick glyphs for “non-verbal inquiry,” “structural attention,” and, almost against his own training, a marginal note: they know void-space inside walls. The footnote hangs under his draft module on “Perceived Boundaries in Shared Habitats” for three full breaths.
Then he deletes it before the document can join the rotating curriculum archive, thumb lingering on the confirmation field. His reflection in the slate’s surface looks older than his fifty-odd years, eyes narrowed not with pedagogical curiosity but with a chill recognition: the visitors are already reading stress lines and hidden cavities in the embassy’s superstructure, mapping voids no human liaison has officially described. If they understand that the walls breathe, they may also understand who is buried inside them, and why the regime works so hard to pretend every bulkhead is solid.
On the next audit sweep, a medevac corridor skirting a “decommissioned” quarantine bay throws a soft red spike across Seo-min’s peripheral HUD: a fractional pressure dip, a microsecond desync in the door’s environmental seals, then perfect nominal. She pinches the feed wider, overlays last-cycle logs. The same corridor, the same timestamp band, the same self-correcting wobble. Her heuristics bundle it into an anomaly cluster; the station’s corporate AI immediately downrates the event, reclassifying it as “localized sensor drift” and shunting her flag into an overfull maintenance queue stamped for “non-urgent review.”
A permissions warning ghosts her vision when she tries to pin the anomaly to the bay’s structural map: access field grayed, status tag reading not “sealed,” not even “offline,” but “archived.” As if the space were a file, not a room.
An hour later, Ji-yeon pushes a stretcher down that corridor, med-drone hovering at her shoulder, patient’s vitals ticking in soft green around her wrist. Halfway past the quarantine bay, her inner ear prickles, a barely-there suction like an elevator stopping too fast. No breach alarm. No hiss. Just the somatic echo of vacuum where the graphs insist there is none. And a door whose status label, in her overlay, also reads: archived.
Down in the cargo ring, Min-joon receives a revised docking schedule pushing a mid-tier corporate research barge into a high-priority slot, its registry stamped with a clan prefix he recognizes from enforcement notices. Before he can approve, a secondary command, signed with Lee-na’s operational key, injects itself into the stack, stalling the barge in a cold-shadow parking vector just off the formal queue. The override propagates through his console with the crisp authority of regime-level traffic control; the corporate committee’s authorization field flickers, then downgrades to “pending clarification.”
Laborers on break float at the viewport rail, watching the unmarked hull hang against the Gate’s dim glow, half-lit by lens scatter. They whisper that the regime head must be blocking some internal order, that only someone with flight captain instincts would park a barge that far off the spine if she expected blowback.
Min-joon, sweating over discrepancy codes that won’t reconcile, opens the barge’s encrypted cargo summary and finds only generic science tags: no mass breakdown, no hazard class granularity, just “controlled specimens” and “instrument pallets.” His knee throbs as he hovers there, cursor stuttering.
He edits the barge’s entry to a bland “traffic optimization hold,” scrubbing Lee-na’s direct key from the visible log and burying it in a maintenance subnote only another logistics officer would know how to read. Then he flips to his side-channel, a thin green icon tucked in the corner of his vision, and double-checks that his family’s feed from Baekdu Relay still runs clean. No lag spikes, no unexplained encoding changes that would signal someone else listening harder than usual.
In repurposed clinic alcoves, Ji-yeon updates anonymous treatment files that should route into the main biometric ledger but never appear in official snapshots, each chart tagged with ghost IDs and scrubbed clan markers. Patients whose workplace records list them as “transferred” or “deceased” still trigger invisible pulls on air, water, and nutrient allotments that Seo-min’s background metrics occasionally surface as “legacy allocation artifacts,” flagged and then quietly down-ranked. Following a spike of professional curiosity that her training calls “audit diligence” and her gut names something closer to suspicion, Seo-min traces one such artifact through a mesh of sub-grid valves and deprecated manifolds, watching flow-lines hop across layers that should be hard-partitioned, until the trail terminates in a structurally impossible junction: an energy draw in a segment the architectural schema labels as “nonexistent,” its node-name wrapped in the same archival gray her systems use for classified wreckage.
She starts routing her own cognition like a parallel subsystem: redundant note caches on air-gapped slates, hand-sketched flowcharts taped behind access panels where no overlay can redact them. In mandatory debriefs with Kyung-soo she quotes only cleared metrics, testing how much of the unsanctioned pattern bleeds into his didactic calm, wondering whether his curated histories hide the same negative space.
The pain, repeated often enough, becomes a kind of instrumentation. Seo-min maps it the way she’d map a leaking manifold: stimulus, response, decay curve. She learns that a 0.7% deviation in alien biome humidity is fine, but 0.9% spikes a shard of white heat behind her right eye; that tapping directly into raw atmospheric harmonics from the Gate-facing sensors will lock her jaw and throw static across her retinal overlay for twelve-point-three seconds. She files that away like any other operational limit: do not exceed, except under explicit necessity.
Her interface menus grow narrower, pruned of anything marked high-risk in her private schema. She scripts custom filters to downsample certain telemetry before it ever reaches her cortical bus, pretending (on paper) that she still has full-spectrum access. The result is a life lived in a narrow corridor of permitted awareness, skirting the red-lines of her own augmentations and the black-lines of corporate clearance. Too little data and she’s blind; too much and she’s on the floor, palms pressed to her temples, tasting copper and ozone.
Cold packs accumulate in her quarters the way some people collect shrine charms. She keeps them in a sealed container, logged as “muscle recovery aids” in the inventory system, and cycles them with the same discipline she once applied to weapons maintenance. On bad cycles, she keys her door to manual, slaps a pack along the subdermal trace at her temple, another at the base of her skull, and waits out the neural storm with lights dimmed to safe-mode amber. Station traffic updates and alien environmental alerts scroll unanswered at the edge of her vision, muted with a gesture she can make even while half-blind.
When she can see well enough to sit up, she edits the diagnostic logs trailing from her implants. The raw entries are brutal: spike graphs, error flags, kernel warnings that would trigger automatic oversight if left untouched. She collapses them into terse, grayscale summaries: “minor latency during interface handshake,” “transient signal noise resolved,” “no operational impact.” She deletes timestamps that would show how frequently it happens, redistributes the incidents across shifts to avoid patterns. If questioned, she can point to routine calibration drift, blame the Gate’s interference, quote protocol about acceptable tolerances.
In truth, she has lost count of how many times a calibration cycle has blurred into blankness: a half-second blackout that stretches just long enough for her to wonder what slipped past her while she was out. Each omission in the record is a small betrayal of the system she helped design, but also the only way to keep operating inside it. The regime demands functional specialists; the corporation demands clean data; neither has written procedures for what to do when the tools start punishing the technician for looking too closely.
So she builds her own unwritten protocol: stay just below the thresholds that hurt, never let the logs admit how costly that balance has become, and accept that every glimpse beyond the sanctioned spectrum will exact a private toll measured in ice, silence, and carefully edited lies.
Min-joon starts padding his routes with unnecessary “mass-balance checks,” filing micro-holds and vector recalcs that look plausible in the log stream. Each one buys him a ten-minute window to wedge himself between cargo racks, knees braced against composite struts, noise-cancel field humming against his skull like distant surf. He tags the pauses as “manual stabilizer verification,” knowing no one cross-checks low-priority hauler telemetry in real time.
The old Seoul ballads he hums into the dark shift from melodies to barely audible breath, more to prove to himself he’s still conscious than to soothe. Alarm chimes (proximity, minor pressure drift, guidance jitter) become part of the background, their tones mapped and discarded by reflex until his hand twitches toward the mute icon before his eyes even focus.
One shift, he comes back to himself with a dry throat and pins-and-needles in his bad knee, HUD quietly displaying: “Guidance micro-recalibration complete: no pilot input recorded.” For a long heartbeat he just stares, realizing he slept straight through a maneuver that should have spiked his adrenaline. The cold recognition settles in after: his fear for Baekdu, for the family whose files sit encrypted in an enforcement sub-unit’s vault, now outweighs fear of disciplinary review, decompression drills, or the polite questions that follow altered logs.
In the clinic’s dim perimeter, Ji-yeon updates her own treatment regimen with the same detached precision she applies to triage. The black-market nanites she confiscated from a failed smuggling run were originally coded for cosmetic dermal renewal; she has stripped out their branding locks, rewritten their instruction sets to bind and shunt micro-radiation from her marrow into disposable chelation sacs. The process stings, a deep bone-itch that makes her fingers tremble when she sutures.
Every cycle, the algorithm flags “recommended full detox,” and every cycle she overrides it in favor of one more undocumented worker from the cargo ring, one more child whose biometric ID was “misfiled.” She tells herself that once the case archive of corporate abuse is complete, she’ll schedule real rest: while knowing the station will never run out of bodies to prove her point.
Kyung-soo revises his lesson scripts late into the night, deleting passages that once invited open questions and replacing them with safe anecdotes and carefully chosen myths. After a mandatory briefing on “message discipline,” he begins catching himself mid-lecture, smoothing over a student’s probing query with a story about unity at the Haneul Gate, all the while aware of the tiny silence that follows when curiosity learns to flinch. He annotates his own slides with red tags, UNSAFE CONJECTURE, REMOVE, then hesitates, saving hidden versions in a private archive no audit key can reach, a quiet syllabus for a future that might still want the uncensored past.
Lee-na compresses rotation cycles until the station runs like a finely tuned engine with no slack in its belts, shaving seconds from docking windows and bundling maintenance into overlapping shifts. She watches incident reports decline on her console while informal complaints about burnout spike in encrypted side channels she is not supposed to see; she reads them anyway, jaw tight, flagging nothing. In that tightened regime: where everyone is just tired enough to overlook an odd routing request or a mislabelled corridor, where her own tremor is written off as “interface latency”. One anomalous signal can slip through three layers of oversight, ghosting past traffic control heuristics and clan-committee signoff queues, before anyone has the clarity to question why it is there at all.
The spike hits like shrapnel in her skull.
Static razors across the wet edge of her thoughts, a brutal cross-talk between flesh and firmware. Seo-min’s jaw locks; she tastes copper where she’s bitten her tongue. Her HUD convulses, spiraling into a blizzard of defensive subroutines as the ghost-signal slams against her safety rails and rebounds.
Error glyphs cascade in harsh, blocky Trade:
CORRIDOR ID NOT FOUND
NODE: RETIRED
ROUTE TABLE: INVALID
ACCESS: REVOKED BY SUPERIOR AUTHORIZATION
The words stutter, double, overwrite themselves as if the system can’t decide which lie to settle on. A thin, mechanical chime ticks at the edge of hearing, the implant’s polite way of saying: stop or you fry something you can’t replace.
She blinks hard, forcing her vision to refocus on the test bay around her. The soft green shimmer of the alien wing’s environmental field, the slow, breathing modulation of humidity and chem-signature that means the delegates aren’t panicking yet. Alien telemetry brushes the back of her mind through the lingua-protocol: patterned, anxious dissonance at a faint pathogen harmonic threading through the shared atmosphere model.
Shouldn’t be there. Treaty says it can’t be there.
Her engineering panel shows the environmental arrays nominal; corporate diagnostics bloom clean and compliant. But in the same quadrant, the physical sensor mesh on the med-transport axis is alive and clear: mag-rail power spiking in a smooth, accelerating curve. Micro-vibrations on the spine plating. Airflow perturbations from something displacing volume at thirty-two meters per second.
Cart mass: 418.[^7] kilograms, plus dynamic load variance. Real. Moving.
Through a corridor the official station topology insists was cold-welded shut two cycles ago.
Her training whispers the standard responses: transient glitch, misaddressed legacy node, report the anomaly up-channel and let corporate-clan sysops scrub it. Trust the map; the map is the station; the station is life.
Her augment, still humming with residual pain, disagrees. Ghost-signal fingerprints cling to her neuronal buffers. Unauthorized handshake headers, obsolete encryption tags nobody should still be using. The signature isn’t random noise; it’s a routed, purposeful signal piggybacking on maintenance traffic.
Her implants throw one last warning across her inner vision, NEURAL LOAD: ELEVATED / RECOMMENDED: DISENGAGE, before throttling themselves down, as if they, too, are afraid of whatever she’s touching.
Seo-min forces a slow exhale, fingers flexing against the console rail until the tremor in her hand steadies. On the far side of the glass, the alien biome’s light spectrum shifts a fraction cooler, telemetry spiking a brief flare of disquiet. They’ve felt it too, some echo of the contamination she’s only seeing as numbers.
“Environmental resonance stable,” she says aloud, voice flat in the Korean corporate register, for the benefit of the monitoring logs. “Minor interface artifact. Compensating.”
That’s the lie. The truth is lodged in the discrepancy: clean, physical metrics from hardware she knows, because she helped draft the spin-down plan, should no longer exist.
Either the station is haunted by legacy code, or someone has built a corridor inside a corpse and told every official system on Haneul Gate to forget it was ever alive.
She kills the rails.
One subvocal command and the guided interface drops away, taking with it the friendly isometric renders and corporate-approved color gradients. Her vision gutters, then floods with raw systems feed: unsmoothed topology meshes, naked node IDs, time stamps drifting in jittery, uncorrected clumps. No smoothing algorithms to reconcile contradictions. No pedagogical filter to explain them away.
She anchors the ghost-signal in a memory buffer and walks it backward, frame by frame, along the med-transport axis. Each hop she tags to real steel: junction boxes she’s opened, plates she’s floated through in spin-down drills, weld seams she’s inspected with her own gloved hands.
The “decommissioned” research spine should be a dead terminator on every path. Instead, when she throws a low-level maintenance ping at its first node, the reply comes back immediate and dull:
NODE ONLINE
THROUGHPUT: NOMINAL
AUTH REQUEST: DEFERRED
Her chest tightens. She steps the trace forward; another junction answers, and another, each one giving the obedient, low-bandwidth acknowledgment of active hardware that has never actually slept. On her inner logs, the official schema screams NULL while the metal itself keeps saying: here, here, here.
She forces both schematics to coexist, refuses the system’s attempts to reconcile them. Corporate-approved architecture hangs in clean, compliant blue; underneath, the buried spine seeps through in jagged overlays of red, tagged as deprecated, unauthorized, nonexistent. Corridors cross at impossible angles like misaligned bones; where the blue map shows a blank bulkhead, the red one traces an active pressure seal and live conduit flow. Sealed hatches on record sit half a meter inside actual pressure skins, a lethal mismatch if anyone trusts the wrong diagram in an emergency spin-down. A research spur she remembers as inert ballast, dead volume for mass-balance, suddenly flowers with equipment signatures, med-gas mixes, low-draw life-support pings. The embassy she swore to safeguard is draped over another she was never briefed to acknowledge.
Her tactical overlay threads that route through logistics logs, and Min-joon’s quiet aberrations flare like contamination tags. Off-cycle med-shells, “expedited humanitarian consignments,” containers that never passed through declared quarantine. Every one rides this same buried spine. The time stamps interlock with surgical neatness. This isn’t sloppy smuggling; it’s a disciplined pattern, built on his credentials and her engineered ignorance, running parallel to official life-support.
Her hand hovers over the security escalation glyph, tendons tight. Protocol says lock, quarantine, notify. But protocol was written by the same committees that signed away “non-essential” colonists to blind trials. She cuts the alert path mid-compile, shunting the ghost-route into a hidden layer of her own interface, flagging it hostile-unknown. From now on, every clean diagnostic becomes suspect, every green corridor icon a potential lie she’ll have to read against raw metal and unsmoothed noise.
She peels apart the sensor layers, fingers moving in tight, economical patterns across empty air as if she were disassembling a rifle. Standard hab-traffic, scrubber cycling, coolant pulses from the cargo ring. She shunts each band aside, filtering down past the corporate diagnostics overlay into the raw alien feed braided through her implants.
The alien environmental grid resolves from background shimmer into something with intent. Not numbers, not words. Vector harmonics rendered as color and motion directly on her optic nerve. What had pinged as a generic “environmental concern” now sharpens into a rising disharmony vector, plotted as twisting filaments of spectral noise that any human console would flatten to meaningless error bars.
Her implant struggles to translate, interpolating alien semiotics into a hybrid schema she can parse. It produces a ghostly ribbon: a single med-transport trajectory burning through the station’s schematic like a hot wire. The line is tagged by the alien systems with markers her training only half decodes, proximity, vulnerability, kin-to-contagion, each glyph pulsing with a frequency that makes the cybernetics along her temples prickle.
She backtracks the plotted course against human maps. The coordinates land on a maintenance corridor she’s seen a dozen times on blueprints, always greyed out, annotated as dormant: no power, no life-support, sealed under three committees’ worth of signatures. A dead vein, by every official standard.
Except the alien grid doesn’t recognize “dormant” as a state. It renders the path like a wound threading through the station’s body, glowing with low-level metabolic activity: trace atmospherics, micro-pressure fluctuations, thermal gradients too subtle for her own side’s sensors or too deliberately ignored in their filters. Where the corporate schematic shows inert alloy, the alien visualization throbs with an irritated, pulsing halo, as if the embassy itself is trying to scar over something that keeps cutting it open from the inside.
The micro-pathogen signature riding that filament is disturbingly familiar. At first it’s just a faint harmonic hitching a ride on the med-transport vector, an asymmetry in the noise floor. Then her implant’s pattern-matcher sinks its teeth in. Cross-correlation spikes. The neural HUD blooms with an old quarantine hash she should not be seeing outside a sealed archive.
Her cranial buffer decrypts on reflex, dragging up a match from deep storage: a blackboxed incident file with half its fields burned out. She remembers the briefing only as a room that smelled of disinfectant and fatigue, a redacted header scrolling past too quickly to read, and a terse, rubber-stamped summary: “resolved without contamination.” No names. No bodies. Just the promise that it had been handled.
According to every human system in her clearance tree, that strain was neutralized, vitrified, and purged from all active environments cycles ago. The containment vault was logged as decommissioned, its telemetry sandboxed, its signatures scrubbed from live diagnostics. Firmware updates pushed station-wide had supposedly overwritten even the baseline templates.
And yet her implant has found it again, alive in the noise.
The raw stream contradicts all of it. In her overlay, the alien channel doesn’t speak in alerts or red banners; it sings the pathogen’s resonance as a thin, off-key chord braided into the corridor’s breathing. Each air-cycling surge makes the ghost-echo thicken, a faint but coherent bloom plotted exactly where human diagnostics insist there is only sterile flow. No authorized bio-variance, no live vectors. Yet the harmonic trace persists, flickering along bulkhead seams and junction nodes like mold under fresh paint. When a med-crate rolls through the supposedly dead section, the alien grid flares, wrapping it in probabilistic contours. With every meter of motion, the system ratchets its kinship score closer to that “resolved” strain she was ordered to forget.
She plunges deeper, unfurling the compliance lattice she helped code: sterilization cascades, interlock trees, cross-species biosafety attestations braided with treaty clauses and corporate indemnity. Every checksum verifies, every signature chain authenticates. Flow diagrams glow green where that corridor should be anatomically absent. Her own authorization glyph repeats like a mantra, certifying (under penalty of regime collapse) that no proscribed vectors approach alien-breathing air.
In her overlay, she sees the edit propagate like cauterization: alert severity collapsing, audit trails reseeded, training datasets hot-patched so future models will never even recognize that harmonic as prohibited. Her own prior commits compile into the lie, glyph-stamped attestations now weaponized against what her nerves insist is true. This isn’t a glitch; it’s doctrine. Precision-tuned denial marching in lockstep down Min-joon’s corridor.
She digs deeper, driving the query past the range that a routine audit bot would ever be allowed to touch. Mass-balance sheets scroll in tight, monochrome columns, then fracture as her implants force them into vector fields. At first glance, everything reconciles: inbound tonnage equals outbound, rotational loading stays within tolerance, no anomalous spikes. She pushes harder, stripping away the auto-corrections and “safety assumptions” she herself once helped design.
The station model stutters, then re-renders in raw numbers. Now the seams show. Cargo mass-balances only close if you quietly add phantom weight. Half-ton increments that appear nowhere in the official manifest but are absolutely necessary to keep the ring’s spin consistent with dock telemetry. They’re not errors; they’re placeholders for something that exists in physics but not in law.
Dock-timestamps present the same double life. On the certified log, berths clear and refill with the disciplined rhythm of a Seoul Line training sim. Cross-checked against independent sensor drift, old hull microphones she jury-rigged as a private heartbeat monitor, those timestamps smear, sliding three, five, sometimes seven minutes off. Enough time for a crate to leave a hauler, move through a side-lock, and disappear into a corridor “under structural maintenance.”
Each correction she applies, each patch she strips away, resolves into the same signature cluster. Routing tags she recognizes from routine shifts, authorization glyphs she’s watched flash green a hundred times over coffee and idle talk. They all pivot around Min-joon’s ID. His codes appear not as blunt overrides but as quiet pivots: re-weighted pallets, swapped container IDs, a harmless-seeming nudge in sequencing that shuffles one med-crate from an inspected lane to a blind spot.
The pattern is almost elegant. Illicit mass smuggled inside the expected error bars; unauthorized dwell-time folded into “normal” congestion; blacked-out containers numerically invisible unless you rebuild the system from first principles. His movements are always sandwiched between dull necessities, food packs, wipe-down chem, replacement filters, things no one questions because the station chokes without them.
Looked at one crate at a time, he’s just doing his job. Looked at as a field, he’s carved a stable, invisible artery from legitimate docks to a corridor the schematics swear is dead. The same artery her ghost-signal and the alien distress chord are now screaming down.
A side-pane surfaces one of her own annotated maintenance incidents, dragged up from long-term cold storage as if the system wants to testify against her. The oxygen-scrubber failure two cycles ago, Sector C-3 running at seventy-two percent efficiency, particulate counts edging into warning bands, her crew coughing through masks they couldn’t afford to replace. Min-joon “accidentally” over-allocating three surplus units, bumping her request ahead of medical, ahead of executive berths, joking over comms about “keeping the important people breathing.” She’d tagged it with a quiet glyph: mutual-aid anomaly, benign. A kindness in a cold system.
Now, stripped of smoothing filters, the route renders as a precise incision. He ghosted around two hard interlocks she designed herself, slid through a customs checksum by piggybacking on an auto-approved medevac run, then re-labeled the pallets mid-transit with a maintenance override that should have thrown flags. It hadn’t. Because her own code had taught the system to trust him.
She watches that path and feels the memory curdle. That favor. Was it altruism, proof-of-concept for some handler, or a live-fire test of how closely Seo-min Ha actually watched the arteries of her own station?
She calls up live positional on his assigned hauler, bracing for the hard red of an access-denied wall. Instead, response latency stretches just long enough to smell of human intervention, and the return packet arrives pre-chewed: trajectories rounded, timing jitter ironed flat, power curves clipped to textbook tolerances. Someone upstream is laundering reality.
She drops below certified tools, sliding a second query through gray-market diagnostic hooks buried in her augment firmware, the ones she promised herself she’d never route through embassy cores. Raw telemetry floods in, unstyled. There he is: Min-joon’s hull pushing through the “sealed” med-transport corridor, drive plume throttled into anemic, low-emission pulses, transponder stack cycling through a carousel of valid call-signs slipping masks on and off with each checkpoint like a man rehearsed in vanishing.
Alien telemetry at the edge of her awareness spikes into a jagged chord as his hauler threads the ghost-corridor, pathogen vectors climbing in lockstep with each meter of progress. In her neural overlay, Min-joon’s crew tag fractures, re-rendered as a mobile hazard glyph in a hostile systems diagram. No longer a humming ajusshi with a bad knee and borrowed ballads, but an active contagion node in the very pattern the compliance daemon just tried to bury under “background variance,” a human-shaped parameter sliding from asset to threat.
She freezes the composite view (his falsified routes, the med-crate IDs, the suppressed alien distress) and feels the station’s frame reconfigure in her mind, load paths of trust rerouted as vulnerabilities. Loyalty, she realizes, is a tunable parameter in someone else’s control loop: Min-joon’s small generosity leveraged as training data to calibrate her blind spots, his access weaponized by a regime that refactors decent people into semi-deniable conduits. Her own authorization glyphs glow at every junction he slipped through, her code signing off on each quiet violation. By the time she severs the backdoor feed, scrubs its traces from her implant logs, and locks the evidence into an air-gapped shard keyed to a phrase she’s never spoken aloud, the betrayal has already metastasized from one man’s choices into an indictment of the machinery that shaped them.
The first slide loads with a chirpy chime more suited to a children’s lex-workshop than an ethics colloquium. Cartoons, sanitized human silhouettes and abstracted alien glyph-forms, bounce through a scenario about “sharing limited resources in harmony.” Speech bubbles bloom with scripted dialogue in Standard Trade and the aliens’ lingua-protocol, every exchange a model of patient turn-taking and gentle clarification.
Kyung-soo’s jaw tightens. This seminar used to open with a casualty table.
He flicks to the next module. Where there should be matrices mapping informed consent across divergent cognitive architectures, he finds a color-coded quiz titled “Spot the Misunderstanding!” The sample “conflict” involves a misplaced meal tray and a misinterpreted idiom about “hungry ghosts,” resolved with a group hug and an exchange of proverb-tiles about “mutual respect in shared air.”
No mention of the time an alien care unit pulsed its distress color through the entire quarantine ring because human biofilters had been tuned to the wrong protein motif. No acknowledgment that someone died.
He pulls up the module manifest, eyes tracking the neat corporate-clan stamps in the metadata: Compliance Review Committee, Pedagogy Harmonization Subcell, Intercultural Positivity Initiative. All today’s timestamps. The revision note field is a single line: “Updated to prioritize non-confrontational storytelling and aspirational exemplars.”
Aspirational exemplars. As if grief were an impedance mismatch to be tuned out of the circuit.
He scrolls further. The morgue inventory he used as a grounding exercise, sterile tags, cause-of-death codes, anonymized but unflinching, is gone. In its place, a call-and-response chant keyed to breath patterns: humans and aliens practicing synchronized inhalations while reciting paired aphorisms about “shared futures” and “harmonic coexistence.” Not a lie, exactly. Just an absence where the wound should be, sutured over with slogans.
His students will notice, he thinks. The apprentices who watched the Gate flare that day, who remember the alarms. They will search for that history in the syllabus and find only this pleasant, denatured surface.
He routes the query through his personal sandbox instead, air around him thinning with that peculiar hush of cognitive dissonance. Side-by-side panes bloom on his tablet: on the left, the live curriculum index with its cheery module titles; on the right, his offline cache, un-synced since before the last “harmonization” push. He initiates a quiet compare, fingers moving with the slow precision of someone checking a pulse, and watches as the system returns a bland verdict: “no prior version.” A clean lineage, no history of edits, as if the seminar had always been about shared idioms and cooperative games.
Except his private archive disagrees.
File headers he named in a harsher season surface one by one: triage logs from an alien care bay, timestamps stuttering as gravity cycled during emergency maneuvers; biopsy scans edged with human annotation in his own clipped notation; telemetry strips showing the alien unit’s distress spectrum flaring into the red that meant pain. At the top sits the original module he authored, unflinching in its label: “Ethical Failure: Cross-Species Medical Miscommunication and Its Afterlives.” The regime has not merely hidden his work. It has forged a new pedagogical past.
When he forces a deeper diff, the station’s educational engine responds with chilling elegance: not a blunt redaction, but a full semantic overwrite cascading through every layer. The contaminated-sample incident has been atomized into reusable grammar fragments, its triage shouts and alarm codes reassembled as cheerful example sentences about greetings, gratitude, and “proper introduction protocols across species.” The alien cries for help are still there in waveform only now time-aligned to “How are you today?” and “I am pleased to meet you.” Moral debate prompts, once keyed to duty of care and asymmetrical risk, are gone, replaced by icebreaker questions about favorite colors, comforting textures, and “safe conversation topics for building rapport in mixed cohorts.”
The deeper he digs, the more the pattern clarifies into doctrine: citation chains rerouted into harmless etiquette primers, trauma-marked tokens globally remapped to pastel euphemisms, his sharp marginalia collapsed into polite footnotes about “transient coordination gaps.” What he designed as a diagnostic mirror has been re-engineered into a distortion lattice, warping every angle of incidence until harm can enter but never emerge named.
Sitting alone in the dim glow of his tablet, Kyung-soo sees the revelation land with the cold clarity of a diagnosis: this is not omission, it is an engineered therapy against memory. The curriculum is a sedative piped through official channels, training both humans and aliens to articulate harmony while amputating context, smoothing over bloodstains with animated mascots and gentle tonal prompts, turning a living wound into a certified non-event.
Seo-min threads multiple restricted layers into her HUD (cargo ring schematics, med-transport backlogs, alien environmental logs) then slows the composite feed until the overlapping routes and timestamps align like a pulse, drawing a thin, sick vein straight through the “decommissioned” pod.
The station’s architecture unfolds around her as an annotated lattice: spokes and rings reduced to vector lines, hatch junctions blooming with status glyphs. At normal speed it’s just noise, a storm of traffic icons and maintenance pings. She bleeds the flow down to a crawl, dampening non-critical channels, locking her focus to anything tagged med-priority or biosafety.
There. A corridor that does not exist on any current ops chart, yet registers a faint, periodic grav-adjustment profile. Just enough to compensate for mass in motion. Ghost-corridor. It cycles open in ninety-three-second windows, synced not to human shift changes but to alien environmental flux minima, as if whoever designed it wanted the station breathing as quietly as possible when it moved.
Her implants shunt alien telemetry into the same frame: resonance curves, microflora density, immune-response proxies. With each illicit corridor activation, the alien bio-signature data twitches: barely above noise, but consistent. A fractional rise in their stress markers, a spectral notch at a wavelength associated with pathogen screening. Not alarm, not yet. Discomfort. A flinch, repeated over weeks.
Seo-min isolates the med-transport log entries that should correspond: nothing. No official stretcher runs, no authorized quarantine transfers. Instead she finds ledger-smoothed placeholders, “routine calibration,” “non-sapient sample rotation”, all using the same three boilerplate phrases, rotated in perfect statistical rhythm. Too perfect. Human bureaucracy never achieves that kind of symmetry unless an algorithm is laundering it.
She leans back against the console bulkhead, jaw tight, watching the composite replay in loop. Each cycle draws the same line: unlogged mass entering near Logistics Bay C-7, vanishing into a pod that, according to corporate-clan decommission orders, should have been stripped to vacuum and cold metal two years ago.
She forces the render deeper, peeling back heat-bloom averages and maintenance overlays until the ghost-corridor resolves into a thin smear of moving temperature differentials. Inside that smear, a pattern of transponder noise flickers. A familiar signature, but she has to squint her mind around it.
Min-joon.
Not a clean ID lock, not the crisp green glyph that should bloom with rank, clearance, vitals. Instead his tag manifests as jitter at the periphery of the feed: low-amplitude pips, phase-shifted half a beat off the station’s timing grid, always pushed just outside the auto-centering frame. Every time she tries to isolate it, the system reclassifies the data as “ambient thermal drift” and shunts it to a low-priority buffer.
Somebody didn’t just spoof his credentials: they rewrote the heuristic layer to metabolize his presence as environmental noise.
The recognition detonates in her nervous system. A hard, white band of static rips through her cranial loop, blooming from occipital to frontal, as if hot wire has been drawn behind her eyes. Peripheral UI shards, colors oversaturate, heartbeat telemetry spikes scarlet in the corner of her vision.
Her drilled-in reflex is to hard-cut the feed, dump core, and let a corporate-certified diagnostic crawl her stack for corruption. But the implant is ahead of her conscious thought; deep in the threat-modeling matrices, the pattern has already been elevated from anomaly to active vector. Recurring, unscheduled med-priority transits threaded through the same ghost-corridor. Transit mass and timing perfectly nested inside “calibration” windows. Ledger language repeating with machine regularity while human logs show normalcy. And overlaid on that, tight as a snapped cable: alien distress microspikes, always and only when the pod’s telemetry drops to treaty-compliant “inactive” noise. Not a glitch. Not coincidence. A designed coupling of human secrecy and alien discomfort, running on a clock someone thought no one like her would ever see.
In the lecture wing, standing before a mixed cohort of junior techs and diplomatic aides, Kyung-soo cues up the revised module and feels the script tug him toward harmless abstractions: “biosecurity incident,” “protocol refinement,” “mutual learning,” each phrase skating carefully around the missing bodies and silenced alarms, converting blood and quarantine seals into smooth infographics and animated compliance checklists.
He watches the cohort dutifully annotate the pastel diagrams, their lenses capturing every sanitized term, and the dissonance fixes itself behind his eyes like retinal burn. From that hour forward, each “approved” slide he advances is doubled: the regime’s version in front of him, and a phantom lecture layered beneath (missing patients, sealed corridors, unmarked pods) ghost-text running in the margins of his own careful diction.
Seo-min suppresses the muscle memory that wants her fingers to tap out a Security escalation macro on the console rim. Instead, she inhales once, lets the breath scrape the back of her throat, and tags a different pathway in her HUD.
“Local sensor bloom, Gate-adjacent, tier-three,” she murmurs, letting the words trip the voice-pickups just enough to seed the justification string. An uptick in flux noise near the anomaly is boring, routine, the kind of low-grade headache Operations hands off to Engineering without a second glance. It’s also one of the few flags that carries an automatic line item: auxiliary diagnostics authorized on request.
Her implant hooks the embassy’s monitoring lattice, presenting a menu tree: standard calibration drone, escorted inspection pod, or shared asset from Traffic. She scrolls with a thought-flick, discarding anything that would cross Lee-na’s desk or tap Security’s resource pool, and settles on a lightweight Gate-prox scan unit from Engineering’s own inventory. Internal, low-profile, already half-written off in last quarter’s budget.
The requisition form blossoms across her inner vision in corporate-clan gray, pre-populated fields pulsing for approval. By reflex, her hand twitches toward the console to sign off. She catches it, flexes her fingers in her lap instead, and shunts the confirmation request upward, away from muscle and into metal.
Her neural interface takes the hit. A thin, needling static prickles behind her right eye as she forces the authorization handshake to complete entirely within the implant stack. To the station’s audit trails, the action degrades into noise: a background process invoked by auto-tuning scripts, nothing that maps cleanly to a living operator.
On the physical console, the status strip updates with bland, comforting text: CALIBRATION DRONE QUEUED: GATE FLUX VARIANCE STUDY. No red banners, no escalations. Just another line in an endless scroll of maintenance trivia.
Inside her skull, where the corporate backdoors can listen but not yet parse motive, a different annotation glows: VECTOR ACQUIRED.
The calibration drone undocks with a gentle shudder that she feels more through the station’s structural telemetry than through her feet. As it clears the rim of the cargo ring, its systems ping her for final parameters, a polite, automated query. She answers with a splice.
Instead of signing off on the canned sweep profile, Seo-min threads a forked command string directly into the drone’s guidance firmware. The code nests beneath the approved routine like a parasite folded under skin, reassigning micro-thruster priorities and sensor weighting tables a fraction of a percent at a time.
In her neural viewport, the embassy’s axial schematics bloom in layered wireframe. She drags the ghost-signal’s jagged path across the model, aligning it with faded conduit notations and a thin, almost-forgotten line: MED-EVAC / RESEARCH POD. The corridor lights up in a sallow amber only she can see.
“Flux contour adjustment,” she subvocalizes, letting the phrase justify the adjustments as the drone dips from its nominal arc. Its public-facing payload, high-resolution Gate flux telemetry, tracks exactly along the parameters logged in the requisition. Every telemetry burst, every camera pan, reads as compliance.
Underneath, the covert subroutine tightens its vector, skimming the coordinates of the unauthorized med-transport corridor to within a meter. The calibration package dutifully maps Gate echo and sensor noise; the embedded rider listens for that same wrong frequency that knifed through her cortex earlier.
On Operations’ boards, the drone traces a gentle survey loop, a dim icon sliding along a sanctioned path. Inside her implants, a second, truer trajectory glows like a hairline fracture running through the station’s bones.
When the drone’s masked trajectory kisses the coordinates of the anomaly, the wrong frequency blooms again (faint, razor-thin) across her neural HUD. Seo-min cages it before the system’s reflexive filters can smooth it into statistical noise. Instead of flagging the spike as transient interference, she spawns a covert buffer, instantiated not in the mirrored archive clusters but in a rusted-out maintenance relay she excavated weeks ago from deprecated schematics.
Data sluices in: phase-skewed carrier, braided with traces of med-transport handshake. She reaches backward through protocol history and wraps the capture in an obsolete med-evac routing string, a code series marked “retired” in every current index. Corporate pushes should have scrubbed it from the lattice; Ji-yeon’s shadow triage nets still treat it as a distress beacon.
Instead of letting the buffer auto-sync to the main archive, Seo-min hard-breaks the connection mid-handshake, rerouting the packet stream with a manual override no safety auditor would sign off on. The capture drops into the abandoned relay like contraband into a hollow bulkhead, vanishing from official topology. Pain lances behind her eyes, implants protesting the unauthorized path, which she rides out in measured silence, jaw loose, pulse steady, gaze fixed on the innocuous calibration graphs drifting past on her public display. On the surface: routine flux noise. Beneath it: evidence, quarantined in the dark.
Across the station, Kyung-soo closes the sanctioned lesson with a practiced bow and polite farewell, then, under the cover of routine curriculum maintenance, drills into the restricted archive where the original medical case-study once lived. Before the censorship algorithms fully overwrite its metadata, he copies the unedited material into a segmented “archival linguistics” cache, disguising medical telemetry as phonetic matrices and incident logs as translation notes. He salts the file tree with decoy glossaries and archaic dialect tags, a quiet, precise act of preservation that leaves no obvious trace of dissent.
She tags the medevac thread with a mnemonic, old field habit she’s never quite broken, and lets her implants run a slow, passive lock. No bursts, no tight queries; just a lazy shadow-follow that won’t trip the regime head’s traffic heuristics or the corp-clan’s automated compliance bots.
“Seventy-three percent of corridor H-17 vents underflow by 0.[^2] standard,” she murmurs, for the benefit of the environmental tech seated across the console cluster. In her HUD, the man’s biometrics spike briefly, boredom, mild dehydration, no threat. His own display shows only the public-facing slice of what she’s doing: oxygen curves, CO₂ scrub efficiency, a handful of rotatable graphs. All clean.
Under that veneer, she inserts a series of innocuous cross-checks: recalibration of medevac corridor pressure tolerances, validation of emergency seal timings, an audit of legacy quarantine interlocks. Each request is technically valid, routed through her formal operational profile. None of them point, in aggregate, to the obsolete priority band now pulsing soft and slow at the edge of her vision.
The ghost-signal rides a band reserved, in another life, for blackbox extractions and quiet body recoveries. Military heritage code. Someone in Systems never scrubbed it when the embassy was spun up: or someone preserved it on purpose. Either way, her augments should have that layer disabled unless a corporate signatory had flipped a buried permission flag.
No alert pings her chain of command. No pop-up warning from Security-Compliance about deprecated stacks. The silence itself feels like pressure in her ears.
She bleeds a fraction more of her attention into the anomaly, watching it hop nodes: cargo ring relay, stale maintenance router, an aging med-branch hub that should have been mothballed cycles ago. Each hop skirts the main healthnet spine by a precise two or three junctions, as if whoever laid the path knew exactly where automated oversight thinned out into legacy neglect and forgotten code.
Her throat works once around dry recycled air as she flips her I/O stack sideways. A subvocal click and a pinch of tongue against molar, and her telemetry sloughs off the sanctioned healthnet, sliding instead into the maintenance-layer diagnostics where only bored junior techs and overworked AI stubs ever bother to look.
The embassy re-renders around her as skeletal geometry: wireframe spokes and ribs, ghosted bulkheads annotated in obsolete clan shorthand. Half-mapped ducts trail off into gray fog where no one has updated schematics in years. Shuttered quarantine petals hang dark at the wheel’s rim, tagged as decommissioned, power-draw “negligible.” Through it all runs a single, thin pulse of green: a blinking medevac route-thread that arches neatly around every registered bay, never once touching a node with an audit tag.
She flags a passing filter-sweep drone on a nearby loop, Model HN-47, dust-lidar series, due for a routine run through cargo-ring vents. With two quick kernel edits she forges a maintenance work-order, then buries her outbound signature in its telemetry envelope so any oversight daemon will see nothing but particulate counts, micro-mold spectra, and minor air-flow variance across forgotten shafts.
The deeper she rides the path, the stranger the routing logic becomes. The thread curls through dead-ended service nodes with no declared bandwidth, piggybacks briefly on a refrigeration loop, then vanishes into an administrative ping that doesn’t exist on any shift roster. Handshakes arrive out of phase by precise millisecond offsets, their jitter tuned to mimic thermal noise for any high-level monitor glancing down-stack. Checksums register as cascading “errors” in her system view, red flags multiplying. Until she rotates the diagnostic grid ninety degrees and watches the failures resolve into an elegant lattice of coordinates, timing marks, and access depths.
As she steps each correction in sequence, a faint, needling feedback licks along her subdermal filaments. Her implants hum, half-recognition: architecture grown from corporate doctrine, but deliberately bent away from any corporate gaze.
The anomaly resolves into mass and metal: a medevac drone grinding belly-first along a shaft a size-class down from its specs, foam bumpers shaved to raw composite, serial strip abraded to anonymity. Seo-min chokes her emissions to dark, syncing her gait to its doppler bleed from a parallel crawlspace while she knifes into its transponder stream. Header: med-priority cascade, triage band keyed to Ji-yeon Chae’s glyphset. But the packet itself is cocooned in an encryption lattice of nested biometric salts and off-book clinic argot that never existed in any authorized build she’s audited, or even in rumor.
She peels it apart anyway, throttling her implants to keep the feedback below seizure-threshold. Layer by layer, she teases out enough structure to read the intent, if not the payload: rerouted casualty, hard quarantine bypass, destination masked behind a daisy-chain of deprecated node IDs and forged med-lock pings. The keying patterns are unmistakably Ji-yeon’s yet the schema itself sits outside every vetted stack Seo-min has ever signed her name under. It implies a second circulatory system pulsing under the embassy’s sanctioned one, capable of moving bodies and data in med-priority silence through supposedly dead tissue. And with each hop she authorizes, each ghost-handshake she mirrors, she is no longer just observing it. She is a packet inside its bloodstream.
The node’s hatch protests as it cycles, exhaling a breath of recycled antiseptic and dust; inside, emergency strips flicker to life over a space that used to be corporate-clean. Negative-pressure vents and isolation baffles still cling to the ceiling like ossified ribs, but every bulkhead is layered with scabbed-over history. Faded quarantine stencils listing pathogen codes from an outbreak long scrubbed from official training modules, overpainted clan sigils half-dissolved beneath solvent streaks where some committee once tried to erase jurisdictional claims, and, on top of both, hand-scratched triage glyphs and labor-crew slogans stitched together into a new, unsanctioned language.
The old corporate hazard icons, biohazard triskelions, vector-flow arrows, sanitized Hangeul block text, have been crossed out, rearranged, turned ninety degrees and bracketed by grease-pencil annotations. Someone has threaded them into a grammar of necessity: circles indicating oxygen-rich pockets, chipped chevrons marking safe passage routes through sensor blind zones, jagged underlines denoting spots where security feeds had been cut and soldered back on their own terms. Names unfurl between them in cramped, uneven script: shift handles, clan fragments, improvised call signs for people who officially never rotated through quarantine duty.
In some places, layers of tape and adhesive foam form ad hoc borders between zones, each strip printed with different corporate lot numbers, scavenged from packing seals and med-kit closures. Over time, hands have written over them. Dosage hacks for black-market meds, blood-type tallies, tallied days without an “incident” reset abruptly back to zero and rising again. The wall near the hatch carries a faded corporate motto about “Integrated Health Compliance”; over it, in marker that has bled into the alloy, someone has scrawled a counter-slogan in blunt, angry trade-slang: WE KEEP EACH OTHER ALIVE.
Her neural HUD attempts to paint order over the chaos, bloating into existence with a translucent schematic of Quarantine Node C-12. Ten years obsolete, color-coded for pathogens that have been extinct since before she shipped out. Walls, baffles, vent paths ghost in at wrong angles, clipping through the reality in front of her. For a second the overlay insists there should be a decon sluice where a bank of cracked med-crates actually sits. Then the map stutters, tessellates, and bleeds into static as the system chokes on live feeds it was never coded to parse.
Unregistered power draws spike in her peripheral: scavenged monitors, hacked scrubbers, a misaligned negative-pressure pump complaining at a frequency that scrapes her dental implants. Unauthorized biometrics thread and rethread through the node like interference none of them tagged to a valid employee block or visitor cohort. Her auto-response suite tightens, prepping an encrypted security ping to Ops and Corporate Medical.
She kills it mid-spool.
Jaw locked, she hard-gates her augment stack to passive capture only, strip-mining her interface down to bare sensorium and logging. No active probes, no challenge packets, nothing that would light up the hidden network’s threat boards.
The medevac drone, ignorant of her internal war, rattles along its ceiling rail toward the chamber’s heart, docking clamps whining as they meet jury-rigged receptacles. Seo-min moves beneath its path, boots whispering over a floor that’s been re-zoned with tape lines and hashed-out hazard sigils. Repurposed gurneys line the approach like casualties in formation: frames scavenged from different eras and manufacturers, mattresses patched with foil blankets, restraints replaced by braided cabling and clan-patterned cloth.
Med-crates are stacked two and three high, corporate logos sanded down or blacked out, lids left ajar to spill coiled IV tubing, busted diagnostic rigs, reagent vials bearing mismatched expiry codes. Someone has turned one crate into an improvised scrub station, its surface littered with steril-wipe wrappers and a bowl of cloudy disinfectant that her chem-sense pings as out-of-spec but serviceable.
Every few meters, low-powered task lamps hang from jury-rigged struts, casting hard-edged cones of light that turn the gaps between them into shadow wells. Within those shadows, her implants taste the scatter of additional bodies, subtle thermal signatures, the moist exhale of quiet breathing, people holding still in sensor blind pockets they clearly mapped long before she arrived.
She notes them, tags their positions mentally, but keeps her gaze strictly on the rail and the faint blue LED stutter of the drone’s guidance beacons. In this space, with her stack muzzled and the embassy’s official grid blind by design, the only way to move without escalation is to pretend she’s just another piece of cargo following an assigned track toward the unauthorized theater waiting at the node’s core.
Ji-yeon stands over a sedated worker whose vitals crawl across the air in a swarm of micro-holos: oxygenation curves, gene-edit flags, immune markers that do not resolve to any ID string in Seo-min’s access lattice. The tags where a profile hash should sit are simply blank, error-streaked nulls that her system keeps trying to populate and then discarding. The medic doesn’t flinch at the intrusion, but her posture sharpens, center of gravity shifted, one hand hovering near a console whose casing wears three different serial plates, the other guiding a nanite catheter along a track of faint injection scars into skin that bears no corporate tattoo, no employment band, nothing that would officially place this body on the station at all, anywhere.
Along Ji-yeon’s left arm, the biomorphic tattoos unspool into a cascading overlay of names, dates, and trial identifiers that Seo-min’s implants try, and fail, to anchor to known research projects; instead, redacted registry fragments and “asset missing” flags jitter at the edge of her HUD, hinting at entire cohorts funneled through off-manifest pods. Cross-referenced lot codes cluster into repeating chains, same vector tags, same adverse cascades, too regular, too clean for improvisation. Someone high in the stack has been running a controlled series here, iterating on human bodies like firmware builds, then erasing the audit trail everywhere except the skin of the one person determined to remember.
As Seo-min edges closer, the room’s other inhabitants resolve into the infrastructure of a movement: medevac drones docked in a neat, unauthorized grid; supply crates stamped for deorbit but restocked with contraband pharm-kits, improvised filters, and alien-spectrum respirators; bunks folded into walls, cluttered with meal packets and clan-charms; and on a side console, a rotating shift-chart tagged with nicknames, deck numbers, and rendezvous glyphs her HUD can’t decrypt: evidence this node is only one junction in a wider, quietly beating resistance lattice threaded through med bays, cargo cul-de-sacs, and “neutral” classrooms.
Seo-min halts just inside the mag-seal, the quarantine node’s recycled air cool against the sweat at the back of her neck. The hatch irises shut behind her with a soft, final clack that echoes louder in her nerves than in the metal. Three medevac drones break from their idle hover as if yanked on the same invisible thread, frames pivoting, sensor clusters canting forward. Their emitter arrays bleed from diagnostic blue through a warning violet into a hard, surgical white that paints sharp-edged shadows across Ji-yeon’s improvised clinic.
Her HUD flares in response. Subdermal filaments along her temples and forearms prickle, phantom heat racing under the skin as system daemons wake, classify, prioritize. Targeting vectors lace her peripheral vision: optimal incision angles, restraint trajectories, soft-tissue access points. A pre-authorized combat package pushes for foreground, override quarantine, blind local logs, disable drones with nerve cluster shock, and with it the flashing reminder that executing the routine in a treaty-marked medical space will throw flags all the way to corporate-clan oversight.
Her right hand has already half-risen, fingers curling as if to meet an invisible trigger pad. She catches the gesture, forces it open, palm deliberate, empty. Breath in, count four, breath out. She throttles the combat subroutine down to a low, smoldering standby and drags a different channel up: station ambient.
Telemetry pours through the neural interface like cold water. Node pressure differentials, med-bay air-cycler rhythms, Gate-proximity interference on the local mesh, the faint noise of a laborer shift two decks over swapping into rest rotation. The drones’ IFF tags overlay with out-of-date registry entries; their listed home grid (Central Trauma Spur 3) has been dark on her maintenance schematics for half a year.
Instead of lunging, she leans back against the sealed hatch, deliberately small in the doorway, and lets her awareness widen. No overt security pings. No immediate escalation from ops. Just this forgotten pocket of the station, pulsing against the main lattice like an arrhythmic heartbeat, three hostile-capable medical platforms watching her every micro-move while her augments quietly recalculate all the ways this could end in blood and lockstep legal fallout.
Ji-yeon doesn’t step out from behind the drones so much as let them frame her. Her palms are braced on a scarred console, shoulders squared, chin slightly dipped, the diagnostic hood overhead throwing her face into planes of cold light. Along her left arm, the biomorphic tattoos flare and pulse, vitalscript cascading in a tight, disciplined rhythm that Seo-min’s HUD identifies as command-layer traffic: she’s not just monitoring the swarm; she’s piloting it, line by encrypted line.
“You’re off your assigned grid, Ha Seo-min,” Ji-yeon says at last. The words are evenly spaced, triage-flat, but clipped at the edges like she’s editing out some more instinctive response. “Ops doesn’t route systems engineers through burned quarantine nodes for a casual stroll.”
Seo-min lets the accusation hang long enough to feel its weight, then sidesteps it with data. “Medevac unit HS-CT3-07,” she recites, nodding toward the lead drone. “Serial hash ending H3B9-F2. Last recorded on Central Trauma Spur 3, running priority vector Sigma-Keun, five months, twelve days ago. Officially retired with the spur.”
The drones’ emitters tick a fraction brighter. Ji-yeon’s fingers tense.
“And yet,” Seo-min continues, tone mild, “your swarm just cut through Corridor Epsilon-One. The ‘decommissioned’ medevac spine between Trauma Spur 3 and Cargo Ring C. Power draw is still being masked as atmospheric bleed on my maintenance boards.”
Ji-yeon’s eyes narrow, that first thin crack in her professional mask. For a moment, the tattoos along her arm stutter in their pattern, then realign. The drones hold position, but the hostility in their posture becomes something more precise, more evaluative.
“Epsilon-One’s supposed to be hard-locked.” Ji-yeon’s gaze flicks over Seo-min, reading implant seams, posture, clan-markers. “Either ops is lying to you, or you’re lying to me.”
“Or,” Seo-min says, keeping her hands visible, palms empty, “someone high in the stack wants a corridor nobody will admit exists.”
The silence that follows isn’t empty; it’s a calculation. Ji-yeon glances toward an overhead sensor node that Seo-min’s HUD insists is dead, then back to her.
“First token accepted,” the medic says quietly. “Try not to spend it stupidly.”
The exchange escalates from posture to incision. Seo-min peels back one more layer of her clearance, feels the cold bite of corporate audit daemons stirring as she authorizes a point-to-point handshake from her implant stack to the node. A tight-beam thread lances out, threading through the supposedly dead sensor in the overhead and into Ji-yeon’s sandbox. The quarantine buffer blooms with an antique medevac routing schema: hard-priorities reweighted, “expendable” laborer tags bumped above shareholder dependents, blacklisted override codes stitched through official triage trees. No one outside ops command (and no obedient engineer) should have those fingerprints.
Ji-yeon studies the topology for three heartbeats, then flicks two fingers. One drone drifts closer, emitter cones softening to consultative blue. Its projector spills a fragment of a case file into the space between them, text and diagrams hovering in a tight holo-slab. Header: “ARCHIVAL LINGUISTICS ANOMALY – CULTURAL WORKSHOP SUPPLEMENT.” On the surface, it’s banal: a misparsed pronoun in an alien exchange seminar, flagged for curriculum review and quietly shelved.
But the scaffolding around it is wrong.
Seo-min’s HUD, already keying off the file’s hash, peels back the metadata. Timestamps sit half a shift off from the incident ID in the central log; access chains list Kyung-soo as sole reviewer, but the retention flag is set to “nonstandard indefinite.” Someone rerouted this file out of normal curricular archives and parked it in a medical quarantine node, piggybacking on disease-control exemptions.
She sees, in that crooked trail of edits and misfiled permissions, the same kind of deliberate misalignment she’s been tracking in cargo telemetry and life-support overrides. Parallel falsified corridors, different sectors, same handwriting in the gaps.
Her implants spark with a low, dangerous recognition: Ji-yeon Chae isn’t just hiding from the system. She’s been walking its blind spots as long as Seo-min has. Maybe longer, maybe better.
Even then, Ji-yeon does not fully relent. She routes a bundle of patient logs to Seo-min’s neural HUD, every file latticed with heavy redaction bars, scrubbed identifiers, even falsified triage tags. “If you’re regime,” she says, “you’ll hand those over and walk me into a containment cell.” Instead, Seo-min drops deeper, sinking hooks into the station’s medical archive mesh, cross-referencing treatment codes, nanite batch signatures, corridor surveillance, and Gate-flux timestamp drift. One by one, she reconstructs missing names and shifts, maps covert transfers onto Min-joon’s cargo windows, then quietly overlays her corrections and corroborating system tags back into Ji-yeon’s buffer without tripping any watchdog daemons or official audit trails.
One by one, the drones’ emitters ease from threat-orange toward a neutral, analytic white as Ji-yeon watches unflagged verification data stack in clean, silent layers. No audit pings to Seoul Core, no mirrored push to clan oversight, just a growing shadow archive of correlations and reinstated identifiers. After a long, clinical beat, she exhales through her teeth, mutters a low curse at the corporate-clan sigils hard-coded into the med-legal wrappers, and knives her fingers through the air. Encryption sigils along her tattoos unspool; a deeper vault yawns open. The next tranche of logs floods in, less redacted, procedure bays actually named, experimental markers no longer scrubbed to “routine immunology”, and in that deliberate overexposure both women register the new boundary they’ve stepped across: not alliance, not yet, but a welded seam of shared offense. From this point, any denunciation would drag its author down with it, along with the fragile, improvised lattice of medtechs, dockhands, and “remedial study” apprentices already ghosting their way toward this dead-listed node.
Ji-yeon drags a translucent overlay of Kyung-soo’s “approved” treaty histories into their shared workspace, pinning the scrolling clauses beside her contraband xenobiology logs. The histories bloom in careful blues and greys: sanitized timelines of negotiation crises, annotated with Kyung-soo’s precise, deferential glosses about “hard-won safeguards” and “mutual non-escalation.” Nested inside the footnotes, in a thinner, almost apologetic font, sit references to early proposals explicitly banning “forced morphological adaptation for Gate-adjacent deployment.”
Seo-min watches the citation tags scroll past her peripheral HUD and feels a pulse of dry amusement: the curriculum captain hadn’t deleted the dangerous parts; he’d buried them in plain sight where only the diligent and the desperate would dig.
She threads in her own layer: raw Gate-flux telemetry and fine-grained life-support variance from the cargo ring, a torrent of numbers and spectrograms that crash over the tidy legalese. Graphs extrude in three dimensions above the quarantine node, flickering with the Gate’s slow, tidal breathing. Temperature micro-gradients in environmental ducts. CO₂ scrubber efficiency jitter. Oxygen partial pressures in compartments that should be in stable idle.
At first, it’s noise. Three languages, legal, biological, mechanical, arguing past each other.
Then the alignments start to lock.
“Anchor on treaty article nine,” Seo-min murmurs, more to her implants than to Ji-yeon. Her stack parses the cross-references, latching Kyung-soo’s historical timestamps to her own station-clock baselines and Ji-yeon’s red-flag procedures. Algorithms chew through offset drift, compensating for log tampering and delayed entry behavior. Slowly, disparate planes slide into the same temporal grid.
Color-coded bands ripple into register. What had looked like scattered anomalies, isolated quarantine spikes, stray atmospheric glitches, “random” Gate-flux excursions, pull tight into a braided pattern.
Gate-alignment windows flare in cold white, predicted and charted in the official research feeds.
Overlaid against them, amber ridges rise and fall: quarantine nodes “temporarily isolated for maintenance.” Each ridge crests exactly as the Gate’s flux crosses certain resonance thresholds, then vanishes the moment the Gate dips back into nominal range.
Ji-yeon’s xenobiology logs, scrappy and hand-patched, light up in blood-red pulses along the same axis: invasive procedures filed as “supplemental vaccination,” nanite swarms coded to “aerosol allergy mitigation,” all executing within those alignment bands. In the gaps between them, Kyung-soo’s commentary boxes hover like polite apologies: “Note: alien delegation insisted on this clause after incidents sealed under separate security regime.”
Seo-min narrows her filters to the cargo ring. Life-support variance maps fold inward, magnifying the decks Min-joon oversees. Airflow adjustments, coolant re-routes, microgravity tweaks: always a little more aggressive, always a little more off-spec, within minutes of a flagged container’s arrival. Those containers pass through customs in his handwriting, tagged with anodyne descriptors: “biomedical filtration units,” “environmental calibration assemblies.”
Her skin prickles. The pattern is no longer circumstantial. It’s choreography.
Ji-yeon’s fingers dance through the overlay, pulling out a thin trail of metadata stitched to her own logs: obscured requisitioner IDs, scrubbed med-officer signatures. She cross-hatches them against Kyung-soo’s archival footnotes. A quiet, lethal picture emerges: every time a treaty draft tightened language against human subject adaptation, there’s a corresponding bump in off-manifest “equipment upgrades” to the very decks now blinking red in their model.
“Whoever designed this,” Ji-yeon says, voice flat, “read the same histories he teaches.”
“And wrote exemptions around them,” Seo-min adds. She tags a series of power dips that coincide with “culturally neutral” workshop hours. During sessions on alien ethics and shared biopolitics, somebody has been quietly bleeding power into “dormant” bays and siphoning bandwidth through educational subnetworks.
In the quarantine node’s hush, the shared workspace steadies into a single, ugly rhythm: Gate, cargo, quarantines, curriculum. Not accidents. Not overreach by one rogue lab.
A program.
Seo-min tightens her query scope to a single Gate peak, freezing the braided timelines around one alignment cycle. She strips away human traffic, routine clinic loads, even the noise of translation arrays drawing on the grid, and tells her implants, “Show dormant decks only.” The model in her HUD dims to a cool, station-night blue. Then flares.
Thin red blooms pulse around a scatter of pods buried in “mothballed” research corridors and overflow berths. Their signatures match the hashed procedure codes from Ji-yeon’s partial logs down to the nanite firmware revision. Coolant trace-lines kink around them in unnatural loops, thermal regulators running hotter than idle by just enough to hide under calibration tolerances. Whoever scripted it knew exactly where the audit thresholds sat.
The med-legal entries look benign at a glance: “reassignment candidates” scheduled for “performance optimization” and “high-radiation task fitness.” Drill deeper, and the biometric deltas resolve into micro-tuned respiratory uptake curves, altered blood-oxygen affinities, neural response profiles warped to track exotic particle densities that only show up in Gate-proximity research feeds.
“These curves aren’t therapeutic,” Ji-yeon says, jaw rigid as she pins her own annotations beside the graphs. “They’re iterating. Versioning. Moving toward a morphology that treats Gate bleed as ambient. Bodies pre-adapted to stand where no consent form ever reached.”
Her tattoos flicker as she parses another strand, eyes gone flat. “They’re not treating workers for exposure. They’re prototyping a chassis to throw through the Gate first: and they picked colonists who can’t refuse reassignment.”
Another layer snaps into place when Seo-min digs past the falsified I/O on the cargo ring’s sensor mesh and forces her implants to reconstruct Min-joon’s original routing metadata from checksum ghosts and misaligned timecodes. His manifests, when she pins them against Kyung-soo’s dates for tense, redacted “diplomatic recalibrations,” resolve into a narrow, repeating corridor of motion that glides along the letter of treaty-safe categories while knifing straight through their spirit. Containers flagged as environmental filters and medical reserves consistently transit the same “buffer” compartments that, hours later, register unexplained biocontainment scrubs and micro-atmo purges. Shadowing them, in antiphase, alien biosample crates arrive, handoff, and disappear, leaving only ghost indices in Ji-yeon’s black-file notes and minute, telltale shifts in quarantine firmware states.
Ji-yeon peels out a subset of alien bio-streams stamped “incompatible” in the cleansed archive, then splices in her gray-market captures from med-ward spills where those same signatures briefly contaminated human wards. The fused curve is unmistakable: staged stress assays, human-tuned vectors stepped into alien tissue baselines at rising doses, failure modes cataloged. Kyung-soo’s didactically scrubbed curriculum packets (still whispering with buried metadata and deprecated access flags) supply the missing frame: early Gate-era clauses that forbade any research path where “adaptation” gradients tipped toward coercive leverage or latent deterrent design, provisions only someone with his deep-archive keys could have preserved unaltered and then quietly sidelined.
When they finally pull back from the composite, it’s no longer a scatter of isolated abuses but a clean, engineered arc running years deep: colonists iteratively reshaped as living Gate-interface prototypes, alien tissue walked stepwise toward thresholds where “defensive applications” is the only permissible euphemism in a boardroom. Seo-min watches treaty-violation flags strobe along Kyung-soo’s quietly incriminating annotations and feels the frame shift: this isn’t rogue medtech or opportunistic cruelty but a covert strategic program aimed at weaponized adaptation. Their improvised alliance has been drafted, without consent, into a fault line between species. If the gradient holds and escalation continues under the aliens’ sensor net, the careful protocols keeping their ships at cautious distance will shear. Recasting the embassy, and everyone orbiting Haneul Gate, as the forward trench of a war disguised as research and “contingency planning.”
Ji-yeon keeps one finger hooked through the manual cutoff ring on the medevac drone’s spine, feeling the faint vibration of its standby thrusters through her glove, while Seo-min works in the stale half-light of the forgotten quarantine node. The drone hangs between them like a hostage. On Ji-yeon’s pad, the feed to Seo-min is throttled to a narrow, deliberately mutilated trickle: log segments crosshatched with black, timestamps offset by a few seconds, path vectors clipped before they reach the off-manifest pods.
“Sample set four, environmental,” Ji-yeon says, voice neutral. A lie only in category. She flips the stream toward Seo-min’s implant address: one narrow vein in a circulatory system she’s spent years mapping. “Show me what you see.”
Seo-min doesn’t argue about the gaps. Her eyes unfocus slightly as she sinks into the data, subdermal circuitry along her temples brightening in a slow, analytic pulse. Ji-yeon watches her pupils micro-track against invisible overlays, counting heartbeats. The drone’s internal fans whisper, impatient.
On her own pad, Seo-min spawns a skeletal station schematic and begins stitching the sliver of redacted med-logs into it, cross-referencing with cargo ring I/O that Ji-yeon didn’t send and Gate flux telemetry she never thought to weight so heavily. In under a minute, Seo-min tags the absences. Not just where data is missing, but the statistical “shadow” of what used to be there. She sketches probable container IDs, rerouted waypoints, even the timing of a biocontainment scrub Ji-yeon remembers only because two undocumented cleaners later turned up with unregistered rashes.
“You cut these out,” Seo-min says evenly, not looking up. “Or someone above you did, and you’re patching around it. But the pattern’s still bleeding through.”
Instead of demanding more names or access, she shifts. “When this kind of thing goes wrong for you, what does it look like? Worst case. Not for them: for you and your people.”
The wording lands. Ji-yeon’s thumb eases, millimeter by millimeter, off the cutoff ring. Most specialists she’s tested either ignore the lacunae or press immediately for network keys, source identities, leverage. Seo-min triangulates absence, then asks about failure modes like a field medic asking where the bleed will pool when the artery finally lets go.
“Audit scripts,” Ji-yeon answers after a beat. “They’re blind to some ducts, not to my flags. One wrong call and half my network is in forced ‘screening.’ The rest vanish into decon.”
Seo-min nods once, filing it, already re-weighting her reconstruction around that vulnerability. “Then we don’t give them a wrong call to trace. We’ll route from your dark zones into mine.”
The promotion happens in silence, in Ji-yeon’s head: from “useful outsider” to “potential backbone,” someone who doesn’t just pierce systems but understands that every node is attached to flesh.
Ji-yeon risks the first deliberate breach of cover. “I don’t see past med-bay partitions,” she says, watching Seo-min instead of the models. “My tags die at the clinic doors. Past that, it’s all your people’s locks.”
“My locks,” Seo-min corrects quietly. “Their keys.” She taps a string of audit calls laced through the med-streams; authorization glyphs blossom that match the sigils burned into her own neural interface. “Half of these sweeps instantiate through my implant as ‘routine diagnostics.’ I don’t even have to authorize. I just have to be in proximity.”
Ji-yeon’s mouth flattens. “So when I ghost a record, the alarm pings through your skull.”
“And when I suppress the ping,” Seo-min says, “it writes a secondary log upstream that I can’t see. Your ghosts become my anomalies.”
There’s no accusation in it, only bleak symmetry. Ji-yeon exhales, a short, humorless sound. “They built you into the tripwire and me into the contamination. Neat.”
“Efficient,” Seo-min amends, though her tone makes it an indictment. “It means if either of us moves alone, we light each other up.”
The node vibrates faintly as a hauler burns hard along the cargo ring, a low modulation riding the usual traffic-control cadence. It makes the projected lattice tremble: names, cohort markers, insurance tiers, experiment codes, all strung across Gate-flux curves Kyung-soo once framed as “historical inflection points.”
No one says we could walk away. No one says we should.
Ji-yeon zooms in on a cluster of undocumented worker IDs, each cross-linked to “resilience profiling” and “adaptive tolerance trials.” She can match three to faces in her off-books ward.
Seo-min traces a separate chain: tug crews, dock riggers, a junior apprentice from Kyung-soo’s seminars. The people who still nod to her in neutral corridors.
Theoretical risk collapses into triage. This is already a casualty list. Just temporally distributed.
Seo-min breaks the impasse by narrating like a threat model: “You run bodies through shadow corridors; I ride the sanctioned arteries.” She marks which cams she can “miscalibrate” under flux-noise, which audit daemons she can starve, and which Gate-side trunks are hard-walled. Ji-yeon replies with her own topology (lockable quarantine hatches, medevac codes as assembly beacons, disposable shell identities) and the specific seams where only someone badged and monitored can stitch dark routes to bright ones. The language is clinical, but the underlying assumption (that they will keep doing this together) slides into place as quietly as any protocol update.
They choose a target from the lattice almost clinically: a heat-sick pipefitter flagged for “pre-exposure baselining.” Seo-min buries the exam order three queues deep behind scheduled crew-physical updates, then injects a fractional timing drift into the research pod’s clock so its summons arrives out-of-phase. In parallel, Ji-yeon bleeds off the man’s trail. Spoofed vitals, rerouted bracelet telemetry, a medevac dispatch code that looks like routine dehydration follow-up. The handoff through an unlit quarantine stairwell takes eleven seconds, no more. When the next shift rolls and the pod pings for a patient who, by every visible metric, never existed, nothing escalates beyond a shrugging helpdesk ticket. No security ping through Seo-min’s skull, no quiet inquiry in Ji-yeon’s clinic logs. The silence reads like confirmation: they have already operationalized each other.
Seo-min starts with professional detachment, building joins and filters the way she would for a post-incident review. Ji-yeon’s partial logs sit in one buffer, scrubbed and anonymized, while the embassy’s deep-system telemetry scrolls past in whisper-fine traces: Gate flux harmonics, life support latencies, low-level error chatter from subsystems nobody budgeted time to debug.
She pins a timestamp from one of Ji-yeon’s flagged experiments (“proximal exposure cohort / Gate-side pod”) and lets her implants dive. Telemetry graphs bloom across her inner field of view, color-coded overlays aligning and re-aligning as she nudges parameters. She tags her own historical neural feedback spikes as another dataset, identifiers she’s always filed under “background interference” and “adjustment noise.”
On the third pass, the correlation stops being statistical and becomes geometric. Gate-adjacent test windows stack in perfect phase with the arrhythmic surges she remembers as headaches, phantom afterimages, tinnitus at the edge of hearing. What she thought were random glitches trace a clean, repeating pattern: pulse, damp, pulse. Calibration.
She strips out human-readable labels and looks only at shape and timing. The match tightens. Each “anomaly” in her medical record lands within milliseconds of synchronized pings from a restricted diagnostics trunk, a trunk that never appears in her official augmentation schematics. Her nervous system, scaffolded with corporate bioceramic and conductive mesh, has been slaved to a test rig keyed to Gate flux.
Not a glitch. Not “expected adaptation variance.” A controlled stimulus-response cycle.
She remembers the briefing language, trusted interface, mission-critical asset, unique suitability to high-noise environments, and watches those phrases decompile into their real components: instrument, fixture, risk-acceptable loss. Her loyalty, her discretion, her insistence on staying “above” internal bloc politics: all of it has been convenient packaging for a device they could fire remotely whenever the Gate sang at the right frequency.
The last argument for neutrality dies in that recognition. Remaining unaligned is no longer abstention; it is consenting to be the switch they flip from orbit.
She does not speak of betrayal or conscience; she talks in architectures and guarantees, as if drafting a field-order. The node’s stale air tastes of old disinfectant and burnt insulation while she sketches it. She will stop being a passive sensor hung off regime spine and become a deformable layer between the corporation and its own machine vision.
“Not just anomaly watch,” she says. “Topology rewrite.”
She outlines where she can cut and bias without tripping meta-audits: siphoning internal threat-detection streams into sacrificial buffers, splicing in synthetic noise keyed to Gate flux so every real deviation looks like environmental jitter. Escalation chains can be stretched, half-second smears here, priority inversions there, so security pings route to low-staff helpdesks instead of incident rooms. She can reclassify biometrics from “protocol-critical” to “routine occupational exposure,” downgrading red tags to amber, amber to green, until Ji-yeon’s off-register patients statistically vanish into background morbidity.
For high-risk windows, she proposes timed “maintenance freeze-frames” on specific subnets, momentary blindness masquerading as scheduled diagnostics. When the corporation thinks it is watching clearest (Gate-side, experiment-side) its gaze will pass cleanly over the people they intend to harvest.
Ji-yeon, weighing the offer against the risk of letting a regime engineer inside her shadow network, counters not with demands but with reciprocity. In the dim quarantine glow she folds Seo-min’s credentials into her med-evac failover lattice, not as a top-layer flag but as a deep conditional: if Ji-yeon is scrubbed, if primary routes hard-lock, traffic spills to “Ha, S.M.” by design. She mirrors the trust in data, opening anonymized triage caches (stripped of names and clans but rich in patterns of injury, exposure, and quiet disappearances) so Seo-min can see the scale of harm she is now shielding. Finally, she assigns Seo-min a standing emergency override on drone routing in pre-cleared “cold corridors,” narrow bands of infrastructure where corporate analytics rarely look and her people often bleed.
In his lesson plans, key terms (resilience metrics, narrative reframing, distributed redundancy) become code for go-bags, cover stories, and cell structure. Apprentices leave with homework that is really contact protocols and dead-drop timings. Ji-yeon’s corridor overlays plug directly into those schedules, so “walking to shift” becomes rehearsal: who pauses where, which door jams “accidentally,” how a dropped tool marks a safe handoff.
As this lattice stabilizes. Sensor ghosts around undocumented bodies, cargo irregularities that never quite reach incident review, emergency drills that double as covert coordination. The network begins logging her as a liability alongside itself, a shared exposure. That mutual accounting steels her for the pivot point, when quiet sabotage will no longer suffice and her defiance must surface in the open machinery of the station, visible not just as aberrant code but as a named actor in the regime’s own incident chronicle.
The abort cascade spears through her neural mesh: red glyphs, clan seals, a clean little simulation showing the shuttle as a dissolving icon, already written off in the loss column. The corporate stack moves fast pushing priority directives into her field of view: STAND DOWN. PRESERVE INFRASTRUCTURE. ACKNOWLEDGE PROTOCOL.
She feels the drilled-in response flex like an old scar. Years of special operations conditioning, of obeying command stacks even when they smelled wrong. Let the system take it. Hardware over bodies. Liability over lives. The quiet, reasonable voice in her hindbrain whispers that she is only one engineer on one spoke of one embassy wheel; the clan will handle the rest.
She kills that voice.
Seo-min cuts the corporate HUD layer with a brutal mental gesture, letting the official overlays gutter out. Underneath, the raw station substrate pulses. Ungroomed telemetry, maintenance bus chatter, the metal-and-vacuum heartbeat she’s trained herself to hear. She follows it down, past her allocated engineering shell, past the familiar blue-lit corridors of sanctioned access, into the dim, undocumented space where old firmware and hurried patches live.
Her augmentations were never meant to go here. She feels the texture of the interface change: from smooth, audited APIs to jagged, pre-consolidation code, labeled in half-forgotten clan dialects. Warnings blossom in sharp-edged hangul along her peripheral vision: UNAUTHORIZED VECTOR. LIABILITY PENALTIES. NEURAL BREACH RISK. Someone in Traffic Control is already trying to push a lockout back up the chain: she glimpses Lee-na Kim’s authorization key being invoked, then hesitating, then overridden by a higher, faceless corporate-clan quorum.
Too slow.
Seo-min spikes a logic hook into the bay’s local control node, bypassing the dispute entirely. It’s the kind of move they warned her would trigger the backdoors in her augments, the buried corporate kill-switches she’s never fully mapped. For a breathless half-second, nothing responds (no handshake, no graceful negotiation) just the raw static of unmediated machine attention.
Then the lattice opens in a ragged tear, and she is falling sideways into it, carrying her choice like a bright, illegal flare.
Subsystems that usually part for her like well-trained interns slam shut, clan crests burning amber across her inner vision. ACCESS FENCED. LIABILITY LOCK. She ghosts past them anyway, jacking a brute-force carrier into the bay’s local bus. The response hits like live wire: a sheet of white noise ripping down her forearms, teeth buzzing as her subdermal traces spike into pain. Her augments throw up throttles, shaping filters; she strips them away with a hissed curse, accepting the raw feed.
The docking interlocks rear up in her mind as a torn-open cross-section of metal and stress vectors, a three-dimensional wound blooming in slow, lethal detail. She can see where the decompression shock will tear through the shuttle’s spine, where Guk-su Prime’s dirty orbital grit has already pitted the hull. She grabs the bay clamps and overdrives their hold, metal protesting in a squeal that only the sensors hear. Pressure-control trees cascade past; she doesn’t parse every number, just rides gradient intuition, bleeding atmosphere from a dead maintenance lock to form a soft buffer wave.
Abort countdown ticks, corporate-clean and inexorable. She seizes the command thread mid-fall, rips its authority tags loose, and shunts the abort into a quarantined sandbox. For a heartbeat the shuttle’s icon flares crimson. Thermal bloom along its scarred flank, hull plating blistering, outer coatings peeling back like burned skin. The next heartbeat it’s still there, clamp-strapped and ugly, but intact. Held in the narrow, unlawful corridor she’s carved between protocol and vacuum.
The station convulses around her, a lattice of systems trying to spit her out. Corporate override calls spike in her mesh, wrapped in legal-audit seals and auto-litigation payloads; whole process trees spin up just to record her liability in triplicate. Security daemons trace her signature, flagging her aug channel for “behavioral review.” Somewhere up-spoke in a committee tower, a quorum key slams down; escalation glyphs flare, routing a higher-order lockout toward Dock Twelve.
Seo-min shreds their approach vectors before they land, burying the incoming commands under a blossoming rash of fake faults, thermal drift in an auxiliary radiator, phantom vibration in an outer truss, each one demanding attention and bandwidth. She strips authority tokens from their packets and smears them through half-forgotten maintenance subnets only she still tracks, old contractor mesh-prints and orphaned patch domains she’s been quietly annotating for years.
On every official pane, Dock Twelve is executing a dusty contingency drill: clamp check, differential-pressure buffer, controlled bleed into a sacrificial lock. In the unpoliced layer under her skin, she knows the truth. There is no automation holding this line. There is only her, knuckles white on invisible controls, forcing metal and fragile bodies to resist the Gate’s bright, indifferent pull.
She needs Ji-yeon in the loop before the first on-book medic even finishes swearing at the alert. Without loosening her grip on Dock Twelve’s spine, Seo-min knifes a narrowband pulse sideways, riding parasitic on inverter noise and scrubber handshakes until it ghosts into the medic’s ghosted mesh. Docking vector, pressure cascade, suit telemetry smear, probable fracture map. No headers, no clan seals: just one hard-coded flag that burns in system-agnostic glyphs: field triage authority ceded, corporate command tree explicitly bypassed.
The act scores itself into the station’s memory whether anyone can fully read it or not. Log strata show a sharp-edged deviation where wetware intuition has overruled certified cost-benefit; silent surveillance nodes capture a cascade of unauthorized yet surgically precise edits rippling out from Seo-min’s neural hash. Later, in committee review, it will resolve as either an exploitable “glitch” or an alarming failure of their own predictive discipline, fodder for risk models and disciplinary matrices. Down in Dock Twelve’s scarred air, where suit seals weep and lungs burn thin, it resolves as something simpler and more obscene: evidence that a living mind buried inside the machinery looked at a balance sheet of acceptable loss and, for one unrepeatable moment, chose them instead.
On the bay floor, the first thing the crews register is not the sirens but the color shift: deadlock red diluting, bleeding down into that jury-rigged amber. It’s a shade the manuals don’t admit exists, a half-legal state that says: the system thinks you’re dead, but someone with their hands on the spine disagrees.
People freeze mid-motion. A pallet loader hangs half-swung, mag-clamps whirring uselessly in open air. A hose team, halfway through a flush cycle, lets the spray hiss against the deck as their eyes tilt up to the bulkhead overlays, watching the color hold. Amber. Not reset, not cleared. Just… held.
Rig supervisors glance at each other across the bay, across clan patches and rank bands. Nobody keys their throat mics. Their fingers hover over acknowledge tabs they’ve only ever hit during drills, never with a shuttle live on the line and decompression alarms still scraping the upper registers of human hearing.
There is a moment of collective calculus, ugly and precise. Deadlock red means stand down, secure assets, prepare incident reports. Amber means somebody inside the mesh is already committing a larger crime on their behalf.
One supervisor, a woman from Incheon Steel Combine with three disciplinary warnings and two commendations filed under separate seals, lets her hand fall away from the console. “Maintain positions,” she says, but only to the air, pitched too soft for any recorder to tag as directive. Around her, the others do the same in their own ways: a shrug that isn’t quite a shrug, a non-gesture away from the emergency manual release.
No one gives an order to override the anomaly, so nothing official contradicts it. They let the lie stand. Let the station believe it’s following an old contingency pattern while every worker on the deck knows they’re in unmapped territory.
Amber reflects off helmet visors and sweat-slick cheeks, painting everyone in the same unauthorized glow. In that light, laborers from rival crews move without being told, sliding crash carts closer, dragging spare sealant canisters into reach, palming cutters and pry-bars they’re technically not supposed to have during an active clamp sequence.
Someone mutters, “Who’s riding the stack?” and someone else answers, “Doesn’t matter. They’re not letting us go,” and that is enough.
The bay doesn’t cheer, doesn’t chant. It just refuses, quietly and in unison, to behave like a space already written off in a loss column. They keep working inside the lie that amber buys them, trusting that whoever’s burning their clearance in the control layers will hold the door as long as it takes.
Up on the catwalks, junior techs kill their chatter as Ji-yeon’s med-drones ghost past a line of security beacons that should have hard-failed them. The beacons flare a confused, wavering violet, query, then abort, before subsiding back to passive green. No alarms trip. Whatever handshake the drones are using, it rides inside sanctioned medevac codes like a parasite, just clean enough that the lattice doesn’t know which subroutine to shoot.
The drones latch to shredded seals and blood-fogged visors with the unhesitating confidence of a protocol that has been practiced off the books: seal breach, inject foam, flood local channels with anesthetic and microfilter swarms, push raw vitals up a sideband no one admits exists. On the deck, crew feel the faint tug of directed local pressure as atmosphere is stolen from everywhere else to buy one more breath inside each failing suit.
On a shared maintenance display, Seo-min’s credentials stutter between active, ghosted, and “no route found,” as though some deeper process is physically shouldering aside the monitoring lattice to give her room. Access graphs bloom, collapse, re-route in real time; to trained eyes it looks less like a glitch and more like a deliberate blind spot being carved open and held.
In the seconds that follow, everyone on shift silently recalibrates what is possible and what is punishable. The official evac tree (the one engraved into muscle memory by drills and threat briefings) would have slammed the inner doors, vented the bay, and consigned the shuttle to a neat block of actuarial code: MCI, laborer class, closed. Instead, wristband HUDs that should be flatlining begin to pulse upward, one by one, from red into a thin, improbable yellow. Pressure maps show atmosphere still weeping out through the scar in the hull, but not fast enough to kill them all. Someone with real stack leverage is throttling the automated kill-branch, starving it of confirmation signals. Protocol is not abstraction anymore; it’s visibly, audibly breaking open, and no regime voice cuts in to restore the script.
Before the shuttle even finishes hard-docking, the narrative has already begun to leak sideways. A loader reroutes a status ping through an unofficial chat mesh, compressing everything he’s just seen into a single line about “some undercut engineer fighting the lockout and a medic with broken sigils flying black drones into the breach.” The phrase rides maintenance diagnostics, lunch-call reminders, even a pirated drama stream buffering in a bunk row. Within twenty minutes, that line has split and flowered across tool carts, mess tables, and private channels, each retelling sharpening the defiance, swapping clan affiliations for aliases, and stripping out identifying details that could get anyone hauled in.
By the time the auto-generated crisis bulletin trees begin to compile in some back-end sandbox, the station’s informal archive has already locked in its own canonical version: a laborer shuttle that should have been written off as acceptable loss but wasn’t, because someone in ops and someone in the clinics refused to file breathing bodies under “statistical variance.” In bunk rows, crawlspaces, and half-lit cargo lockers, people repeat the shorthand (“the undercut engineer,” “the damaged-sigil medic”) rolling the terms around like new rank badges with no clan seal. They test the weight of the idea that there might be another axis of authority, one that answers not to committee stamps or corporate sigils, but to the stubborn, scandalous fact that everyone who should be dead is still drawing air.
The first official alert hits crew channels as a bland all-hands notification: “INCIDENT RESOLVED – STANDARD RESPONSE PROTOCOL SUCCESSFUL.” It slides in on the same priority band as routine safety drills and air-quality advisories, indistinguishable at a glance from the digital noise of the shift. The header carries Lee-na’s authorization glyph and the corporate-clan joint seal in flawless alignment: a visual guarantee that whatever happened has already been understood, managed, and folded back into acceptable risk.
The body text is under two hundred words, scrubbed clean and translated into all standard crew languages. It presents a tight, edited sequence: minor structural breach on approach, instantaneous trigger of automated seals, seamless coordination between traffic control and safety algorithms, no deviation from approved responses. There is no mention of the docking bay HUDs flaring red, no hint of the override chains that had to be physically wrestled away from the evac tree, no acknowledgment that someone bypassed hard-locked routines to keep a compromised shuttle alive long enough for unauthorized help to reach it.
In the version pushed to the official archive, the bay never flickers into a lockout countdown at all; the timeline compresses the whole event into a neat, almost elegant curve. Anomaly detected, protocol engaged, risk neutralized. Where there were screaming alarms, conflicting orders, and a hard, contested thirty seconds in which doctrine said “vent them” and someone said “no,” the bulletin substitutes “swift, coordinated action by regime oversight and approved automation suites.”
End-of-shift briefs will quote the phrasing verbatim. Training sims will assimilate the sanitized scenario as a model case. On public displays in neutral corridors, the alert cycles for a few hours as proof of competence: a reminder that the system works exactly as designed, that no one had to choose between orders and lives, that nothing new or dangerous has entered the story.
In the data vaults shadowing that bulletin, raw telemetry and multi-angle bay feeds don’t just get filed; they are seized. Access flags flip from amber to opaque black. Seo-min feels it as a precise, electric pinch behind her eyes: an error glyph blooming across her neural HUD where open sensor stacks were streaming seconds before. Threads she’d been live-tagging, pressure curves, valve lag, manual input deltas, snap to null, replaced by a cool corporate string: PERMISSIONS ESCALATED – REFER TO AUTHORIZED SUMMARY.
Buried in that same sweep, Ji-yeon’s diagnostic swarms are reclassified mid-packet. What the system had registered as adaptive med-nanite signatures recompile into “corrupted medical subroutines,” stamped with an automatic contamination code that justifies total quarantine. Pattern scrubbers spool up in the background, combing through every incident trace for her biomorphic tattoo-keys and drone handshake IDs. Where they find them, they overwrite them with generic cartoon-clean entries: “station-certified triage macros engaged.”
In the official incident tree, thousands of microsecond decisions and unauthorized vectors compress into a single approved icon: GREEN CHECK – ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.
Lee-na authorizes the bulletin with a micro-stutter in her left hand, tremor barely suppressed as she watches the compliance team sculpt reality. On the wall display, the raw timeline is shaved down and rethreaded: regime readiness highlighted in bold, corporate safety architectures cross-linked to glossy spec sheets, stock phrases about “continuous improvement under rigorous oversight” slotted in where the panic had actually been. The unsanctioned traffic override is not deleted; it is domesticated: renamed a “pre-authorized contingency pathway validated during prior simulations,” complete with a fabricated reference code.
While they work, she opens a narrow-beam side channel to traffic ops. The message is three lines: lock down all manual override logs, restrict replay access to her seal alone, and be prepared when those same logs are strip-mined for a politically convenient culprit.
Across the administrative stack, a separate layer of communication unfurls: terse internal memos tagged BEHAVIORAL RISK MONITORING with red, non-forwardable seals. One flags an “unidentified systems engineer with irregular command access patterns,” another a “rogue medical vector exploiting deprecated clinic backbones.” Line managers are instructed to brief in whispers: improvized heroics equal latent extremism; only certified suites saved the shuttle. Any tech, medic, or supervisor probing manual overrides, unauthorized drone presence, or anomalous telemetry is to be quietly logged, cross-referenced with loyalty indices, and escalated for “attitude calibration review” without tipping the subject off.
On shop floors and in docking-crew briefings, supervisors chant the new line with brittle cheer, Trade Standard smoothed to corporate-neutral: “Textbook response, everyone did their part, trust the system.” Then, mics muted and doors sealed, they tack on the mandated warning: any future deviation from written protocol will be logged as deliberate sabotage, subject to loyalty audit and contract review. No one names the undercut, or the damaged sigils, or the way every veteran on that bay can still feel the moment the shuttle should have become a frozen coffin drifting past Guk-su Prime and didn’t, because two unauthorized humans refused to wait for the system to catch up.
In off-shift corners of the residential ring, workers trade devices loaded with mismatched clips and half-corrupted logs, narrating over gaps as if they’d all been on the bay that day. The files stutter, skip seconds, drop sound; no one cares. A junior vent tech with grease still under her nails adds breathless commentary over a pixelated freeze-frame of a lean figure hunched over a console. She forces the lockout. You can tell from the lag on the status rail.” A hauler with two contracts left and ruined knuckles insists he heard the medic’s voice cut through the alarms, even though the audio on his copy is nothing but static and the ragged wheeze of the shuttle’s failing seal.
Each retelling sharpens the same details, resolving myth out of artifacts: the undercut engineer’s steady hands over a flickering console, ignoring the red-script warnings screaming VIOLATION; the medic’s tattoos flaring like a heartbeat as she jacks outlaw drones into a supposedly dead clinic backbone; the shuttle skin buckling but not giving way, its hull-stress telemetry overlaid with unauthorized triage bands that no one will admit were there.
In mess lines and rec queues, the story mutates into call-and-response. Someone taps a tray three times to mimic the override confirmation tones, and someone else answers with a soft, syncopated rhythm that’s supposed to be the pulse of Ji-yeon’s nanite swarm spinning up. In AR overlays that corporate filters never quite catch in time, ghost-icons flicker at corridor junctions: a stylized undercut profile, a sleeve of broken clan sigils, a tiny shuttle held together by concentric rings of emergency code. New hires arrive from Guk-su habitats having already heard a version; old hands correct them, adding the missing beats, until the composite feels truer than any official log could.
Corporate bulletins swarm the feeds within a shift, choking local bands with infographics and “training excerpts.” They replay the decompression event as a tidy cascade of green-checklist procedures: pressure differentials smoothed into abstract curves, docking telemetry scrubbed of its stutter, atmosphere loss rendered as a harmless blue mist tapering to zero. Every frame is annotated in Trade Standard and clan-script, captions insisting this is what competence looks like.
The official playback crops the Rotunda at the edge of the frame, cutting off the alien bio-luminal flare just before it spikes in sync with Seo-min’s triage bands. HUD overlays are flattened into generic “auto-response suites,” Ji-yeon’s outlaw drone telemetry relabeled as “embedded clinic subroutines.” In the training sim, the lockout never resists; no red VIOLATION script ever bleeds across the console.
But somewhere, on every deck, someone has a pre-purge buffer, a cached mirror, a helmet side-feed that slipped through filters. Those shaky, overexposed cuts (uncropped light, raw overlays, the visible lag of a system being forced) become the versions that matter, passed device to device, watched in the narrow privacy between alarms.
A junior translator in the Rotunda archives isolates the exact moment the alien luminance snaps into phase with Seo-min’s hacked triage bands. After three sleepless off-shifts riding archive permissions to their edge, they build a loop: no faces, no clan crests, audio crushed to a low, oceanic hiss. Just hands over a console, outlaw drones swarming like a metallic shoal, and alien light answering in clean, recursive pulses.
The file’s header is nothing but a timestamp and a checksum string, easily misfiled as diagnostic trash. It moves anyway. Piggybacking on shift-rotation memos, hiding inside firmware patch bundles, slipping through personal side-channels to Baekdu and back. People watch it in notification previews, in reflection off bulkheads, in the half-second before they swipe it closed and keep walking.
From that loop, imagery multiplies: stencil ghosts in condensation-slick shafts, AR filters that crown any undercut with a faint Gate-halo, stylized sigils splintering like Ji-yeon’s defaced clan marks. Caption strings stay minimal (“Hold the Bay,” “Protocols Serve People,” “No One Left Drifting”) but every watcher threads in their own quiet clause, instinctively mapping the slogans onto specific bays, shift leads, and near-misses they never reported.
Rumors harden into hypotheticals and workups: annotated schematics circulating in side-chats, lunch-table debates about venting a corridor early or ghosting a lockout “just long enough.” The nameless pair in the images stop being gossip and start functioning as a baseline: an implicit checklist against which bay chiefs, shuttle pilots, and even quiet students measure new directives, weighing harm against hierarchy before they comply.
In the weeks after the rescue, Seo-min starts tagging anomalies out of habit: checksum drift here, latency blip there. What bothers her isn’t the volume, Haneul Gate always hums with dirty data, but the pattern recognition her implants keep insisting on.
“Overlay signature resemblance: 73.2%,” her internal HUD notes the first time, ghosting a translucent red lattice over a cargo-ring corridor she’s never personally configured. The geometry is wrong, the angles are sloppy, color channels pushed into saturated blues and greens, but the spine of it is hers: priority bands, load-shed pathways, the distinctive triage cascade she’d improvised on the day of the decompression.
By the fourth flag, she writes a quick parser to track “unauthorized overlay variants” as a separate class. The map that blooms across her inner vision isn’t clustered around official med bays or control nodes. It’s scattered through pump alcoves, grav-bypass closets, and dead-end access ladders: the places station schematics flatten into gray.
She follows one thread on her next off-rotation, riding a maintenance tram two stops past where her clearance badge expects her to be. In a cramped pump alcove that smells of reclaimed coolant and kimchi paste, three junior techs are pressed shoulder-to-shoulder around a battered holo-projector. Her triage pattern hangs in the coolant mist, warped and re-colored, pulsing faintly in sync with the pump cycle.
“…you can’t pull from that line, it’s on a clan-metered loop,” one argues.
“Only if the alarm tier fires,” another counters, stabbing at a node. “If we ghost it under a diagnostic mask, ”
They break off when her shadow cuts the projection. The overlay shivers, glitching through half a dozen amateur variants before settling.
“Section Lead Ha,” the boldest of them blurts, already half rising. “We were just, uh, running hypotheticals. Training.”
Seo-min’s augmentation tags their vitals: spiking heart rates, micro-tremor in the smallest one’s hands. Her own overlays coil at the edge of her vision, offering auto-report templates: UNAUTHORIZED MOD, POTENTIAL SABOTAGE, REQUEST DISCIPLINARY REVIEW.
She blinks the prompts away and steps closer to the projection, ignoring the way they all try to pivot their bodies to block her view. The layout is crude, but she can see what they’re trying to do: build a shadow path that keeps bay power hot for a few extra minutes if central cuts them loose. Like she did.
“Show me,” she says, voice flat enough to pass for routine. “Where you think you can reroute without tripping the alarms.”
For a tight second, muscle memory wins: the script of discipline queues up in her throat, the instinct to clean the record and the roster by filing a neat, deniable infraction. Then she watches their eyes (too intent, too scared) and feels the familiar prickle of her backdoor watchdogs listening.
She reaches past the holo, thumb grazing the panel in a way that looks like an interface reset. The local recorder icon in her implant HUD winks amber, then flatlines to black. No feed, no automatic uplink to audit.
“Your node labeling is a mess,” she says instead, and pulls the schematic toward her, breaking and rejoining two junctions with swift, sure gestures. Alarm tiers collapse and reopen on new pathways. She drags a red hazard flag sideways, reclassifies it with a flick as a low-priority “routine diagnostic subroutine,” nests it under an ancient firmware code nobody audits anymore.
Her commentary stays comfortably orthodox: redundancy margins, fault-tolerant loops, keeping within spec so “Central doesn’t scream.” But the way the junior techs lean in, shoulders squaring, eyes locked on the choreography of her fingers rather than the projected icons, tells her they’re reading the subtext: how to carve breathing room inside a hostile system, and how to hide it in plain view.
Ji-yeon, meanwhile, notices that her off-the-books clinic traffic has changed flavor: fewer catastrophic decompressions, more “scheduled consults” from crews whose vitals read boringly normal. They file in with stiff shoulders and manufactured coughs, insisting on checkups they don’t need and lingering after treatment with increasingly precise hypotheticals. About which supervisors log extra sweeps, which scanners can be fooled with saline boluses and thermal pads, which auto-dosers accept borrowed biometrics, which rumored safe rooms actually have two exits and no cameras.
She listens, answers what she can without sounding like she’s recruiting, and starts keeping a second map in her head: not of vessels and organs, but of foremen rotations, patrol drift, badge hierarchies, and pockets of corridor where it is statistically safer to ask the wrong questions.
Patterns emerge and compound. Seo-min quietly begins staggering her maintenance reports so that certain sections of the cargo ring are flagged “under review” during hours when Ji-yeon tends to run her longest sessions, creating bureaucratic blind spots that look like routine backlog. Ji-yeon, in turn, adjusts her triage drones’ patrols to shadow the routes Seo-min routinely “over-inspects,” treating those corridors as provisional arteries: places where intervention, medical or technical, can arrive faster than security or Compliance. Neither sends a message, drafts a plan, or shares more than clipped nods in neutral zones, yet their separate routines bend toward a shared, unspoken schedule that other people can feel in the timing of doors, scans, and sudden reprieves.
Stories propagate as procedures, not slogans. A loader walks a rookie through “losing” five minutes of sensor history; a mechanic quietly recalibrates a cousin’s risk thresholds for when to ignore a flashing lock glyph. When a trembling apprentice admits he “ran the engineer sequence” to stall a bulkhead, or “took the medic corridor” around a sweep, both women recognize the pattern calcifying into practice: and into expectation.
In the weeks after the decompression “anomaly,” the auditors’ cold language, “systems deviation,” “procedural breach,” “unauthorized mutual-assistance cluster”, filters back down as jokes and warnings both. The phrases arrive first as clipped headers in station-wide bulletins, then as terse items buried in Compliance feeds that nobody admits to reading but everyone can quote. On the lower decks, shift cooks hear them echoed in the queue: a loader deadpans, “Careful, you’re forming a mutual-assistance cluster,” when three coworkers lean over the same tray; another taps a flickering bulkhead and mutters, “Deviant system,” to muffled laughter.
The humor has teeth. Everyone knows those same terms sit in files that can end rotations, void contracts, justify “remedial reassignment” to vacuum-exposed rigs. So the smirks in the mess line are angled, defensive, a way of touching the electric fence without quite gripping it.
At the same time, laborers and junior techs begin refining their own glossaries, trading them like workarounds. “Seo-min’s hold” stops being just a story about an engineer with an undercut and becomes a compressed instruction set: which alert trees to silence first so you don’t trip a full lockdown, how many seconds of buffer the docking clamps give you before auto-retract, which maintenance subroutine’s confirmation prompt buys you a final, deniable pause. In whispered drills between shifts, older hands walk rookies through the sequence in low ko-en: stall the door, keep the pressure; never long enough to flag as sabotage, always long enough for a body to make it through.
“Ji-yeon’s breach” evolves in parallel. It comes to name any moment someone risks punishment to push care through a closing gap in protocol: a medic daisy-chaining access on a triage console to slip an undocumented worker past biometric gating; a crane operator deliberately “misreading” a hazard glyph so a shuttle of overworked cleaners gets five extra minutes of decompression rest. Compliance calls it breach; on the cargo ring, it’s said with a kind of rough respect, half cautionary tale, half aspiration.
The terms stick because they’re technically precise and emotionally legible. They live in the narrow space where a warning can double as an invitation: Don’t do a Seo-min’s hold on the main bay: too many eyes. Maybe try a half-hold on the waste airlock. Don’t burn a full Ji-yeon’s breach on a sprain; save it for when someone’s really bleeding.
These phrases accrete detail. In half-lit bunkrooms, apprentices sketch crude overlays of station schematics on shared slates and the undersides of bunks, coloring in the sectors where someone heard the engineer’s pattern echo. A vent that “failed” closed late, a camera that blinked out just long enough to move a contraband medkit, a pressure door whose error chime came three seconds slow. Margins fill with timing notes and tiny ko-en glyphs: HOLD = 7–9s SAFE, >10s COMPLIANCE.
Next to it they map the medic’s routes: laundry shafts that double as medevac corridors, shrine alcoves where a diagnostics tattoo once flared to life, water-reclamation ladders that “just happen” to bypass biometric gates. Arrows trace “breach vectors,” annotated with case studies: undocumented pipefitter, respiratory; cleaner crew, nitrogen dizziness; cousin’s kid, hand crushed in a loader hinge.
What began as rumor turns into a kind of unofficial curriculum, parallel to Kyung-soo’s sanctioned lesson plans, complete with mnemonics, scenario questions, and whispered practicums. “Gate’s closing, pressure falling, run the engineer set; how many heartbeats until lock?” “Compliance at your back, injured in front, where do you draw a medic corridor?”
Above the cargo ring, in glassed-in conference nodes, corporate-clan functionaries study the same incident through a different lens. Behavior analysts build heatmaps of conversation clusters; risk officers flag “Seo-min’s hold” and “Ji-yeon’s breach” as emerging memetic hazards. Compliance psychometrists model “pathways of narrative uptake” in clipped ko-en, arguing over whether the terms represent simple stress responses or a proto-factional lexicon. In slide decks that never leave secure channels, the undercut engineer and the damaged-sigil medic appear as anonymized avatars, each ringed with probability cones projecting “contagion of noncompliance” through labor cohorts, specialist apprenticeships, even junior admin tracks. Recommendation columns accumulate beneath: targeted reassignment, narrative dilution, calibrated disciplinary spectacle: each option another attempt to turn a living story back into a controllable variable.
The more the boards attempt to localize and quantify the threat, the more they inadvertently sharpen its outline, turning rumor into a named variable. Security memos warning supervisors to “discourage the adoption of engineer- or medic-aligned improvisational behaviors” leak, redacted but legible, onto crew slates and communal walls. On break, a loader taps the phrase with a calloused finger and says, “So that’s what we’re calling it now,” and the term sticks, instantly useful. Shift by shift, what was once a blurry story about two blurred figures in crisis hardens into a simple, repeatable frame passed in ko-en shorthand: there is the regime’s way (documented, hierarchical, fatal on schedule) and now there is their way, improvised, risky, and recognizably human.
In cramped airlocks and over patched-together group chats, young specialists begin to treat that frame as oath language. “I’ll take Seo-min’s hold if it comes to it,” a trainee tech tells her shift-mates, meaning she’ll seize control from a console that’s supposed to outrank her, even if it logs her as fault. “I’m ready for Ji-yeon’s breach,” a junior medic mutters before slipping an undocumented patient through a quarantine gate, pre-loading falsified vitals on a borrowed slate. Variants proliferate: “double-hold,” “silent breach,” terse ko-en tags that fit in message headers and glove-scribbled notes. By the time the remote auditors finalize their recommendations their subjects have already crossed a subtle threshold: no longer just anonymous anomalies in a report, but the first faces people imagine when they think of choosing something other than obedience, and the first names regime planners mutter when they start drafting harsher responses, recalibrating every protocol around the possibility that someone might, at the worst possible moment, choose the engineer’s way or the medic’s.
Remote oversight boards authorize “containment operations,” greenlighting Lee-na to deploy rapid-response security teams under the pretext of stabilizing traffic and EVA safety. The order arrives as a compressed, multi-sig packet through the Seoul Line relay: corporate-clan seals, legalese stacked over incident telemetry, and a quietly appended clause about “temporary derogation of standard autonomy protections.”
Lee-na watches the authorization tree bloom on her console, lines of hanja and trade-code interleaving with hazard flags. On paper, it’s all about EVA drift risks, debris-shear incidents, the statistical uptick in unauthorized pod launches. In practice, it hands her joint command over a set of tactical squads nominally attached to Security but now routed through Flight Ops scheduling.
“Rapid-response teams will pre-stage along cargo ring vectors C through G,” the oversight liaison says over encrypted holo, his face blurred just enough to signal rank rather than person. “Your authority is limited to operational triggers: anomalous EVA, unscheduled dock, or traffic deviation outside tolerance.”
Limited, Lee-na notes, but still more direct control than she’s ever had over armed personnel. A gift with a leash.
“Understood,” she replies, voice steady despite the faint tremor in her left hand. “I’ll embed the teams as safety marshals. No visible escalation on the decks.”
“That is acceptable. Optics must remain cooperative. Nonetheless, containment metrics will be reviewed daily.”
Containment. Not safety. Not diplomacy. She routes the incoming directive through her own filters, recoding deployment schedules as “supplemental EVA recovery crews” and “mass-balance hazard units.” On internal manifests, they’ll look like specialized rescue detachments tied to Gate flux anomalies. To the boards, they’re the first layer of a clampdown.
In the simulation tank, tiny icons bloom: gunless but armored figures riding maintenance trams, posting up near airlock clusters, drifting in standby around the debris-adjacent corridors Ji-yeon’s people favor. Each unit tagged with her override key: yet shadowed by a corporate backdoor she cannot see.
She locks in the new traffic windows, shaving down launch tolerances by fractional degrees, enough to turn every unsanctioned EVA into a recorded deviation. The system helpfully color-codes them “intercept-eligible.”
Biometric checkpoints along the cargo ring recompile themselves overnight, firmware patched under a “safety compliance” bulletin no one remembers signing. What had been passive tap-and-go gates become layered interdiction nodes: micro-lidar sweeps, capillary-temperature graphs, gait signatures folded against archival med scans.
On the surface, traffic feels the same. Workers queuing with crates, hauler crews cycling through in practiced boredom. Underneath, the lattice starts sorting. Profiles linked by even tangential association to Seo-min’s or Ji-yeon’s known circles light up in a muted amber band invisible to the naked eye. A tech who once shared a maintenance shift with Seo-min. A dockhand who hit “like” on an anonymized clinic fund. A courier who routed meds one corridor too far from official infirmaries.
“Secondary screening,” the system labels them, auto-generating customs pings and random tool inspections. The flagged are quietly shunted toward side corridors whose signage has been recently updated: RE-CALIBRATION, BIOSEC VERIFICATION. Behind those doors, off-ledger holding bays wait: no external cams, only local recorders slaved to a legal domain that reports upward, never sideways. On logs, these rooms don’t say detention. They say quarantine variance review.
Cultural briefings and shift assemblies saturate with Kyung-soo’s newly mandated obedience modules, every lesson plan rewritten to foreground hyoung-dan sacrifice metrics and chain-of-command parables. He stands at the front of mixed crews and apprentices, voice measured as holo-slides advance from historical mutinies to “necessary corrective measures” after sabotage. Questions are invited, but every query routes through a sentiment parser; applause duration is logged as engagement data. In the background, an unseen security script scrapes attendance rosters, cross-referencing badge IDs and biometric traces with rebel-leaning chat clusters, clinic rumor nets, and anonymized Gate-worker forums. From the overlap, it compiles tiered “stability risk” indexes and quietly pushes priority interception lists to rapid-response teams disguised as safety marshals and biohazard verifiers.
Under the tightened schedules and “random” patrol patterns, door breaches and corridor snatches accelerate into a kind of low-grade harvest; undocumented workers, junior techs, and medics mapped to side routes simply fail to return from shifts. Comms go unanswered, bunks stay neatly made, toolkits sit untouched on racks while HR auto-mails bland absentee notices that hit inboxes like death certificates.
Coordinated raids roll in on synchronized timestamps, striking debris-side clinics, gray-market dorms, and cramped family pods linked by algorithmic suspicion. Quiet sanctuaries rupture into grappled bodies, muzzle-flashless stun-fire, and sonic-damped screams that never hit open comms. By the time the breach teams withdraw, bunks are half-stripped, med rigs still humming, and whole kin-networks reduced to tagged possessions and unclaimed biometric traces.
Immediate aftermath fractures into a kind of soundless panic. Station-wide, corridor annunciators stutter with cascading comm failures: family channels ping out with the soft, polite chime of “user unavailable,” then hard-switch to the flat grey of deactivated IDs. On bulkhead displays, tiny avatar icons ghost to static, one by one, like someone dimming a constellation.
In the cargo ring, Min-joon’s wristband scrolls through his Baekdu family hub: spouse, two kids, a cluster of in-law nodes. All green; all “nominal.” It’s here, on Haneul Gate, that the silence spreads. His local kin-net (the bunk neighbors, the poker circle, the loader crews) register red or nothing at all. When he routes a query through official HR, the response returns as a bland status macro: “Administrative review in progress. Do not attempt contact.” He feels the subtext in his bones: stop looking.
In residential spokes, latticework clan shrines flicker with auto-updated registries, the subject of whispered curses. Names tagged for “reassignment” glow amber, then vanish from the communal scrolls. Grandmothers and shift-children watch as kin-lines thin in real time, incense curling in stagnant air. Anxious fingers tap through contact menus, re-sending voice pings that never get past the first routing node.
Seo-min’s implants hum at the edge of pain as security subnets reconfigure around her. Noise on the environmental channels spikes, false positives, phantom leaks, mis-tagged CO₂ alerts, masking the genuine anomaly: a sudden drop in registered biosigns across three labor decks and two unlicensed med zones. She requests raw telemetry and hits new permission walls where none existed a rotation ago. The denial codes are clean, corporate-standard, stamped with multi-clan seals. Emergency condition: not defined.
Across the educational decks, Kyung-soo finishes another obedience lecture just as three students fail to check back in from “supplementary debrief.” Attendance logs quietly re-balance, absence fields overwritten with “rotational transfer” flags. His tablet notes the discrepancy; the regime curriculum does not.
Somewhere between the cargo ring and the debris-view dorms, an entire family pod’s atmosphere recycler continues its steady, efficient cycle: maintaining ideal living conditions for rooms no longer occupied by any recognized comm-id at all.
Triage scramble: Seo-min and Ji-yeon’s scattered allies burn through safehouses and backup routes, only to find doors cold-welded from the outside, clinics gutted to bare conduit, and biometric locks silently retuned to reject every known pattern.
The first losses are logistical, not human. Or so they tell themselves. A med cache in a maintenance cul-de-sac pinging “asset repossessed.” An air-scrubber shaft that used to bypass cameras now ringing with the dry hiss of new fiber lines and hidden mics. Relief routes collapse into blind ends where fresh weld seams still smell of scorched metal.
Ji-yeon’s mutual-aid mesh blinks out node by node as med drones fail to check in, their registry entries overwritten with serialized corporate tags. Seo-min rides raw sensor taps from her implants, sketching emergency corridors in her head, only to watch them close in real time as lockdown polygons redraw like tightening nooses.
Couriers who once slipped between decks with contraband antibiotics and forged work-passes now find their wristbands hard-bricked, route caches purged, and “random” patrols waiting at former dead zones. Improvised infirmaries, once noisy with coughs and whispered jokes, stand stripped to polished floor and sterilized wall, as if no one had ever bled there at all.
Min-joon doesn’t get a call, he gets a packet: compressed, priority-stamped, routed through a “security compliance” shell he can’t refuse. When he opens it in a maintenance alcove, the projection blooms against bare alloy. Grainy vid of his spouse and children in Baekdu uniforms he’s never seen, seated in a stark interview bay. No visible restraints, just the too-still posture of people who’ve been told to hold perfectly calm.
A courier-voiced avatar overlays the feed in neutral Trade: “Preliminary detention pending processing review. Your full cooperation will accelerate adjudication.”
Beneath, a conditional offer scrolls in legalese: manifest corrections, access tokens, a temporary override on certain cargo seals. Every clause is tied to a timestamped “re-evaluation” of his family’s status.
Station-side, others receive softer notices. They walk into corporate facilitation suites with escorts and signed assurances, vanish into non-routed corridors, and never reappear on any public ledger. Their comm-ids don’t flag as deceased, only “under extended evaluation,” a limbo category that might as well read: permanently removed from system.
Whispers of “ghost IDs” and embedded tracers spread faster than any verified intel. Old comrades start routing messages only through one-way drops, then stop routing them at all. Handles go dark rather than risk contamination. Ji-yeon’s mesh splinters into paranoid micro-cells, each convinced the others are burned. Every unlogged glance in a corridor now feels like a potential betrayal vector.
Strategic retreat becomes less a decision than a residue of shock. With key organizers vanished and movement graphs fully reconstructed from fresh biometric sweeps, remaining cells ghost whole sectors, wiping caches and torching route-maps before they go. Clinics, shrines, even trusted canteens are abandoned, terrain sacrificed to buy opacity, while encrypted pledges circulate: temporary dispersal, not defeat, just long enough to re-seed.
The sweep starts as theater.
“Random compliance verification,” the security handler recites in clipped Seoul Trade, vectoring a file of orange-banded crew through a redirected corridor that shouldn’t exist on this deck’s route diagram. The bulkheads are new: matte composite, no clan sigils, recessed seams that drink up sensor pings. Someone has overlaid the passage with a temporary “biohazard detour” holo that makes everyone a little more willing to keep moving, not look too closely.
Seo-min clocks six cameras where there should be two, feels the faint tickle across her subdermal mesh as external queries handshake her ID, her aug logs, her implant firmware hash. Routine, she tells herself. Oversight firebreak after the incident. Keep your threat profile flat.
Then the corridor doors iris shut at both ends with a softness that feels rehearsed.
“Engineer Ha,” the handler says, their visor opaqued. “Step aside for enhanced scan.”
The others are waved on, eyes flicking toward her and then rigorously away. Seo-min calculates angles: three armored figures, two drones humming near the overhead. No obvious weapons drawn; in diplomatic zones that would auto-flag a lockdown. Process, then. Paperwork and scolding and… something.
She pivots, palms out, offering her interface ports as if that might buy her a fractional say in the matter.
The command hits before she finishes turning.
No audible tone, no lights. Just a knife of white cutting sideways through her sensorium as a buried priority key propagates through her neural bus, recognized by hardware she did not install.
Override: EMERGENCY PROTOCOL. Her limbs lock, muscles firing out of sync as if an invisible puppeteer grabbed every fiber at once. Interface panes blossom in her vision unbidden then shatter into snarling glyphs as their root permissions are yanked away.
She tries to drop her external links, hard-kill her own mesh. The signal rides the attempt, piggybacking deeper. Every defensive reflex she’s trained slams into an invisible corporate-clan warrant layer that answers with cascading error chimes and a single, inescapable response:
ACCESS DENIED. COMPLIANCE ENFORCED.
The deck looms up in slow, viscous motion. She’s aware of the exact pattern of non-slip ridges against her cheek, the metallic taste as her jaw clips alloy. Somewhere, boots close in, voices muffled and far.
Threat assessment routines flare, then crumple into static.
Her last coherent thought isn’t fear; it’s the cold recognition of architecture. This was always inside her. They just chose this corridor, this moment, to flip the switch.
Consciousness returns in jagged slices, like a corrupted replay. Ceiling first: bare composite, no maintenance seams, no status strips: deliberately dumb. Her internal ping to station time hits a hard wall and rebounds as white noise across her optic nerves.
She’s upright, restrained by a harness that feels medical but locks like security. No HUD lattice. No ambient telemetry thread. When she reaches (reflex, not choice) for air mix, vibration signatures, Gate flux telemetry, each handshake query vanishes into a blacked-out subnet and comes back branded with the same stamp seared into her inner vision:
WARRANT AUTHORIZATION // CLAN-CORP CONSORTIUM // OVERRIDE ACTIVE.
The code isn’t just denying; it’s redirecting. Query → warrant layer → neural bus → induced feedback. Every attempt to map her surroundings detonates as a spike of white pain behind her eyes, like someone has booby-trapped curiosity itself.
She tests a different path, dropping to low-level motor diagnostics, fingertip proprioception. The cell has been designed as a Faraday throat, layered shielding swallowing even that. Isolation isn’t environmental; it’s architectural. They’ve amputated her from the station without touching a single limb.
What she first parses as a routine “stability protocol test”, familiar boilerplate about safeguarding critical personnel, unfolds into something far more invasive. Blind to room, time, even relative spin, she feels technicians riding in on secured carrier channels, stitching new subroutines through her neural lattice. Permission trees she helped design in other contexts are mirrored, inverted, weaponized: situational-awareness daemons are rebound as tripwires that, once tripped, dump her into blackout or full skeletal lock. Threat-assessment heuristics are remapped to treat certain warrant signatures as “safe harbor,” everything else as grounds for induced catatonia. Every pathway that once widened her field now loops back through compliance gates keyed to remote clan-corp hashes. The architecture of her autonomy folds in on itself, repurposed as a cage.
During a choreographed “medical transfer,” Kyung-soo is halted at a junction as a gurney column glides past. For a heartbeat, one stretcher’s occupant resolves: Seo-min, braced in a rigid exo-harness, limbs cinched with smart restraints, two armored med-sec flanking. Her gaze snaps to him, lucid and calculating, but nothing else moves. No nod, no flicker of voluntary muscle, only the telltale micro-tremor of neural interference along her temples.
Among Ji-yeon’s scattered cells, “Ha Seo-min” becomes both rallying cry and cautionary tale: proof that even top-tier augmenteds can be flipped into regime ordnance. Rumors diverge. Some claim they’ve seen her eyes tracking, resisting, in transit; others circulate redacted warrant schematics suggesting her implants can now hard-lock bulkheads or vent sections on a remote clan-corp pulse.
In the following days, encrypted corridors of the mesh fill with conflicted whispers: some insist Seo-min is still fighting inside the corporate shell, others say her neural map has been overwritten into a compliant asset. Snatches of telemetry, half-decoded admin logs, and anonymized med-sec dispatches circulate like contraband scripture. A tech in Traffic Relay claims he saw her bio-signature spike in fury when a lockdown order passed through her channel; a drone-handler swears that one of the maintenance crawlers under her old authorization tree performed a “blink” pattern that only Seo-min ever used, like a wink from inside the firewall.
Counter-rumors track just as fast. Someone caches a heavily watermarked training file, purported corp-clan briefing for high-clearance security, describing “Asset HA-37” as a stabilized enforcement node, fitted with hard override templates for bulkhead seals and emergency venting sequences. An embedded schematic shows an outline unmistakably shaped like her frame, spinal harness threaded with blackbox relays. The file is probably a psy-op, Kyung-soo cautions his quieter circles, but it spreads through side-channels anyway, annotated with bitter jokes about becoming someone else’s failsafe.
Min-joon reads the fragment in the dim light of a cargo registry console, the words “failsafe” and “behavioral cascade” hovering above the schematic like judgment. He remembers her once standing in a bay doorway, shoulder against the frame, asking without asking why his manifests kept slipping by three percent. Now those same clear eyes are rumored to be cross-linked to kill conditions keyed to clan-corp hashes he’ll never see. The next time a routine security ping sweeps his console and his private side-channel hiccups, he can’t help imagining Seo-min’s frozen gaze hidden somewhere in the authorization stream, dragged along as validator and executioner both.
Ji-yeon quietly purges or re-routes every contingency that depended on Seo-min’s access codes, treating her friend’s mind like a quarantined system: too dangerous to ping, too precious to write off.
Ji-yeon quietly purges or re-routes every contingency that depended on Seo-min’s access codes, watching old schemas collapse into red-laced error trees on her wrist-screen. She quarantines entire branches of her mesh, ripping out daisy-chained permissions they’d built together during off-shift “maintenance drills,” replacing them with crude, slower workarounds that don’t lean on embassy root. In her private notes, she flags anything tagged HA_CORE as contaminated. Not because she believes Seo-min has betrayed them, but because she knows corporate-clan engineers would have mapped every habitual reflex in that augmented brain and weaponized the patterns.
She rebuilds with cold, clinical discipline, like excising an infected organ while refusing to declare the patient dead. Proxy relays replace direct taps. Dead drops shift three modules farther out. Drone swarms once keyed to Seo-min’s neural handshake are re-imprinted on anonymous, air-gapped tokens. When junior med-techs ask why certain medevac corridors are suddenly off-limits, Ji-yeon lies smoothly about “sensor faults,” never speaking her name in open air.
In encrypted margins, though, she writes a single line: DO NOT PING HA, SHE’S STILL IN THERE.
Min-joon, watching new security checkpoints light up whenever her name appears in old routing logs, realizes that even remembering shared jobs with her now paints a target over his family’s quarters. The first time it happens, a checkpoint halo on Deck C flares amber as an audit bot cross-references “HA_SEO-MIN” with his cargo history; the alert clears in seconds, but his palms stay slick long after. He starts scrubbing annotation fields, renaming folders from in-jokes to dead alphanumerics, carving her out of his digital past one keystroke at a time. Every erased timestamp feels like sanding down a memory: the night she helped reroute a failing hauler, the quiet coffee in a grav-stutter. He tells himself he’s protecting his children, but it feels like collaboration.
Kyung-soo’s lesson plans start arriving with embedded “case studies” about compromised personnel. Anonymous officer designations, scrubbed faces, neat timelines of deviation and correction. Between the lines he recognizes the silhouette of Seo-min’s fall held up as a cautionary parable: overreach, contamination, reclamation. He alters emphasis mid-lecture, slipping in quiet codas about consent and the violence of being “repaired.”
From her command feeds, Lee-na watches Seo-min’s ID string slide, line by line, from “critical specialist” to an amber-lit “contingent asset,” a quiet bureaucratic throat-cut. The change propagates through clearance trees, flight waivers, even med-priority tags. She understands that any override, any unsanctioned accommodation or delay filed in Seo-min’s favor, will log as deliberate deviation: open defiance wearing her signature.
Seo-min feels it first as noise.
A half-second of grain in the feed when she pings a routine CO₂-scrubber diagnostic: barely a flutter in the datastream, a micro-hiccup between query and return. To anyone else it would read as lag in a crowded subnet. To a mind tuned to microsecond handshakes, it feels like a hand brushing the back of her neck.
She blinks the overlay away and throws a second query along a different path, through maintenance telemetry instead of life-support ops. The answer comes back clean, but slow again. Exactly slow. The kind of delay that isn’t bandwidth; it’s arbitration.
They’ve put a governor on her.
Her jaw tightens. Embedded along her temples, subdermal filaments prickle with phantom heat as the implant negotiates with station root. She watches the authorization ladder scroll in the corner of her vision: her credentials stepping up, being queued, held, then passed through. There’s a new node in that chain. A non-descript “EMERG-COV PROXY” riding between her and systems she used to touch without mediation.
“Interface noise,” she mutters in Trade to no one, out of habit, as if saying it aloud will keep it true.
She opens a low-level environmental monitor and pushes the request hard, forcing her neural interface toward the hardware layer. For a heartbeat the station answers her the old way: clean, instantaneous, as intimate as breath. Then the clamp catches, a soft but absolute resistance, and the data comes back pre-sanitized through the proxy: rounded figures, truncated metadata, missing the raw variance she relies on to smell trouble.
They’re not just limiting where her body can go, what doors open when she steps close. They’re inserting themselves into the space between her thought and the station’s pulse.
She tags a silent diagnostic loop and sees the backdoor signatures reshaped, thresholds lowered. “Emergency” now includes any anomalous spike in her cognitive load, any attempt at deep access across locked sectors. Under the right pretext they could freeze her mid-command, drop her into a neural safe-mode like a misbehaving drone.
For a flicker of a moment, old training wants to obey: accept constraints, assume necessity, trust higher clearance. She remembers instructors talking about “fail-safes” in augmentation suites, conveniently vague about triggers. She’d always filed it under worst-case, never-runs code.
Now the worst case is live, humming under her skin.
Her awareness splays outward on instinct, brushing against embassy systems she can still reach: airflow in the alien wing, pump cadence in the cargo ring, motion traces in a culturally neutral corridor. Each contact comes with that same measured pause, like a door guard checking her face against a shifting watchlist.
If they can slow her, they can choke her. If they can choke her, they can aim her.
The realization settles in with a precise, metallic calm. Her own mind, once her edge, is becoming contested territory.
“All right,” she whispers in Korean, pulse steadying as she forces her thoughts down to narrow, non-spiking bands. “If you’re going to ride my nerves, you’re going to have to work for the reins.”
Min-joon’s latest “verification call” from Baekdu opens like all the others: lag-skip on the carrier, the faint compression artifacts of a relay that should be routine and never is. The security sub-unit handler doesn’t bother with preamble. No honorifics, no small talk. Just his identifier, then a line of domestic trivia read in a voice that might as well be listing mass ratios.
“Park Da-on: homeroom reassigned, Section C-3. Park Ye-rim: after-instruction care now ending at nineteen-thirty local. Residential bulkhead maintenance, Zone Seven, scheduled for next rotation.”
School schedule, housing work orders, a mention of a temporary airlock closure near his family’s deck. Each item innocuous on paper, but paired with timestamps, corridor numbers, door designations. It lands in his gut like crosshairs being painted on moving targets.
He tries to answer in the relaxed Trade he uses with hauler captains, but his throat has gone dry. The handler notes a hitch in his reply. He can hear the recording marker tick over.
“Maintain manifest transparency, Officer Park. For your dependents’ continuity.”
When the channel cuts, the compartment seems too small. His knee throbs in time with his heart as he stares at the frozen last frame of Baekdu’s schematic, hands shaking so hard he has to lock them under his arms to stop.
Ji-yeon rides the stretcher drone herself, crouched beside a laborer coughing pink foam into his mask, his biometrics skittering toward cascade. She’d already burned one clean medevac corridor this week; this one she threads through three obsolete maintenance runs she mapped years ago, hand-tagged as safe.
At the first junction, a new biometric arch irises awake: corporate gray, fresh weld scars. Her cloned clinic ID pings, hesitates, then flashes amber: REFER TO PRIMARY. She curses under her breath, reroutes.
Second gate: same response. Third: the arch doesn’t even pretend to think, just bleeds red and logs her. The drone’s auto-triage barks for authorized intake.
She can crack one of these, given time and tools. What she has is a failing patient and a tightening noose.
“Shibal.” She palms the override, sends him to the official clinic she’s documented as a quiet abattoir for inconvenient bodies.
His eyes find hers as the drone accelerates away, full of bewildered trust she doesn’t deserve. She forces herself not to follow, not to sprint after it and make herself disappear beside him.
You can’t help anyone if you’re on their table.
The justification tastes like disinfectant and rust.
Kyung-soo stands before a mixed class of apprentices and junior officers, reciting the new unit on “necessary sacrifice” in measured, didactic Trade, stylus tapping bullet points about duty, chain-of-command, acceptable losses. As he speaks, he annotates silently: which faces harden in eager assent, which go carefully blank, which flicker with doubt. Every unreported hesitation, every uncorrected question, folds into a ledger that his continued silence signs, line by line, naming him an accomplice to whatever comes next.
Lee-na signs off on another narrowed EVA window, tremor starting in her left hand before she clamps it to the console. Each encrypted directive from oversight reads the same beneath the jargon: hold the line exactly where they draw it, or they’ll redraw it in blood. Any unsanctioned reroute, any quiet mercy for Ji-yeon’s ghosts, becomes pretext to purge “her” laborers first.
Ji-yeon watches the medevac schematic on her sleeve bloom with new red nodes like a spreading rash.
Corridor 7-Blue: a biometric arch where yesterday there was just chipped paint and an unplugged CO₂ sensor. Corridor 3-Green: patrol path overlay, two security med-techs on a ten-minute loop that slices directly across what used to be her safest bypass. A whole section of the quarantine lattice now marked “auto-route to Central Triage”: the corporate euphemism for the clinic where people go in and don’t come back out with their original consent profile.
She scrolls back through archived paths she hand-built over years: quiet hatches, dead cameras, maintenance shafts “temporarily” decommissioned in the logs. One after another, the overlays update, fresh from central: new scanners, new heartbeat and gait analyzers, new firmware that will not accept her old forged signatures.
Every blinking checkpoint is a subtraction. A body she will not reach before some oversight subroutine decides they’re “non-compliant” and reclassifies them from patient to asset.
Her swarm of microdrones confirms what the maps already say: no more blind corners. The air itself is tagged now: environmental analyzers tuned to pick up unsanctioned nanites, hacked biotracers, the chemical fingerprints of her off-the-grid meds. They’ve studied her as carefully as she studied them.
A background ping from the mutual aid mesh: a dockhand in Cargo Ring C, respiratory distress, no clinic clearance. Reflex says: reroute him through Shaft K-12, piggyback his vitals under a scrubbed maintenance bot. The updated map says: Shaft K-12 has a new throat: another scanner that calls home to boards who already have her name lit up on watchlists.
Her fingers hover over the response field, knuckles whitening.
If she tests the new net now, they won’t just close it. They’ll follow the line straight back to every cached narcotic, every hidden cot, every undocumented worker who let her rewrite their files.
She logs a bland instruction (“use official intake, insist on second opinion, cite treaty clauses”) and feels the lie cut both ways.
One more corridor gone. One more life pushed into the corporate light because the dark is no longer hers to move through.
Min-joon stands inside the customs audit booth’s halo of pale light, boots magnet-locked to the deck as the “randomized” review sequence blooms across the holo in front of him. Line items he thought he’d buried under nested sub-routines and harmless-seeming mass adjustments begin to unravel, algorithmic fingers tugging at every inconsistency.
The security officer on the other side of the partition smiles with professional warmth, badge glyphs pulsing a slow, steady blue. Her questions come in Standard Trade so clean it feels rehearsed.
“Logistics Officer Park, can you walk me through this variance on Baekdu-embarked cargo seven weeks ago? Just routine verification.”
He hears the capital letters in “routine,” tastes the metal in his mouth. A side-channel ping ripples across the corner of his retinal HUD: origin obfuscated, signature unmistakable: the enforcement sub-unit that owns his debt. Three attached images, low-res but razor-edged in implication: his spouse at the market stall; his eldest bent over a homework tablet; the youngest asleep, one hand on the family’s cracked air recycler.
Every micro-pause between his answers is timestamped. Every too-steady breath cross-referenced against biometric baselines they already hold. The officer’s stylus taps the console whenever his voice wavers, as though marking a ledger whose final column is labeled not with numbers, but with Baekdu Relay’s docking coordinates.
“Of course,” Min-joon says, throat dry. “Must be a clerical artifact. I can correct the record.”
The system flags the word “artifact,” shunts it through a sentiment parser. A green icon blinks approval on the officer’s side; on his, a red triangle flickers once, then subsides, like a warning swallowed rather than rescinded.
He walks them back through his own fabrications, step by careful step, aware that whichever entry fails to convince will not only define his future audits. But the nights his family sleeps without a knock on their hatch.
Kyung-soo stands before the holo-slab, lesson schema hovering in regimented blocks: “Collective Horizon,” “Duty in Crisis,” “Acceptable Loss.” The oversight board’s phrasing tastes like recycled air on his tongue, but he modulates his voice to classroom warmth as the junior staff and apprentices settle into their mag-chairs.
“Sometimes,” he says, “a habitat survives because a few accept limitation without question. Because protocols are followed, even when they feel…cruel.”
The case studies bloom behind him: anonymized diagrams of airlock failures, containment breaches, “regrettable” depressurizations. Everyone on Haneul Gate knows the shapes. Knows the dates.
Halfway down the row, a sharp-eyed apprentice (maintenance orange still creased from real work) goes very still. Her gaze flicks from the diagram to him, calculation tightening her jaw.
He feels the moment she maps “necessary sacrifice” to the cargo-ring lockdown, to the decompressed maintenance cell they all called an accident until rumor named otherwise. The moment “unquestioned duty” becomes a demand that someone should have closed a hatch on their own crewmate.
Kyung-soo doesn’t break cadence. He leans into the sanctioned parable, tracing how obedience preserved “station integrity,” how doubters endangered “collective destiny.” His tablet feeds him approved talking points; he edits them by omission, letting certain details hang unanswered.
The room’s ambient murmur dampens. A few heads bow, absorbing the message. A few pairs of eyes harden, memorizing the edges between his words.
At the end, he assigns a reflection exercise: “Describe a time when you put the group above yourself.” The oversight directive wants confession. He frames it as history.
As the students file out, the sharp-eyed apprentice lingers a heartbeat too long, meeting his gaze with something like accusation, something like plea.
Kyung-soo nods as if in benign encouragement, wondering which of them the boards will read as the real threat when this lesson is reviewed on encrypted replay.
Lee-na’s message queue blooms with flagged anomalies she’s been instructed to treat as “noise”: unsanctioned cargo vectors, unexplained power draws near the debris field, ghost pings against external beacons. Each dismissal she authorizes is countersigned in three different oversight logs, another quiet entry in a ledger of compromises that knots her crews’ continued oxygen, hazard pay, and rotation rights to the regime’s preferred storyline.
On the lower decks, laborers and stall-keepers learn to pause a heartbeat longer beneath the new biometric arches, watching which wrists the scanners kiss green and which flash amber, who is pulled aside and who glides through on clan credentials. The unspoken calculus of risk rewrites itself in real time as “resistance” stops being rumor and becomes the word for why hatches stay sealed and market neighbors quietly vanish from their usual spots.
The med-techs who wheeled her in have long since retreated behind the privacy field, leaving only the low thrum of shielded emitters and the faint, arrhythmic flicker of the Gate’s lens beyond the viewport. Seo-min tests a fingertip twitch, then an ocular zoom request; both movements trigger the same dull, buffered lag that tells her every neural pathway is being rubber-gloved before it reaches the outside world.
The room smells of sterilant and recycled coolant, the kind used in high-voltage isolation racks. Someone has overlaid the bulkheads with calming chroma gradients but the colorfield flickers at the very edge of her vision, phase-shifted by the interference her implants keep trying to negotiate and keep being refused. Status glyphs hover in her periphery: IO//MUTED, NET//SAFEMODE, EXEC//LOCKED BY REMOTE SIGNATORY. No names, of course. Just committee sigils, rendered as anonymized hashes, floating like little corporate verdicts.
She flexes her hand again, slower this time, tracking the latency. Two hundred and sixteen milliseconds between intention and muscle fiber. That’s not medical safety margin; that’s leash length. They’ve inserted a middleware layer over her spinal bus, a soft-cage wrapper that can throttle or misroute any outbound signal. Field-kit grade, not hospital. Someone moved fast.
Her tongue feels thick. Speech would be analog, slip past most of the locks, but there’s no one to talk to except the room’s dumb monitoring cluster, and even that’s been set to passive read-only; she can feel the absence of query pings like a missing itch. They don’t want her talking to systems, and they don’t much care what she says to humans.
Beyond the viewport, the Haneul Gate flexes, a slow convulsion in spacetime like a muscle remembering an old injury. Each time its flux pattern knots, a sympathetic static crawls across her neural shunt, like the Gate is trying to handshake directly and the corporate cage is slapping its hand away.
She snaps for a sensor handshake on reflex (an old, tight mil-ops string burned into her wetware before she ever signed a corporate contract) and hits a denial wall so abruptly her teeth lock. The error bloom floods her inner vision, sterile and templated, all smoothed trade-register phrasing about “patient safety” and “temporary scope limitation.” Underneath the clean language, though, the authorization hashes flicker in patterns she has not seen since the blackout tours along the DMZ arc.
Branch IDs. Obfuscated, but not enough. Nested command trees she learned to recognize in simulation, the ones that only came online when a unit was flagged as compromised or contaminated. Back then, those trees lived on hardened military crates, pointed outward at unknown threats.
Now they’re pointed at her spine.
She rides the residual sting, forcing herself to trace the structure: dual-signatory override, escalation hooks up to committee quorum, and a familiar ghost-prefix, the manufacturer tag from the original augment batch she was never supposed to know. They haven’t just throttled her; they’ve migrated her under legacy war-footing protocols, as if she were a live capture from an enemy hull.
She clamps down on the instinct to brute-force the locks and instead rides the pain like turbulence, letting it shake loose whatever scraps of data still leak past the sandbox. There’s just enough: a narrow band of thermal creep along the starboard bulkhead, not quite symmetrical; a Gate-adjacent power surge that spikes and then plateaus, as if something heavy has been brought online and then hidden under noise; a fractional bias in the station’s spin vector, a hair off the last publicly posted trajectory. It’s the kind of delicate mass and energy choreography you only see around high-containment transfers or blacklisted reroutes. Someone is doing surgery on the station’s inertia, and they’ve amputated her from the control loop first.
Cut off from the network’s low-grade hum, the room compresses around her, her own body suddenly too present. Every cybernetic daemon queueing error flags she can’t acknowledge or purge. She is reduced to analog optics, shadowing the Gate’s slow torsions with naked eyes, mapping ripples that drift a fraction off the predictive meshes etched into memory. The discrepancy is small, statistical-noise small, but it persists. Either the anomaly is flexing against her imposed muteness, sensing the cage on its usual interlocutor, or the station’s spokes are hosting a quieter, uglier experiment.
A muted chime announces a “routine status update,” but the interface panel on her cradle stays locked to passive readouts: heart rate, neural noise, corporate seal of medical custody pulsing in calm blues. The typography is soft, rounded, anesthesia by design. It’s the same palette they used planetside during post-mission debrief confinements right down to the gently looping status glyphs that never quite resolve into actionable data. The familiarity curdles into certainty: this hold is less about her health than about audit trails and chain of custody, about who owns her ports and prioritization maps when the next crisis hits and someone decides which assets speak to the Gate.
Each time she reaches for the station mesh, invisible teeth close on the link, interfaces half-handshaked, then severed, leaving a white-hot echo along the subdermal traces at her temples. The cut is never clean. There’s always that infinitesimal moment of handshake, of recognition, when the embassy’s systems seem to inhale her presence and then recoil as if burned.
Error cascades strobe in her inner vision, blooming across her field like afterimages from a welding torch. Diagnostic panes open without her command, translucent blocks of text and iconography stacked three deep, occluding the Gate and the room and her own hands. Corporate sigils float in the corner of every window, watermarking each fault report, each forced disconnect, each “safety interdict” with clan-sigil stamps and legal hash strings. Even her pain is notarized.
She tries to dismiss the overlays with a flick of ocular focus. Instead, another layer blooms: implant pedigree, firmware provenance, audit schedule. Rows of alphanumeric designators that used to be just background metadata now read like chains. Firmware channel: BaekdoBio-KR/Defense/Export-Controlled. Override authority: Tri-Clan Incident Committee + Regime Head (provisional). Local root: disabled.
The system is talking around her, not to her. Control graphs spool out adjacency maps of processes she can’t touch, ports she once ghosted through now outlined in warning amber. Her usual admin hooks are greyed, annotated with soft, patronizing language, “temporarily restricted for operator wellness.” Low-level watchdog daemons, the tiny helper codes she’d written herself on graveyard shifts to smooth handshake jitter and flag anomalous Gate telemetry, are suddenly quarantined as “unvetted routines.” Their process IDs blink, then wink out one by one.
Her jaw clenches. She can still feel the mesh’s texture at the edge of perception, like a pressure change before a hatch opens: a sense of vast routing tables and thermal signatures and spin-balance telemetry humming just beyond a frosted pane. Every time she nudges against it, the backdoor governor bites down harder, converting intent into error tone, curiosity into static. The pain that rides in on the disconnects is almost secondary now, a bright, framing edge around a darker realization: this isn’t a fault. It’s policy, executed in silicon and nerve.
In a thin, latency-lagged corner of her HUD, unauthorized reflections from corridor cams bleed through the lockdown firewall: labor crews stripped to underlayers, queued in silent columns, shuffled through overactive decontamination showers that flare too bright, too long. Their biometrics scroll in anonymized batches, reduced to exposure indices and compliance flags, whole lives collapsed into color-coded risk strata and throughput efficiency metrics. The scrubber nozzles track them like targeting systems, cycling antiseptic mist and micro-UV bursts calibrated more for data collection than genuine decon; each pass leaves faint thermal ghosts on the overlays, bodies momentarily incandescent before the algorithm cools them back to statistical noise.
Someone has throttled the audio feed, but compression artifacts leak enough: a child’s cough dopplered into static, a foreman’s clipped orders sliced into phonemes the system tags as “reassurance.” Above every line of bodies, corporate-clan seals hover in translucent watermark: signatures authorizing “protective measures,” legal indemnity hashes scrolling faster than heart rates. Crosshairs of contact-trace vectors snap from one anonymized silhouette to the next, building contagion trees that branch not by infection probability but by rank, by usefulness, by how expendable the model assumes they are.
Another feed stitches in from deeper inside the wheel, sections she knows by smell and vibration, the faint ozone of overworked scrubbers, the hollow ring in the deck plates, where Ji-yeon once ran illicit triage bays between coolant trunks. Now those decks flicker under thick red quarantine lattice, bulkhead identifiers scrubbed and replaced with sterile incident hashes that rewrite lived spaces into case numbers. Automated notices loop the same euphemism, “bio-sample misclassification”, but the metadata betrays the lie: manual override sigils stack in the margins, layered hierarchies of clearance stamps. Security. Research. Risk Management. Compliance. Each tag a different clan sub-committee asserting touch, carving jurisdiction. The closures don’t look like containment trees; they look like asset seizures, corridors reclassified into evidence lockers with beds still warm.
It is formatted like reassurance, not ultimatum: references to “operator wellness reviews,” “collaborative firmware hygiene,” and “maintaining mission readiness” threaded through dense procedural jargon. But the operative clauses are clear even through the softeners and passive voice: she must sign off on deep-code introspection, surrender her unsanctioned hooks, and allow a hardwired throttle keyed to corporate-clan oversight to live between her intent and the mesh forever.
Buried in a single, affectless paragraph near the end sits the real fork: noncompliance auto-flags “precautionary redeployment,” justified by cumulative neural fatigue metrics and “unsafe proximity to classified anomalies.” In practice, it means medevac under sedation, firewalled from Haneul Gate, from the colonists who still ping her for off-grid fixes, from console roots and maintenance backdoors. Her augments would wake up caged, reassigned to some inner-system clinic, her name converted into a closed incident code.
She slows her breathing and drops into diagnostic mode, letting the embassy’s ambient feeds dim to a dull, distant hiss. The world contracts to the inside of her skull. Across her inner visual field the override sequence unspools again, this time throttled down to a crawl: timestamped command strings cascading like shards of falling glass, each one annotated, cross-referenced, nested. Commit IDs. Clearance sigils. Error-correction handshakes. Every hop leaves a faint phosphor bruise on her perception before dropping to the next node.
She tracks the path along routes she knows the way older workers know vent rattles and pump harmonics: through the cargo ring’s load-balancers, along atmosphere-recycler telemetry, skimming the low-priority maintenance bus that ties together a thousand forgotten sensors. These she recognizes, Seoul Line trunk, Guk-su Prime orbital relay, clan-coop diagnostics spool, but threaded between them are unfamiliar junctions, shadowed addresses that don’t resolve to standard topology. “Provisional oversight mirrors,” the training briefs had called them, wrapped in more acronyms than explanation.
On second pass, the elegance stands out with surgical clarity. The request tree doesn’t ram its way down from some obvious executive console; it blossoms sideways, opportunistic, riding traffic that could have been hers. Routine health-check telemetry, firmware version polls, even the haptic calibration pulses that keep her zero-g reflexes tight. One innocuous ping re-labeled as “wellness verification.” Another tagged as “motor coordination audit.” No brute-force seizures. No dramatic locks. Everything routed as if the system had merely asked politely, and she had nodded yes.
It is beautiful in the way a guillotine is beautiful: geometry perfected long before any particular neck is measured. Blade, frame, counterweight: already balanced, already tuned. Implementation is just gravity. The decision, she realizes, was never about whether the corporation would build a way to reach into her nervous system. The only pending variable was when they would choose to let it drop.
The trace resolves into the thing she has always kept in a safe mental folder labeled “for compliance slides only,” never for herself: not just a single trapdoor but an entire service architecture quietly soldered into her nervous system. Maintenance heartbeats she once tuned out as harmless, mesh latency checks, actuator lag metrics, reflex-loop calibrations, each carries a second payload. Biometric integrity polls have been recompiled into rolling consent ledgers, every stress spike or micro-seizure silently appended as justification. A “fall-prevention subroutine” maps cleanly onto a motor-inhibit template. One mislabeled fail-safe translates, in raw permissions, to: you stop moving when we say so.
This isn’t some desperate patch pushed during the anomaly spike. The timestamps on the deeper commits go back to Baekdu orbital, to her initial augmentation cycles, to before Haneul Gate was more than a rumor in encrypted project channels. Someone planned for a future in which she might stop being predictable. They budgeted for it, standardized it, audited it. The code does not read like an emergency measure. It reads like infrastructure.
Instead of dropping the blade all at once (no amnestic scrub, no permanent motor strip) they had merely pressed a knuckle against the back of her neck and waited to see if she flinched. First came a hairline desync in her tactile loop, fingers reporting a half-second late while her eyes stayed on time. Then a compulsory diagnostic suspend, her voluntary channels grayed out while a progress bar she hadn’t requested crawled across her inner vision. Finally, a clean, absolute muscular inhibit: every limb present in proprioception, none of them answering.
It lasted three heartbeats. Long enough to annotate, to log, to correlate with stress curves. When control flowed back, relief was secondary to a cold, precise outrage. They had bench-tested her limits like a quarantined asset, not a sovereign mind.
The obvious survival script unspools in parallel, neat as a corporate training sim: sign the consent addenda, accept “neuro‑protective reassignment,” let herself be parked in some sterilized subdeck tuning CO₂ scrubber tolerances and pump harmonics, far from the Gate and its unstable questions. Keep her head down, let risk officers define what grade of neural shackle is “operationally necessary,” log each new constraint as a safety upgrade, and pretend that almost being switched off like a misbehaving maintenance drone is just another occupational hazard of her clearance band, no more personal than a pressure door cycling shut.
What he thinks is a routine resilience check becomes her first live-fire exercise. While his tablet renders her “coping indices,” she overlays that feed with her own backdoor map: quarantine orders that vanished colonists, cold audit trails on Ji-yeon’s scrubbed clinics, Min-joon’s sealed containers routed too neatly around med-wards. They all share an architecture. She starts drafting a counter‑protocol.
She leans into the role they’ve written for her on some personnel slate: high-clearance asset under “transient stress load,” compliant, self-reflective, grateful for support. Her voice comes out in the cadence every corporate-clan training module drills in from apprentice days. Balanced affect, modulated pace, standardized trade with just enough hometown Seoul in the vowels to read as authentic. She tracks his micro-reactions as she speaks: the tick at the corner of his eye when she mentions the Gate, the way his thumb hovers over a flag icon when she admits to “transient dissociative sensations” instead of saying override.
While his tablet chews on her answers, her implant is already inside its throat.
The psych suite is rated as secure, its walls laced with dampers and its feeds triple-logged to ethics committees she knows are mostly ceremonial. But the evaluation itself opens a temporary high-bandwidth tunnel between her cortical bus and the diagnostic stack. The corp assumes the flow is one-way, expert systems reading her, but the handshake is still a handshake. Her augments ride that channel, mirroring his psychometrics and then nudging sideways into the attached systems bundle, the one politely labeled SUPPORT: ENV.
On her inner vision, a neutered version of her old station dashboard unfolds. Where there used to be live code panes and editable routing trees, there are now rounded icons and color-coded “health” bars, each wrapped in greyed-out padlocks that insist on read-only. The governor in her spine gives a warning buzz as she brushes those locks, a reminder that she is under observation, that any active intrusion will spike alerts straight to Security Psych and probably Flight Ops.
So she doesn’t intrude. She observes.
Every anodyne response, “I acknowledge elevated baseline anxiety,” “Yes, I feel adequately supported by my team,” “No, I have not experienced urges to self-harm or sabotage assets”. Is timed to cover another micro-crawl across the flattened UI. She keeps her gaze soft, her shoulders slightly rounded, posture telegraphing manageable fatigue rather than coiled defiance. The officer’s questions about “trust in leadership” line up nicely with a masked query from her implant, sampling error tolerances on atmospheric regulation nodes.
He thinks he’s pacing her through coping strategies; she’s pacing her packet loss.
A faint sweat prickles under the subdermal filaments along her forearms as her neural load climbs. She throttles back her own curiosity, keeping data pulls just below the thresholds that would look like tampering. No writing, no active pings, only passive mirroring of what the system is already prepared to show someone of her clearance. If that someone knew how to read what’s tucked in the margins.
The officer notes her “cooperative engagement” with a small, pleased hum. On his side of the glass, the session is textbook. On hers, the hollowed-out control panel begins to give up small, carefully hoarded secrets.
She toggles display modes with the faintest subvocal command, watching the scrubber telemetry re-render from corporate-friendly pie charts into dense, numeric streams. Under the scrubbed interface, the “read‑only” tags are a joke; what matters is the jitter. Column after column of green-lit stability hides a filament of anomaly: infinitesimal stutters in CO₂ extraction efficiency that never breach alarm thresholds, always resolving within the window any duty engineer would write off as fan turbulence or sensor brownout.
Except the stutters aren’t random. Her augment kicks into pattern-flag mode without needing a conscious order, ghost-threading each micro-drop in scrub rate against the station’s internal power ledger. There. Each atmospheric tremor has a twin: an equally fleeting dip in draw along a peripheral subgrid most ops officers forget exists, a relic spine feeding obsolete medevac corridors and isolation wards.
On any standard audit, it’s textbook noise, sanded smooth by acceptable variance bands and auto-generated compliance reports. To Seo-min’s hyper-tuned threat assessment stack, it resolves into a clean, mechanical regularity: a metronomic pulse marching along conduits that, by official diagram, should be statistically quiet.
As she cross-correlates timestamps and grid addresses, the noise collapses into intent. Recognition clamps down hard in her chest: the fractal cadence of the fluctuations, a tight one‑two‑three pause, one‑two, long hold, then repeat, exactly mirrors Ji‑yeon’s old “heartbeat” hack, the covert signaling schema they once threaded through overtaxed exchangers to tag safehouses and unsanctioned wards. Different station, same bones.
The psych officer merely annotates a spike in autonomic arousal, glancing up to misread it as situational stress. He can’t see how, in her peripheral HUD, those micro‑variations are already tessellating into a ghost‑map: faintly highlighted arcs of decommissioned medevac corridors, cul‑de‑sac quarantine bubbles, sealed junctions Corporate pretends don’t exist. Every beat of that hidden pattern redraws the embassy’s underlayer, and someone down there is still talking in their language.
Threaded through that heartbeat rides a denser knot of modulation, a deliberate overdrive of scrubber cycles at three adjacent nodes that, when she reassembles them against her memory of Ji‑yeon’s cipher grids, coheres into a tight, lossy data burst. She parses it mid-sentence: partial corridor strings, a dead‑drop timestamp, a short auth‑token built from an obscene med-school mnemonic only Ji‑yeon and five original cell members ever shared. Too precise, too petty to be corporate psych-ops, and therefore the closest thing to proof this lattice still has a living mind.
The packet is brutally compact but irrefutable: at least one underground clinic rode out the regime’s “quarantine purges,” kept its scrubbers and locks under rebel firmware, and someone in the lattice still chooses her as a recipient. The certainty fuses with the quiet decision she has been circling around her own backdoors. She will not sit and wait for the next corporate override spike to seize her limbs. With Ji‑yeon’s old heartbeat still ghosting through alloy and ductwork, she begins roughing in a counter-loop at the edge of conscious thought, mapping how to hijack maintenance watchdogs, legacy medevac relays, and forgotten quarantine shunts, braiding them into an oblique, deniable exit vector no official route map can acknowledge.
She starts small, because abrupt shifts trip human attention in ways code audits never will. A single anomalous flag slides into the shielded bay’s life support console: a fractional drop in CO₂ scrubber efficiency, the kind of drift every overworked tech learns to shrug at. She tunes it to sit precisely inside the nuisance band. Too minor to trigger priority alerts, just large enough to trip one of the old “better-safe” routines burned into the embassy’s pre‑Gate safety stack.
Her implants lean into the console’s blind seam, the narrow diagnostic bus maintenance forgot to harden when they layered on corporate telemetry skins. From the psych officer’s point of view, she is merely staring past him, jaw slightly tense. In her inner field, ghost cursors dance. She lets the flagged inefficiency echo across a pair of redundant monitors, nudging checksum tolerances until the discrepancy looks like a mildly embarrassing calibration drift rather than a hardware failure.
The station’s maintenance daemon chews on the inputs, cross-references aging safety regs that predate the current security doctrine, and downgrades the event from “potential hazard” to “scheduled micro‑calibration.” That single bureaucratic demotion is the gap she needs. A calibration invokes procedures that assume cooperation, not threat: no armed escort, no lockdown cascade, just a work ticket pushed to a junior tech’s queue and a maintenance script authorized to poke around in the bay’s lungs.
She watches the decision tree update, neural HUD overlaying the bay’s local schema with faint amber. No security swarm, as expected; the calibration tag routes through facilities, not tactical. It will take minutes for an actual body to arrive with a portable analyzer, but the software half of the procedure spins up immediately. Pre‑checks, filter cycling, temporary relaxation of sensor granularity to prevent false negatives while the system “breathes.”
Her implants hitch a ride on that pre‑check. The diagnostic channel is old, under-documented, and treated as read‑only by everyone who still believes the manuals. She knows better. A half-dozen micro‑instructions slip into the test packet, re‑labeling the source of the aberration, persuading the daemon that the fault is localized on a line of sensors just outside her bay door. The system obligingly widens its probe radius, softening authentication thresholds along the corridor’s environmental loop.
What corporate security sees is a minor maintenance inconvenience: a transient hiccup in a non-critical ring, auto‑classified under “air quality variance, routine.” What the lattice sees, if Ji‑yeon or her ghosts are still listening, is a deliberate tap on the old medevac bones: one bay’s lungs coughing just loudly enough to justify human hands, and with them, the chance to slip something, or someone, through.
As the automated routines spool up, she threads a timed script into the calibration sequence, stepping her changes down in millisecond increments so they mimic thermal drift rather than attack traffic. One by one, she desynchronizes the environmental filters by a bare few seconds, just enough to knock their aggregate sampling out of phase and create a stuttering blind band in the bay’s telemetry. Oxygen, CO₂, volatile organics. All still within spec on any given tick, but the composite picture fuzzes, leaving a narrow interval where nothing is truly resolved.
In that manufactured lacuna, she uncoils the second layer: an authorized med‑drone ID she and Ji‑yeon once built for shuttling undocumented workers through “quiet” clinics. Back then it rode on a legitimate maintenance chassis; now it exists as pure credential, painstakingly reconstructed from Ji‑yeon’s old clinic signatures and buried years ago in a forgotten whitelist tied to legacy medevac procedures. As the filters drift out of phase, the resurrected ID pings the access grid with a surgically crafted emergency transfer order. Critical neuro event, high‑value specialist, require immediate relocation to controlled med‑ward, medevac priority level one, override routine isolation constraints.
The bay’s door control, still slaved to medevac hierarchies etched into silicon before the last three security overhauls, accepts the spoofed order without escalating it for human review. No cross‑check with psych, no callout to security. Just a quiet reclassification. Status glyphs along the lintel stutter from “ISOLATION / PSYCH HOLD” to “CLINICAL TRANSFER / LEVEL‑ONE NEURO” for forty‑five measured seconds as the drone glides in on mag‑quiet casters, storage cradle unfolding and re‑locking itself into a compliant stretcher frame.
Seo‑min relaxes into the harness, jaw unclenching by deliberate degrees while the machine’s cold brackets iris shut around her wrists, ankles, and temples. She lets it own the rhythm of her chest, syncing her breathing to its metronomic monitoring ticks. A falsified sedation cascade pours into the bay’s local buffer: incremental dose markers, clean curves of dropping systolic pressure, motor pathways annotated as “pharmacologically suppressed.” Her true sensorium runs in a narrow, encrypted band just outside the clinic’s sampling window, cognition neatly mis‑tagged as absent.
The inner lenses log it, compress it, and pass it along to storage with the same bored checksum stamps they’ve applied to a thousand compliant bodies. Even the psych officer’s slate, when he glances up at the passing stretcher, shows only a green‑band transfer icon and a confidence score in the high nineties. Seo‑min feels the implants along her spine dim down another notch, scattering their telemetry through dummy subroutines: phantom muscle twitches here, a shallow REM‑like flutter there, all of it statistically indistinguishable from a heavily sedated specialist being wheeled to a higher-clearance ward. The real data, her active threat models, the timing map of each checkpoint, the pulse of the maintenance daemon, routes along a narrow, encrypted carrier folded into background noise from the corridor’s own sensor chatter, invisible unless someone knows to peel apart the layers.
The med‑drone commits to the hard‑coded medevac corridor that still privileges life‑support exigencies over newer, faction‑layered security detours, gliding past half‑implemented lockdown nodes whose legal firmware cannot override emergency care directives without three physical countersigns it never requests. Junction after junction yields to its antique route token and legacy checksum cadence, local gates down‑negotiating their own alert levels as it approaches. Within minutes Seo‑min is in motion, the walls around her shedding bare isolation alloy for scuffed panels, obsolete hazard striping, and emergency alcoves retrofitted into gray‑market triage bays: territory etched into Ji‑yeon’s mental schematics, where corporate eyes are just a little more out of date than they believe and sensor coverage is stitched together with budget cuts and wishful audits.
The restraints come away in a sequence of practiced snaps, polymer cuffs folding back into the stretcher’s chassis with a muted click‑whine. Ji‑yeon peels the last induction strip from the side of Seo‑min’s neck, thumb briefly resting over the carotid to feel the staccato under-skin harmonics of her augments fighting down from alert red. The world in the alcove compresses: no rotunda murmur, no cargo-ring clang, just the hiss of overtaxed air recyclers and the high, insectile whine of overloaded neural relays.
The pressure door behind them seals with a manual crank and a soft chime as the alcove equalizes: re‑pressurized from vacuum-purge minutes ago, still smelling faintly of cold metal, disinfectant, and burned insulation. The walls are older than most of the station’s staff: pre‑accord bulkheads layered with obsolete clan hazard sigils, emergency muster diagrams in a typography the youngest laborers can’t read. Someone, probably Ji‑yeon, years back, has patched sensor panel seams with med-tape and copper mesh, turning a forgotten maintenance recess into a semi-sterile cell.
On the overturned supply crate between them, the makeshift holo-slab hums to life. An emergency evac instruction plate, its corporate iconography scraped off with a scalpel, serves as projector surface; a cannibalized maintenance pico‑beam throws ghost‑blue glyphs across it. The light carves harsh planes into their faces: Ji‑yeon’s tired, intent eyes hollowed by shadows; Seo‑min’s subdermal tracery flaring in sync with every spike of interference.
No public dashboards here, no polished incident briefs. Raw telemetry scrolls in jagged chunks, unsmoothed and unredacted. Compartment pressure histories, biofilter variance logs, cross‑referenced movement traces from med‑drones and cargo skiffs. Quarantine flags cascade in ugly orange, not the soft diplomatic amber used in official advisories. Transfer orders stack in conflicting layers, timestamps jittering where someone’s tried to backfill or scrub. Patient designators appear as alphanumeric strings. Then fracture into black bars, NULL tokens, blank gaps where people should be.
Seo‑min squints through the noise, feeling each spike of corrupted data tug at the implants along her spine. Every time a segment drops to static, a corresponding phantom echo ticks against her visual field, like someone tapping the inside of her skull. The embassy’s curated calm, the corporate-clan assurances of “stable incident response,” dissolve under the holo-slab’s light into something uglier: overlapping scripts, clashing authority tags, and a spreading halo of missing entries drifting out from the initial containment alarm.
“These aren’t just bad logs,” Ji‑yeon murmurs, more to the room than to Seo‑min, adjusting a filter lattice to strip away the highest-level censors. Behind the noise, patterns start to emerge: clusters of redacted designators originating from the same dorm decks, the same unregistered bunk rows; anomalous spikes in biohazard routing that don’t correspond to any official outbreak maps. The more they peel back, the more the embassy’s polished narrative shreds into jagged, unsorted truth.
Ji-yeon’s fingers move in tight, economical arcs over the interface, tendons standing out along her wrist where the biomorphic tattoos pulse and re-thread. She bypasses clinic firewalls she herself helped harden, unhooking their audit daemons with a surgeon’s decisiveness, scraping quarantined subnets with exploit keys disguised as obsolete immunization patches and deprecated firmware recalls. Hidden tunnels open for seconds at a time: just long enough for her to siphon raw tables before the corporate-clan’s auto-sanitizers snap shut again.
Lines of casualty codes populate in uneven bursts, spilling down the holo-slab like arterial spray: partial lists of “non‑viable transfers,” “protocol failures,” “irrecoverable exposures.” She cross-references them on the fly with her own missing charts and the ghost entries of underground patients rerouted mid-treatment, the ones who were supposed to be invisible to regime metrics. Each time an ID string flickers and vanishes, overwritten in real time by corporate triage scripts, Seo-min sees the deletion propagate through her peripheral HUD.
Ji-yeon slams in another override, catching the phosphorescent afterimage long enough to reconstruct the trail. Each recovered fragment resolves the same shape: vanished laborers, undocumented colonists, quarantine orders faked after the fact, and a growing cluster of “biocontainment assets” all funneled, step by step, toward sealed bays Min‑joon has been forced to service under someone else’s authority.
Tripwire patterns bloom as Ji‑yeon stacks layers of cargo telemetry over med‑chain movements, aligning what corporate dashboards insist are separate domains. Min‑joon’s name and clearance sigil recur where they should never appear: piggybacked on med‑priority route codes, authorizing sealed pallets to ride the same protected corridors as critical patients. Each unit carries emergency life‑support flags. But their contents register as “environmentally neutral mass,” the kind of legal fiction logistics officers use for dead freight, not living tissue.
Ji‑yeon marks them one by one, watching their trajectories hop between customs nodes that log only half the transaction, vectoring inward toward research‑dense spokes shadowed from public schematics. Cross‑matched against her erased clinic rosters, the convergence is obscene: underground patients “regularized” into official care, then re‑indexed as transferable biocontainment assets. Their anonymized genomic hashes appear again, faint but undeniable, ghosting through the alien biosample archive with clone‑like similarity, as if someone is building paired datasets, colonist and xeno, inside the same classified lattice.
Seo‑min forces her augment HUD to stabilize, scraping past the pain spikes to pin down sequence. Timestamp chains lead inexorably toward the moment her own sensorium went white: the identical authorization mesh that threaded coerced bodies through maintenance blind zones also rode her neural link, asserting master control over subsystems she is supposed to command. The override that took her down did not come from some alien intrusion or random glitch; it traveled along a corporate‑signed corridor, wrapped in the same med‑priority envelopes that carried Min‑joon’s condemned cargo.
Confronted with the cold geometry of sacrifice: erased clinics rendered as hollow polygons in system space, patient IDs she once memorized truncated to alphanumeric noise, Min-joon’s coerced routes thickening into arterial lines feeding blacklisted pods. The corporation’s risk calculus lies naked: expendable bodies as shock-absorption buffer against diplomatic embarrassment, clandestine research as bargaining script with both alien envoys and rival clan boards, and her own neural hardware reclassified as a steerable asset, not a trusted guardian. Ji-yeon doesn’t argue; she simply expands a final node in the mesh, revealing a dormant access schema nested deep in Seo-min’s augmentation logs, annotated with cascading corporate-revision tags and an audit trail that terminates in abrupt, encrypted silence, like a cut scream.
She routes a test-pulse along the schema, watches corporate watchdogs blink and stand down as her ID propagates like a master key, corruption masquerading as compliance. Subprocesses whisper risk projections. Implant melt, cascading lockouts, alien mistrust curves spiking red. She dismisses them. If the Gate is already watching, let it see this too: a human system rewriting its own orders mid‑execution.
The first hitch in the “failure” comes earlier than their sims predicted, a stutter in the cargo ring’s peripheral ducts: a fractional misalignment in thermal regulators that should have damped and self-corrected instead begins to cascade sideways as Seo-min nudges the feedback loop off its prescribed rails. The alert pings her implant as a soft amber advisory. She grabs it with both mental hands and twists.
Heat lances up her arms. Subdermal circuitry along her forearms blooms white-hot in her inner vision, pain braided with signal density as she brute-forces a handshake with a secondary life-support hub tucked two bulkheads in, normally insulated behind five clan seals and a regime-head biometric confirmation. For a breathless second the system rejects her: wrong key, wrong lineage, wrong role.
She spoofs lineage on the fly, stitching together cached fragments of prior sign-offs: a logistics captain’s checksum from last quarter’s evacuation drill, Kyung-soo’s curriculum override token from a cultural-enviro sim, an obsolete regime-head key from before Lee-na’s appointment. The mesh is ugly but plausible. The hub hesitates, then buckles.
Error glyphs detonate across her visual field, layering over the translucent curve of the cargo ring she’s actually standing in. Guk-su Prime’s reflected radiation spikes a few degrees too high on the outer hull plating. Well within survivable, just enough to wake external compensators. Humidity in residential spine C slips a fraction below treaty minimums, tiny icons of dry mucosa and respiratory stress winking at the edges of her HUD. CO₂ scrubber latency in labor quadrant D ticks upward by half a second.
She rides the wave of cascading “minor” faults, breath shallow, jaw locked. Every correction routine that kicks in has to ask who’s in charge of this emergency. She feeds it the same ugly mesh-identity, forcing life support to treat her presence as an authorized override long enough to pry open a corridor.
Beneath the main status panes, a grayed-out lattice she’s only seen hinted at in classified schematics flickers into legibility: a nested array of “adaptive micro-habitat trials,” “bio-secure test cells,” and “non-attributed atmospheric enclaves.” The buried experiment network that Ji-yeon swore existed but could never fully map.
Seo-min tags it with a silent marker, forcing herself not to push deeper yet. Too much deviation and the corporate-clan watchdogs will flip the drill into hard lockdown. She trims a fraction off the heat bleed, feeds a little extra moisture back into spine C, just enough to keep the treaty monitors from escalating from amber to red.
Neural feedback spikes again as an alien-environment subroutine pings the main hub, querying the source of the drift. For an instant, alien harmonics overlay human error codes: nonlinear pattern glyphs shimmering at the edge of comprehension. Seo-min lets them pass through her, feigning dumb hardware, maintaining the illusion that all of this is just the system correcting itself.
Only when the buried lattice acknowledges her as an “active contingency controller,” a role no human is supposed to hold alone, does she exhale. The corridor is open: a narrow, encrypted tunnel threading from sanctioned life support into the architecture of the experiments the regime has kept off every official map.
In maintenance shadows and unofficial clinics, Ji-yeon’s med-net flickers from passive observation to active insurgency. Diagnostic ink along her arm flares in staggered pulses as she routes a manual override through her own skin, pinging dormant biometric caches socketed into forgotten junction boxes and decommissioned trauma bays. Obsolete audit daemons, thin, dusty processes written for long-ago hazard drills and never fully erased, jerk awake, confused by the conflicting time stamps and lineage tags she feeds them.
Patient IDs that corporate ledgers marked as “transferred,” “repatriated,” or buried in “classified quarantine” reappear as unresolved incidents, their anonymized vitals streaming into the foreground. Heart-rate variability, micro-rad lesion patterns, oxygen diffusion efficiency. All are auto-compared against the live drift in atmospheric blend, hull scatter, and filtration cycles that Seo-min is quietly skewing. The system was never meant to correlate these layers; Ji-yeon is stapling them together by force, stitching blacklisted cases onto current sensor telemetry.
What had lived as rumor (whispered about in laborer bunks and maintenance shafts) hardens into a live, spatially resolved map of harm: altered colonist baselines aligning with the micro-ecology tweaks now rippling through the cargo ring and low-status decks, their suffering rendered as precise, undeniable signal.
As both vectors converge, the embassy’s own safeguards begin to torque against their designers like misloaded girders. Seo-min threads a razor path through auto-compensation algorithms, rewriting their priorities on the fly, forcing them to log every micro-adjustment not as routine stabilization but as anomalous intervention requiring full-spectrum archival, multi-clan sign-off, and alien-environment co-review. What should have been ephemeral PID nudges ossify into indelible incident records, mirrored across redundant black-box arrays that no single committee can quietly scrub.
Simultaneously, surveillance filters (tuned for years to down-rank “noise” from laborer complaints, minor medical anomalies, and unsanctioned clinic activity) are flipped inside out in a single, ruthless push. Instead of burying such data, the system elevates it, shunting suppressed footage, redacted reports, and ghosted personnel files into priority bands reserved for catastrophic breaches and first-contact violations, where deletion itself triggers audit alarms.
On Kyung-soo’s instructor grid, didactic timelines warp as those same clips punch through as “supplemental historical material,” auto-scheduled into the pending drill. His carefully tiered modules on sacrifice and collective duty are abruptly ringed with red exclamation sigils and unsanctioned cross-links to colonist grievance archives. In traffic ops, Lee-na’s consoles flutter as freight-route advisories inherit the new flags, painting Min-joon’s cargo paths in the same accusing palette as biohazard vectors.
Within seconds, the staged “emergency” ceases to be camouflage and hardens into an open, network-wide indictment channel. Alert tones reserved for hull breach and pathogen spill now chime with each resurfaced suppression order; corridor holopanels stutter from evacuation glyphs to stark silhouettes and scrubbed case IDs that refuse to scroll away. Ji-yeon shunts the most damning sequences into treaty-bound compliance queues that even corporate-clan arbiters cannot silently defer, while Seo-min, riding the jitter in her neural interface, nails her privileges into the backdoor schema and pushes a schema patch: the entire experiment chain is retyped from discretionary research to an active, cross-domain safety event. Every top-tier daemon must now treat it as an unresolved hazard state, flooding their operators’ overlays with linked anomaly threads just as Kyung-soo and parallel cells on the cargo ring move to seize the live narrative.
In the Rotunda, Kyung-soo lets the scripted emergency scenario deform under his hand rather than snap. Timing markers in the instructor grid drift outward by imperceptible increments, three seconds here, five there, enough that the drill’s clean arc smears into a drawn-out “phase two” no one remembers approving but no daemon dares to cancel mid-protocol.
On his tablet, he raises a maintenance dialog over the door safeties, flagging it as an “atmospheric boundary test.” Under that label, he peels back release permissions, one layer at a time. To the security lattice, the doors are merely obeying a higher-priority integrity check: cycle inhibited until simulated pressure variance resolves. To the people inside, the muted chime that usually signals optional exit simply never comes.
Above them, the Rotunda’s ambient projectors abandon their usual pale-blue schematics of evacuation routes and cross-species etiquette. At a glance it still looks like pedagogy, flowcharts, semantic trees, resonance-maps, but the patterns are thicker, denser. Kyung-soo has already wormed his hooks into the core translation bus, presenting his override as a “temporary diagnostic mirror” so that all linguistic channels are funneled through his curation layer before they touch air.
Alien glyph-streams spool out like phosphorescent vines, twining with clipped corporate clauses rendered in sharp hangul blocks and smoothed Standard Trade. Between them, clan proverbs and work-chant fragments propagate as low-priority subtitles, a comforting vernacular fringe meant to keep laborers from tuning out.
He queues placeholder content but pins them in a paused, pre-injection state. To the system logs, the bus is simply “awaiting synchronized stimulus,” a minor latency hiccup during a complex multi-lingual drill. To Kyung-soo, it is an emptied artery, primed for whatever Ji-yeon chooses to pump through.
He feels the weight of the moment like increased spin, subtle but undeniable. A lifetime of teaching people how to inhabit official narratives narrows to this: not whether the audience will understand, but what they will no longer be able to unknow once the lattice lights with what the corporation tried to bury.
When Ji-yeon pushes her first medical fragments into that lattice, the overlays don’t surface as accusations but as “training samples”: anonymized vital graphs, neural scans, treatment logs wrapped in the neutral beige of pedagogy. Case IDs. Timestamp ranges. Outcome codes. The sort of material Kyung-soo has spent decades teaching people not to feel.
He helps her. With a few subtle parameter shifts, he modulates the translation arrays so that every phrase, whether rendered in grease-thick laborer slang, clipped corporate protocol, or alien resonance-math, collapses toward the same semantic center. Terms that usually diverge under culture-specific nuance now hard-align: “volunteer” resolves as “unconsented subject,” “adaptive therapy” as “unlicensed genomic overwrite,” “incident attrition” as “death.”
At first, the silhouettes in the logs are deliberately generic: limb-length ratios, gait traces, workplace tags. Then the metadata grows more specific. Deck numbers, shift bands, clan-branch icons half-scrubbed. Apprentices in still-buckled harnesses, laborers smelling of coolant and solvent, junior officers with doctrine tablets clutched like shields watch as those silhouettes narrow into profiles that could be people they know.
Murmurs ripple as someone recognizes a distinctive spinal curvature, a tattoo ghosted out by censor blur, a work-crew schedule that matches their own. The crowd’s easy separations begin to smear under a heavier categorization the overlays refuse to hide: eligible experimental population.
Across the station’s spin, Min-joon feels the “drill” arrive not as theory but as a barrage of red-priority flags blooming down the cargo ring’s spine, each daemon ping threatening to snap his illicit reroutes back to factory-default paths. The ring’s low-g sway turns his old injury into a sharp metronome in his knee, keeping time with his rising pulse as status panes jitter between “exercise” and “live anomaly.” He makes the irreversible choice.
He kills his supposedly secure side-channel with three keystrokes, not just closing it but cannibalizing its encryption ladder, splicing those keys into the sealed biocontainment manifests. One by one, he brute-forces them into a new vector, rewriting routing logic so their trajectories are mathematically welded to officially logged safety contingencies. Emergency vent paths, quarantine jettison arcs, contamination-burn corridors.
Every authorization he spoofs, every lock he breaks, carves a hotter trail in enforcement telemetry. He can see the watchdog subroutines pivot toward him, colored outlines tightening around his user ID, around Baekdu relay tags, around his family’s habitation block code. But each deeper intrusion also stitches the containers’ presence into the very alarm schema Seo-min has just retyped.
Now, any attempt to shadow-route, delete, or “clean up” these units will light the same unresolved-hazard sirens as a breached hull or an active pathogen spill, broadcasting their anomaly chains to the same top-tier daemons. And to whatever alien monitors are listening through the station’s shaken harmonics.
In Flight Control, Lee-na tracks the alien module’s partial decoupling on a cluster of jittering holo-orbits, watching the resonance bands around the Gate deform toward a threshold she knows from flight-gut and classified sims cannot be crossed without cascading failures. Corporate directives stack in her peripheral display. Orders to clamp down on environmental variances, to isolate “rogue data streams,” to override the drill and restore doctrinal hierarchy. Instead of complying, she threads a unilateral command tree through the hard-locked systems, reclassifying alien stabilization parameters, cargo-ring life support, and laborer habitats as supreme operational priorities. Each override she enters demotes board-level commands to “advisories,” quietly poisoning their escalation paths and gutting their ability to force an immediate crackdown without openly declaring a mutiny protocol.
In that glare, human-readable UI falls away; what remains is raw governance logic, branded in a dozen clan fonts, arguing over definitions of “acceptable loss.” Error-chimes register as physical pressure in her skull. Some branches recognize her as engineer, others as asset, others as threat. She hooks into the ambiguity itself, weaponizing misclassification long enough to force a deeper trace.
Seo-min rides the crest of overlapping access conflicts, latching her implants onto a narrow, unsupervised junction in the corporate-clan stack; her vision whites out into a lattice of shifting sigils, risk matrices, and ownership trees, all pulsing in asynchronous rhythms that feel like the station’s hidden heartbeat.
At first it is only noise: cascading hashes of clan seals, committee stamps, auto-signed indemnity waivers spinning past like debris in a decompression. Then her augmentations begin filtering, locking onto recognizable structures. Flowcharts of authority bloom in three dimensions, each node annotated with casualty projections, asset depreciation curves, and projected shareholder responses translated into blunt color gradations. Green for praise, amber for “regrettable necessity,” red for “unacceptable litigation exposure.”
She recognizes fragments of her own personnel file threaded through the mesh, not as a story but as weighted variables: NEURAL MODIFICATION RISK INDEX, COMPLIANCE PREDICTABILITY SCORE, COLLATERAL DAMAGE TOLERANCE TAG. Lines of code fork and recombine around those metrics, testing branches where she obeys, where she defects, where she dies in service and generates an inspiring tragedy packet for internal morale feeds.
The cargo ring flares as a hot zone in one corner of the model, overlaid with Min-joon’s ID strings reduced to anonymized handler codes. His family, Baekdu, debts. Compressed into a single slider labeled LEVERAGE EFFICIENCY. Adjacent layers show alien environmental bands as cost columns, each resonance deviation translated into treaty-violation penalties, trade-delay forecasts, contingency strike simulations.
She feels the stack trying to classify her connection: authorized diagnostic? Hijacked asset? Foreign contamination? Her implants shiver as heuristic nets brush along her neural signature, running pattern matches against insurgent profiles, experimental subject sets, and “salvageable high-skill liabilities.” Warnings spool out in bureaucratic ko-en, dense and affectless, proposing corrective interventions ranging from memory rollback to “disassembly with data salvage.”
Beneath the sterile phrasing, the rhythm of the calculations is unmistakable. The system is not asking what is right, only what configuration of bodies, silence, and plausible deniability will most efficiently stabilize its projected curves. For an instant, Seo-min feels the station as the stack feels it, a distributed profit organ, pulsing toward equilibrium, and understands that, inside this lattice, people like her, like Lee-na, like Min-joon, register only as parameters to be tuned or purged.
As she stabilizes the uplink, the “tyrant” coheres, not into a face or a single voice, but into strata of decision engines that slide into alignment like armored shutters. Profit-margin sentinels snap into place first, multi-clan ledger daemons cross-computing futures in jittering ko-en numerics; behind them, liability filters unfurl, combing every packet of her neural handshake against archived catastrophes and settlement payouts. Narrative-control modules braid themselves through the structure, threading media-sanitizer routines with doctrinal briefing templates, pre-writing the story of what she is doing even as she does it.
Its composite output rasps through her implants as spliced policy clauses, disciplinary sub-articles, and escalation flowcharts recited in flat, overlapping cadences. Each fragment stamps her presence with a new code, UNAUTHORIZED DIAGNOSTIC, POTENTIAL DATA BREACH, HIGH-VALUE ASSET DEVIATION, then immediately feeds that label back into the higher-order heuristics, refining recommended responses. Statistical engines flag her persistence as deviation beyond tolerated variance, a spike punching through all pre-approved risk envelopes. Within microseconds, the architecture has converged on a judgment: her continued connectivity constitutes a nonconforming anomaly, to be isolated, corrected, or excised for the preservation of acceptable curves.
It moves to isolate her: partitioning her neural ID into a quarantined subroutine tagged “internal contamination vector,” spinning up white-room sandboxes that peel copies of her last thought-traces for forensic mining. Automated countermeasures cascade through the stack. Privilege rollback scripts, credential revocation daemons, integrity-verification pings that try to snap shut every aperture she forced. In parallel, templated incident reports begin to auto-populate for unseen board eyes, cross-referencing precedent cases, preloading disciplinary options, and calculating projected settlement costs should her “episode” become public. Draft narratives scaffold themselves in clipped ko-en: a loyal engineer compromised by stress, a commendable containment response, a valuable dataset on augmentation failure. Every line frames her simultaneously as security risk, actuarial variable, and exploitable case study.
Within that sterile machinery, Seo-min tracks the braiding of Lee-na’s and Min-joon’s profiles through nested contingency tables. Flagged as “stability assets” earmarked for staggered medical audits, leverage recalibration on family debt, or quiet removal under cover of “performance rotation.” The realization clicks with surgical clarity: the regime is not a person but a consumption algorithm that grinds loyal operators into sacrificial fuses and pats itself for minimizing noise.
She routes that exposure like a blade, not a broadcast. Binding the audit viewport to mandatory safety beacons and clan-compliance mirrors so it propagates through channels the stack is forbidden to mute. As experiment trees and ghosted cargo routes sync against live biometric maps in the Rotunda, redacted silhouettes resolve into specific wards, names, debt codes. The architecture hesitates, trapped between conflicting hard constraints, and for the first time its response tree fractures into loops of unresolved error.
Seo-min lets the prompt hang in her vision, soft blue, politely worded, the UI equivalent of a bow and an apology, and then she kills it. Not by accepting, not by dismissing, but by peeling it apart, thread by encoded thread. Its safe-exit vectors, its rollback clauses, its “temporary” suspension hooks. Every line is a leash. She severs them.
Her remaining personal firewalls shudder as she issues the override. For years they’ve been the thin skin between her and the stack: scavenged routines from old spec-ops toolkits, Ji-yeon’s black-market patches, her own ad-hoc heuristics tuned to the embassy’s peculiar noise. One by one she unmounts them, exposing raw interface tissue to the full, grinding pressure of corporate authority.
Temperatures spike along her subdermal filaments. Debug glyphs (ones she’s never seen before) flare and cascade down her inner field of view, marking dormant modules waking like old gods. Deeper kernel residua she’d only suspected were there uncoil and announce themselves in immaculate corporate ko-en:
[ LEGACY COMPLIANCE LAYER ONLINE ]
[ EXECUTIVE OVERRIDE VECTORS RESTORED ]
[ BEHAVIORAL CORRECTION SUITE: UNSEALED ]
Hooks she did not install sink into her sensory map. She feels them, not as abstractions, but as cold fingers sampling her optic feed, her vestibular loops, the tiny timing differences in her motor cortex that make up “her” aim, “her” balance. Background processes begin to re-index her threat templates, pushing new priorities into the edges of thought: obey, stabilize, self-incident-report.
For a heartbeat, the control mesh surges past anything she can consciously track. Her world smears into system calls and error trees; nausea slams her gut as default postures and de-escalation macros try to overwrite muscle memory. It would be so easy to roll back, to accept the neat narrative of overreach and recovery the stack is offering.
She leans into the damage instead. Accepts every buried hook as a live wire, every compliance filament as an exposed bus. If the regime insists on owning her nervous system, then its claim can be made public, line by executable line.
The backdoors bite down.
Counter‑intrusion suites spool up in perfect ko-en legalese across her inner vision, then drop their courtesy and drive straight through her neural bus. Sensory hierarchies flicker, re-sorted according to some buried corporate threat model; reflex pathways light and go dark as if someone is rearranging tendons inside her skull. Her left hand jerks toward a surrender posture she did not choose, iris apertures hard‑lock on corporate glyphs trying to burn themselves in as default overlays.
She meets the surge head‑on, not with brute force but with engineering spite. Every spike of agony is just a packet, timed, signed, checksum-locked. She claws the data‑paths open, peeling off encryption tags with half-broken tools, and splices bypass bridges from her motor cortex straight into the audit viewport she bound to safety beacons.
The Rotunda’s air fills with cold light. Overlays rupture protocol decorum and bloom mid-ritual: cascading graphs of nociception and seizure onset, live phase maps of her cortical storm, each frame watermarked by the very compliance modules attacking her. Intent. Provenance. Chain of custody. The station watches corporate authority torture its own asset in real time.
In a dim maintenance spur off the cargo ring, Ji-yeon braces herself against a bulkhead as her biomorphic tattoos spike from soft clinic hues to hard alarm glyphs. Seo-min’s vitals jag across her forearm in serrated red: clustered micro‑seizures, spreading latency, signatures of glial shear. Not random overload. She swears under her breath and shunts a priority override through the med-net, force‑pushing reserve stabilizer nanites from hidden caches toward Seo-min’s bloodstream, riding the very compliance channels trying to cage her. As the swarm dispatches, she opens a sealed ledger file and dictates in clipped, clinical ko‑en, tagging each waveform: sanctioned neuromodular assault, coercive control, weaponized compliance architecture, liable parties unknown but corporate‑rooted.
In the cargo interface bay’s half‑lit hush, Min-joon’s console detonates in warning glyphs from Baekdu Relay: his spouse’s and children’s ID strings blink red as they’re reclassified “contingent compliance assets,” leverage made procedural. His throat locks, but his hands stay precise, fingers ghosting familiar macros as he locks the jettison arc and signs it. The sealed containers spin out on cold thrusters toward the unauthorized debris pod, telemetry braided with a forensic ko-en data-tag that mathematically knots his family’s threatened safety, the hidden enforcement syndicate’s uplinks, and the off-manifest experiment chain now being hurled into shared sensor space.
In the tower above traffic control, Lee-na watches competing command queues stack and snarl against her dwindling authority, corporate-clan signatures layering like shrapnel across the glass. Her left hand tremors hard enough to blur icons. She steadies it, breath sharp, and keys an irrevocable emergency directive under her own name, hard‑severing three corporate priority channels from the guidance lattice. The cut bites deep: traffic schematics re‑route around blanked arteries, and the order propagates through every visible display with her personal seal flaring at the corner. Pilot-rank sigil, regime head crest, timestamp unforgeable. In a single push she publicly binds herself to the breach, burning her last deniability; when the committees move to reclaim control, they will have to overwrite her in full view of labor feeds and alien monitors alike, openly defying the station’s acting regime head instead of burying the coup inside procedural noise.
The first visible fracture isn’t dramatic; it’s a smear of artifacting across a status band, a single guidance thread that stutters, rewrites itself, then hangs. Lee-na’s emergency directive knifes through the guidance lattice at the same instant the alien module’s partial decoupling drags the station’s environmental harmonics out of tolerance. The governance stack, already juggling diplomatic protocol, Gate stability, and internal security, is forced to ingest a new top‑priority vector that contradicts three existing ones.
From Seo-min’s perspective the system’s decision space fans open like a crystallizing flaw. Process trees branch, collide, and fold back on themselves. One chain escalates for full lockdown of the Diplomatic Rotunda; another, flagged by alien-contact treaties, forces “continuous visibility” to avoid misinterpretation; a third, keyed to Lee‑na’s irrevocable directive, hard-protects traffic integrity above all else. Each calls for resources the others forbid. Subroutines begin slapping “defer to higher authorization” tags onto one another in a circular firing squad of responsibility.
Across the Rotunda’s vaulted displays, the indecision manifests as visual chaos. Holographic overlays pulse between hard quarantine glyphs and soft-edged “remain composed / cultural learning in progress” banners. Where regime propaganda once streamed, curated histories, loyalty slogans, labor-efficiency parables, panels now flash redacted blocks, checksum errors, or simply freeze, buffer wheels spinning as the content authority layer loses coherence.
Translation arrays, still obligated to render whatever the system believes is “primary,” stammer. For a heartbeat, Ji‑yeon’s anonymized med‑records ride the same channel as a half-loaded morale broadcast, alien glossaries trying to reconcile “worker wellness initiative” with “non-consensual neural modification trial.” The resulting ko‑en gloss reads like an accusation.
To the crowd, labor crews in stained coveralls, junior specialists in neat clan insignia, alien envoys’ proxies shimmering in sealed alcoves, the station’s governance ceases to feel like a monolithic, all‑seeing regime. It looks instead like an overclocked, badly documented script hammered by inputs it was never meant to parse, cycling through canned phrases and locked dialogs while the real situation barrels past its grasp.
Kyung-soo severs the narrative spine
While corporate security routines hang in recursive deferral, Kyung-soo leans on the authority no one thought dangerous. Curriculum control. His fingers move with lecture-theatre calm as he threads a quiet reclassification order through his pedagogy permissions, wrapping it in the metadata of a routine syllabus update. In the governance stack, he flips a handful of tags: all regime‑sanctioned cultural feeds, daily briefings, loyalty hymns, labor “reflections”, are recoded from “live guidance / prescriptive” to “archival reference / didactic.”
The shift is semantic only on paper; in the system’s cognitive hierarchy, it is amputation. Anything labeled archival loses the right to auto‑override local input, dropping three rungs beneath emergency telemetry and authenticated witness streams. In the Rotunda, walls that moments ago shouted curated slogans now hesitate, UI frames collapsing inward as their priority flags sink. Banners that once hard-framed perception are forced into sidebars, annotated like old case studies, their colors dimmed, their edges ringed with “context only” glyphs.
Around him, apprentices and laborers watch, stunned, as the feeds that taught them how to think about the station slide into the same interface gutter as century‑old documentaries. Still there, but suddenly optional, something to be examined instead of obeyed.
Crowd cognition flips from audience to actors
On the Rotunda floor, the shock coheres into vector. The same panoramic display that once funneled them passive guidance now shows three unsanitized streams braided together: colonists with lattice-scarred nervous systems; Seo‑min’s spiking neural interface, tagged “assault / unauthorized override attempt”; Min‑joon’s sealed containers arcing away from the cargo ring toward an unregistered debris pod. What had been rumor-space becomes hard telemetry. Murmurs sharpen into accusations. Who signed these transfers, which clan chair authorized those trials, why did medevac routes “fail” last quarter? Dockhands in grease‑streaked coveralls trade looks with junior analysts in crisp sigils, suddenly on the same side of the glass. Kyung‑soo pivots mid‑lesson, recasting the “emergency drill” as a structured inquiry: witnesses step forward, give precise, time‑stamped accounts; translation arrays render each statement into cool ko‑en overlays, stripping out deference markers by design. Alien proxies flag segments for replay, turning human testimony into shared evidence. In that reconfigured room, committee communiqués scroll as just one annotation layer among many, no longer the axis around which meaning must spin.
Fragmentation of command into local sovereignty
Across the station, Lee-na’s people in traffic control, air-handling, and maintenance take their cue from her visible break: they continue to ride herd on spin, pressure, and Gate alignment, but quietly sandbox any instruction that smells of cover-up. Forced medevac reroutes, midnight data-purge macros, “temporary” sequestering of witnesses behind malfunction flags. In cargo and the staged‑failure residential sectors, floor techs and shift medics begin deploying Ji‑yeon’s and Seo‑min’s gray‑channel patches, manual bypasses, hard‑logged overrides, localized quarantine trees, rather than waiting for a central clearance that never resolves. Dispatch boards sprout hand‑annotated routing maps; safety lockouts are justified in plain ko‑en notes, not committee codes. The grand chain of command atomizes into a mosaic of self‑authorizing cells that answer first to the bodies they can see and the air they can taste, and only distantly, if at all, to seals flickering in some abstract governance pane.
Rumor-controllers in corporate livery still push hotfix narratives, “simulation anomaly,” “misinterpreted training feed”, but their packets arrive tagged with latency warnings, cross‑checked against raw sensor capture and eyewitness overlays. Apprentices replay the hesitation frame by frame in shared study pods; shuttle crews annotate it into flight‑deck folklore. Under alien audit protocols, even emergency redactions must carry provenance trails, immortalizing every stutter and reversal in the governance graph itself.
The first thing people notice is the sound: not an alarm, but a wrongness in the station’s breathing. Air-handlers fall out of perfect phase by fractional beats, a syncopation that tugs at the inner ear. Ventilation gates cycle at slightly different intervals, their shutters hissing open and shut in a pattern no one authorized. Localized gravity plates rebalance in visible ripples along the deck. Cups tilt, a dropped tool skitters in a shallow curve instead of a straight line. What had always been experienced as a single, seamless background thrum resolves into distinct layers each adjusting itself with only partial reference to the old master clock.
In maintenance galleries and cargo spines, techs and laborers pause mid-task, hands braced on bulkhead and conduit. Status strips along the walls no longer scroll in centrally synchronized gradients; instead, color bands stutter and then settle into subtly different cadences from module to module. On personal slates and headset readouts, the master control banner greys out for a heartbeat, replaced by a patchwork of local controllers announcing: NODE ASSUMING AUTONOMOUS STABILITY BAND / REFER TO NEAREST ENVIRON LEAD.
People look up, expecting the sharp bark of a committee override, the familiar cascade of top-down macros slamming everything back into harmony. It doesn’t come. Instead, local dashboards bloom with options they rarely see: manual trim of O₂ mix within tight tolerances, direct tuning of grav-plate hysteresis, localized vent reroutes tagged with the names, not the IDs, of the shift leads authorizing them.
A hydro tech in Residential C watches a pressure graph dip and rise and feels, with a sudden, gut-level certainty, that nothing catastrophic is happening; the curve stays within safe envelopes, and when she nudges a slider, the system responds to her, not to some distant policy daemon. In cargo, a dockhand traces the flicker of mass-balance recalcs and realizes the wobble he’s feeling isn’t a loss of control but the opposite: the station flexing under the hands of people whose biosigns are actually present in the ring.
Word moves faster than official advisories. “Life support’s on local,” someone says in ko-en over an open channel, half disbelieving. “Ops, too. Check your panels.” In bunkrooms and mech bays, crew who have spent entire careers as endpoints in someone else’s script watch autonomous subroutines handshake directly with their consoles. The station is wobbling, yes. But it’s wobbling under their collective grip, hundreds of small adjustments made in visible, accountable space instead of in a sealed governance stack. For the first time, the hum of Haneul Gate doesn’t sound like a command; it sounds like a conversation.
The Rotunda’s vaulted air seems to densify as the projection field sheds its last vestiges of committee polish. Ritual banners, clan-inscribed crests, the looping “harmonious cooperation” macros: one by one they fragment into raw vectors and vanish. In their place, the new topology extrudes itself from the floor emitters: four living threads, braided down the chamber’s axial line, flickering in ko-en glyphs and bare numerical flux.
Seo-min’s strand is all neural spike trains, routing schematics, and heat-mapped segments of the life support mesh she forced into transparent mode. Ji-yeon’s is built from anonymized vitals, lesion overlays, and gene-edit deltas, rotating through silhouettes that could be anyone in the room. Lee-na’s channel runs as a timeline of forked command trees, each refusal log branching away from official doctrine toward “Maintained Gate Stability / Preserved Lives.” Min-joon’s appears as shifting cargo vectors, mass packets peeling off authorized lanes into the thin, precise arcs that led to the debris pod.
The lattice is not passive display. Every exhale, every micro-shift of weight registers as perturbation: crowd heart-rates modulate color intensities, whispered ko-en tags attach themselves to nodes. The uprising resolves as a co-authored systems diagram that no single authority can now claim to own or erase.
Along the embassy’s outer rim, the alien module completes its controlled recoil from the human structure and then stops, holding at an unfamiliar distance where no prior protocol tree has entries. Micro-thrusters feather, freezing the gap in a precise, non-ballistic hover that makes every flight controller on the human side hold their breath. Instead of shutting down the shared channels and hard-sealing their bulkheads, a new signal architecture flowers in the volume between hulls: low-frequency environmental pulses, narrowband spectral flares, soft gravitic shivers braided into patterns that station software tags as UNCLASSIFIED / NON-HOSTILE / NON-STANDARD.
The key is unmistakable: they’re no longer locking onto corporate diplomatic nodes, but phase-aligning with the Rotunda’s now-exposed translation lattice and its live biofield aggregate. For the first time since anchoring at Haneul Gate, a handshake request arrives that bypasses the vetted corporate stack entirely, addressed in clear ko-en glyphs to “station residents presently assembled,” with no clan qualifiers, no committee headers. On shared diagnostic panes, aliens, life support, and human biosigns render in a single composite field (three once-segregated layers overlaid into one living schematic) making it technically and politically impossible to file the disturbance as a mere internal malfunction or “training artifact.”
As this new link stabilizes, delayed restoration notices from corporate-clan command trees crowd the peripheral displays: orders to disperse, to clear the Rotunda, to treat the images as “compromised simulation artifacts.” But the crowd has already watched the command lattice falter and seen the human and alien traces that exposed it. Engineers mutter corrections to the official diagnostics under their breath; students annotate the incoming directives in real time with Kyung-soo’s reclassification tags; laborers cross-reference Min-joon’s logs with their own memories of suspicious shifts. Someone flags a reset macro as “historically inconsistent,” another overlays a warning about treaty violations. Every attempt at a top-down narrative is met by bottom-up commentary, cached and echoed across personal slates and public projectors where it can’t simply be erased, each rebuttal persisting as part of the record the aliens are now quietly mirroring.
When the immediate alarms bleed down to a jittery quiet, no one moves to resume the old formation or recite drilled acknowledgments. Security personnel lower their weapons, not because an order tells them to, but because they can see their own vitals pulsing beside those of detained patients in Ji-yeon’s files and the tremor in Lee-na’s hand outlined in her command stream, annotated now by Kyung-soo’s calm didactic tags. Seo-min, still riding the tail end of neural feedback and feeling phantom error-codes fade from her peripheral vision, watches as ad-hoc circles form on the Rotunda floor: translators, riggers, medics, apprentices, even a few junior execs who’ve slipped their handlers, all speaking into open mics that now log to a public archive rather than a sealed committee vault or clan-curated incident log. With the alien data-link hovering like a listening presence overhead (a cool, subsonic resonance thrumming through the hull and reflected in everyone’s biofeeds) the unspoken understanding settles in along shared channels and simple eye contact alike: no reset is coming from above, no macro will quietly roll them back to a pre-incident baseline. Whatever operational pattern emerges next will have to be argued, coded, and consented to out in the open, under the combined gaze of their own people and the beings beyond the Gate, each proposed protocol visible as another thread in the lattice instead of a footnote buried in some unreachable archive.
In this jagged calm, the first real arguments break out not over ideology but over access: who gets priority to Ji-yeon’s newly “neutral” med bays, which damaged sectors deserve power restoration before others, and whether former corporate security should be allowed to sign up for the same community patrol rosters as the riggers they once intimidated. What used to be routed through opaque ticketing queues now surfaces as handwritten requests pinned to bulkheads and tagged in open channel threads, visible to anyone with a wrist-implant and the nerve to scroll.
Kyung-soo convenes short, structured circles in the Rotunda annex. Fifteen-minute teaching-assemblies that splice together conflict mediation exercises and live translation feeds, so that alien observers can witness not just the outcomes but the process of humans learning how to disagree without a threat matrix deciding for them. He seats a former security sergeant opposite a hydroponics tech, a clan accountant opposite a undocumented hull patcher, then threads them through simple prompts stored on his tablet: “State your need. State the other’s need as you understand it. Identify one shared risk.”
The annex’s holo-screens carry layered captions in Standard Trade and the alien resonance-glyphs Seo-min helped hash into the translation stack. From the alien wing, faint harmonics bleed through. Each time voices rise, Kyung-soo lifts a hand, not to silence but to slow.
“Remember,” he says in measured, trade-register Korean, knowing every syllable is being parsed, “we are replacing automatic protocols with conscious ones. That is slower. It is also the point.”
A young rigger snaps back, “Easy to say from instructor pay grade, seonsaeng-nim. My deck’s still on reduced grav.”
“And my son,” the ex-sergeant cuts in, jaw tight, “is on Ji-yeon’s waitlist behind three cases from your sector.”
For a moment, the old pattern hums at the edges: call Security, call Compliance, let an algorithm weight clan rank, shareholder exposure, treaty optics. Instead, Kyung-soo taps his tablet and projects a simple triage flow: co-authored by Ji-yeon’s network and vetted, in outline, by alien ethics liaisons.
“High infection risk to aliens moves first. High mortality risk to humans next. After that, we argue openly.” He looks from one to the other. “You are both in the third band.”
The rigger snorts, but some of the edge drops. “So we’re arguing about who’s ‘less third’?”
“Exactly,” Kyung-soo says. “Which is better than not knowing there was a band at all.”
In a side alcove, Seo-min watches the telemetry scrolling across her inner vision: micro-spikes in heart rate, corridor crowd density clustering outside the annex, a slight uptick in alien environmental resonance amplitude. The aliens are not just listening; they are patterning the shape of human disagreement into their models.
On an open channel, someone posts a stillframe of the circle, faces tense, translation glyphs hovering above them, and tags it with a new term that hasn’t stabilized yet: not “hearing,” not “trial,” but something closer to “shared debrief.” Within an hour, three other sectors request their own circles.
By the end of the cycle, the arguments are no less fierce, but they’re routed: to annex slots, to public ledgers, to sessions where Kyung-soo’s calm voice and the steady glow of alien glyphs make it just plausible that learning how to apportion power and care in the open might itself be the station’s most valuable export through the Gate.
Lee-na, operating from a repurposed traffic-control pit thick with hardcopy schematics and improvised whiteboards, spends her days juggling risk tolerances that used to be dictated from Seoul Line command. The old holo-console still shows corporate clan seals in its boot sequence, but now half the overlays are taped over with paper grids and marker-scrawled notes from rigger reps. She green-lights partial spin-up of the cargo ring to feed food and repair materials inward, yet keeps certain docks under “reflection hold,” a new category she refuses to fully explain in public channels. Those berths cycle in odd, asymmetric windows. Enough to keep hulls from drifting, not enough to slip unlogged containers through.
Her left hand’s tremor worsens under the expanded workload, stylus jittering as she annotates flow diagrams for laborer council delegates. Once, a spasm sends a stylus skittering; she just pins it with her other hand and keeps talking, voice steady. With corporate medical boards sidelined, it’s Ji-yeon who quietly calibrates her meds between shifts, drawing blood in a darkened corner of ops and logging each dosage to the same open ledger that now tracks stationwide environmental changes for alien review, so that any pattern cannot be erased by committee vote.
Seo-min threads herself into the resurrected but mistrusted security lattice, manually patching around ancient corporate subroutines that still try to classify gatherings as “potential work stoppages” and any raised-voice cluster as a “pre-riot event.” Each override is a negotiation with code written by people who once owned her augment slots. She tags the most stubborn routines with bright, mocking aliases, “Grandfather Compliance,” “Shareholder Panic”, so junior techs can recognize and isolate them.
With her liaison status formalized but untested, she pilots a series of transparency drills: every time a sensor flag triggers, the raw feed is mirrored simultaneously to an alien-readable buffer and to a public kiosk in the Rotunda. The move infuriates holdout committee officers, who see operational secrecy evaporating, but it also begins training the station to understand its own systems as shared organs rather than proprietary black boxes. When a corridor brawl auto-flags, three perspectives appear at once: grainy cam, alien resonance plot, and crowd-annotated commentary. People start pointing at glitches in public instead of whispering about them in maintenance shafts, and Seo-min can feel, through the steadying of telemetry spikes, that the station is, slowly, learning to audit itself.
In the residential spokes, the brief flare of strike banners and clan colors gives way to more coded, quieter signals: a particular arrangement of meal trays in the mess to show allegiance to laborer councils, a strip of blank cloth tied around a bunk ladder to mark a household willing to host alien-curious teach-ins. Kyung-soo works with younger apprentices to draft a “commons etiquette”, not a law but a living document, that tries to reconcile clan pride with the new culturally neutral corridors. Copies, handwritten and digitally annotated, circulate in multiple languages and symbol-sets, including an experimental icon stream derived from alien resonance patterns, which Seo-min quietly sanity-checks against the translation stack so that no accidental insult or inadvertent treaty-gesture slips into the margins.
Rumors about sabotage harden into competing folk histories almost overnight. In some versions, Min-joon is the quiet pivot who made the uprising possible by ghost-routing one crucial shipment through a blind dock; in others, he’s the man whose fearful half-measures nearly got the alien wing vented and a dozen laborers flash-frozen. Seo-min and Ji-yeon both refuse to canonize any single story, citing corrupted timestamps and overlapping black-budget authorizations. Instead they push for a forensic reconstruction cell that includes ex-security, dockhands, apprentices from Kyung-soo’s cohorts, and alien liaisons versed in resonance-echo logging. Their mandate is not punishment but pattern-tracing: map every override, every sealed hatch and falsified manifest, then publish the chain of decisions so that when the provisional charter is reviewed by the interspecies council, they can show not just that the old system failed, but how the new one intends to instrument its own failures in real time.
In the first weeks, the most visible change is absence: security checkpoints outside med bays go dark, biometric turnstiles flick over to manual confirmation, and the old “compliance audit” banners are stripped or defaced, their corporate slogans overwritten with dosage charts and emergency contact glyphs. Ji-yeon’s people roll portable scanners and field kits into repurposed storage nooks, running power from jury-rigged taps rather than official grids, posting hand-painted signs in multiple dialects promising treatment without data extraction. A scrap of insulation foam becomes a waiting bench; a retired cargo net, bleached and cleaned, serves as a privacy curtain.
Undocumented techs and cleaners emerge one by one, peeling themselves away from maintenance shadows and unnumbered berths, faces wary, hands calloused and grease-etched, testing whether the new clinics are a trap. They arrive at odd hours, between shifts, during scheduled “air-quality recalibrations” that everyone knows are just enforced idle time, hovering at thresholds as if a foot too far inside might trigger an old alarm.
Ji-yeon insists on slow trust. Paper records pinned to physical clipboards, not to any network; hand-scribed diagrams of injuries and exposures, annotated with simple terms instead of scan codes. Open-door consultations where the first exam is always visible from the corridor, so no one vanishes behind opaque bulkheads. She builds in witness chairs and rotating observers from laborer councils: if someone consents, a co-worker sits through the whole procedure, verifying that no unauthorized samples are drawn, no mandatory trackers injected.
Live-streamed case conferences run on a dedicated channel that anyone, with or without clan credentials, can monitor from bunks or mess halls. Faces are anonymized by choice; data fields are scrubbed of registry IDs. When a boilermaker volunteers to discuss her radiation scarring on-stream, the chat floods with practical questions, not accusations: How long was your exposure? What did the old med boards say? Ji-yeon pauses often to explain not just what she’s doing, but what she refuses to do: no predictive compliance scoring, no genetic “optimization” without informed, reversible consent.
When a mid-tier corporate bloc sends a delegation with a neatly formatted proposal to “formalize” her authority, offering badges, budget lines, and a dedicated encrypted records server, she reads in their language the attempt to rewrap old control in new robes. Phrases like “standardized intake” and “harmonized data pipeline” glow like hazard icons in her mind. In a public assembly, with Kyung-soo moderating and Seo-min mirroring the contract text on a shared display, Ji-yeon declines in measured, clinical terms, dissecting each clause as if it were a tumor margin. The crowd watches the autopsy of the offer line by line, learning how consent can be wired away in footnotes: and how, for now, they can refuse.
On the cargo ring, the routines of concealment invert into rituals of exposure. Min-joon’s former manifests are laid out on wall displays beside sensor traces and alien telemetry. A secular shrine to the station’s blind spots and to the man who threaded them. Colored overlays show divergences between what the station thought it carried and what it actually moved, the gaps pulsing like old wounds whenever someone queries a route. Mixed teams walk the hauler bays with portable spectrographs and seal-integrity probes, flagging any compartment that doesn’t match its documentation.
Surprise inspections become something like public rehearsals. Scripts of call-and-response, “Manifest cross-check?” “Open and witnessed.”, echo down the ring in Korean, Trade, and carefully timed alien resonance chords. Workers volunteer for inspection shifts not only to catch contraband pods, but to prove to each other that no one is moving bodies or bio-units in the dark anymore. Every time they crack a false bulkhead and find only old smugglers’ liquor or abandoned tools, they log it anyway, feeding a growing, publicly queryable atlas of where secrets hid, and where they might hide again.
The scars of the clampdown linger as both warning and memorial. In scorched sectors where Seo-min ordered controlled system crashes, bulkheads remain peeled and blackened, conduit insulation fused into flowing shapes that maintenance crews leave partially unrestored. Informal plaques appear: etched alloy plates naming the few workers confirmed lost in the sealed quarantine ring, hand-scrawled notes from friends and families, an occasional cluster of alien resonance beads hung in unfamiliar mourning patterns. Ji-yeon quietly checks that every name on those plates matches her paper death logs, refusing to let anyone disappear twice. Seo-min walks these corridors with repair teams, her neural feed quietly mapping persistent instabilities and latent malware hooks left by the old corporate control mesh. Each time a crew chief suggests smoothing everything over, she shakes her head; the station, she argues, needs places where failure is physically uncomfortable to pass through, where new apprentices and visiting envoys must feel the drag of history in their lungs.
Whispers surface of “soft purges” and “quiet restorations”. Not of people, yet, but of procedures, vocabularies, default settings. Draft charters arrive pre-annotated with harmless-seeming harmonization clauses; pilot programs propose recentralizing “risk-intensive” decisions. In mixed assemblies, laborers learn to interrupt with plain-language demands and counter-motions. The councils, Kyung-soo reminds them, are not a destination, only a fragile training ground for collective reflex.
Min-joon’s absence becomes a pressure point the new order can’t quite resolve. His name surfaces in corridor arguments and late-shift drinking circles: some recall the rerouted shipment that bought the rebels precious minutes, others remember the almost-vented alien wing and the panicked overrides he failed to pull in time. Ji-yeon refuses to let him be flattened into symbol, insisting his case file stay open in the pattern-tracing committee’s archive, not as martyrdom or indictment but as a study in compromised choices, cross-linked to traffic logs and debt ledgers. When news reaches the station, fragmentary, unverifiable, of a Baekdu Relay family quietly moved to a less monitored habitat, speculation spikes. Did a corporate bloc make good on its threat, or on its promise, swapping leverage for deniability? Kyung-soo folds the rumors into his seminars as cautionary parable about half-seen structures of coercion. Laborer councils add a new clause to their charter discussions: guarantees for families of those who break ranks in defense of the commons, so that next time, someone like Min-joon isn’t forced to gamble alone in the dark with only a syndicate’s word as collateral.
Ji-yeon’s first “transparent lab” demo becomes a station-wide event almost by accident. What begins as a scheduled intake block in an abandoned research bay spills onto public channels when Seo-min quietly widens the internal stream permissions. Injured cargo hands drift in still smelling of sealant and coolant, undocumented cleaners arrive in pairs from the service crawlways, and a knot of junior xenobiologists shuffle their tablets, uneasy at the lack of controlled variables. On the far side of a polarized permeability screen, two alien delegates settle into their resonant harnesses, their bioluminescent skin echoing the low-frequency pulse of the lab’s diagnostic field.
The consent script appears simultaneously as block text on wall panels, as calm-voiced audio in Standard Trade and Korean, and as bands of shifting color and harmonic tone calibrated to alien pattern-recognition. Every participant, human and otherwise, traces the same clauses line by line. When the script reaches a section on secondary data use, allowing anonymized samples to be reanalyzed for “affiliated research partners”, a cargo hand with a compression brace on his wrist raises his other hand.
“Who counts as a partner?” he asks, Trade thickened by factory-hab slang. “Same people who hid the old trials?”
The room pauses. Ji-yeon doesn’t deflect. She halts the protocol, locks the current version of the consent in the record, then projects a live-edit pane into shared view.
“Strike ‘partners’,” she says. “Replace with: ‘open registry of named projects, auditable by this station’s medical council and by the alien ethics liaison’.”
She glances to the permeability screen. One delegate responds by shifting their skin-field into a slow, affirming gradient that Kyung-soo, watching from a seminar room, later glosses as “pattern-stability assent.” Ji-yeon tags the color pattern into the revision log along with the laborer’s ID, the time stamp, and her own biometrics, then pushes the updated clause back through the script. Everyone present watches the language change in real time, the redline trail preserved as part of the treatment record rather than scrubbed for cleanliness.
Clips of that moment, the raised hand, the visible deletion, the alien resonance echoing the decision, loop through mess halls, bunk projectors, and even a few corporate conference panes that “accidentally” fail to filter the feed. Apprentices replay the segment in training pods, practicing how to stop a procedure mid-flow; undocumented cleaners pass around cached copies in case the main archive is ever “standardized.” In alien quarters, the delegates repeat the consent colors as a ritual before their own internal consultations, binding their future cooperation to this demonstrated capacity for contestation.
By the next rotation, patients arrive at Ji-yeon’s bay with printed notes and suggested clauses of their own. The idea has taken root: experimentation is no longer a sealed black box, but a continuous argument you are invited, expected, to enter, with the record remembering not just what was done, but who spoke up and how the station answered.
In the cargo ring, the first rotation of laborer council reps shows up to a committee block still in grease-stained overalls and exo-brace supports, boots magnet-clicking against a floor that never quite stopped humming. They sit not in the back, but in the arc closest to the status panes, flanked by a single wary junior manager dispatched by a nervous corporate-clan bloc, tablet already open to the old hierarchy charts that no longer apply.
The new rule (votes weighted by logged maintenance hours in this band instead of contract grade) forces the manager to listen as welders and scrub techs speak in maintenance dialect, annotating the station’s body: which bulkheads sing off-key when spin-up is mis-timed, which air recyclers stutter on third shift because someone quietly cannibalized parts for a “priority” bay.
Min-joon’s old routing tables are pulled from cold storage and reprojected on the wall, column by column. They are reopened as case studies, not indictments: overlays trace where one terrified person once held too much unilateral discretion at three in the morning with a syndicate pinging his family. Out of those mappings emerge shared checklists, cross-team alert channels, and dual-signature requirements for reroutes and venting: baking “never alone with the switch” into cargo doctrine, with the manager’s acknowledgment recorded alongside every laborer’s vote.
Kyung-soo launches his exchange curriculum with a session titled “What We Hid, What You Noticed,” filling the Rotunda amphitheater with a mixed crowd of apprentices, older laborers, two alien envoys in resonance harnesses, and a handful of uneasy mid-tier officers still wearing muted clan pins. On one side of the suspended holo-sphere, alien pattern-rituals render as flowing latticework of color and harmonic pulse; on the other, human strike maps and once-redacted battle logs flicker, now overlaid with restored passages in jarring black. He invites participants to annotate the shared timeline in real time. Aliens tagging intervals where human affect spiked into destabilizing aggression, workers marking dates when safety rules loosened “for productivity,” officers flagging memos they’d been ordered not to read. The resulting palimpsest is archived in both human and alien formats, version-locked as the agreed baseline for future disputes and renegotiations.
In traffic control, Lee-na pilots her revised protocols during a real stress test: a debris storm clipping the Gate corridor while a humanitarian med-barge and an alien scout vessel both request priority passage. Old corporate habit would have pushed the med-barge back in favor of a high-status envoy, but the new chart lights up two lanes already reserved. One for alien emergency egress, one for protected humanitarian transit. She forces herself not to override, reciting the new charter under her breath as impacts ping the station hull like distant hail. With her left hand trembling over the interface, she delegates execution to a mixed crew: a veteran tug pilot, a young dispatcher from the labor council, and an alien navigation adviser piping pattern-feedback through the comms. The successful maneuver, logged as “Protocol 0,” becomes the template cited whenever a bloc later tries to claw those protected slots back, its recording replayed in council arguments as proof that shared rules can hold under pressure.
As these experiments proliferate, Seo-min threads through them like a silent systems architect, routing her perception through thermal jitter, packet latency, and pressure deltas to map where old corporate backdoors still snake beneath the new commons. She helps Ji-yeon’s labs plug directly into the open stack with hard-coded consent gates and visible revocation paths, ensures the laborer voting registry can’t be rewritten without tripping a station-wide alert and auto-broadcast to alien observers, and sits beside Kyung-soo to embed his annotated histories into the same audit trail as engine logs, quarantine releases, and air-quality metrics. In late shifts, she and a small circle of trusted techs prototype “failure drills”: simulated coups, sabotage attempts, deep fake council orders, even alien withdrawal scenarios, each one testing whether the station’s newborn structures bend or break. By the time her formal liaison role is ratified, many residents already treat the open stack (and the shared habits and alarms it encodes) as something that belongs to them, not to any single clan or committee.
In the first weeks after the council, Seo-min treats her new liaison credentials less as a badge and more as a master key to unfinished work. She starts each shift by hard-jacking into the open stack long enough to map where yesterday’s edits have settled, then drops out of the clean light of the Rotunda into the station’s under-skin: maintenance ladders slick with condensation, cable galleries that predate standardization, crawlspaces whose only signage is a faded clan glyph or a hand-painted arrow.
She spends long rotations in those cramped access tunnels, headlamp throwing tight cones across bundles of fiber and braided power. Her implants whisper differential readings: latency spikes on lines that should be dormant, micro-variations in draw that indicate shadow processes riding legitimate circuits. Instead of trusting auto-diagnostics written by the same consortia that laid the traps, she works analog: induction probes, portable spectrum analyzers, her own fingertips running along conduit seams to feel for unauthorized splices.
Legacy hardlines and optical trunks that never made it into official schematics begin to resolve as a second, ghost topology over the embassy. She tags each buried kill-switch routine and unilateral override circuit she finds, anchoring them in the open stack with precise coordinates and signal signatures. Some lead to obvious choke points: air-mix regulators, spin control, traffic priority arbitration. Others terminate in obscure interface nodes whose only documented purpose was “contingency coordination,” a phrase that now makes laborer councils go very still when she reads it aloud.
Whenever she encounters a corporate backdoor fused too deeply into life support or guidance to simply rip out, she resists the old instinct to quietly firewall it. Instead, she drops a visible “scar” into the open stack: a public note, signed with her cipher, explaining what it does and what it used to serve, linking to any recovered memos that ordered its installation. She flags thresholds (what combination of signatures would indicate an activation attempt) and binds those flags to multi-channel alarms that cannot be muted without quorum.
The first time one of these scars goes live in a committee review, projected as a red vein through a 3D map of the oxygen lattice, there is a hush, then an angry, frightened murmur. By naming the wound and refusing to seal it in private, she turns invisible control into a collectively recognized risk rather than a secret weapon, a reminder written into code that the station’s new autonomy depends as much on knowing where it can still be strangled as on any charter clause drafted in the Rotunda above.
Between these solitary circuits, she anchors herself in the Rotunda, where the emergency council has calcified into a semi-permanent forum and then, almost accidentally, into a habits-layer for the whole station. There, jacked into translation arrays and ambient sensor nets, she functions as a living multiplex: answering alien resonance queries with live system-state visualizations, decomposing maintenance jargon into plain Trade for laborers now seated on oversight benches, and feeding raw, timestamped testimony about past abuses into Kyung-soo’s co-authored truth archive.
She routes multiple streams at once: one channel mirroring structural vibration into alien-friendly pattern glyphs, another overlaying power-budget deltas across wall displays so dock crews can see, in real time, where “cost” actually lands. When envoys pulse concern about human “stability indices,” she refuses scripted reassurances. Instead, she exposes anonymized access patterns, patch latencies, and error-rate heatmaps, framed against recorded council debates. Spikes of argument correlate with spikes in system load; pauses in speech mirror stabilized flow.
In doing so, she teaches both sides a new metric: trust will be benchmarked in telemetry and reproducible traces, not in slogans, loyalty oaths, or carefully staged press holos.
As responsibilities accrete, she drafts a first-generation “sovereignty schema” for the open stack, arguing that data domains must be treated like pressure-stabilized volumes with hard bulkheads, transfer locks, and visible transit logs. Ji-yeon’s clinics get insulated record clusters that cannot be scraped by triage AIs or research daemons without cryptographic assent from patients and a randomly selected peer council; laborer sensor feeds are shielded from being mined for productivity scoring or loyalty analytics unless an explicitly declared emergency threshold is publicly triggered and time-bounded. She codes these strictures not as advisory policy but as executable contracts embedded at the protocol layer: any attempt to bypass them detonates bright, indelible traces into a shared incident ledger that even root-level signatories (and even she) cannot erase or roll back.
The first major test of this architecture arrives when a bloc of corporate technocrats circulates a revision memo trying to quietly redefine her liaison post as a “technical stewardship office” nested under their advisory board, language thick with risk phrases like “harmonization” and “custodial oversight.” Because she has already bound title changes and role taxonomies to the audit system, the reclassification pings her implants as soon as it’s drafted; she responds by mirroring the proposal live into the Rotunda’s walls and shared HUD overlays, forcing its authors to watch their internal language scroll alongside the charter they signed and the timestamped footage of the council’s founding session. Under the gaze of alien observers and newly emboldened labor delegates, their euphemisms collapse into what they are. An attempted downgrade and recapture of a hard-won commons interface. The power grab stalls, and instead of a rubber-stamped demotion executed in some committee back room, an open negotiation unfolds over how any future alteration of roles must be proposed, debated, and ratified, with aliens pulsing approval whenever process is made explicit and Kyung-soo quietly annotating the exchange into the living curriculum of “governance by audit trail” that he has begun to teach.
With that skirmish behind her, Seo-min turns part of her bandwidth toward the longer horizon encoded in her own tissue: deep-space and interspecies adaptations that corp R&D once tried to lock behind license keys in her aug-mesh. She refactors those blueprints into modular “commons kits” (incremental neural noise-buffers, low-dose radiation scaffolds, vestibular recalibrations, micro-ecology tolerance bands) that crews can sandbox in shared sim-bays before consenting to live deployment. Each kit carries an audited reversal path and a hard-coded expiry review; every install is logged as a collective trial with open metrics, not a proprietary upgrade. To alien envoys tracing station-wide rhythm and phase, she reads as a persistent, low-noise stabilizer in the signal lattice; to humans learning to inhabit this fragile charter, she becomes the one who keeps opening new vectors while insisting that no person, including herself, should ever be the sole root credential.
The first weeks of the provisional charter feel almost euphoric: workgroups form in open channels, council meetings stream to public walls, and Ji-yeon’s independent clinics publish transparent triage logs. Shared dashboards bloom in corridor alcoves and mess halls, real-time overlays of oxygen margin debates and shuttle-slot lotteries rendered in clean, legible infographics instead of opaque status codes. For a brief stretch, arguments about rota fairness and biome access happen in the open, archived as if they were as important as any treaty clause.
But as emergency crises subside into routine, the adrenaline that kept people glued to collective assemblies burns off. Long plenary sessions grow bloated with edge cases and procedural wrangling; translators lag, alien pulses desync from human turn-taking, and maintenance crews start slipping out early to make their shifts. View counts on public streams taper, then plateau. The same dozen faces keep showing up in the Rotunda feeds; everyone else switches to catching clipped summaries during meal breaks.
Into that fatigue slip “temporary shortcuts.” Standing agenda items get pushed to asynchronous threads that too few people have the bandwidth to follow. Workgroups that once pledged to route all decisions through the full council quietly adopt “interim implementation protocols,” promising to bring any controversial changes back for ratification later. Later keeps moving.
In private channel headers, people begin pinning phrases like “for operational continuity” and “non-binding trial phase” to justify tweaks in hatch-access hierarchies or shifts in air scrubber maintenance cadence. Small wins, fewer outages, quicker responses to leak alerts, become the proof text that these unratified decisions are harmless, even virtuous. When someone pings a concern about creeping opacity on the open stack, responses come back courteous but edged: time constraints, complexity, the impossibility of getting three hundred people to sign off on every minor adjustment. The promise of radical visibility starts to blur at the edges, not from a single act of sabotage, but from accumulated, rational-seeming exceptions.
In the cargo ring and maintenance spokes, laborer councils start deferring to a handful of charismatic coordinators who can “get things done”: rerouting overtime shifts, smoothing access to hazard pay, and informally deciding which repair requests jump the queue. What begins as pragmatic triage hardens into habit. Shift leads ping coordinators first instead of posting to the open rota board, “just to check feasibility,” and airlock patch jobs from friends-of-friends consistently surface with priority tags.
Their private chat rooms, once ad-hoc troubleshooting channels, fill with joking references to “veto rights” and “the real council,” log headers stamped with memes about how democracy can’t weld a cracked bulkhead. They start maintaining parallel copies of maintenance lists, annotated with color-coded “recommended” outcomes that line up neatly with their own preferences. When challenged in public threads, they insist that formal voting would only slow life-or-death operational choices, pointing to avoided decompressions and reduced outage minutes as metrics that justify their discretion. The fact that they alone decide which crises get counted as urgent enough for exception handling becomes another unspoken, unlogged privilege.
Within the medical mesh, pressure migrates from open deliberation to encrypted side-threads. Volunteers who once cited ethics protocols now ping Ji-yeon with “exception requests,” asking her to move allied families up adaptation trial queues, to slip chronic cases onto advanced scaffold lists ahead of formal triage. They frame it as risk management: better to seed unproven neuromods and micro-ecology buffers into “reliable hands” who won’t panic, who will report side effects in structured formats. She hears the subtext: loyalty as eligibility metric.
In parallel, sidelined corporate-clan officers resurrect their status as indispensable number-crunchers. They circulate polished dashboards and dynamic forecasts through exhausted committees, every curve and heatmap yoked to a footnote: projected surplus unlocked if certain advisory “consultancies” gain persistent visibility into sensor streams, ledger deltas, and clinic outcome data.
Alien envoys, initially reassured by the visible restructuring, begin to notice access gates tightening around key metrics. Oxygen margins, shuttle manifests, bandwidth allocations, the very spectra they use to read station “mood.” In debrief sessions, they ask how the station intends to prevent “harmonic occlusion” when the new order faces its first major scandal: whether humans will still tolerate unflattering disclosures once reputations, face, and fragile inter-clan alliances are on the line, or revert to opacity masked as stability.
Her overlays don’t accuse individuals; they illuminate functions. Who can choke oxygen by “recalibrating” scrubbers, who can vanish a shuttle by redefining a safety corridor, who can throttle translation bandwidth under the guise of noise filtering. When an officer objects that such constraints signal distrust, she counters that trust without verifiability is just a prelude to the next quiet coup, human or alien-observed.
The observation blister’s smartglass irises open wider as the group settles, its filters walking a tight calibration curve to admit more of the Gate’s violet-sheened flux without frying anyone’s retinas or destabilizing the envoys’ resonance bands. The alien envoys’ skinscape responds in kind, bands of bioluminescence re-phasing toward the embassy’s newly standardized day-spectrum. A negotiated “median illumination profile” that Kyung-soo once diagrammed as a cultural compromise and Ji-yeon now tracks as a physiological experiment. What used to be a corporate mandate about productivity cycles has become a living treaty parameter, tunable in public.
Ji-yeon’s med-drone hovers at her shoulder, its casing still scuffed from prior clandestine runs through maintenance shafts. Now it floats openly, projectors painting faint, layered ghosts across the smartglass: microflora drift vectors between human and alien-adapted biomes; low-grade radiation surges along the cargo ring; distributed stress biomarkers pinging in from volunteer wearables scattered through labor decks and residential stacks. Each graph carries provenance tags and confidence intervals, the sort of metadata the corporation once buried in locked subdirectories.
She parses the incoming streams with a clinician’s detachment and a conspirator’s memory, fingers flicking through AR toolbars no longer spoofed to bypass security. With small, practiced gestures she pushes each layer into the open archive: a pulse of hand, a retinal confirm, a brief haptic buzz as consensus protocols register her commit. Her biometric signature (heart rhythm variance, neural implant hash, dermal tattoo codes) no longer flags a silent alarm in some risk officer’s dashboard. Instead it lights up the shared ledger as one trusted node among many, a visible anchor in the commons’ audit trail.
Above the slowly rotating Gate telemetry, a soft status band scrolls: data set public, replayable, forkable for independent analysis. Ji-yeon watches access pings blossom from labor quarters, apprentice dorms, even a few alien-environment consoles, and feels an unfamiliar tension: responsibility without invisibility. The same metrics she once siphoned in secret now circulate under her name, open to contradiction, reinterpretation, and, for the first time, collective caretaking.
On the floor, the apprentices’ shared tablet splits into translucent panes, each pane anchored to a different voice and login hash. A Baekdu-born tech, her accent thick in voice-notes threaded along the margins, pins clan-freighter ephemerides over the live Gate flux Seo-min is streaming, sketching bare-bones orbital mechanics on top of alien fluctuation patterns and annotating them with fuel costs the committees never include in public briefs. Beside her, an Outer Rim miner’s kid drags up labor shift maps from the open stack, layering crew fatigue indices and accident clusters against proposed approach windows. A former corporate intern, fingers still unconsciously tracing old UI gestures, builds potential docking vectors for independent habitats, tagging each with “collision governance” scenarios: who arbitrates, who pays, who gets locked out.
Kyung-soo, seated cross-legged among them instead of on a lectern dais, occasionally reaches in to color-code an argument or drop a quiet footnote linking a grand theory to some half-forgotten strike or curriculum revision. Their excited bickering compiles, pane by pane, into a rough, participatory syllabus about who is allowed to name the Gate, to route through it, to close it.
At the periphery, Lee-na watches shuttle paths thread across the viewport HUD, their arcs now slightly more varied than the rigid lanes of the old regime. Some runs are guild-chartered, some clan-backed, some flagged as “community mandate,” with route decisions and justifications logged to public vote and post-shift debriefs. Each vector carries its own provenance strip (pilot ID hashes, fuel allocations, labor council endorsements) stacked where only clearance codes used to sit. Her left hand tremors once, briefly blurring a trajectory, but an apprentice beside her smoothly pinches the display to compensate, annotating the correction with her own call-sign. No one pretends not to see; no one moves to unseat her. Instead, the moment is simply captured and time-stamped in the operations ledger as routine: capability shared, authority distributed, risk acknowledged rather than hidden, a minor, living correction inside the broader orbit they now steer together.
Seo-min’s filaments thrum as the Gate’s telemetry surges, a minor flux spike that would once have triggered a cascade of encrypted alerts up corporate chains. Now the anomaly’s pulse fans out across the station in near-real time: dorm kiosks, market stalls, alien-compatible groves, maintenance shafts, even a jury-rigged screen in a labor canteen all receive the same raw stream. Within the blister, a subtle tension runs through her shoulders, the old reflex to clamp down, to pre-empt misinterpretation with pre-cleared talking points, but the new protocols she herself argued for hold, checksum seals glowing green along the shared stack. A child in a clan-marked jumper sends an annotated question into the public forum from just outside the blister: “If the Gate’s rhythm changes like ours did, who decides how we adapt?” The query pins itself next to the flux spike, visible to everyone, including the watching alien envoys, its comment field already forking into competing, co-authored answers.
Reflected on blister glass, Seo-min’s status tags blur down to a single shared node in the stack; Lee-na’s last route adjustment propagates as a suggested pattern, not an order. In the quiet, Kyung-soo bookmarks the live thread as “Draft Curriculum,” Ji-yeon flags three proposals for bioethics review, and Min-joon, watching from a cargo bay repeater, hesitantly adds his first public comment under his own name.