I learned to read the language of stars before I learned to fear silence.
My hands shook even then: barely noticeable tremors that my mother pretended not to see as she positioned herself behind me at the colony hub’s main console. The interface glowed soft blue in the dimness, casting shadows that made the cramped station feel larger than it was. Outside the viewport, our colony’s aurora displays rippled in patterns I’d memorized since infancy: the predictable dance of charged particles guided by magnetic fields, beautiful and utterly safe.
“Feel it,” my mother murmured, her palms warm against the backs of my hands. Not steadying. She never steadied. Just present. “Don’t watch the readouts. Listen with your skin.”
I closed my eyes. The haptic feedback system translated electromagnetic data into tactile sensation, and through the interface gloves, I felt the quantum-entangled signals as textures against my fingertips. Smooth silk for clean connections. Rough canvas for interference. Each relay station in our network had its own signature, distinct as voices.
We breathed together, her chest against my back, and the data streams bloomed across the holographic display in cascading color. Amber for local traffic. Emerald for deep-space routes. Violet for the military channels we weren’t supposed to monitor but did anyway, because my mother believed in knowing what moved through our little corner of space.
“This one,” she said, highlighting a frequency. “What does it tell you?”
I focused on the amber stream, letting the haptic feedback speak through my palms. The signal pulsed with regular rhythm, but underneath: there. A flutter. An irregularity so slight the diagnostics hadn’t flagged it yet.
“Distance,” I whispered. “And something else. Like…” I searched for words. “Like it’s tired?”
Her laugh was soft against my hair. “Like a bird with a broken wing. Yes. You hear it.”
My mother’s hands lifted from mine.
The absence felt like vacuum: sudden cold where warmth had been. I kept my eyes closed, afraid that opening them would break whatever fragile understanding I’d found in the darkness. The haptic feedback continued its conversation through my fingertips: rough canvas texture, irregular pulse, that distinctive flutter.
“Show me,” my mother said from somewhere behind my left shoulder. Close enough to catch me. Far enough that I had to balance alone.
My fingers moved across the interface, muscle memory from hundreds of hours watching her work. I isolated the amber frequency, filtered out the healthy signals, magnified the degradation until it filled the holographic display. The flutter became visible: microsecond delays cascading through the quantum entanglement like ripples in disturbed water.
“Outer buoy network,” I said, surprised by the steadiness in my voice. “Relay seven or eight. The coherence pattern.”It’s not software. Physical damage. Crystal matrix.”
The silence stretched. Then footsteps, and my mother’s reflection appeared in the dark viewport glass. She was smiling.
“Again,” she said. “Slower this time. So you remember.”
I traced the cascade pattern in the air, my finger following the invisible path of degradation. My mother leaned over the secondary screen, and I watched her eyebrows climb. Actual surprise, not the teaching kind.
“Marta. Olav.” She gestured without looking away from my analysis. “Come see this.”
Two heads appeared over the workstation rim. I forced myself to keep talking, pointing to where the microsecond delays bloomed across the display like frost patterns. The words came easier than I expected: coherence degradation, harmonic resonance, crystalline lattice failure. Technical vocabulary I’d absorbed the way other children learned songs, just from being here, from listening to her voice shape these concepts into something real.
“Physical damage,” I finished. “Not corruption.”
The AI chimed confirmation. Three minutes, seventeen seconds after my diagnosis.
My mother’s face transformed: not the careful teacher-smile, but something unguarded. She pulled me against her chest, and I breathed in coffee and the sharp ozone smell that clung to everyone who worked the relays. Around us, applause. My face burned.
“You have it,” she whispered against my hair. “The gift. You feel them breathing.”
I understood. The signals weren’t data. They were alive.
Her mother’s fingers steadied mine on the interface, logging each diagnostic step with ritual precision. “The network trusts us,” she said, her shoulder warm against mine in the narrow station. “Someone waits for every signal we carry. A birth announcement, coordinates home, goodbye.” Her hands smelled like solder flux. I learned then: we weren’t technicians. We were witnesses to what mattered most.
I bounced in my seat hard enough that Mother’s water glass trembled. Father had been gone six weeks, a supply run to the outer markers, and now he sat beside me, solid and real, one calloused hand heavy on my shoulder while I tried to explain everything at once.
“The phase-locked loop synchronizes the local oscillator with the incoming carrier frequency,” I said, my words tumbling over each other. “But today the variance kept spiking because of solar interference, so I had to manually adjust the feedback coefficient every forty seconds to maintain lock, and Mother said I could try implementing an adaptive algorithm that would,”
“Ragna,” Mother interrupted gently, her fingers finding Father’s across my shoulders, “your papa doesn’t speak phase-lock.”
I took a breath. Tried again. “The signals were wobbly. I helped make them steady.”
Father’s laugh rumbled through his chest into my back. “That’s my girl. Fixing what’s broken.”
“Not broken,” I corrected, because precision mattered. “Just… disturbed. The sun was loud today.”
Around us, the hall hummed with other families doing the same. Translating the day’s work into dinner conversation, children explaining their lessons while parents nodded and asked questions. The Johansens’ daughter demonstrated her first successful hydroponic graft. Old Bjorn described a hull patch that held against micro-debris. Everyone contributing their piece to the station’s collective knowledge.
Mother squeezed Father’s hand. “She logged every adjustment. Textbook documentation.”
“Of course she did.” Father’s voice carried pride that made my chest tight. “Thorsdottirs don’t just fix things. We teach the next person how to fix them too.”
I understood then, in a way I hadn’t quite grasped before: this was the real work. Not just maintaining the relays, but maintaining the knowledge. Making sure someone else could read your notes when you were gone. Building networks that outlasted any single operator.
Someone always had to be listening. Someone always had to care enough to document what they heard.
My hands carved shapes through the air: sine waves rising and falling, interference patterns colliding and canceling. Father watched my fingers like they were writing equations he could almost read, his brow furrowed in concentration that looked so much like my own when I faced a difficult repair.
“The carrier wave is like… like your ship’s route,” I tried, forcing myself to slow down. “Always the same path. But the modulation is the cargo: the actual message riding along.”
“So the route stays steady while the cargo changes,” he said, testing the metaphor.
“Exactly! And when solar noise interferes, it’s like debris in your flight path. You have to. Mother’s smile was soft, satisfied. She’d taught me to translate technical precision into human terms, the way she translated my enthusiasms into conversations Father could join after weeks in the black. Making sure no one was left outside the signal’s reach.
“That’s it,” I breathed. “That’s exactly it.”
His hand tightened on my shoulder. “You’ll be better than both of us.”
His hand stayed there. Callused palm warm through my thin shirt, the weight of it grounding me like a good connection to station hull. Real. Present. The kind of touch that said I’m here, I’m listening, you matter.
“And that helps the message travel farther?” Simple question. The kind that showed he was building understanding piece by piece, the way he’d taught me to check relay connections: methodical, patient, missing nothing.
Around us, conversations softened. I caught Sven’s mother nodding to mine, that look parents shared when they saw their children becoming what they were meant to be. The Johansen twins’ father smiled over his coffee, recognizing the particular fire of someone finding their frequency.
Blood calling to blood. Signal to signal.
Mama’s hand found my other shoulder. I felt her there without looking: steady presence, letting me hold this space. Papa’s eyes did that crinkle thing, the one that meant proud, and something in my chest expanded like a properly tuned signal finding its carrier wave. His thumb traced small circles against my collarbone while I explained entanglement theory, my words tumbling fast and certain, no tremor yet to slow them, no doubt that signals always, always found their way home.
The weight of their hands, Papa’s callused, Mama’s precise, anchored me to something unshakeable. Around us, the families smiled like they were witnessing an initiation, and maybe they were. I belonged to the relay stations, to the quantum arrays, to the sacred certainty that no voice would ever be lost. The colony’s future keeper, they called me. I believed signals were promises the universe couldn’t break.
Mama’s workstation became my cathedral. I’d watch her fingers dance across the interface, no tremor then, no hesitation, adjusting phase alignments while explaining how entangled particles remained connected regardless of separation. “Once paired, always paired,” she’d say, and the mathematics scrolling across her screens looked like poetry to me, elegant proofs that the universe had built-in guarantees.
I memorized the equations before I understood them. Recited the principles of quantum coherence like other children learned folk songs. The decoherence timescales, the error correction protocols, the redundancy architectures: all of it a liturgy promising that every signal would arrive, that every voice would be heard, that the void between stars was merely an inconvenience the technology had already conquered.
She’d let me run diagnostics on the secondary arrays, my small hands mimicking her precise movements. “See?” she’d point to the confirmation pings returning from stations scattered across three sectors. “Every message finds its home. The universe doesn’t lose things, Ragna. Not if you build the connection properly.”
I believed her absolutely. Believed that communication was a solved problem, as fundamental and reliable as thermodynamics. The relay network stretched across human space like a nervous system, and we were the technicians who kept the signals flowing, who maintained the invisible architecture that made separation temporary, distance meaningless.
At night, I’d trace the signal paths on my tablet, following transmissions as they hopped from relay to relay, watching the confirmation codes blink green across the network map. Every successful handshake felt like proof of cosmic order. Every message delivered was evidence that the universe itself conspired to keep us connected.
I never imagined silence. Never conceived of a signal that wouldn’t arrive, a message that would simply vanish into nothing. The mathematics promised otherwise, and mathematics, Mama taught me, never lied.
Papa’s face would resolve in the holo-display at 19:[^00] station time, always, the quantum handshake completing with a soft chime that meant the entangled particles had done their work across however many light-years separated his hauler from our station. We’d gather (Mama, my younger brother Sten, me) and for twenty minutes the distance collapsed into nothing.
He’d tell stories about the ice fields of Skadi Station, the bioluminescent clouds near Freya’s Gate, the crew he was hauling with. His voice never lagged, never stuttered. The technology made him present, made the separation a technicality rather than a reality. I could see the laugh lines around his eyes, watch him gesture with his coffee bulb, hear him ask about my schoolwork in real-time as if he stood in our quarters instead of riding a trajectory three sectors away.
Every third day. Precise as orbital mechanics. The system never failed us, never introduced doubt. When the chime sounded, he’d be there. The mathematics guaranteed it, and the mathematics had never once been wrong.
Mama kept the logs in physical books, ink on paper: a deliberate choice, she said, to honor permanence. She’d let me turn the pages sometimes, run my fingers down columns of timestamps and confirmation codes. Five years. Eight years. Twelve years without a single dropped connection, without a degraded signal, without even a momentary static burst. Our station’s array had achieved what the technical manuals called “theoretical maximum reliability,” which Mama translated as: we’ve never failed anyone.
She’d tap the current page, smile at me. “This is what we do, Ragna. We make sure the words reach home. Every time. No exceptions.” The book’s weight in my hands felt like a promise the universe had made and kept.
I configured the relay myself, nine years old and trembling with concentration, routing Grandmother’s birthday message through three stations. When her voice came through (clear, unbroken, perfect) the senior techs nodded their approval. I felt invincible. This was my inheritance: a system that couldn’t fail, a skill that guaranteed connection. I’d spend my life maintaining certainty itself.
The academy entrance exam’s final question: “Explain why quantum-entangled communication is theoretically impossible to disrupt.” I wrote three pages proving the premise wrong, citing seventeen documented cascade failures, including one that killed forty-three people when their distress call dissolved into static. They accepted me anyway. My mother didn’t speak to me for a week. Some certainties, once questioned, become unforgivable.
I told myself it was about learning. That I needed to understand the real systems, not the sanitized versions in my training modules. But the truth, the truth I can admit now, trapped in this pocket universe with nowhere left to run, was that I wanted to prove my mother wrong. Wanted to crack open her perfect world and show her the rot underneath.
The hack took three weeks of careful work. I’d watch her fingers on the haptic interface during her evening maintenance routines, memorizing the patterns. She had a tell. Always tapped her left index finger twice before entering the final authentication sequence. A nervous habit, maybe, or just the muscle memory of someone who’d done the same task ten thousand times.
When I finally got in, past her locks and into the restricted technical archives, my hands were shaking so badly I had to rest them on the cool metal of the console. The tremor wasn’t there yet, not the one that would eventually define me, but fear and excitement produced a convincing preview.
The files were nothing like I expected. No grand conspiracy, no deliberate deception. Just… compromise. Endless compromise. The quantum-entangled arrays that were supposed to be “maintenance-free” required weekly calibration adjustments. The backup systems that “guaranteed” signal integrity failed thirty percent of the time, and engineers just routed around the failures without reporting them. The core worlds’ master technicians (the ones I’d dreamed of becoming) spent their days applying patches to patches, improvising solutions to problems that officially didn’t exist.
I sat there for hours, reading incident reports that contradicted every textbook I’d studied. The clean mathematics of signal propagation meeting the messy reality of failing components, cosmic radiation, and human error. It was thrilling. It was devastating.
It meant I could be better than the diagrams. It also meant the diagrams were lies.
The meals became performances. I’d wait until the second course, when everyone had relaxed into the familiar rhythm of shared food and small talk, then I’d ask. “Why do the relay specifications claim point-nine-nine-seven reliability when the actual logs show point-eight-three?” Watching Olaf’s fork pause halfway to his mouth. Seeing my mother’s shoulders tighten.
The older techs would explain, patiently at first. Then less patiently. “Theory versus practice, Ragna.” “You’ll understand when you’ve worked real systems.” “The manuals describe ideal conditions.”
But I’d read the incident reports. I knew they were protecting something: maybe their competence, maybe their comfort, maybe just the fiction that our small world worked as designed.
The other families developed a look. A slight narrowing of eyes, a glance toward my mother that asked: Are you going to handle this? The Johansons stopped inviting us to their table. The Lindqvists’ daughter, who’d been my friend, suddenly had other commitments.
Egalitarian, they called our colony. Everyone equal. What they meant was: everyone the same size. And I was growing too tall, asking too much, wanting too far.
The tremor started during a routine maintenance check: my left hand suddenly refusing to hold the calibration tool steady. Just fatigue, I told myself. Twenty-hour shifts did that. But my mother saw it happen, and her face went somewhere I’d never seen before. Carefully neutral. Professional. The colony doctor’s scanner hummed over my wrist, my elbow, finally my neck, and his expression matched hers. “Minor anomalies in the neural pathways. Nothing we can diagnose properly here.” Then, softer: “Maybe take it easy with those academy applications. Stressful programs, very demanding.”
I understood perfectly. My body had joined the conspiracy. Even my nerves were telling me to stay small, stay safe, stay contained in this predictable little world where signals always found their destination and daughters never left.
I’d proven something that night: not to the colony, but to myself. That my mind could outthink my failing hands. That I could build systems elegant enough to work around my body’s limitations. My mother’s terror was love, I understood that. But her fear couldn’t be my ceiling. The applications went out the next morning, each one a small act of defiance against the tremor, against comfort, against staying.
The custom gloves came first. Pressure-sensitive pads that read intention before the tremor could corrupt it. Then the neural pathways, training her right hand to mirror-compensate, her mind to predict the shake’s rhythm. Each technique a small architecture of defiance. The colony’s head engineer noticed, said nothing, left advanced manuals where she’d find them. Complicity in her escape.
The relay junction was a simple calibration: routine maintenance she’d performed a hundred times before. Muscle memory should have guided her fingers across the interface panel, adjusting the quantum-entangled nodes with the precision her instructors praised. Instead, her left hand stuttered against the smooth surface, the index finger tracing a jagged path where it should have moved clean.
I pulled back. Stared at my hand like it belonged to someone else.
Tried again. The tremor was subtle, a flutter, barely visible, but in the precise world of communication relays, barely visible meant catastrophic. The interface read my intention as noise. Error codes bloomed across my display.
My first thought wasn’t fear. It was calculation.
How long had this been happening without my noticing? I reviewed the past week’s work logs, searching for anomalies in my calibration times, deviations in my accuracy ratings. There. Three days ago, a correction I’d attributed to equipment drift. Five days before that, a recalibration I’d blamed on power fluctuations. My subconscious had been compensating before my conscious mind registered the problem.
The second thought: who might have noticed?
I pulled the maintenance records, cross-referenced them with observation logs. The head engineer had signed off on my work without comment. My mother, who reviewed all junior tech performance metrics, had marked my evaluations as exemplary. Either they hadn’t seen it, or they’d chosen not to see it.
The third thought, the one that settled into my bones like cold: this changes everything.
The academy applications waiting in my files suddenly felt like fantasies. Medical evaluations. Physical capability assessments. Standards that didn’t accommodate tremors, however slight. I could already hear the sympathetic rejections, the suggestions for alternative careers, the careful language that meant: you’re broken now.
I flexed my left hand. Watched it shake.
Then I started calculating workarounds.
My mother found me in the communications hub three nights before launch, surrounded by discarded glove prototypes. She didn’t ask what I was doing. Just sat beside me in that way she had, her own hands busy with a maintenance tool she didn’t need to clean.
“The gloves help,” I said finally. Not a lie, but not the truth either.
“I’m sure they do.” Her voice carried no inflection. We both understood the game.
She worked the tool in silence, her fingers moving with the same restless precision I’d inherited. Then: “Your father called yesterday. He’ll miss the departure.”
“I know.”
“He wanted me to tell you. Started again.”I want to tell you. Go.”
The word hung between us, permission and benediction and fear all compressed into a single syllable.
She placed something in my palm. Her old academy badge, the one she’d never used. “Even though,” she whispered.
I closed my gloved fingers around it. Felt the tremor steady.
The meal tasted like every celebration I’d ever known: dried fish rehydrated with too much care, synthesized root vegetables that almost remembered earth, bread someone had hoarded real yeast for. Around me, faces I’d mapped as thoroughly as any relay system: Olaf’s weathered smile, Ingrid’s careful pride, the Johansen twins finishing each other’s sentences about my future.
The administrator raised his glass. “Our brightest star.”
The weight of it settled across my shoulders like a pressure suit. Not just Ragna leaving, but proof. Evidence that small stations weren’t dead ends. That we mattered.
My hand tremored around the glass stem. I watched it shake, watched everyone pretend not to watch it shake, and forced my fingers steady through pure wanting. Through the desperate need to be their proof instead of their pity.
The aurora rippled across my viewport at 0300, patterns I’d read before words. Magnetic field lines dancing, solar wind signatures I could name in my sleep. My fingers traced the glass, memorizing what I’d always known: the comfort of predictable systems, signals that always completed their journey.
But I’d grown larger than these patterns could map. The ache of it filled my chest: loving completely what could no longer hold me.
My fingers moved through the relay diagnostics without conscious thought: check the quantum entanglement coherence, verify the signal integrity, confirm the backup systems. Maintenance as meditation. Mother’s restlessness lived in my hands now, transformed into something sharper: ambition that tasted like hunger, like the need to prove I could map systems larger than anyone imagined. I was carrying her forward, toward Yggdrasil. Toward Tyra.
Toward the cage I couldn’t yet see.
The acceptance letter arrived as a quantum-burst transmission, priority flagged, the kind of delivery reserved for positions that mattered. I opened it in the communications bay where I’d logged ten thousand hours, where my hands had never once failed a repair, where my efficiency ratings glowed in the top percentile of the entire colonial network.
Yggdrasil Station Research Facility. Communications Systems Director. Immediate placement available.
Three days. The diagnosis had been in my file for exactly three days.
I read it twice, searching for the enthusiasm that should have flooded through me. This was the posting: pocket universe research, cutting-edge relay systems, the kind of work that opened doors to core-world positions. The kind of assignment I’d been angling toward since I was sixteen, mapping signal degradation patterns while other kids were still learning basic maintenance protocols.
Instead, I tasted metal. Understood with a clarity that felt like falling: they knew. The medical algorithms had already recalculated my trajectory, had quietly shifted me from “promising core-world candidate” to “suitable for frontier research. Limited duration posting.” Yggdrasil wasn’t a triumph. It was a consolation prize. A place to send someone whose hands might fail during a critical relay alignment, whose career had an expiration date the actuarial systems could predict better than I could deny.
The station would be prestigious. The work would be groundbreaking. And it would be far enough from the core worlds that when I eventually couldn’t hold a neural interface steady, when the tremors progressed from occasional to constant, I’d already be somewhere that didn’t matter to the people who calculated worth in decades of uninterrupted service.
I accepted the position that afternoon. Told myself it was still what I wanted. That frontier research was more exciting than core-world bureaucracy anyway. That Tyra’s name on the research team roster had nothing to do with my decision.
I was good at lying to myself. The tremor in my left hand was teaching me how.
I told my mother two weeks after the diagnosis. Showed her the medical report on a data tablet, the genetic markers highlighted in clinical blue. I’d expected her to say it was wrong, that I should get a second opinion, that Nordic stubbornness could outlast any degenerative condition.
Instead, she went quiet. Looked at her own hands, capable, weathered hands that had maintained communication arrays for thirty years on this small station. Turned them over slowly, studying the palms like they held answers written in skin.
“I compensated,” she said finally. The words came with difficulty, each one a small surrender. “Chose colony work because…” She paused. “The core worlds have standards. Not written down. But you learn. Perfect biometrics. Perfect steadiness. Perfect everything.”
She’d known. Had carried the same genetic sequence, had made her own calculations about where someone like us could thrive. Had never told me because she’d hoped: what? That I’d be spared? That I could have the core-world career she’d quietly abandoned?
“You gave me this,” I said. Meant the condition. Meant the choice. Meant everything.
“I gave you the ability to see patterns,” she corrected. “What you do with it is yours.”
I made the choice in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by the electromagnetic field visualizations I’d mapped since I was twelve. The relay schematics glowed soft blue on my walls. I held my hands in the dim light, willing them steady, watching the barely-perceptible tremor that would only worsen.
Yggdrasil Station wasn’t second-best. It was defiance.
A pocket universe laboratory where the impossible happened daily, where dimensional mathematics rewrote reality’s rules. Where maybe, maybe, my particular way of reading patterns in chaos would matter more than whether my fingers tremored. Where I could prove that brilliance didn’t require the perfect biometrics the core worlds demanded but never admitted to requiring.
Where compensation could become innovation instead of limitation.
I applied that night.
Mother’s hands guided mine through the calibration sequence, her own tremor finally revealed in the fabrication lab’s harsh light. We built compensation into every sensor array, each stabilizer a conversation between her experience and my defiance. The gloves translated betrayal into precision, weakness into a different kind of strength. Technology as bridge between the body we had and the work we refused to surrender, each micro-adjustment proof that limitation could birth innovation.
The station shrank to a point of light, then nothing. My gloved hands lay quiet against my thighs, Mother’s engineering, Mother’s curse, Mother’s gift. I’d believed signals always found their way home, that electromagnetic whispers crossed any distance. Now I understand: some silences are absolute. The pocket universe swallows every transmission I send. Connection was never guaranteed. I’d built my faith on a child’s misunderstanding of how easily the universe severs its threads.
The neurologist’s words kept looping in my head while I stared at the tremor in my left hand like it belonged to someone else. Five years of reliable fine motor control. Ten before my right hand joined the betrayal. Fifteen before my speech centers might fragment mid-sentence, leaving me trapped behind a mouth that wouldn’t form the words my brain still generated with perfect clarity.
I’d made her repeat the timeline three times, not because I didn’t understand, but because understanding meant accepting, and I wasn’t ready for that. Wasn’t ready to calculate how old I’d be when I could no longer calibrate quantum-entangled nodes by touch, when the electromagnetic signatures I read like poetry would require assistive interfaces, when the systems that sang to me in frequencies most people couldn’t perceive would become inaccessible behind the prison of my own failing nervous system.
The worst part, the part that made my throat close, was knowing my mind would stay sharp through all of it. I’d watch myself deteriorate with full comprehension, understanding the technical specifications of my own dissolution. The neurologist had tried to frame it gently: cognitive function remains intact, you’ll always be yourself intellectually. As if that was comfort. As if being conscious while your body stopped obeying was somehow better than losing awareness entirely.
My mother had known. Had to have known, carrying the same genetic marker, watching for signs in me the way I’d now watch for them in myself. She’d said nothing when I’d chosen communications tech, nothing when I’d applied to the academy, nothing until that call after my diagnosis when her silence stretched so long I’d checked if the connection had dropped. Finally, just: I’m sorry, Ragna. Not surprised. Sorry. She’d let me choose this path knowing where it led.
I pressed my palm against the viewport, feeling the station’s heartbeat through the glass: the pulse of data streams, the electromagnetic whisper of ships calling to each other across the void. My left hand tremored against the cold surface, but I could still sense everything. The freighter’s distress signal like a sharp taste on my tongue. The relay operator’s steady response, a warm current threading through the chaos. The way she compensated for her own visible tremor with interface gloves that translated intention into precision.
She was older than me. Maybe ten years into her diagnosis, if I was reading the signs right. Her hands shook worse than mine would for another decade, but her fingers moved across the controls like a pianist who’d learned to play through arthritis. Adapted. Evolved. Refused to stop.
I watched her guide that freighter home, and something settled in my chest. The timeline the neurologist had given me wasn’t a countdown to irrelevance. It was just parameters. Constraints I’d learn to work within, the way I worked within bandwidth limitations and signal degradation.
My body might betray me, but the systems would still sing.
I applied to Yggdrasil Station’s communications program that night, my application essay written with my right hand compensating for my left’s increasing rebellion. I didn’t hide my diagnosis. I led with it. Explained how understanding signal degradation in my own nervous system made me better at reading electromagnetic interference patterns. How adapting to my body’s constraints had taught me to improvise solutions that standard operators never considered.
The acceptance letter came three weeks later. Hallgerd Magnusson’s signature at the bottom, and a handwritten note: “We don’t need perfect operators. We need ones who understand that every system has limitations, and that genius lies in working within them.”
I packed my custom gloves and headed for the edge of known space.
The gloves became extensions of thought: silver conductive threads woven through reinforced fabric, pressure sensors calibrated to distinguish intention from tremor. I learned to work with my body’s chaos instead of against it, letting the spasm pass through while my mind held steady on the signal patterns. What others did through muscle memory, I did through pure focus. The limitation carved out space for a different kind of precision.
The relay nodes aligned under my tremoring fingers, the gloves translating chaos into precision. Fastest calibration time in the academy’s history. The proctor’s datapad confirmed it even as his expression shifted from skepticism to something worse: pity. I’d proven myself exceptional. I’d also proven I was dying by degrees, that every perfect connection I made now was a star burning brightest before collapse.
“Mor,” I said, and heard my own voice do that thing. Flatten into professional calm, the tone I’d use reporting a system malfunction. “I’m not Bjorn.”
The pause lasted three heartbeats. Through the quantum relay, I could see her kitchen on Heimdall Station, the same blue tiles from my childhood, the window showing the familiar star patterns I’d memorized before I could read. Everything exactly as I’d left it, except for the distance I’d put between us by refusing to be reasonable.
“No one is saying you are.” Her hands moved to clasp together, stilling their betrayal. “But there are practical considerations, elskling. Communications work in the outer colonies, with proper medical support nearby. My glove whirred softly, compensating as my fingers wanted to curl.”Top of my class.”
“For now.” She said it gently, which somehow made it worse. “But in five years? Ten? The progression rate,”
“I know the progression rate.” I’d memorized every clinical study, every statistical model. I knew exactly how many years I had before the tremors spread, before the gloves couldn’t compensate anymore, before I’d be the one on the other end of these calls, watching my own daughter try to outrun genetics. “I also know what I’m capable of right now.”
Her expression did something complicated, pride and grief braiding together. “Your bestemor said the same thing. Right up until she couldn’t hold a coffee cup without spilling it.” A pause. “She was brilliant too. It didn’t matter.”
The words landed like a diagnostic confirmation I’d been dreading. Not you’ll fail: worse. You’ll succeed brilliantly, and then you’ll lose everything anyway, and we’ll both have to watch it happen.
“Then I’d better make these years count,” I said.
I watched my hand against the console’s cool surface, the glove’s micro-adjustments invisible to the camera’s resolution. She couldn’t see the tremor, but she knew it was there. The same way I’d known with Bestemor, even when she’d hidden her hands in her lap during our calls.
“Bjorn’s position includes full neurological support,” Mor continued, and I heard what she wasn’t saying: the kind you’ll need, the kind that costs more than a communications tech’s salary. “The corps has excellent long-term care protocols.”
“For when I can’t work anymore.” Saying it out loud felt like acknowledging a future I’d been outrunning since the diagnosis.
Her silence confirmed it. Through the quantum relay, I watched her reach for her coffee cup, saw the slight hesitation before her fingers closed around it: checking her own grip, the habit she’d developed after Bestemor. We were all just echoes of each other, generations of women measuring our worth in how long we could pretend our hands were steady.
“I’m not ready to plan for that yet,” I said.
The professional distance collapsed between one breath and the next. “I just want you safe, elskling.” The word I hadn’t heard since I was small enough to believe my mother could fix anything. Her voice cracked on that last syllable, and suddenly I wasn’t looking at the communications officer who’d trained me in signal protocols, but at a daughter who’d watched her own mother’s hands forget how to button shirts, how to sign her name.
She wasn’t trying to cage me. She was standing at the end of a road she’d already traveled, watching me insist on walking it anyway.
My throat closed around words I couldn’t shape into sound.
My right hand found the disconnect icon. My left hovered beside it, tremor rippling through fingers that had soldered quantum relays just yesterday. Mamma’s gaze dropped to that betraying movement, and I watched her recognize the pattern she’d seen in mirrors for fifteen years. The screen went dark before either of us could name what we’d witnessed.
I spent three days parsing the files in my quarters, cross-referencing Mamma’s decline against Bestemor’s, calculating the statistical probability of each intervention’s success. The data showed what we’d both known: I had maybe ten years of fine motor control left, fifteen if the experimental treatments worked. She’d sent me the truth she couldn’t voice: that I was running out of time to prove I was more than my failing neurons.
The gloves arrived two weeks before launch, custom-fabricated on Mars by a medical tech company that specialized in adaptive equipment for degenerative conditions. I’d spent my entire signing bonus on them: twelve thousand credits that could have gone toward the experimental treatments Mamma kept forwarding me information about, the gene therapies being tested on Titan, the neural mesh implants that might slow the progression.
Instead I chose function over hope. Chose now over maybe.
The haptic feedback sensors lined each fingertip, microscopic pressure readers that detected my intention before my compromised nerves could fully execute the command. When my left index finger began its characteristic tremor, that fine oscillation that made precision work impossible, the glove’s stabilization field engaged, subtle magnetic resistance that steadied the motion without restricting it entirely. I could still feel through them, still sense the texture of relay components and the heat signature of active circuits, but filtered through a layer of compensation that made my hands reliable again.
The pressure-responsive gel lining was the real innovation. On bad days, when the numbness crept up from my fingertips toward my palms, the gel contracted and expanded in programmed patterns, maintaining circulation, preventing the complete sensory dropout that had ended careers before mine. Each finger joint had been reinforced with a flexible exoskeleton, nearly invisible under the black synthetic skin, that engaged when my grip weakened unexpectedly. No more dropped tools, no more fumbled connections during critical repairs.
I wore them for sixteen hours the first day, calibrating them to my specific neural patterns, teaching them the difference between intentional movement and pathological tremor. By the second day, they felt like extensions of myself. By the third, I’d almost forgotten I was wearing them.
Almost forgotten I needed them.
That was the dangerous comfort of good adaptive technology: it let you pretend you weren’t failing.
I hadn’t replied to Mamma’s message. What was there to say? Fifteen years felt like both forever and no time at all, Grandmother had been sixty-three at diagnosis, already retired from the Tromsø communications array, her trembling hands a curiosity rather than a catastrophe. I was twenty-seven. Fifteen years would take me to forty-two, if I was lucky, if the progression was kind.
The family pattern. As if genetics were destiny, as if my neurons would fail on the same predictable schedule that had taken Grandmother’s fine motor control, then her speech, then her ability to swallow. Mamma had watched it happen over a decade and a half, had become expert in the stages of decline, could probably predict my trajectory better than any medical AI.
Data. The only gift she knew how to give.
I’d deleted the message without archiving it, but the numbers had already embedded themselves in my brainstem. Fifteen years. Maybe ten functional ones. Maybe less in high-stress environments with limited medical support.
I’d accepted Hallgerd’s offer anyway.
Hallgerd’s expression during that interview had stayed with me. Not the sympathetic head-tilt I’d learned to dread, but something sharper. Her steel-gray eyes had tracked my hands through the interface demonstration, watching how I’d compensated for the tremor with predictive algorithms and custom gesture mapping. My scores had been exceptional. The three-second quantum delay had given me time to see her face shift from assessment to decision.
She’d known exactly what she was hiring: someone skilled enough to maintain communications in a pocket universe laboratory, desperate enough to accept isolation posting, and compromised enough that my inevitable decline wouldn’t matter to corporate’s long-term staffing models. Frontier work had always run on calculated expendability.
I’d recognized the transaction. I’d signed anyway.
Kari had watched me compensate through that first week: the way I’d braced my left wrist against console edges, how I’d mapped gesture controls to my steadier right hand. He’d added me to medical bay rotations without announcement, his only comment a gruff “tremor’s manageable” that acknowledged the degenerative timeline we both understood. Not sympathy. Assessment. The first person who’d seen my condition as engineering problem rather than career epitaph.
I’d catalogued every relay node, memorized backup protocols even senior techs didn’t know existed, made myself the one who could diagnose interference patterns by sound alone. Double shifts when my hand cooperated, triple-checking my work when it didn’t. Frontier stations were practical. They kept who solved problems. But practicality had limits, and mine had a medical countdown. I was building indispensability against my own expiration date.
I kept the message. Stupid, maybe, but I needed the evidence that I’d been good enough. The interview had gone flawlessly, I’d shown them how I could map neural pathway degradation in real-time communication systems, predict failure points three cycles before standard diagnostics caught them. The senior tech had leaned forward, actually interested. She’d asked follow-up questions. Technical ones. The kind that meant they were imagining me on their team.
Three days of checking my messages every hour, my left hand behaving itself for once, letting me believe the universe might offer fairness alongside its cruelty.
The rejection came during breakfast shift. I was alone in the commissary: early riser habit from academy days when I’d needed extra time for tasks my classmates completed easily. The coffee bulb was cheap station standard, but it was hot and caffeinated and mine. I’d earned it with another night of flawless system monitoring.
“Innovative approach.” They’d actually written that. My technique for reading electromagnetic interference patterns through neural mapping, something I’d developed specifically to compensate for the fine motor control I was losing, was innovative. Valuable. Just not valuable enough to offset what their insurance algorithms projected about my declining productivity curve.
“Current organizational needs.” The phrase that meant we need workers who won’t deteriorate. Who won’t require accommodations. Who won’t become a liability when the tremors spread from hands to arms to speech centers to everything that made me myself.
The coffee bulb crumpled in my grip. My hand had been steady that morning: genuinely steady, not the forced control I’d learned to fake. Steady enough to betray me with its strength when rage needed somewhere to go. Brown liquid globules floating in station gravity, my palm burned, and all I could think was that Heimdall Communications would never know what they’d refused. That I’d have made them better. That “innovative” should have meant something.
I developed a spreadsheet. Tracked every application with the precision I’d bring to their communication arrays: company name, position level, interview date, moment when medical disclosure occurred, hours until rejection. The data told a story my instructors’ praise couldn’t override.
Heimdall Communications: forty-seven hours after the medical
coordinator’s call.
Bifrost Systems: thirty-two hours.
Nordstern Relays: seventy-one hours, but that included a weekend.
Secondary tier positions required the same disclosures, triggered the same algorithmic flags. I watched my carefully crafted applications. Test scores in the ninety-eighth percentile, three published papers on interference pattern analysis, that glowing letter from Professor Andersen calling my intuitive grasp of quantum entanglement “once in a generation”: get filtered into whatever digital void held candidates deemed actuarially inconvenient.
Tertiary positions. Station maintenance tech roles. Jobs I could perform with both hands tremoring, jobs that wasted the neural architecture I’d spent six years building, and still the medical questionnaires arrived. Still the algorithms calculated my declining value. Still the rejections came, each one professionally apologetic, each one exactly the same.
The tremor became my interviewer. Not me: the tremor. I’d watch their eyes track to my left hand during video calls, see the micro-expression when they noticed the custom interface glove I wore to compensate. The conversations would shift. Suddenly they were asking about “long-term reliability” and “stress tolerance under extended operations.” Code for: how long until you can’t do this job?
I learned to keep my left hand off-camera. Learned which angles hid the glove. Learned that disclosing after the technical assessment but before the medical screening maximized my interview count while minimizing time wasted. Learned that fifteen variations of “your qualifications are impressive, however” all meant the same thing.
The actuarial tables had calculated my worth. The corporations had accepted their recommendation.
I stopped opening the cohort network feed. Couldn’t watch another celebration, another “thrilled to announce” post with location tags that read like a catalog of everywhere I’d never go. When Astrid messaged directly (“Rags, you’re being weird, what’s happening?”) I archived it unread. Easier than explaining that my tremor had better job prospects than I did.
I’d archived the attachment without opening it (some instinct for self-preservation) but the file name had been visible in the preview: RiskAssessment_Thorsdottir_Neurological.pdf. Someone had calculated me. Reduced five years of perfect marks and three commendations to a percentage, a liability projection, a reason to choose literally anyone else. The colony hadn’t even bothered changing the template greeting from “Dear Applicant.”
The phrase had sounded almost kind when her instructor first said it, frontier opportunities, the way she’d emphasized the word “opportunities” as though it were a gift being offered rather than a consolation prize. But sitting in her dormitory that evening, watching the acceptance letters populate her classmates’ feeds while her own inbox remained conspicuously empty, Ragna had felt the euphemism’s real weight settle through her understanding like sediment through water, each particle of meaning drifting down to form a layer she couldn’t ignore.
Frontier opportunities meant positions no one else wanted. Stations too remote for proper medical support, too dangerous for specialists with families, too experimental for careers that mattered to the people making decisions from comfortable offices in the inner systems. It meant her instructor had already performed the same calculation as that risk assessment file. Had looked at Ragna’s transcripts and her trembling hands and decided where someone like her could be spent.
Because that was the word, wasn’t it? Spent. Not employed, not utilized, not valued. Spent like ammunition, like a resource with a known depletion rate.
Her instructor had meant well. Ragna understood that even through the anger. The woman had taken time to research postings, had written recommendations emphasizing Ragna’s technical brilliance, had probably argued with administrators about giving her a chance. But meaning well didn’t change the fundamental categorization happening beneath the kindness: the sorting of Ragna into a different class of worker, someone whose talent could be expended where failure wouldn’t ripple back to affect anyone important, where if her hands finally betrayed her completely and she couldn’t work anymore, it would be a staffing problem for some remote station commander rather than an embarrassment for a prestigious program.
Damaged goods, still useful, but only in places where breaking wouldn’t matter as much.
Her hands shaking worse than usual as she composed the response email, each keystroke requiring conscious effort, the cursor jumping as her left index finger spasmed against the touchpad. Delete. Retype. Delete again. The fury at her own body’s timing made the tremors worse, a feedback loop of anger and physical betrayal.
She’d drafted seven versions before settling on careful professional language about “accommodation strategies” and “performance metrics,” each phrase a small surrender. What she wanted to write was that she could outwork any of them even on her worst days, that her condition made her better at reading system instabilities because she lived with instability in her own nerves, that she understood failure modes in ways their steady hands never would.
But that would sound defensive. Desperate. Like someone trying to convince herself as much as them.
So instead she wrote about adaptive interface protocols and redundant verification systems, made her disability sound like an engineering challenge she’d already solved, attached performance data that proved nothing except that she was very good at compensating, at hiding, at making her struggle look effortless enough that maybe someone would take the risk.
She’d built the spreadsheet with the same precision she applied to signal diagnostics, color-coded cells tracking medication costs against projected salary ranges, cross-referencing frontier station postings with their medical facilities, calculating which compromises were survivable and which were just slow deaths with better lighting. The numbers didn’t lie the way people did with their careful encouragement. Five years at full capacity if she landed somewhere with decent pharmaceutical access. Three if she had to make do with generics and rationing. The spreadsheet had a column for “best case scenario” that she kept meaning to delete because looking at it hurt worse than the tremors. Eight years assuming everything went right, assuming her body cooperated, assuming the universe gave a damn about her plans.
The message played three times before Ragna could delete it, her mother’s voice performing concern like a script she’d rehearsed, each careful word a small burial. Not “you’ll find your place” but “frontier postings suit certain temperaments.” Not “I believe in you” but “your uncle’s friend knew someone.” The subtext wasn’t even hidden. Just Ragna’s future being gently, lovingly downgraded to something manageable, survivable, small.
I found Yggdrasil Station buried in the experimental postings: pocket universe research, communication systems so complex they’d burned through four techs in two years, isolation parameters that made other applicants withdraw. Perfect. I composed my application with my left hand braced against the desk, every word a middle finger to the careful voices suggesting I aim lower, choose safer, accept less.
The medical disclosures arrived in sequence, each more invasive than the last. I filled them out in my quarters with the lights dimmed, my left hand trembling worse than usual as I translated my body’s betrayal into checkbox categories. Progressive neurological deterioration. Check. Anticipated functional decline. Check. Current medication regimen and projected efficacy timeline. I listed the drugs that bought me borrowed time, their names like a countdown.
The corporate physician contacted me directly for the third disclosure: a video call where her professional sympathy couldn’t quite mask the calculation happening behind her eyes. She asked about my “functional timeline” with the delicacy of someone discussing funeral arrangements. How long could I maintain fine motor control? When did I anticipate requiring mobility assistance? Had I considered the psychological impact of accelerated decline in isolation?
I answered each question with clinical precision, watching her take notes. She was building a risk assessment, weighing my technical skills against the liability of my failing nervous system. I was a resource with a depreciation schedule.
The approval came through three days later. Standard contract, experimental posting hazard pay, and a brief note in the附加 documentation: Candidate’s medical profile falls within acceptable risk parameters for experimental postings requiring specialized technical expertise with limited long-term personnel retention expectations.
I read it twice, parsing the corporate language. They were saying I was good enough to be worth the risk and broken enough that losing me wouldn’t matter. Disposable expertise. A technician with an expiration date for a station that might not have a future.
I signed without hesitation. My trembling hand made the signature look desperate, which felt honest. They wanted someone skilled enough to handle quantum-entangled communication arrays in a pocket universe and expendable enough that my inevitable decline wouldn’t disrupt long-term operational planning.
I was exactly what they needed. And they were exactly what I needed: a place where my compressed timeline matched the posting’s risk profile, where burning out meant something more than just fading away in some safe, sustainable position, watching my hands forget how to work.
The advisor had leaned back in her chair, the gesture of someone preparing to deliver difficult truth wrapped in kindness. “You have exceptional aptitude scores, Ragna. Top five percent in quantum-entangled systems. You could have your pick of stable postings, Mars relay stations, orbital platforms with full medical facilities.”
“Stable,” I’d repeated, letting the word sit between us like something dead.
She’d understood immediately. I watched her expression shift from professional concern to something more personal. “How many have you seen make this choice?” I asked.
“Enough.” She pulled up my medical file, not looking at it, just needing something to do with her hands. “The brilliant ones with conditions like yours. They calculate the math differently than we do. Years of comfortable decline versus months of. She nodded slowly.”The corporation knows exactly what they’re doing, recruiting people like you. They’re not offering opportunity. They’re offering a particular kind of ending.”
“I know.” My left hand tremored against the desk. “I’m choosing it anyway.”
The advisor closed my file. “Then make it count.”
The training facility smelled like recycled air and desperation. I sat through module after module: corporate presenters with practiced smiles explaining “temporal adaptation protocols” and “dimensional perception recalibration” like they were describing software updates rather than fundamental alterations to how my brain would process reality. Around me, the other recruits laughed too loudly at the hazard pay jokes, that particular humor of people who’ve already made peace with bad odds.
I recognized us all. The woman with the prosthetic spine that disqualified her from military postings. The man whose neural architecture was “atypical”: brilliant but unmarketable. We were the corporation’s perfect crew: skilled enough to be useful, disposable enough not to matter.
They’d calculated us precisely. We were already writing ourselves off. They just had to provide the pen.
I folded the gloves carefully, their haptic sensors catching the light: six months’ salary in custom engineering, the only reason I could still work. The medical files went into a sealed envelope Kari would open, learning everything before I had to say it aloud. My mother’s message played twice more before I deleted it, those four words already memorized, already feeling like both blessing and unbearable weight.
The shuttle’s cabin lights had flickered, dimensional transition turbulence, as I finally read the contract’s subsection seven. Extended quarantine protocols. Indefinite assignment duration pending experimental outcomes. The corporate attorneys had buried it in passive voice: “Personnel may experience temporal displacement relative to standard rotation schedules.” May experience. I’d highlighted it with a fingertip, my left hand already trembling, understanding too late that I wasn’t just accepting a job in an experimental space. I was becoming the experiment.
I’d steadied myself against the corridor wall, my gloved left hand leaving a momentary print on the too-smooth surface, and made the mistake Hallgerd had just warned against. Through the viewport, the pocket universe sprawled in colors my brain kept trying to correct. Auroras that moved in directions that weren’t up or down or sideways, boundaries that shimmered like soap bubbles stretched across infinity, a sky that was simultaneously deep and shallow, distant and intimate. My stomach lurched sideways.
“Shit,” I managed, closing my eyes hard.
“Everyone does it.” Hallgerd’s voice carried amusement without mockery. “Your colonial physics education prepared you for normal space. This isn’t that. Come on: orientation briefing in Research Module 1. Dr. Svensdottir is eager to meet our new communications specialist.”
I followed her through corridors that hummed with a frequency I felt in my teeth, past crew members who moved with the casual confidence of people who’d stopped questioning reality’s fundamental nature. The research module’s doors opened onto a space that made the viewport seem tame. A two-level cathedral of machinery and mathematics, holographic models of dimensional equations rotating in midair like prayer wheels for a religion I didn’t understand.
A woman stood at the central workstation, dark blonde hair catching the strange light, her right side scarred with the pale texture of radiation burns. She looked up as we entered, and her eyes held the kind of focus that made me feel simultaneously seen and catalogued.
“Ragna Thorsdottir,” she said, not quite a question. “Your application essay on quantum-entangled relay systems in high-interference environments was elegant. I’m Tyra Svensdottir. Welcome to the place where communication theory meets the impossible.” She gestured at the equations floating around us. “Everything you learned about signal propagation? It’s all still true. It’s just that here, we’ve added seventeen new dimensions for the signals to get lost in.”
The airlock cycled with a sound like a sigh, and I stepped through into air that tasted wrong. Not stale but somehow angular, like breathing geometry. My lungs registered it as different before my conscious mind caught up.
A tall woman waited on the other side, platinum blonde hair cut military-short, captain’s insignia gleaming on her immaculate uniform. She extended her hand with the kind of confidence that came from commanding spaces most people couldn’t even conceptualize.
“Hallgerd Magnusson,” she said. Her grip was firm, professional, her steel-gray eyes taking my measure in a single sweep. “Welcome to Yggdrasil, Thorsdottir. The pocket universe takes some adjustment.” She released my hand and gestured toward the corridor ahead. “Don’t look directly at the viewports for more than a few seconds until your visual cortex adapts. We’ve had people vomit from the perspective distortion.”
I nodded, trying to look like someone who belonged here, like someone whose entire understanding of physics wasn’t about to be rewritten. My left hand tremored slightly in its interface glove.
“Understood, Captain.”
“Just Hallgerd. We don’t stand much on hierarchy here.” Her smile was slight but genuine. “Though you’ll find that’s easier said than practiced.”
The corridor stretched ahead, clean Scandinavian lines interrupted by viewports every three meters. Hallgerd’s warning echoed in my head, but my eyes found the nearest window anyway. Couldn’t help it, like telling yourself not to think about falling.
The pocket universe stared back.
Colors that shouldn’t exist rippled across impossible distances. Auroras moved in directions my visual cortex had no framework for processing. Not up or down, not forward or back, but through angles that made my inner ear scream. The boundary shimmered like soap film stretched across infinity, simultaneously close enough to touch and unreachably distant.
My stomach dropped. The corridor tilted, or maybe I did.
I grabbed the rail, knuckles white, fighting the urge to close my eyes. My tremor spiked, the glove compensating automatically.
This was where I’d chosen to work. Inside a deliberate wound in reality.
I forced my gaze away from the viewport, back to the hub. The crew moved like they’d forgotten what normal space felt like. A woman with a temple port laughing at something her display showed, an older man in medical blues checking inventory without even glancing at the reality-bending sky. They’d stopped seeing the impossible.
I wondered how long until I would too.
Hallgerd’s hand settled on my shoulder, warm, solid, real in a way the viewport wasn’t. “The disorientation passes,” she said, her voice carrying command-deck certainty. “A few days. Your body adapts to the new physics.”
New physics. As if reality was something you could just learn different rules for.
“You’ll work Communications Module 3 with Signe. Quantum-entangled relays. Familiar systems.” Her grip tightened slightly. “Colonial techs know how to make things work when nothing’s coming to save you. That’s why you’re here, Thorsdottir.”
“Let me show you what we’re actually doing here.” Tyra’s voice cut through the fog still wrapping my thoughts, sharper than Hallgerd’s reassurance. Not unkind, but impatient: the tone of someone who’d explained this a hundred times and knew the next hundred wouldn’t make it clearer.
She moved toward the observation deck, expecting me to follow. I did, because what else was there?
The boundary shimmered beyond the reinforced viewport. Oil on water, someone had said in the briefing documents, but that was bureaucratic poetry trying to domesticate something fundamentally wrong. The colors bled into each other in sequences that shouldn’t exist: wavelengths my eyes registered but my brain refused to process. Ultraviolet folding into infrared, light that was somehow also shadow.
Every physics course I’d taken on Heimdall Colony was screaming. Causality didn’t work like this. Spacetime didn’t bend this way. The equations I’d memorized, the principles I’d built my career on. They were children’s drawings compared to this.
But my eyes confirmed it. Real. Impossible and real.
Tyra stood too close, close enough that I could smell the faint ozone scent that clung to her lab coat. Her scarred hands moved through the air, gesturing at holographic equations that materialized around us. Mathematical poetry in a language I barely spoke.
“The substrate responds to precisely calibrated field harmonics,” she said, fingers tracing a symbol that looked almost like a Lagrangian but twisted through dimensions I couldn’t visualize. “We’re not breaking physics. We’re finding the seams where different physical laws meet.”
Her confidence was absolute. These were hands that had touched the fundamental fabric of reality and survived: the scars proved it. She’d paid for this knowledge in burned flesh and still reached for more.
I wanted to understand. Wanted to be someone who could stand here and see what she saw.
Instead, I just felt small.
The equations bloomed across the holographic field like crystalline flowers, each petal a tensor calculus expression that my training recognized, barely, before it folded into something else entirely. I knew those symbols. I’d used them to calculate signal degradation through plasma fields, to map quantum entanglement across relay networks.
But here they twisted. Rotated through axes that shouldn’t exist.
The other scientists leaned forward, asking questions in a technical dialect I’d never heard. “Substrate resonance harmonics” and “dimensional membrane tension coefficients.” Words that sounded like physics but operated in a grammar beyond my vocabulary.
My left hand started its familiar tremor. Stress always made it worse. I gripped the console edge, trying to make it look casual. Attentive. Like I was steadying myself to focus rather than just staying upright.
The numbers kept cascading. Tyra’s hands danced through them, pulling equations apart and reassembling them into new configurations. Each transformation was elegant, precise. She moved through eleven-dimensional mathematics the way I moved through standard comm protocols. I understood perhaps one symbol in five.
And even those, I suspected, I was understanding wrong.
The words hit me like decompression. I’d been bracing for dismissal. For the polite corporate smile that meant “you don’t belong here.” Instead, Tyra was offering me a framework. Not to understand her mathematics but to understand where my skills fit into this impossible place.
“Relationships,” I repeated, testing the word. My tremoring hand relaxed slightly against the console. “Not spatial positions but… ratios between states.”
“Exactly.” Her scarred face caught the holographic light, transforming the old radiation damage into something almost deliberate. Artistic. “You already think that way with signal propagation. Quantum entanglement isn’t about distance. It’s about relationship. This”, she gestured at the equations still floating between us, “is just more relationships. More complex, yes, but the same fundamental principle.”
The others drifted away like debris in zero-g, back to their stations where they belonged. Where they understood. I stayed rooted, watching the containment field generators pulse with barely-contained power, feeling the vibration in my bones.
Tyra turned to me fully then, and something shifted in her expression. The lecturer’s mask cracked.
“I read your file,” she said quietly, and my stomach dropped. Here it comes. “Your work on quantum-entangled relay repair: using improvised components from three different colonial systems? That was elegant.”
Elegant. The word felt foreign applied to my work. Jury-rigged. Desperate. Functional. Those were my words.
Her fingers grazed mine, deliberate or accident, I couldn’t parse it, as she traced the equation’s curve through holographic light. “The pocket universe negotiates with reality,” she said, voice dropping intimate. “Your colonial instinct for electromagnetic patterns? That matters here more than theory.”
The compliment felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. My pulse betrayed me, responding to proximity and possibility in equal measure.
Hallgerd’s voice cut through the dining area’s low murmur like a blade through water, clean, precise, impossible to ignore. “Ragna Thorsdottir, join me please.”
Not a command. The captain never commanded in communal spaces, maintained the egalitarian fiction with disciplined care. But somehow the invitation carried weight that made refusal unthinkable.
I lifted my tray, hyper-aware of every eye tracking my movement across the dining module. The standard-issue tables were identical, the chairs all regulation height, the spacing deliberately equal. Colonial principles made physical. Yet my path to Hallgerd’s table felt like crossing a stage, proximity to authority becoming its own currency despite the carefully maintained architecture of equality.
My hands wanted to tremble. I locked them steady through practiced compensation, wouldn’t give my condition that satisfaction. Not here. Not now.
Hallgerd gestured to the seat across from her with the same casual grace she’d use for anyone. The performance was flawless. I slid into the chair, set my tray down with deliberate care, felt the weight of observation from every other table like pressure against my skin.
On my colony, hierarchy had been explicit. You knew where you stood, who outranked you, which conversations required permission. Here, the Scandinavian ideal insisted we were all equals, all entitled to sit anywhere, speak to anyone. The principle was beautiful.
The reality underneath made my chest tight.
Because this wasn’t just dinner. This was something else entirely, wrapped in the fiction of casual conversation. Hallgerd’s steel-gray eyes held mine with complete, undivided attention: the kind of focus that felt like being scanned by diagnostic equipment, every response measured and catalogued.
“I’ve been reviewing personnel files,” she said, her tone conversational, almost warm. “Your background interests me. Tell me about your colony’s communication infrastructure.”
The question landed like a test I hadn’t known I was taking.
I started describing our colony’s setup: the way we’d jury-rigged communication relays from decommissioned mining scanners, how I’d learned to read interference patterns in the asteroid field’s magnetic chaos. Technical details I’d always been proud of, problems I’d solved with wire and improvisation and stubborn refusal to accept “impossible.”
Hallgerd listened like my words were data streams, her attention absolute. Not the polite half-focus of social conversation. Something sharper. Clinical.
“The power distribution problem,” she said, leaning forward slightly. “How did you solve it without standard regulators?”
I explained the capacitor array I’d built from salvage, how I’d mapped the power fluctuations and found the rhythm underneath. Her eyes never left my face. Watching not just what I said but how I thought through problems, how I structured solutions.
The realization hit mid-sentence: this wasn’t dinner conversation. This was assessment. Evaluation wrapped in egalitarian performance, the corporate version of a job interview conducted without ever acknowledging the interview existed.
My colony would have posted the position, held formal reviews, made the hierarchy explicit.
Here, talent identification happened over standard-issue meals at identical tables, invisible and constant.
“, the Jotunheim relay network upgrade, forty million credits, twelve stations, eighteen-month timeline,” Hallgerd’s voice stayed casual, using the numbers as throwaway context for some point about phased implementation strategies.
Forty million credits.
My hands went still around my fork. My entire home station’s annual budget, life support, mining operations, education, medical, everything, ran maybe four million. On a good year.
She’d referenced a sum ten times our existence like it was a minor project detail.
“Of course, scaling challenges differ,” Hallgerd continued smoothly, and I realized she’d clocked my reaction, was already adjusting. “Resource optimization matters at every level.”
I’d been about to mention our three-relay system. How proud I’d been of making it work.
The words died in my throat, suddenly small as dust.
Bjorn from hydroponics stood, polite but firm. “Captain, the water reclamation priority should shift to agricultural,”
Hallgerd listened, nodded, actually changed the schedule.
I watched the room relax. Democracy in action.
Except she’d already locked in medical and life support allocations before this meeting. The “debate” was over scraps. Consensus-building that looked like shared power, felt like it, while the real decisions had been made in conversations I hadn’t been invited to.
My colony’s commanders just gave orders. Honest, at least.
Hallgerd’s words hung in the recycled air like a verdict reversed. My trembling hand (the thing I’d hidden through three interview rounds) suddenly testimony instead of evidence against me.
“Miracles from scraps.” She’d seen my repair logs. The relay I’d rebuilt with colonist ingenuity and spit.
These corporate techs had never needed anything to work. Just ordered replacements.
I’d needed everything.
The tremor pulsed. For once, I didn’t hide it.
I’d watched Signe’s hands move across the interface panel with the efficiency of someone who didn’t need to look. “Want to jack in together?” she’d asked, like offering to share lunch. “Diagnostic sequence goes faster with two perspectives.”
The silver port at her temple caught the overhead lighting. I’d seen those ports before. On traders passing through my colony, on corporate techs who’d visited for equipment upgrades. My mother’s voice echoed: They lose themselves in there. Forget what it means to be present.
“I don’t have an implant,” I said, which wasn’t what she’d asked.
Signe’s smile held no judgment. “I know. You use the manual interface. I’ve watched you work: you catch things I miss.” She tapped her temple. “This just lets me process faster. Different tools, yeah?”
Different tools. Not better. Different.
She settled into her station, fingers finding the neural interface contacts without looking. Her breathing shifted, deeper, more measured. Then her eyes began to flicker, that distinctive rapid movement that had always unsettled me. Like watching someone dream while awake.
But her voice stayed steady. “Bringing up channels one through six. See that corruption pattern on three? Intermittent, every forty-seven seconds.”
I pulled up the data stream on my manual display. There. A flutter I’d catalogued as random noise. “I logged that as interference.”
“It’s too regular.” Her eyes still flickering, processing information I couldn’t see. “Watch.” She isolated the pattern, ran it through filters I hadn’t thought to apply. “Forty-seven point three seconds. Exact. That’s not interference: that’s something generating a signal.”
My hands moved across my own interface, checking her work through traditional analysis. She was right. Completely right. And she’d found it in seconds while I’d spent an hour missing it.
The tremor in my left hand pulsed. Not inadequacy this time. Recognition.
The data streams split across our shared displays like tributaries of light. Signe’s fingers rested motionless on her interface contacts while her consciousness moved through the systems. One. Two. Three. Four, five, six.
“Channel one’s clean,” she said, her voice unchanged despite her eyes’ constant flicker. “Two has standard pocket universe distortion. Three. There’s that corruption pattern again. Four’s showing quantum decoherence in the entanglement pairs. Five and six are nominal.”
She explained each stream like Kari walking me through a medical procedure. Patient. Thorough. Assuming I wanted to understand rather than just receive conclusions.
“Wait.” Her attention sharpened on channel three. “There. You see it?”
I pulled up the same data on my manual display, fingers clumsy compared to her neural elegance. The pattern she’d isolated showed a rhythmic degradation I’d completely overlooked in my earlier analysis.
“I marked that as random interference,” I admitted.
“Your pattern recognition is better for anomalies,” Signe said, already running correlation algorithms. “Mine’s better for volume. We complement each other, yeah?”
Not competition. Collaboration.
The tremor in my hand felt less like failure.
The pain crossed Signe’s face before she could mask it: hand rising to her temple port, fingers pressing against the silver interface. Her eyes’ steady flicker became erratic, data streams collapsing into chaos visible in her expression.
She disconnected with practiced smoothness. “Just feedback from the dimensional interference. Happens sometimes.”
The casualness in her voice was the same tone I used when my hand seized mid-repair. It’s fine. Just the condition.
Signe’s augmentation wasn’t the superpower I’d imagined. It was another way of working around a body’s limitations. She made miracles from imperfect flesh and questionable technology, same as me with my custom gloves and tremor-compensation algorithms.
We were both just finding ways to function despite everything trying to stop us.
The conversation shifted as they recalibrated the quantum arrays. Signe’s hands moved across her console while she spoke, casual: “My collective voted for neural implants despite the elders’ resistance. We needed every efficiency advantage. Ideology’s a luxury when you’re counting oxygen.”
The words hit like a diagnostic reading I didn’t want to see. My colony had rejected augmentation as unnatural: but we’d had enough resources to afford principles. Signe’s people had chosen survival over philosophy.
My left hand tremored against the console, suddenly feeling like its own accusation.
“I requested Communications assignment because of you,” Signe said, not meeting my eyes. “Your reputation: improvising with broken equipment, making systems work past their specs. That’s real skill, not just procedure-following.”
The admiration in her voice made me uncomfortable. She was seeing me the way I’d been seeing Tyra: someone operating on another level entirely.
Except I wasn’t. I was just making do, same as her collective had with their implants. Survival forcing innovation. Expertise wasn’t hierarchical; it was collaborative, contextual.
My prejudices about augmentation crumbled watching her work through obvious pain, choosing function over comfort.
The message appeared while I was elbow-deep in a relay junction, Signe’s neural port flickering as she routed diagnostic streams around corrupted pathways. My interface glove vibrated against the quantum-entangled components. Incoming personal transmission, not system alert.
I shouldn’t have checked it immediately. Professional protocol demanded I finish the repair sequence first. But my left hand was already trembling from forty minutes of precision work, and I needed the excuse to pull back before I damaged something.
“Come to Research Module 1, observation deck, 23:[^00], if you want to see something extraordinary.” Tyra’s name glowed in the sender field. No formal signature, no research justification. Just… invitation.
My finger hovered over delete. This was how boundaries eroded: casual messages, after-hours meetings, the slow drift from colleague to something undefined. I’d watched it happen on Freya Station, the complications that followed when professional distance collapsed in confined spaces.
But I was already calculating corridor schedules, checking which decontamination cycles would be running, mapping the path between modules that would minimize encounters. The conspiracy of it made my pulse quicken in a way that had nothing to do with my condition.
Twenty-three hundred meant third shift, skeleton crew, most people in their quarters. I could transit through the hub during the automated cleaning cycle. Medical wouldn’t flag movement between modules unless someone triggered biometric alerts.
I was planning this like a teenager sneaking out. Not a communications officer with a degenerative neurological condition and a professional reputation to maintain.
“You okay?” Signe’s voice pulled me back. She was watching me with that too-perceptive implant-user focus, probably reading my elevated heart rate through the station’s biometric mesh.
“Fine. Just need to change out my gloves.” I closed the message without deleting it. “Can you finish the calibration sequence?”
“Sure.” She didn’t believe me, but she didn’t push.
I had four hours to decide if I was actually going.
The observation deck was empty except for Tyra standing at the viewport, her radiation scars catching the impossible light from the pocket universe boundary. She turned as I approached, and something in her expression made my chest tighten. Scientific enthusiasm mixed with something softer, more personal.
“I wanted to share this with someone who understands what it means to see beyond the surface.” Her voice carried that particular warmth she used when explaining theories she loved.
The compliment landed differently than Signe’s earlier admiration. Signe looked up to me. Tyra was inviting me to stand beside her, as if I belonged in that unreachable space of brilliance she inhabited.
The aurora of wrong colors reflected in her eyes as she gestured me closer. “Come here. You need to see this properly.”
I moved to the viewport, acutely conscious of the distance between us: less than a meter, then half that. The heat between our bodies felt tangible in the ozone-scented air, or maybe that was just the dimensional radiation making my skin prickle.
“Watch this section,” she said, pointing.
The viewport’s light painted Tyra’s scars silver as she moved closer, her shoulder pressing against mine with deliberate weight. “See how the boundary oscillates here?” Her hand rose to trace the pattern, and her fingers wrapped around my wrist (not accidental this time, purposeful) guiding my hand to follow the fluctuation’s rhythm.
My left hand tremored harder, the neural degradation betraying every spike of adrenaline. I tried to steady it against my thigh, but Tyra had already noticed. She always noticed.
“The mathematics predict.
“Most people see it as wrong, disturbing. But you’re not flinching.” Tyra’s voice had dropped to something intimate, dangerous. Her gaze left the viewport, fixed on my face with an intensity that made dimensional physics irrelevant.
The moment stretched. My pulse hammered against my throat as I understood: this wasn’t about science.
I met those dark eyes and saw my own want reflected back. Colony instincts screamed warnings about reaching beyond my place, but I was already leaning in.
The pocket universe’s colors still burned behind my eyelids when I finally reached my quarters. My hand tingled where hers had almost touched. Had almost. Or had briefly, so quickly I might have imagined the warmth?
I lay in the dark, replaying her voice dropping low, the way she’d looked at me instead of the impossible sky. Someone like Tyra Svensdottir didn’t want techs from nowhere colonies. Couldn’t.
But her hand had lingered.
Hallgerd’s office occupied the central hub’s upper level, and walking into it felt like stepping into a space designed by someone who’d never had to choose between heat and food. The walls curved in that expensive way that said custom fabrication, not modular standard. Viewports showed the pocket universe’s impossible aurora from three angles. Beauty as casual backdrop rather than the scientific miracle it was.
“Sit, please.” The captain gestured to a chair positioned exactly level with her own, no desk between them. Just two seats angled toward each other like equals having a conversation.
My colony upbringing screamed wrong at the setup. Authority sat higher. Power put barriers between itself and workers. But Hallgerd settled into her chair with the ease of someone who’d never questioned that leadership could be collaborative, that Scandinavian corporate egalitarianism wasn’t performance but structure.
I sat. My left hand tremored against my thigh.
The holographic display materialized between us: my performance metrics rendered in clean blue light. Efficiency ratings. Problem-solving scores. Innovation indices. Numbers that climbed higher than I’d let myself hope for, each percentage point another step away from “adequate despite disability” toward something I didn’t have words for.
“Your improvised solution to the quantum decoherence problem showed systems-level thinking we don’t usually see from technicians.” Hallgerd’s voice carried approval without condescension, stating fact rather than praise.
Technicians. The word landed like a classification I’d worn so long I’d forgotten it was a container. Something that held me at a certain level, kept expectations manageable, made my condition the most interesting thing about my capabilities.
Hallgerd’s steel-gray eyes assessed me with an intensity that felt like being truly seen for the first time since arriving. Not seeing past the tremors. Seeing through the deliberate smallness I’d wrapped around myself like armor.
“Have you considered,” she said carefully, “what you might accomplish if you stopped thinking of yourself as someone who fixes problems and started thinking of yourself as someone who solves them?”
The distinction she drew felt like philosophy, but her expression said she meant something concrete. Practical. Real.
“I’m not sure I understand the difference.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“Fixing means responding to failure. Solving means understanding why systems fail and redesigning them so they don’t.” She gestured at my metrics. “You’ve been doing the second while calling it the first.”
The words rearranged something in my chest. All those late shifts I’d told myself were just thoroughness: mapping the entire communications infrastructure, documenting redundancies, modeling failure cascades. I’d framed it as diligence. Compensation for the tremors that made me slower at physical repairs.
But Hallgerd was naming it something else. Systems thinking. Architecture-level comprehension.
“Your condition,” she said, and my spine went rigid. Here it came. The gentle suggestion that I’d peaked, that maintenance work was appropriate for someone managing decline. “It’s taught you to think in contingencies. To build resilience into everything you touch. That’s not a limitation. That’s a strategic advantage we need.”
Need. Not tolerate. Not accommodate.
Need.
I hadn’t planned to say it. The safe answer was right there: maintain current competencies, perhaps mentor junior techs. Words that acknowledged my reality without demanding more than a body with failing nerves could promise.
But Hallgerd’s assumption had cracked something open. No doctor had ever used that word. Stabilize. They said manage decline, accommodate progression, prepare for eventuality.
“I want to understand the systems, not just repair them.”
The words escaped before I could stop them. Wanting felt dangerous. Admitting want felt worse.
My left hand tremored against my thigh. Evidence. Proof that I’d just revealed too much, reached for something a smarter person would know to leave alone.
Hallgerd’s smile carried weight I couldn’t parse, satisfaction, maybe calculation. She pulled up organizational charts like they were gifts, cross-training schedules and certification tracks appearing on her display. Advanced systems theory. Leadership protocols. She spoke about years as though my nerves weren’t counting down months.
Hope burned through my chest. That treacherous colonial weakness. Hope was how you broke when the universe remembered you were disposable.
But I didn’t say no.
My reflection ghosted across the viewport: copper braid, tremoring hand, eyes too wide. Behind me, the pocket universe folded colors that had no names. Something impossible, holding itself together through sheer force of mathematics and will.
I pressed my palm against the glass. The tremor looked worse in reflection.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe Hallgerd saw what I couldn’t: not the countdown, but the defiance of existing anyway.
I stood in the Communications Hub’s center, surrounded by Kari’s medical objections made manifest in his posture: arms crossed, jaw tight, that look he got when he was remembering Njord Station and everyone he couldn’t save. Signe had already activated her temple port, the silver interface flickering with readiness, and I could see her wanting to help, wanting to prove that neural operators weren’t fragile despite what people thought.
“It’s not a medical procedure,” I said, keeping my voice level even as my left hand betrayed me with another tremor against the console edge. The custom gloves helped, the pressure sensors and stabilization mesh did their job, but they couldn’t hide everything. “It’s a technical workaround. Signe guides me through the protocol steps, I make the physical connections manually. No actual neural interface for me.”
“Manually.” Kari’s tone carried all his unspoken fears. “Through corrupted relay systems experiencing dimensional interference. Ragna, the feedback alone,”
“Won’t be worse than what we’re already experiencing from communication blackout.” I met his eyes, willing him to see past the daughter-he-lost and recognize the technician-who-could-fix-this. “We’ve been isolated for sixteen days. People in other modules don’t know if we’re alive. That’s its own kind of damage.”
Signe stepped forward, her young face serious. “I can monitor the signal corruption in real-time through my implant. If the interference spikes beyond safe parameters, I’ll know before Ragna’s even connected.”
The lie sat between us. We all knew dimensional interference didn’t follow predictable patterns. But Hallgerd had appeared in the doorway, drawn by the raised voices, and I saw her calculating. Weighing crew morale against individual risk. Weighing my capabilities against my condition.
“Show me the procedure breakdown,” she said finally. “Step by step. Then I’ll decide.”
My tremoring hand steadied slightly. Someone was letting me try.
The first node came online with a sound like reality clicking into place: a harmonic I felt in my teeth. Then the second, third, my consciousness spreading through the communication network in a way that shouldn’t have been possible without Signe’s implants, but there I was, feeling the station’s isolation as physical pressure against my ribs. The pocket universe’s interference translated as static in my bones, crawling up my spine.
My left hand’s tremor intensified, then, impossibly, synchronized with the dimensional fluctuations. A moment of terrible clarity: my degenerating nervous system was reading the instability, translating it, using it. The weakness I’d spent years compensating for suddenly became a kind of antenna.
“Ragna, your vitals,” Kari’s voice, distant.
But I was already mapping paths through chaos itself. Seventeen nodes lighting up like constellation points, each connection a triumph over physics and my own failing body. The pain was exquisite, ice and fire braiding through every nerve, but the network was singing, and I was the conductor.
For the first time in years, my condition wasn’t limiting me.
It was making me capable of something no one else could do.
The network opened like a flower blooming in reverse, pulling me inward. Fourth node, fifth: my awareness fragmenting across relay points that shouldn’t have accepted manual routing. The dimensional static wasn’t interference anymore; it was information. My tremoring left hand translated frequencies that the equipment couldn’t parse, each involuntary spasm a data point mapping the pocket universe’s electromagnetic signature.
Sixth node. Seventh. The pain transcended physical: synapses misfiring in patterns that somehow matched the containment field’s fluctuations. My condition wasn’t reading the instability. It was resonating with it.
“Ragna, you’re seizing. I was working. Eleven nodes. Thirteen. The weakness that had defined me for years suddenly made me the only person who could navigate this impossible space between dimensions.
Fifteen nodes blazing. Sixteen. Almost there.
The console’s edge caught my spine as I folded backward, neural pathways still firing phantom connections. Signe’s hands, steady, warm, arrested my fall while seventeen modules erupted with voices I’d thought lost forever. Medical calling Engineering. Research confirming containment stability. Crew members sobbing relief through static.
Kari’s scanner swept my temples. I couldn’t stop laughing, couldn’t grip his wrist to reassure him, my hands useless beautiful disasters that had just threaded impossible needles. Hallgerd’s “Well done” reached through the chaos, quiet as benediction.
Signe looked at me like I’d hung stars instead of routing signals.
Kari’s scanner hummed against my skull while he catalogued my stupidity in three languages. I couldn’t stop grinning. The network held. My dying neurons had threaded seventeen impossible connections, made me the station’s beating heart for thirty perfect minutes.
Then Bjornulf appeared for his medication. Watched Kari fuss over me like salvaged family. His tremoring hands (worse than mine, always worse) clenched white. Ice-blue eyes measured my triumph against his deterioration.
I understood the equation. My miracle was his death sentence.
The files opened like wounds. My gloves compensated for the tremor that wanted to shake my hands apart, but nothing steadied the sick lurch in my stomach as I read.
Dimensional Cascade Probability Models. Such clean language for apocalypse. The mathematics was Tyra’s. She’d calculated our deaths with the same precision she brought to everything.
Seventy-three percent probability of containment failure within six months. The date stamp glowed accusatory: eight weeks before quarantine protocols locked us in this bubble of impossible space. They’d known. Hallgerd had known. Had stood in the communications hub and praised my improvised relay repairs while carrying this knowledge like ballast.
I scrolled deeper, my interface gloves translating tremor into steady commands. Corporate memos discussing “acceptable risk parameters” and “research value versus personnel exposure.” My name appeared in one assessment: Thorsdottir shows promise despite medical limitations. Recommend continued mentorship but restrict access to cascade modeling data. Neurological condition may compromise decision-making under stress.
The laugh that escaped me tasted like copper. They’d decided I was too fragile for truth. Too damaged to be trusted with the same information they’d given Hallgerd, probably Tyra. The promising subordinate who needed guidance, protection, careful handling.
My left hand spasmed against the interface. I forced it steady, downloaded everything to an encrypted partition. The station’s life support hummed around me. Forty-seven days of air, maybe less if the pocket universe kept degrading. We were rats in a maze someone had built knowing the walls might collapse.
Hallgerd had smiled. Had talked about my future, about leadership potential, about the importance of trust in command structures. Had treated me like salvaged family while reading projections of our collective grave.
I understood Bjornulf’s rage now. The bitter mathematics of being deemed insufficient for full truth.
The briefing room fell silent when I entered. Hallgerd looked up from her morning report, that familiar expression of patient authority already forming: the one that said she was prepared to guide me through whatever problem I’d brought her.
I didn’t give her the chance.
My fingers moved across the interface, clumsy with rage and sleeplessness, projecting the files into the holographic display where everyone could see them. The cascade probability models bloomed like toxic flowers in the air between us.
“Seventy-three percent,” I said. My voice came out raw, scraped thin by thirty hours awake and the bitter taste of betrayal. “Eight weeks before quarantine. You knew.”
Signe’s sharp intake of breath. Kari’s hand freezing halfway to his coffee. Hallgerd’s face going carefully, professionally blank. That corporate mask I’d never seen her wear with us before.
“Ragna. The word cracked like ice.”Don’t explain why you decided I couldn’t handle this. Don’t tell me it was for my own good. I’m not your promising student who needs protection from difficult truths. I’m crew. Treat me like it.”
I slammed my palm on the table: too hard, the impact jarring up through my tremoring hand. “Eight weeks. You had eight weeks to tell us the containment field was failing, and you chose corporate protocol over our right to know we might die here.”
The holographic data rotated between us, those probability curves like accusatory fingers. Seventy-three percent chance of dimensional collapse within six months. The numbers didn’t lie, even if command had.
“How many other decisions have you made for us?” My glove joints whirred as I steadied my hand. “What else are you protecting your fragile communications tech from knowing?”
Signe’s workstation chair creaked. Kari’s jaw tightened. The silence felt like vacuum.
I watched her face do something I’d never seen before: the composure fracturing, just for a breath, and underneath was something raw. Hurt, maybe. Then the mask reformed, but different now. Harder.
“You’re correct,” she said. Each word precise as a scalpel. “Need-to-know was my judgment. My error.”
But her eyes said: I was trying to protect you.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The silence stretched until it became its own statement. Around us, the crew shifted. “You’re right,” Hallgerd said finally. Not an apology. An acknowledgment. “The data is yours to review.”
When she looked at me again, something had equalized between us. I’d wanted that. Demanded it.
So why did it feel like I’d just broken something irreplaceable?
The first time happened three weeks into quarantine. I’d stayed late calibrating signal processors while Tyra adjusted containment field harmonics: work that required coordination but not conversation. Yet I found myself explaining my improvised solutions in unnecessary detail, technical descriptions I knew she didn’t need, just to hear those thoughtful hums of understanding she made when following complex problems.
She began leaving her workstation more often. Standing closer than the work required. Our shoulders nearly touching as we shared a display, her scarred hand reaching past mine to adjust parameters, the Research Module’s ozone taste mixing with whatever subtle scent she wore. Something clean and sharp, like winter air on metal. It made my concentration fracture.
My left hand tremored worse when she was near. The glove’s stabilizers compensated, but I wondered if she noticed. Wondered if that’s why she’d started watching me work with that intense focus she usually reserved for dimensional mathematics.
“You don’t have to explain everything,” she said one night, not looking up from her calculations. “I trust your solutions.”
The words shouldn’t have hit as hard as they did. Trust. Not pity. Not the careful distance most people maintained around my condition, that invisible buffer of anticipated failure.
“I like explaining to you,” I admitted, then immediately wanted to recall it. Too honest. Too revealing.
She looked up then. The holographic display painted her scarred face in shifting auroras, beautiful and strange. “I like listening.”
The silence that followed felt different than the comfortable quiet we’d built. Charged. Dangerous. The containment field generators hummed their constant warning about forces barely controlled.
“We should run another calibration,” I said, not moving.
“We should,” Tyra agreed, also not moving.
Neither of us reached for our workstations.
The manufactured excuses became our language. Tyra would message about “anomalous interference patterns in sector seven” that somehow required my physical presence in the Research Module. I’d claim the containment field harmonics were “corrupting my signal baseline” and need her to walk me through the mathematics.
We both knew the station AI could coordinate our systems automatically.
One night, calibrating a particularly stubborn relay, my glove malfunctioned. The tremor broke through, my hand jerking across the interface. I yanked it back, face burning, already forming the apology I’d perfected over years.
Tyra caught my wrist. Not restraining: steadying. Her scarred fingers traced the glove’s reinforced seams, the custom servo joints, the neural feedback threads I’d woven myself.
“Show me how it works,” she said quietly.
Not what’s wrong with you. Not can you still do your job. Just genuine curiosity about the solution I’d engineered.
So I explained. The progression, the compensations, the future I was building despite my body’s betrayal. And she listened like I was describing something beautiful rather than broken.
When I finished, she held my gloved hand between both of hers.
“You’ve made yourself unstoppable,” she said.
The moment stretched like the pocket universe itself. Infinite possibility compressed into finite space. Tyra’s scarred cheek was warm beneath my palm, the textured skin familiar from a hundred stolen glances. My tremor had gone silent, every nerve focused on the centimeters between us.
“Ragna,” she whispered, and my name had never sounded like that before: question and answer together.
I felt the decision crystallize in my chest. We were already quarantined, already living on borrowed time in a dimension that shouldn’t exist. What was one more impossible thing?
I closed the distance. Her lips met mine halfway, soft, tentative, then suddenly fierce. Her hands found my face, my hair, pulling the braid loose with desperate gentleness. I tasted recycled air and coffee and something indefinably her.
The first kiss dissolved into the second, then a third. Each one erasing the careful distance we’d maintained for months. Tyra’s fingers traced my jaw, my throat, the pulse hammering there. My interface gloves caught in her hair, and she laughed against my mouth, that rare sound I’d memorized from across workstations. “We can’t,” she breathed, even as her body contradicted every word, pressing closer until the holographic equations flickered around us like blessings.
The rules felt necessary: professional boundaries, crew cohesion, plausible deniability. But Tyra’s hands on her skin rewrote every equation. In the observation deck’s impossible light, they mapped each other with desperate precision, pretending urgency was just circumstance. When Tyra traced the tremor in Ragna’s left hand without flinching, murmuring calculations about neural pathways like love poems, the lie became transparent: this mattered more than survival itself.
I hadn’t expected her to understand the mathematics of it: the way deterioration compounds, how each failed synapse makes the next failure more likely, the exponential curve that looks manageable until suddenly it isn’t. But Tyra pulled up my scans on the medical bay’s secondary display, overlaying them with signal degradation patterns from the quantum relays, and I watched her eyes track the similarities. Neural pathways misfiring like corrupted data packets. Tremors propagating through muscle groups like interference cascading through a communication array.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a cluster of dying neurons in my motor cortex. “This is like the phase coherence problem we solved in Module 3 last month. The system isn’t failing: it’s losing synchronization.”
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t the same, that bodies weren’t machines you could recalibrate, but my throat had closed up. She was treating my condition like a technical challenge, not a tragedy, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful or furious.
“The treatment protocols assume linear progression,” Tyra continued, fingers dancing across the display. “But if the degradation follows a wave-collapse pattern instead,” She stopped, turned to look at me directly. “Have you tried any of the temporal stabilization techniques? The ones we use for equipment in high-interference zones?”
“On myself?” My voice came out rougher than intended.
“Why not?” She said it like it was obvious, like my body was just another system requiring maintenance. “The pocket universe affects biological processes. We know that. What if your condition isn’t just progressing. What if it’s being accelerated by dimensional interference? What if we could shield you the same way we shield the equipment?”
It was probably impossible. Definitely dangerous. Completely against medical protocols.
But she was looking at me like I was a problem worth solving, not a person worth pitying, and that made all the difference.
I kept two logs after that conversation with Tyra. The official maintenance records showed flawless execution: every quantum relay calibrated within point-zero-three microseconds, every signal processor aligned to manufacturer specifications, completion times that would make any supervisor proud. The encrypted file told different stories: Relay 7-B required four attempts because my left hand seized during the coupling procedure. Communications array realignment took six hours instead of two. I’d developed seventeen distinct workarounds for tasks requiring steady hands I no longer possessed. Bracing my wrist against bulkheads, using magnetic clamps as external stabilizers, programming macros to compensate for tremor frequencies I could predict now with disturbing accuracy.
I reviewed that private catalog obsessively during sleep shifts, cross-referencing my degradation curve against essential station functions, calculating the exact day I’d become more liability than asset. The mathematics were merciless. Twelve weeks until I couldn’t perform emergency repairs. Eight months until I couldn’t operate a standard interface without assistance.
I was documenting my own obsolescence with the same precision I brought to every technical challenge, and somehow that felt like the only control I had left.
The moment stretched between us like a quantum state. Signe’s fingers moved across her interface with the casual expertise of someone who’d hidden her own vulnerabilities, and I watched her teach me the patterns of deception: how to introduce micro-variations that mimicked genuine biological drift, how to corrupt just enough data points that Kari’s diagnostic algorithms would flag them as sensor errors rather than systematic manipulation.
“The implant community learned this years ago,” she said quietly, not meeting my eyes. “When they started pulling operators for ‘neural stress indicators’ that were just… us being us.”
Her conspiracy felt like drowning and breathing simultaneously: the terrible relief of not being alone in my dishonesty, the crushing weight of someone else’s career now tangled with my deception.
The research became my secret vigil: slipping into Tyra’s workstation after she’d gone, fingers trembling over medical databases that catalogued experimental treatments, neural regeneration protocols trapped outside our dimensional prison. I memorized case studies of patients who’d maintained function for years, never the ones who’d declined rapidly. Each article fed elaborate fantasies: breakthrough treatments reaching us if quarantine lifted, if we survived, if my body didn’t betray me first. Hope disguised as preparation, really just another form of lying.
The corridor’s recycled air felt thick between us, his ice-blue eyes tracking every micro-tremor in my exposed hands, I’d removed the gloves to prove some stupid point about transparency. “You get Kari’s attention,” Bjornulf said, voice catching on the consonants his failing nerves garbled. “Special equipment. Extra monitoring.” His accusation landed because it was partially true: I’d cultivated my usefulness like armor, made myself irreplaceable so no one would see me as already lost.
I’d rehearsed the presentation three times in the communications hub, Signe watching with those bright implant-flickering eyes, offering suggestions I’d incorporated to make her feel included even as I’d already decided the framework. Now, standing in the central hub’s communal space, designed for egalitarian gatherings, every sight line equal, no podium to hide behind, I felt the architecture itself judging my assumption of authority.
My gloves gripped the holographic table’s edge, the custom pressure sensors compensating for my tremor, translating my shaking into steady contact. The matrix floated above us in cool blue light: priority tiers, resource allocations, the mathematics of choosing what mattered. Hallgerd stood to my left, her presence an endorsement I hadn’t quite earned. Across the circle, Kari’s expression carried too much understanding: he knew what this performance cost me. Tyra leaned against the research section’s railing, arms crossed, analyzing my methodology with the same focus she gave dimensional equations.
“Life support telemetry takes absolute priority,” I said, hearing my voice project with Hallgerd’s borrowed cadence, the authority I’d studied in her command briefings. “Medical monitoring second tier. Research data transmission third.” I watched Tyra’s jaw tighten. She’d wanted research elevated. “Personal communications fourth. Entertainment systems fifth.”
The silence had texture. I could feel people calculating what they’d lose. Marja from engineering had been waiting three weeks for a message from her partner. Olav had been teaching himself guitar through instructional feeds, the only thing keeping his anxiety manageable.
“Entertainment systems will be cannibalized for repair parts as needed,” I continued, my stomach acid rising. “The neural interface ports require components we can’t synthesize. Keeping communications functional means sacrificing comfort.”
Bjornulf’s voice cut across the hub: “Easy to sacrifice other people’s comfort when you’ve got custom equipment.” His tremor made the words slur slightly, which somehow made them sharper.
I met his eyes across the holographic display, my left hand tremoring against the table edge despite the glove’s compensation algorithms. “You’re right,” I said, the admission tasting like copper. “I have custom equipment. Built it myself because standard interfaces don’t accommodate progressive neurological conditions.” I watched his expression shift, uncertain whether I’d just disarmed him or armed him further. “Signe has neural ports that let her process six data streams simultaneously. Tyra has computational intuition that makes her irreplaceable for containment field maintenance. We all have advantages. We all have limitations.”
I pulled up the next tier of allocations, my fingers leaving faint tremor-traces in the holographic light before the gloves smoothed them away. “The entertainment systems use seventeen percent of our processing capacity. Medical monitoring uses twelve percent but keeps Kari from missing early symptoms of dimensional radiation exposure.” I looked at Signe, saw her bright eyes dim with comprehension. “I’m not asking anyone to like this. I’m asking you to survive it.”
The words came out in Hallgerd’s cadence, but the nausea was entirely mine.
Hallgerd’s workspace smelled of recycled coffee and determination. I spread the holographic models between us, watching power consumption curves cascade in amber light. My left hand betrayed me worse than usual: the glove’s haptic feedback stuttering as I traced module isolation protocols.
“Communications Module Three can run on auxiliary for seventy-two hours if we cycle the quantum relays.” The words came out clinical, detached. “Medical gets priority power. Research second. We isolate Modules Five and Six completely.”
Hallgerd’s steel-gray eyes tracked every tremor, every hesitation I couldn’t hide. The silence stretched until I wanted to fill it with justifications, apologies, anything.
“You’ve learned to think like a captain,” she said finally.
I felt the weight of it settle across my shoulders like a uniform I hadn’t earned. Compliment and condemnation in six words.
I stood at the holographic display, my voice cutting through the murmur. “Video feeds go dark at 0600. Audio and data only.”
The silence hit like decompression. Then Tyra, sharp: “Did you consult mental health protocols?”
“I consulted the power logs.” My hands shook visibly. “This keeps us alive longest.”
Twenty-three faces stared. Some understanding. Some hating me for it.
I didn’t look away.
The Hub’s hum filled the silence after Signe left. No cheerful goodnight, just the hatch sealing. I studied my gloved hands against the dark console. When had I stopped asking permission? Bjornulf’s voice echoed: playing captain while people suffer.
I’d armored myself proving competence despite trembling fingers. Now that armor made decisions for twenty-three lives without hesitation.
Hallgerd’s command presence. My borrowed costume.
The gloves felt like a lie.
I stood at the holographic table, gripping its edge hard enough that the interface gloves registered protest warnings against my palms. Three nights without sleep had refined the calculations to elegant simplicity: or maybe just worn away my ability to see the flaws.
“Northwest quadrant collapse, point-three-seven seconds.” My voice came out steady, borrowed from every briefing I’d watched Hallgerd deliver. “The containment field destabilizes in a controlled cascade. We get a transmission window before automatic restoration.”
The schematics floated between us, beautiful in their precision. I’d color-coded the risk factors: amber for acceptable, red for critical. So much amber it almost looked safe.
Tyra moved to the display, her scarred fingers dancing through my calculations. She didn’t speak immediately. Never did when the math mattered. The room held its breath.
“Microsecond timing,” she said finally, voice soft as a scalpel. “In a pocket universe where temporal dilation fluctuates. Where ‘now’ is a fiction we maintain through consensus.” She looked at me, not unkindly. “You’re asking us to thread a needle that’s moving in dimensions we can’t perceive.”
Bjornulf’s laugh cracked through the tension, sharp, bitter, familiar. “Of course. The golden child’s solution: break everything and hope.”
My left hand spasmed against the table edge. The glove compensated, but everyone saw. They always saw.
I’d meant to present options. Analysis. Professional assessment of calculated risks versus certain slow deterioration. But standing there, watching hope and horror war across twenty-three faces, I understood what I’d actually done.
I’d decided. For all of them. Wrapped desperation in technical language and called it leadership.
The armor I’d built from competence and double shifts had become a cage. Worse: a weapon I’d turned on people who trusted me to see clearly.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, even through the gloves’ dampening fields.
The numbers hung between us like an execution order I’d written myself.
Twelve percent. I’d seen twelve percent. Chosen not to weight it properly because the alternative was watching us die by degrees, counting down pharmaceutical supplies while my hands forgot how to be steady.
“I saw the degradation curves.” My voice came from somewhere distant. “Adjusted the timing window to compensate.”
“You adjusted for linear degradation.” Tyra’s fingers moved through the projections, pulling up my own calculations, showing me where I’d smoothed the data. “The field collapse is exponential. Has been for six days.”
Six days I’d been running models. Six days I’d been finding ways to make the numbers say what I needed them to say.
Signe’s neural port flickered at her temple, processing, understanding faster than speech allowed. The light died. She looked away.
I’d built my entire argument on sand. Called it bedrock. Asked twenty-three people to stand on it with me.
The gloves registered my grip on the table edge: stress limits exceeded, structural integrity compromised.
They were talking about my hands.
They were talking about everything.
Tyra moved into the light like she was stepping through a threshold I couldn’t see. The holographic projections painted her scars in shifting colors: blues and purples that made the textured skin look like continental drift.
“Your plan has a twelve percent chance of creating a transmission window.” Her fingers traced probability cascades through the air. “Eighty-eight percent chance of collapsing the pocket universe instantly.”
The numbers bloomed between us. Failure trees. Causality chains.
“Killing us in ways physics doesn’t have language for yet.”
No accusation in her voice. Just the flat truth of someone who’d learned to speak damage reports while her face was still burning.
My calculations hung there, exposed. Desperate hope wearing mathematics like camouflage.
I’d dressed my fear in equations and called it science.
The vote happened without me in the room.
Hallgerd’s decision. Democratic process couldn’t include the person who’d weaponized her own desperation into a proposal.
I watched from Communications Hub as the crew gathered in the central module. Through the viewport, their body language told the story my locked-down systems couldn’t transmit: Bjornulf’s aggressive gestures, Kari’s mediating stance, Tyra’s mathematical precision even in argument.
Signe sat beside me, her neural port dark. Solidarity in silence.
“I thought I was being brave,” I said.
My gloves couldn’t hide the tremor anymore.
Kari’s voice cut through the argument. Forty-eight hours, medical authority trumping panic. Hallgerd’s hand on my shoulder felt like absolution and exile together. “Rest. Reflect on what leadership actually requires.”
Not capability. Not desperation dressed as courage.
Signe walked beside me, her silence careful, pitying. I’d proven I could work despite the tremor. I’d forgotten to ask whether I should.
The gloves felt heavier with every step.
The lockdown hit like a physical blow. Not the alarms I’d expected, but their sudden absence. One moment I was tracing a degradation pattern in the relay buffer, fingers dancing across haptic controls despite the tremor, and the next every external channel flatlined simultaneously. Not static. Not interference. Just nothing, as if the universe beyond our bubble had simply stopped existing.
My hands moved on instinct, running diagnostics I’d performed a thousand times. Reroute through backup arrays. Boost signal strength. Cycle the quantum-entanglement nodes. The motions felt right, felt purposeful, even as every readout confirmed what my gut already knew: we weren’t blocked. We were erased. The pocket universe had become a tomb with perfect life support and no exit.
Signe arrived within minutes, her neural port already flickering as she synced with the internal systems. I watched her process the same terrible data I had, saw the moment comprehension landed behind those bright blue eyes. But instead of panic, she pulled up the collaborative interface with that relentless optimism that made me simultaneously admire and want to shake her.
“Okay,” she said, sketching governance structures in light, “so external comms are down. We adapt. Everyone contributes equally, just like the station design intended,”
I couldn’t look at her. My hands hovered over consoles that had been extensions of my nervous system, quantum-entangled relays I’d spent five years mastering, equipment that could thread signals through stellar interference and gravitational lensing. Now they were just sculptures. Expensive, useless sculptures that hummed with power going nowhere.
Signe’s voice carried forced brightness as she color-coded voting protocols, and I realized her neural implant, that silver port that let her process data streams from across colonized space, was running diagnostics on our air recycling. Both of us expert operators of machinery designed to reach across light-years, reduced to monitoring our own exhalations.
I watched Signe’s fingers move through the holographic interface. Her neural port pulsed with soft blue light as she rebuilt my mistake in seconds, adding improvements I hadn’t considered. The ease of it carved something hollow in my chest.
“It’s fine,” she said, not looking at me. “Happens to everyone.”
But we both knew it didn’t. Not to her. Not to people whose bodies cooperated with their intentions.
I’d spent five years becoming indispensable. The person who could diagnose relay degradation by sound alone, who threaded signals through impossible interference, who made quantum entanglement feel intuitive. I’d built an identity from expertise because expertise was something my failing nervous system couldn’t take from me. Every certification, every solved crisis, every grateful crew member: proof that I was more than my prognosis.
Except now the relays connected to nothing. My expertise maintained equipment that served no purpose. And Signe’s implant, her youth, her steady hands. They were just as useless as my trembling ones.
We were equal now. Both obsolete. The thought should have been comforting.
It felt like drowning.
I pulled up the council schematic, adding decision nodes the way I’d mapped relay pathways a thousand times. My left hand shook as I gestured through the interface. The tremor caught a cluster of connections. Deleted them in a cascade of red error markers.
“Sorry, I,” The words stuck in my throat.
Signe’s hands were already moving, rebuilding what I’d destroyed. Graceful. Certain. The neural port at her temple flickered as she processed the structure faster than I could track.
I’d spent years becoming irreplaceable. Every certification another layer between me and the truth: that I was building expertise to outrun my body’s betrayal. That every skill was just scaffolding around the weakness spreading through my nerves.
The scaffolding was collapsing. And there was nowhere left to run.
Signe’s voice went flat as she cataloged what we had: “Signal analysis expertise. No signals. Relay diagnostics. Nothing to relay. Encryption protocols for messages we can’t send.” Each item landed like a small death. I watched her list grow: my certifications, her implant capabilities, all the technical mastery that made us valuable. Made us us. Every skill required something beyond these walls to matter. I’d built my worth on being the bridge. Now I was just another person trapped on an island, discovering I’d never learned to exist without someone needing me to connect them to somewhere else.
The tremor caught my braid as I tried to tuck it back. Fingers jerking through copper strands, making a mess of what I’d woven tight that morning. My reflection fractured across the dead display: green eyes unfocused, jaw clenched against nothing. Signe’s hand lifted toward my shoulder, hesitated in the space between comfort and professionalism, then withdrew. We’d spent years building systems to bridge distance. Neither of us knew how to cross thirty centimeters of air.
The medical bay mirror was unforgiving under full spectrum lights. I stood where Kari had left me after the examination, staring at hands that wouldn’t stop their betrayal. The circuit board lay on the counter between us, me and my reflection, where I’d dropped it. Twice. The second time I’d just let it clatter against the steel, watched the components scatter like my credibility.
My mother’s hands moved inside mine. Not metaphor, I could see them, the way memory overlays present when you’ve studied something too long. Her fingers at the breakfast table on Kiruna Mining Station, wrapped around a coffee cup that rattled against the saucer. The harsh overhead lights making every tremor a small earthquake. I’d been fourteen, angry at her weakness, embarrassed when other miners’ kids noticed.
“I’m fine, just tired.” Her voice, then. My voice, now. The same dismissive tone I’d used with Hallgerd yesterday, with Signe this morning, with Kari ten minutes ago when he’d asked how I was managing. The genetic echo was so precise it felt like I’d been reading from a script, hitting marks someone else had already worn into the stage.
I lifted my right hand, watched it shake. Tried to steady it with my left. Both trembled together. The custom interface gloves sat on the counter, their stabilization servos and pressure feedback systems. All my compensations. All my clever workarounds. I’d built an entire identity around working despite the condition, around being the person who connected others no matter what her body did.
But my mother had been a structural engineer. She’d compensated too, adapted, improvised. Right up until the day compensation wasn’t enough, until the tremor moved from her hands to her voice to her ability to swallow. Until she’d faced the choice between surgery and slow suffocation.
I was walking in footsteps worn smooth by someone who’d chosen death.
The neural stabilizer would have stopped the tremor. Microfilament implants threading through motor cortex, recalibrating the misfiring signals. Seventy-three percent success rate, the doctors had said. My mother had refused three times.
“They want to rewire what makes me myself,” she’d told me, hands wrapped around that coffee cup. I’d been nineteen, furious, screaming that it was just pride. Just stupid stubborn pride choosing death over adaptation.
I’d called her a coward. Two months later, I’d watched her suffocate.
Now I understood the terror beneath that choice. Not pride. Fear. The tremor had been with her since childhood, shaped how she thought, how she worked. She’d built compensations into every gesture, every calculation. Who would she be without it? Would fixing the flaw heal her, or erase something fundamental?
I’d spent nine years compensating. Custom gloves, modified interfaces, techniques for working around the shake. I’d made the tremor visible, turned it into part of my identity. Ragna-who-works-despite-disability. But was that honest, or performance? Had I been trading on sympathy while telling myself I was proving capability?
Without the tremor, who was I?
Every adjustment of the interface gloves had an audience in her mind. Every time she’d steadied her hand against a console edge, she’d been aware of who might be watching. The casual mentions (“just need to recalibrate for the shake”) delivered with that specific tone of matter-of-fact competence. Had any of it been real?
She’d told herself she was normalizing disability, making it visible without making it shameful. But maybe she’d been curating vulnerability, offering just enough struggle to seem brave without ever appearing actually limited. The perfect performance of overcoming.
The nausea came from not knowing. She couldn’t separate genuine moments from calculated ones anymore. Had she ever adjusted her gloves without considering how it looked?
The memorial service words echoed differently now. “So strong, never complained, worked twice as hard”. They’d said it about her mother like praise, and people said it about Ragna the same way. Had her mother also performed this exhausting strength? Had the condition trapped them both in roles where they couldn’t afford simple tiredness, where struggle became their only authentic identity because weakness would confirm what everyone feared about them?
The reflection fractures. Not the screen, but something in me. I’ve built myself entirely from resistance: against the tremor, against pity, against becoming my mother’s ending. But strip away the fighting and what remains? A hollow shape where a person should be. I don’t know who Ragna is when she’s not proving herself. Maybe I never did.
The tremor in my left hand spiked so hard I had to grip my tool belt to hide it. Bjornulf’s accusation hung in the recycled air between us, and I couldn’t find words that weren’t either defensive lies or admissions that would confirm everything he believed.
His hand against the wall wasn’t steady. The impact had been meant as emphasis, maybe intimidation, but his arm shook with the effort of holding position. Up close, I could see the medication patch on his neck. The rectangular one with the faded blue border that meant second-generation synthesis, the kind Kari had stopped making three weeks ago because the newer formula worked better with fewer side effects. The kind I wasn’t wearing because mine was the sleek third-generation patch, almost invisible against my skin, that Kari had synthesized in a six-hour session that could have been spent on anyone else.
“You don’t even see it,” Bjornulf said, and his voice caught on the second word, the slight slur that meant his condition was affecting his speech centers now. The thing I’d been terrified of hearing in my own voice. “You walk around like you’re the only one suffering. Like your tremor is tragic and mine is just… inconvenient.”
I wanted to tell him I’d never asked for special treatment. That Kari made those decisions without consulting me. That I’d have shared the better medication if I’d known. But my throat closed around the words because I had known, hadn’t I? I’d seen Bjornulf’s patches getting older, less effective. I’d noticed his hands getting worse. And I’d told myself it wasn’t my responsibility, that Kari knew what he was doing, that I needed to focus on keeping the communication systems running.
I’d told myself everything except the truth: that I’d been quietly, gratefully taking what I was given while someone else suffered the same fate with less.
The silence stretched. Bjornulf’s breathing was labored, each inhale audible in the corridor’s acoustic deadness. Behind him, Signe’s fingers moved across her datapad with the precise rhythm of someone performing a task they’d already completed: busy work to avoid eye contact. The two engineers had somehow found a maintenance panel that absolutely required their immediate attention, their backs to us, shoulders hunched in the universal posture of people pretending not to witness something uncomfortable.
No one was going to speak. No one was going to say “that’s not fair” or “Bjornulf, you’re out of line” or even “let’s all calm down.” Because they’d been thinking it too. I could see it in the way they weren’t looking at me.
How many times had I walked past Bjornulf in Medical, waiting on the bench outside while Kari finished my appointment? How many times had I mentioned, casually, that Kari wanted to see me again next week, just routine monitoring, nothing serious? How many times had I worn these perfect, responsive interface gloves while Bjornulf’s hands shook over basic tasks?
I opened my mouth and nothing came out that didn’t sound like exactly what he’d accused me of being. Yes, Kari reviewed my scans more frequently: but that was proper monitoring protocol, wasn’t it? Yes, I’d received the prototype gloves first. But I worked communications, I needed precision, that was logical resource allocation. Yes, seventeen visits to Medical while Bjornulf had gone twice: but Kari had insisted, had scheduled them, I wasn’t asking for special treatment.
Except I had been asking. Not with words, but with every casual mention of my appointments, every visible adjustment of my perfect gloves, every moment I’d let them see me as competent-despite-disability instead of just disabled. I’d been performing capability so desperately that I hadn’t noticed I was also performing deserving.
The horror wasn’t that he was wrong about me performing. The horror was that I’d been performing so well I’d convinced myself it was real. That my competence earned me consideration rather than my need demanding it. And watching his mouth struggle around words I might soon lose myself, I understood that every time I’d succeeded at looking capable, I’d made it easier for them to look away from him.
The silence after his departure felt accusatory. My left hand wouldn’t stop shaking: stress amplifying the tremor into something visible, undeniable. I’d spent two years learning to compensate, to position myself so the tremor became invisible, to time my movements between the worst spasms. Performance art masquerading as competence. And Bjornulf had seen through it, had named what I’d refused to acknowledge: that my carefully constructed functionality depended on others looking away from his collapse.
I yanked my hand back but the damage was done: the secondary buffer’s containment field collapsed, sending feedback through the relay system. The holographic display erupted in cascading red warnings. My diagnostic training kicked in automatically: isolate the failure, prevent propagation, protect the primary systems. But my hands wouldn’t cooperate. The right one fumbled at the emergency cutoff while the left spasmed uselessly, knocking against the console edge.
“Let me,” Signe started, already moving.
“I can fix it.” The words came out harsh, desperate. I wedged my left hand under my thigh, using my body weight to still it, and reached for the manual override with my right. The interface required a three-point confirmation sequence. My fingers found the first control, the second. The tremor was spreading now, stress feeding the neurological cascade I’d been warned about. My right hand began to shake.
Signe’s hand appeared in my peripheral vision, hovering near the third control. Not taking over. Just ready.
“Together,” she said quietly.
I wanted to refuse. Wanted to prove I could still do this alone, that I was still the expert everyone relied on. But the buffer temperature was climbing toward critical, and pride wouldn’t prevent a cascade that could take down our entire communication infrastructure. I nodded once, sharp.
She completed the sequence. The warnings stabilized, shifted from red to amber. The immediate crisis was contained, but the buffer itself was fried. Twelve hours minimum to repair, maybe more if the damage had propagated to the quantum entanglement cores.
I sat back, both hands trembling now, and made myself look at the damage assessment scrolling across the screen. Quantifiable failure. Documented. The kind of incident that required a formal report to Hallgerd.
The kind of incident that proved Bjornulf right.
The cascade propagated faster than my training had prepared me for: quantum-entangled systems failing in sympathy across the entire communications grid. I watched the holographic display fragment into error states, each one a connection I’d spent months optimizing, now corrupted by a single involuntary spasm. My diagnostic protocols felt useless against the speed of the failure. The relay buffers were overheating. The signal processors were dropping out of phase. And my left hand was still twitching against my stomach, nerves firing in patterns that had nothing to do with intention.
“Signe, disconnect!” I managed, but she was already pulling the neural jack, her face gone white. Blood appeared at her nostril. The neural feedback had hit her directly, all that corrupted data flooding through her implant before she could filter it.
I forced my right hand back to the controls, isolating systems one by one, performing damage control that should have been automatic but now required conscious effort for every command. The tremor was spreading up my arm. I could feel my fine motor control degrading in real-time, each movement requiring more concentration than the last.
The systems went dark in a sequence I’d memorized years ago, primary relays, backup channels, emergency broadcast array, each failure a domino I’d set up myself. My right hand moved through shutdown protocols while my left remained a clenched betrayal against my ribs, the tremor finally subsiding now that the damage was complete.
“I can restart the tertiary systems,” I said, hearing my voice take on that technical flatness I used when I needed distance from what I was saying. “The quantum entanglement cores are intact. Just the relay buffers. Twelve hours to rebuild the signal pathways if we cannibalize parts from the observation deck arrays.”
Signe was still bleeding. I’d done that to her. My body’s malfunction had sent corrupted data directly into her brain.
Hallgerd’s presence filled the doorway before I registered her footsteps. Command alerts, obviously. Her gaze swept the scene with clinical precision: Signe’s bloodied temple, my defensive crouch over the ruined console, smoke still curling from the relay housing.
“Status report.”
Not a question. Never a question with her.
I delivered the technical breakdown with practiced detachment, each word another nail in the coffin of who I’d believed myself to be.
I answered every question with the precision she taught me, yes, I noticed the tremor at 0847, yes, I understood protocol required reporting motor instability before critical calibrations, yes, I prioritized ego over safety. Each admission stripped away another layer of the competent professional I’d constructed. When Hallgerd said “duty rotation adjustments,” her tone careful as handling explosives, I heard what she couldn’t say: You’re being benched. The communications expert who couldn’t be trusted with communications anymore.
The observation deck viewport turned my tears into prisms, scattering them across my cheeks in colors that shouldn’t exist: the pocket universe’s aurora making even my breakdown beautiful in its wrongness. I’d been there since 0317, watching the dimensional boundaries shimmer like soap bubbles containing infinity, and I didn’t hear Tyra approach until her reflection appeared beside mine in the glass.
She didn’t ask why. Didn’t comment on the tears or the hour or the fact that I was supposed to be resting after Hallgerd’s careful demotion. Just stood there in that precise way she’d perfected. Close enough to offer presence, far enough to maintain the professional distance we’d built like a wall between us over two years of working in adjacent modules and pretending the past didn’t exist.
“I don’t know who I am,” I tried to say, but my voice caught on the words, that new thing it did now when the tremor crept into my vocal cords, turning speech into something fragmented and uncertain. “If I can’t fix things. Can’t keep people. Tyra’s hand moved toward my shoulder. I watched it in the viewport’s reflection, saw it rise and then stop midway, suspended in the space between us. The gap felt physical suddenly. Measurable in radiation scars and unspoken feelings and the weight of everything we’d been avoiding for so long. Her fingers hung there for three heartbeats before falling back to her side.
The old intimacy between us had become a chasm. I could see the exact moment two years ago when we’d started building it, brick by careful brick: her accident, my diagnosis, the mutual decision that professionalism was safer than vulnerability. Now we stood on opposite edges, and neither of us knew how to cross.
“You’ve been isolating yourself.” Tyra’s voice came quiet, clinical: not accusation but observation, a scientist naming a pattern she’d tracked across months of data points.
The words cracked something open in my chest. I heard myself confessing what I hadn’t told anyone, not even Kari during our medical sessions: that I’d stopped calling Mikkel four months before the quarantine. Couldn’t bear it anymore: the way his voice would shift mid-conversation when he noticed my speech slurring, words catching on themselves like fabric on rough metal. That careful concern, the pitch change that meant he was hearing me disappear in real-time.
“I’ve been erasing myself,” I said, and my left hand tremored against the viewport, fingers tapping an involuntary rhythm against the glass. “From everyone’s life. Because watching them watch me deteriorate. It’s like dying twice. Once in my body, once in their eyes.”
Saying it aloud made it real in a way that stole my breath. The observation deck’s recycled air suddenly felt too thin, and the pocket universe’s colors blurred as fresh tears came, these ones hot with shame.
I counted thirty-seven seconds of silence. Old habit from timing signal delays, measuring the space between transmission and response. Then Tyra spoke, voice barely audible over the observation deck’s environmental hum.
“I’ve been doing the same thing.”
My breath caught.
“The scars,” she continued, one hand unconsciously touching her neck. “They stopped being about the accident years ago. They became… convenient. An excuse for keeping distance.” Her reflection in the viewport looked haunted, superimposed over swirling auroras. “I hide behind dimensional mathematics the way you hide behind communication arrays. We’re both.”We’re both very good at being alone.”
The confession hung between us like the pocket universe itself: beautiful, unstable, possibly collapsing.
I echoed her words back to her, trying for lightness, but they emerged broken. “We’re both very good at being alone.”
Our reflections overlapped in the viewport: two ghosts against impossible auroras. Women who’d weaponized competence, made ourselves necessary so we’d never risk being simply wanted.
Tyra’s reflection nodded. Her hand settled on my shoulder. Permission. Surrender. Neither of us knowing how to dismantle what we’d built.
The tremor in my left hand had worsened to visible shaking. I watched it dance across the interface like a seismograph recording my dissolution. Forty-three days ago, I could hide it. Thirty days ago, I could compensate. Now the glove’s stabilizers whined with effort, and I wondered if Bjornulf’s hands had looked like this before he stopped pretending competence was enough.
The communications hub at 0620 felt like a mausoleum built to honor someone I’d never been. I sat in the chair that had molded itself to my body over two years. The slight asymmetry of my spine, the way I favored my right side, the forward lean of someone always reaching toward connection. My fingers moved through diagnostic sequences I could perform unconscious, muscle memory outlasting purpose, outlasting hope. Quantum entanglement check. Relay array calibration. Signal integrity verification. Error. Error. Error.
I’d been running the same failed connection protocol for forty minutes. The definition of insanity, or desperation, or maybe just the last ritual of a dying religion where I served as both priest and congregation. The altar was this console. The prayers were initialization sequences. The absent god was the universe beyond the shimmering boundary visible through the viewport. Real and unreachable, like everything I’d ever wanted.
My reflection fragmented across six dark monitors. Six versions of Ragna Thorsdottir, communications specialist, the woman who connected people. Except these Ragnas couldn’t connect anything. These Ragnas just sat in the mechanical darkness, running protocols that had stopped working forty-three days ago, pretending motion was the same as progress.
I tried to remember the last time I’d felt certain about anything. Not confident. But certain. Sure of something fundamental about who I was beneath the compensations and adjustments and careful calibrations.
The memory wouldn’t come. Maybe it had never existed. Maybe I’d always been this: a collection of workarounds held together by the thin thread of being useful, of being needed, of being the person who kept everyone connected even when I felt like scattered signals searching for coherence.
My left hand tremored against the console. I watched it like watching footage of someone else’s body failing. This appendage that had threaded fiber-optic cables through impossible spaces, that had calibrated quantum entanglement nodes while hanging in zero-gravity, that had typed love letters to Tyra I’d never sent. Betraying me with its honesty.
Then my right hand started. Both now. The symmetry felt like a verdict.
I thought about Bjornulf in Medical Module 2. How his hands shook when he tried to hold instruments. How Kari stood beside him now during procedures he used to perform alone, not assisting: taking over, really, while pretending otherwise. The same careful fiction we were building around my gloves, around my “interface technique,” around the increasing number of tasks Signe handled while I “supervised.”
Weeks or months. That’s what I had before I became Bjornulf. Before useful became unable. The pocket universe’s temporal distortions were accelerating everything. Even time was working against me here.
I pulled up my personnel file on a side screen. Ragna Thorsdottir, Communications Specialist, Expert Rating. Forty-three commendations for problem-solving under pressure. The words glowed in neat rows: achievements I’d built my identity around, proof I existed as something more than a collection of failing neurons.
But reading them now felt like examining someone else’s résumé. These were descriptions of what I’d done, not who I was. Tasks completed. Problems solved. Connections maintained. All external. All measurable. All increasingly impossible.
I’d been confusing competence with selfhood. Mistaking the ability to fix broken connections for the capacity to form real ones. My whole sense of self was transactional, I existed because I was useful. And now, watching both hands shake against the dark console, I understood: I’d never figured out who Ragna was when she couldn’t perform Ragna’s function.
The pocket universe rippled like disturbed water, colors bleeding through impossible spectrums: violet into something that had no name, gold folding into dimensions my eyes couldn’t properly process. I should have called Tyra. Should have documented the pattern. Should have been useful.
Instead I sat watching, hands trembling in my lap, thinking: this space only exists because something else contains it. Defined entirely by its boundaries. Its function.
Maybe that’s why I felt such kinship with it.
I started another log. Stopped. The tremor had spread to my right thumb now. Just a flutter, barely visible, but I knew the trajectory. Bjornulf’s hands shook so badly he’d dropped a scalpel yesterday. Kari said forty-seven days of supplies remained.
Which clock was I racing? The quarantine’s indefinite sentence, or my body’s definite one?
I didn’t know which answer I wanted.
The tablet’s glow illuminated the memorial tattoo on his forearm: coordinates that meant nothing anymore, pointing to empty space where a colony used to spin. His finger traced one of the red-tagged names, and I watched his jaw tighten in that particular way that meant he was choosing words carefully, the way he did when telling someone their condition was terminal.
“Marja Lindqvist,” he said. “Thirty-two. Two children. Radiation exposure from the reactor breach. Survivable with treatment, but treatment took six hours and we had four hours until the evacuation window closed.” He swiped to the next name. “Erik Johansen. Nineteen. Crushed pelvis. Could have lived with surgery, but surgery meant using the medical bay when twelve others needed triage space.”
My left hand tremored against the examination table’s edge. I wanted to tell him I understood, that he didn’t need to do this, but the words stuck somewhere between my brain and my mouth. A symptom I hadn’t reported yet, another degradation to hide.
“I made those calls in minutes, Ragna. Minutes to decide who deserved the resources we had left.” He looked at me then, and his eyes carried something worse than grief. The clarity of someone who had survived his own choices. “You think your job is keeping the communications running. Maintaining the links. Proving you’re still capable despite,” He gestured at my tremoring hand without pity, just acknowledgment. “But that’s not the battle that matters anymore.”
He pulled up my scans again, the white branches spreading through gray matter like frost on glass. “The battle that matters is deciding what you’re going to do with however much time those hands have left. Because triage isn’t about saving everyone. It’s about saving what matters most.”
The green tags were easy, he tells me: the pilots, the engineers who could fly the evacuation ships. Yellow took longer. He’d stared at a botanist’s file for thirty seconds, knowing the colonies needed food specialists but also knowing thirty seconds was thirty seconds someone else didn’t get. The red tags were mercy calls, people he thought might make it if everything went perfectly, if the ships had extra medical capacity, if time stretched just a little further.
The black tags, though. His thumb hovers over one. A woman with kind eyes and a maintenance tech rating. “She was conscious when I marked her file,” he says, and something in his voice cracks at the edges. “She knew what the colors meant. She asked me to make sure her daughter got green.”
My right hand finds his forearm, covers those memorial coordinates. The tremor in my left has spread to my shoulder now, a visible shake I can’t control, can’t hide.
“So I’m asking you, Ragna. What color are you going to tag yourself? And what are you going to do with that choice?”
I couldn’t look away even though every instinct screamed to. His hand on my shoulder wasn’t gentle. It was the weight of witness, holding me there as he scrolled through faces I’d never meet, people who’d become data points in his survival calculus. Green meant you mattered enough. Yellow meant maybe. Red meant hope stretched thin. Black meant he’d looked someone in the eyes and decided their death was already written.
His voice never wavered, that bedrock steadiness that made him dangerous to be around when you wanted to fall apart. Eighteen minutes to sort humanity into colors while metal screamed and atmosphere vented. Eighteen minutes that taught him how to carry the weight of playing god.
I understood then why he watched my tremor with such terrible focus.
The files sat there between us like an equation demanding solution. His fingers, surgeon’s hands that had sorted souls by survival probability, rested on the edge of the tablet. Not hiding the comparison. Not apologizing for it either. Just letting me see how triage looked when the body being sorted was mine, when the resources running out were neurons instead of oxygen, when the person holding the spreadsheet loved you enough to make you face mathematics.
The image sharpened. Motor cortex branching like lightning frozen in flesh, the tremor’s origin point glowing amber in the scan’s false color. His finger traced the boundary where healthy tissue met degradation. “Here,” he said, tapping the screen. “This is your green tag decision.” The question hung in recycled air: what function would I defend when my body became a sinking ship, which part of myself deserved the last seat out.
The tremor in my left hand intensified as I watched him work through those files, each swipe revealing another face he’d had to evaluate. He pulled up a woman with engineering credentials, then her medical history: chronic condition requiring daily medication they wouldn’t have on the transport. His finger hovered over her file, and I understood I was watching him relive the exact moment he’d moved her from green to red.
“Marta Johansson,” he said. “Best structural engineer on the station. Could have rebuilt half the colonies we lost in the Expansion Wars.” Past tense. Always past tense when he spoke of Njord. “But her treatment regimen required equipment that massed forty kilos. Forty kilos meant someone else’s child didn’t get a seat.”
He cycled through more files, and I saw the categories weren’t clean divisions but overlapping circles of impossible compromise. A teenager with no specialized skills but two parents who were essential personnel. A doctor with the experience to save hundreds but who refused to leave without her elderly mother. A child with a genetic condition that would require resources the refugee fleet couldn’t spare.
“I kept trying to optimize,” Kari continued, his voice dropping to something rawer. “Spent fifteen of those twenty-five minutes running scenarios, calculating value, as if there was some perfect equation that would make it not be murder.” He looked at me then, really looked, and I saw the same question I’d been asking myself reflected back: what happens when your training, your ethics, your entire sense of purpose collides with mathematics that don’t care?
“There wasn’t an equation,” he said. “There was just me, standing at that airlock, calling names. Twenty-two people who got to keep breathing. Twenty-five who didn’t.”
The scan of my degrading motor cortex glowed between us like an accusation.
“The algorithm took shape in stages,” he said, and I watched him reconstruct it on the medical display: not showing me the files now, but drawing out the decision tree he’d built in real-time while the station’s hull groaned around him. “First pass: anyone who couldn’t survive the journey. Sounds clean, doesn’t it? Medical triage.” His jaw tightened. “Except I was the one defining ‘survive.’ Could Marta have made it to the refugee fleet? Probably. Could she have lived six months after without her treatment? No.”
He drew another branch. “Second pass: skills we’d need. But need for what? Rebuilding? Warfare? Just staying alive?” The categories multiplied, engineers, medics, teachers, soldiers, each one a framework for deciding whose expertise mattered more than someone else’s life.
“Third pass.” His voice went hollow. “Dependents. Do you save the child or the parent who has critical knowledge? Do you count a family as one unit or four separate calculations?” The tree became a maze, every branch splitting into impossible subdivisions.
“I had twenty-five minutes, Ragna. Most people spend longer choosing lunch.”
The shift happened at minute seventeen, he tells me. When his hands stopped shaking over the manifest and went steady. When the question changed from “who deserves to live” to “what shape does survival take.” He needed medical knowledge: that was him. Engineering: that was Torsten. Agricultural systems, weapons training, child development specialists because a future without children wasn’t a future worth the name.
“I built an ark,” he says quietly. “Not a lifeboat. An ark needs breeding pairs and seed stock and the knowledge to use them.” His fingers trace the green tags on the display. “Twenty-two people who could build a world from nothing. Not the twenty-two best people. Not the ones I loved most.” He meets my eyes. “The ones who could carry forward something worth remembering.”
The names pour out like a litany, like prayer, Astrid Johannsen who taught children, Marcus Thorvald who could splice genes in his sleep, little Elsa Bergstrom only six years old, and his voice doesn’t break on the ones he left behind, the ones who understood what the green tags meant, who forgave or didn’t, who died well or badly. What haunts him isn’t the choice. It’s knowing he chose correctly. That he’d do it again.
The scan rotates, showing pathways branching like lightning, compensatory networks spreading through her brain like roots seeking water. “You’re burning through your reserves,” he says. “Building detours around detours. In six months, maybe eight, you won’t have enough healthy tissue left to reroute through.” His finger traces the spreading damage. “That’s your evacuation window closing.”
I stared at the overlays, watching my own betrayal mapped in neural fire. The gloves had felt like salvation: custom-built, responsive, letting me grip tools and adjust relays with something approaching my old precision. But the data didn’t lie. Every stabilized movement showed as a spike in compensatory activity, my brain screaming silently as it forced signals through pathways meant for other purposes.
“The gloves work,” I said, hearing how weak it sounded.
“The gloves lie.” Kari expanded the timeline, showing six months of deterioration compressed into seconds. “They tell your diagnostics everything’s fine while your motor cortex cannibalizes itself. Look here: you’re recruiting visual processing areas now. Parts of your brain that should be helping you read interference patterns are instead trying to keep your fingers steady.”
The implications hit like decompression. Those moments lately when signal analysis took longer, when I had to squint at readouts that used to make instant sense: not fatigue. Theft. My own body stealing from itself to maintain an illusion of competence.
“I need to work,” I whispered. “Without the gloves, I can’t,”
“Without the gloves, you adapt. You learn what your left hand can actually do instead of forcing it to pretend.” He pulled up a different scan, someone else’s brain lit with similar damage. “This was me, after Njord. I kept trying to work the way I had before, kept pushing through, and I lost eight months of function I could have kept if I’d just accepted the new limits and worked within them.”
His hands were steady now. I’d never noticed.
“You saved people,” I said.
“After I stopped trying to save everyone.” He closed the scans, leaving us in the medical bay’s clean white light. “Including myself.”
The words I’d prepared dissolved. My work logs glowed between us. Damning evidence of every hour I’d pushed past exhaustion, every shift where I’d told myself just one more diagnostic, just one more repair. The numbers didn’t care about my intentions.
“They’re not gloves,” I said finally, voice raw. “They’re proof I still matter.”
Kari’s expression softened in that way that made him dangerous: the look that said he understood exactly what I wasn’t saying. “You matter because of what you know, not what you can grip. Signe can handle the physical repairs. You can teach her to read the patterns you see, guide her hands with your expertise.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s harder. It requires you to trust someone else with the work and trust yourself with a different role.” He gestured at the scans again. “But it’s the only way you’re still working in six months instead of watching from a medical bed while your brain finishes eating itself.”
The silence stretched between us like the space between stars. My hand trembled against the cold metal, each involuntary twitch a countdown I couldn’t stop. Kari’s gaze stayed steady on that betraying movement, refusing me the mercy of polite fiction.
“I had forty-seven people and twenty-two evacuation slots.” His voice carried the weight of old ghosts. “The ones who survived weren’t the ones who pretended they could carry more weight than physics allowed. They were the ones who understood their actual value and let others compensate for their limitations.”
I wanted to argue that Njord Station and this quarantine were different. That his triage and my tremors weren’t comparable. But the scans between us told a different story. One where my stubbornness was just another form of denial.
The holographic display rotated between his fingers, neural pathways rendered in clinical blue and amber. I’d never seen my own brain mapped like this. Geography of capability and loss. Those pristine regions glowed like constellations, the parts that made me me somehow fortified while everything else crumbled.
“Your body knows what we need,” Kari said quietly. “Even if you don’t believe it yet.”
I watched those bright regions pulse in the display: communication systems analysis, electromagnetic pattern recognition, quantum signal interpretation. The parts of my brain that understood the station’s voice were growing stronger even as my hands betrayed me. My left tremor spiked, proving his point. The irony tasted like copper and ozone, like the air before everything changes.
The neural pathways looked like rivers of light, branching and reconnecting in patterns that should have been familiar, my own brain, after all, but from this angle they belonged to someone else. Kari’s finger moved through the hologram with the steadiness I’d lost, tracing the degradation in my motor cortex like he was reading a map of territory he’d crossed before.
“This deterioration here, in your fine motor cortex, it’s forcing your brain to compensate by overdeveloping your pattern recognition centers, the parts that read signal interference.” His voice had gone clinical, physician-distant, and I was grateful for it. Easier to hear when it sounded like someone else’s diagnosis, someone else’s slow unraveling. “Your brain is rebuilding itself around what it can still do.”
He zoomed in on the bright regions, the parts that were growing while others dimmed. The compensation patterns looked almost beautiful, neural architecture reorganizing itself like the station’s communication arrays when one relay failed. “The tremor isn’t just taking something away,” he said, and his tone shifted, became almost gentle. “It’s forcing you to become something different.”
I wanted to argue, to insist that different wasn’t what I needed, that I just wanted my hands back, wanted to be the technician I’d trained to become. But I’d seen enough failing systems to recognize adaptation when it was staring me in the face. The station’s voice had been getting clearer to me for months. Electromagnetic whispers that Signe’s neural implant couldn’t catch, interference patterns that spoke of dimensional instability before the instruments registered it.
My left hand tremored against the display table, and I didn’t try to hide it. Kari was right. I’d been spending all my energy trying to steady my hands instead of listening to what they were telling me.
I stared at those ghost scans, neural maps of the dead floating beside my own deteriorating pathways. Three engineers. One survivor. The mathematics of it settled in my chest like cold metal.
“She felt vibrations,” I said, and my voice came out rougher than I intended. “Through the tremors.”
“Through them. Not despite them.” Kari dismissed the ghost scans with a gesture, left only my brain hanging in the holographic space between us. “Your condition is teaching your nervous system a new language, one that reads the station’s electromagnetic field like Braille. But you keep trying to translate it back into steady hands and precise soldering.”
The tremor in my left hand had been worse all week. I’d attributed it to stress, to the quarantine’s psychological weight. Now I wondered if it had been trying to tell me something about the dimensional fluctuations Tyra kept dismissing as instrument error.
“What if I can’t learn fast enough?” The question escaped before I could stop it, before I could wrap it in professional distance.
His expression softened into something that looked like grief. “Then you’ll have company. I’m learning too.”
I watched him pull up my duty logs, and the truth arranged itself in columns I’d been too afraid to read. Every successful repair. Every breakthrough in the communication blackouts. They clustered around moments when my hands had been shaking worst, when I’d abandoned the textbook procedures and followed something that felt more like instinct than training.
“You’re burning cognitive resources trying to maintain skills that are already gone,” he said quietly. “Running diagnostic routines with hands that shake when you need that processing power for the electromagnetic intuition that’s actually keeping our communications functional.”
The holographic data hung between us like an accusation. Or maybe an invitation.
“Your condition isn’t taking away your value,” Kari continued. “It’s revealing what your value actually is.”
I stared at the data, at the tremor frequency graphs overlaid against successful repairs. The correlation was undeniable. When my hands shook hardest, when I’d given up fighting my body and just listened to the electromagnetic whispers threading through the station’s bones, that’s when I’d solved problems that should have been impossible.
“I’ve been trying to compensate,” I whispered. “When I should have been paying attention.”
His palm settled over my trembling fingers, warm and certain. The tremor didn’t stop (it never did) but through his touch I felt the rhythm differently, not as malfunction but as signal. “Your body’s adapting to dimensional bleed-through,” he said, voice carrying that Njord-survivor gentleness. “The interference that corrupts our equipment? You’re learning to read it through your nervous system. That’s not breaking down, Ragna. That’s evolution.”
The chip was smaller than I expected for something carrying so much weight. Cold metal against my palm, edges precise as surgical cuts. My fingers closed around it (tremor and all) and through the shaking I felt the data density, imagined all those timestamps compressed into this tiny artifact. Each one a moment when Kari had pointed left or right, life or death, this person or that one.
“Fourteen hundred people on Njord Station when the cascade started,” he said. His voice stayed level but something behind his eyes went distant, seeing through the medical bay walls to another place, another crisis. “Evacuation capacity for two hundred sixty-three. I had forty-seven minutes to decide.”
The chip warmed in my grip. I wanted to ask how he’d chosen, what criteria, what mathematics of survival he’d used. But the question stuck in my throat because I already knew there was no good answer, no equation that balanced correctly.
“I kept the timestamps because I needed to remember it wasn’t abstract.” He pulled up a stool, sat so we were eye-level. “Every decision had a face, a name, a specific second when I said yes or no. The protocols helped me work faster, more consistently, but they didn’t make it easier. They weren’t supposed to.”
Through the chip’s casing I felt phantom heat, as if those old decisions still burned. My hand trembled harder: stress response, dimensional interference, disease progression, all of it tangled together.
“You’re thinking you can’t make those choices.” Kari’s weathered face held something like pride mixed with sorrow. “But you already do, every shift. Which system to repair first, which signal to chase, where to allocate your limited energy. You just don’t call it triage yet.” His hand covered mine again, steadying the tremor, steadying me. “These protocols won’t tell you who deserves to live. They’ll teach you how to decide anyway.”
The chip’s weight shifted as he pressed my fingers closed around it. Metal warming to body temperature, data sleeping inside.
“You think your condition makes you less capable.” His voice carried that particular gentleness he used for truths that cut. “But I’ve watched you compensate, adapt, rebuild your interface methods every time the tremor worsens. You’ve already done the hardest part of triage.”
I looked down at our hands. His steady, mine shaking even with his support, both wrapped around this artifact of impossible choices.
“Accepting limitation without surrendering function.” He released my hand slowly, letting me hold the chip alone. “That’s what these protocols really teach. Not how to be perfect. How to be effective anyway.”
The tremor made the chip dance slightly in my palm. I thought about the custom interface gloves, the modified workstation grips, the hundred small adjustments I’d made without naming them as survival strategies. Adaptation so gradual I’d stopped noticing I was doing it.
“The protocols won’t make you whole,” Kari said. “They’ll show you how to work broken. Which is the only way any of us work, really. Some of us just hide it better.”
The scans glowed pale blue against the monitor’s darkness. Kari’s finger traced pathways I’d never noticed. Neural highways my brain had constructed without permission, rerouting around dead tissue like water finding new channels through stone.
“Here.” He highlighted a cluster of activity in my sensory cortex. “This shouldn’t exist. Your brain built it in response to the degradation. It’s why you feel interference patterns before the instruments register them.”
I stared at the bright webbing, this architecture of compensation. The tremor that made me clumsy had somehow made me sensitive to frequencies that should be invisible. My body betraying me while simultaneously creating something instruments couldn’t replicate.
“You’re not broken and functional despite it,” Kari said quietly. “You’re functional because of it. That’s the difference.”
The data scrolled past. Interference patterns that pulsed in rhythm with my own neural misfires, like the pocket universe had learned to speak my body’s failing language. My tremor wasn’t inadequate response to stable systems. It was accurate response to systems dying in frequencies only damaged nerves could hear.
“You’re reading collapse,” Kari said. “Not causing it.”
The drawer stayed open. That gap of unlocked metal spoke louder than authorization codes. His file glowed between us: cortisol spikes charting fear in quantifiable increments, REM cycles fragmenting into biological static. He was showing me his own diagnostic collapse, not as confession but as calibration. We were instruments measuring the same disaster from different angles, and he was teaching me that accuracy mattered more than hope.
The coordinates tattooed on his forearm seemed to pulse in my peripheral vision: numbers that once meant home, now just mathematics commemorating absence. I’d seen that tattoo a hundred times in three years of working together, but I’d never really looked at it before. Never understood it was a scar turned inside-out, worn on the surface where everyone could see the wound.
My left hand betrayed me with its familiar tremor, but this time the shaking felt different. Not the neurological static I’d learned to compensate for, but something deeper: my body’s animal recognition that I was standing at an edge I couldn’t map with instruments or intuition.
“You’re not offering me hope,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. “You’re offering me permission.”
He didn’t deny it. The silence between us filled with the medical bay’s ambient sounds. Monitoring equipment counting heartbeats, air recyclers breathing for the station, all the machinery that kept measuring life even when life stopped meaning what we thought it meant.
“Permission to what?” His question wasn’t rhetorical. He genuinely wanted me to name it.
“To stop pretending there’s a solution where everyone survives.” The words tasted like metal, like blood, like the ozone tang that leaked from Research Module 1 when the containment fields fluctuated. “To accept that triage isn’t failure, it’s just… math with consequences.”
The tremor in my hand intensified, spreading up my forearm in visible waves. I watched it with the detachment I’d cultivated for reviewing diagnostic data: observing the symptom without attachment to the body producing it. But Kari was teaching me that detachment was its own kind of lie, and the body always knew the truth before the mind accepted it.
“You’re approaching a threshold,” he said quietly, and I realized he wasn’t talking about my condition anymore.
The mathematics of Njord Station haunted the space between us: equations written in human lives, variables that had names and faces and futures that ended when his stylus marked certain columns. I understood suddenly why he kept the coordinates visible, why he’d chosen the forearm where he’d see them every time he reached for an instrument, made a notation, administered treatment.
It was accountability rendered permanent.
“How many?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“Forty-seven slots. Two hundred and sixteen people.” His voice remained steady, clinical. “I triaged based on survival probability, skill redundancy, genetic diversity for colony rebuilding. Perfect logic.” He paused, and something cracked in that steadiness. “I still hear the ones I didn’t choose. Every night. Perfect logic doesn’t make the screaming stop.”
My tremor had spread to both hands now, but I didn’t hide them. Didn’t reach for the interface gloves that would mask the symptom. If he could wear his wound visible, I could acknowledge mine.
“You’re telling me the choice will haunt me either way.”
“I’m telling you that’s how you’ll know it mattered.”
The words landed like scalpel cuts, precise, necessary, painful. I’d been waiting for him to solve this for me, to use his experience and authority to tell me the correct answer, and instead he was handing me the weight of autonomous choice like it was a gift.
Maybe it was.
“I don’t know how to make that calculation,” I admitted, watching my left hand trace small tremors in the air between us.
“No one does, before they have to.” He moved toward the door, then stopped, his memorial coordinates catching the medical bay’s cold light. “But you’ll make it anyway, and you’ll carry it, and that carrying. That’s the price of mattering. Of being someone whose choices echo.”
The tremor in my left hand intensified as his words settled into the spaces between my ribs. He wasn’t offering comfort or direction. Just the brutal mathematics of limited time, the equation every person with a degenerative condition eventually faces. What haunted me wasn’t the prognosis but the accountability: choosing how to spend capability before it spent itself, knowing I’d have decades to review that choice with hands that could no longer correct it.
He moved toward the door, then stopped, his hand on the frame. I saw it then: the slight tremor in his own fingers, the same betrayal mine performed daily. Everyone was breaking down here in their own way, the pocket universe or the stress or simply time doing its inevitable work.
“I chose to become someone who saves what he can instead of mourning what he can’t.” His voice dropped to something almost too quiet to hear. “But that’s my triage, not yours. Whatever you decide, I’ll still be here to treat the consequences.”
The third layer demanded biometric confirmation. Retinal scan, voice pattern, and the thing Ragna had been dreading: a real-time tremor analysis to prove the operator’s hands were steady enough for critical system commands. She stared at the haptic pad, watching her left hand shake against the sensor grid like a trapped bird.
“Fuck,” she breathed.
Signe’s neural port pulsed brighter, processing streams. “I can spoof the tremor data. Route it through my interface, make the system think your hands are,”
“No.” The word came out sharper than Ragna intended. She softened her voice. “You’re already taking enough risk. The neural feedback from a quarantine barrier breach could fry your implant.”
“Could,” Signe emphasized. “Might not. We don’t actually know what happens when,”
“Exactly.” Ragna positioned her right hand, the good one, over the sensor pad, then used it to physically steady her left, fingers wrapped around her own wrist like a splint. The pressure hurt, bone against bone, but the tremor dampened enough. She pressed down.
The biometric scanner hummed. Analyzed. Her vision blurred as the retinal scan swept across her eye, and she forced herself to recite the authentication phrase in a voice that didn’t waver: “Thorsdottir, Ragna. Communications authority alpha-seven. Emergency protocols acknowledged.”
The system paused. In that suspension, she could still stop. Could claim a diagnostic test, a routine security audit, anything but what this actually was.
The interface chimed acceptance.
Green light cascaded across her workstation. System access: granted. Quarantine protocols: visible. The communication barrier’s architecture spread before her like a map to forbidden territory, and Ragna felt her heart hammering against her ribs. Not from fear, but from the terrible exhilaration of competence meeting opportunity.
“We’re in,” she said, and couldn’t tell if the tremor in her voice was the disease or something worse.
The quantum barrier shimmered in her display, a wall of mathematics that should have been absolute. Ragna’s fingers hesitated over the final command sequence. The one that would route their signal through Signe’s neural implant, using her brain’s processing power to navigate the seventeen-second window.
“Initialize neural bridge,” Ragna said quietly, watching Signe’s pupils dilate as the interface engaged. The younger woman’s breathing shifted, becoming synchronized with the data streams flowing through her consciousness.
Ragna had told herself this was reconnaissance. A test. But her hands were already queuing the actual message. Everything Hallgerd had forbidden them to transmit.
The temporal window opened. Dimensional interference dropped to minimum. The barrier’s quantum encryption flickered, just barely, in a pattern Ragna had memorized like a prayer.
“Now,” she whispered, and executed the breach.
The signal punched through, riding Signe’s neural processing like a wave. For three perfect seconds, they touched the universe outside their prison.
Then the barrier recognized the intrusion and struck back.
The barrier didn’t just reject the breach. It recognized Signe’s neural signature and followed it back like a predator tracking blood in water. Ragna watched the feedback cascade build in real-time, a wave of corrupted data that her equipment could deflect but Signe’s organic brain could not. The younger woman’s hands spasmed against the console, silver port flaring white-hot, and Ragna understood with crystalline clarity that she had weaponized her friend’s trust. That her seventeen-second window was a trap she’d been too arrogant to see. That competence without wisdom was just another form of violence. She reached for the emergency disconnect, knowing she was already too late.
The disconnect slammed home but the damage was already threading through Signe’s synapses, Ragna could see it in the diagnostic overlay, corrupted packets rewriting neural pathways like a virus learning to speak in neurons. Her friend’s silver port flickered erratically, biological and technological boundaries collapsing, and Ragna’s left hand trembled not from disease but from the weight of having turned another person into experimental equipment.
The carrier wave built in Signe’s mind like blood behind a bruise, and I watched her pupils dilate with recognition (we’d actually breached the quarantine, our signal bleeding into the external universe) her mouth opening in what might have been wonder before something on the other side looked back, and the pocket dimension’s boundary convulsed like living tissue rejecting a transplant, recognizing us as the infection we’d become.
My left hand found the emergency cutoff (the tremor making my fingers dance across the panel like they belonged to someone else) while my right hand remained locked on the console edge, knuckles white, body split between two incompatible truths. The medical telemetry I’d learned to read for my own failing nerves now spelled out Signe’s destruction in clinical precision: synaptic temperature 41.[^3] degrees and climbing, neural pathway degradation at 23%, cerebrospinal pressure spiking toward hemorrhage threshold.
The carrier wave held. Seventeen seconds now. Our message was 70% transmitted.
Signe’s back arched against the restraints, safety measures I’d installed myself, never imagining I’d be grateful for them, and a sound escaped her throat that wasn’t quite human, the vocal cords spasming as her autonomic system forgot how to breathe. The neural port’s silver had gone black, then red, the skin around it blistering in a perfect circle like a brand. I could smell burning hair, burning flesh, the acrid tang of melting polymer from the interface cables.
Eighty percent transmission. Nineteen seconds.
My fingers hovered. The cutoff switch was right there, would take point-two seconds to trigger, another point-five for the electromagnetic pulse to collapse the carrier wave. I’d run the simulations a hundred times. I knew exactly how to stop this.
But the external universe was listening. After forty-seven days of silence, of screaming into the void of our pocket dimension prison, something out there was receiving our coordinates, our situation, our desperate plea for extraction. The data was flowing through Signe’s burning synapses like water through a shattered dam, and I was calculating (still calculating) whether one person’s brain was worth sixty-three people’s survival.
Twenty-one seconds. Blood ran from both Signe’s nostrils now, dark and thick.
My hand moved toward the switch. Stopped. Moved again.
The carrier wave achieves eighty-five percent transmission at fourteen seconds and Signe’s mouth opens (no sound, just the terrible O of a scream her lungs have forgotten how to produce) and the neural port begins to smoke, actual smoke curling from the silver interface like incense, the metal blackening as circuits designed for elegant data transfer encounter something raw and hungry that was never meant to touch human tissue. The readouts spike into red zones I’ve only seen in simulation disasters: FATAL FEEDBACK, NEURAL BURNOUT IMMINENT, SYNAPTIC CASCADE FAILURE.
But the signal holds. Still flowing outward through her burning synapses. Still punching through quarantine encryption layers like tissue paper.
Ninety percent transmission. Fifteen seconds.
I’m calculating. God help me, I’m still calculating. Three more seconds would complete the message. Three seconds to tell the external universe exactly where we are, exactly what we need, exactly how to extract us from this dimensional prison. Three seconds against Signe’s brain, against her future, against the trust she placed in me when she volunteered for neural interface duty.
My tremoring hand reaches for the cutoff switch.
Stops.
Reaches again.
The pocket universe responds at sixteen seconds. Not with malice, because dimensions don’t hate, but with something worse: automatic correction. My sensors scream warnings as the substrate recognizes our signal the way skin recognizes a splinter, and I watch the mathematics of reality itself rewrite in real-time, elegant equations collapsing into chaos. The dimensional boundary doesn’t just reject our transmission: it inverts it, transforms our carefully modulated carrier wave into a feedback loop that tears back through every relay I’ve ever calibrated, every amplifier I’ve ever tuned, every quantum node I’ve installed with such stupid pride. The system I built to connect us becomes a whip, and Signe, Signe is holding the live end, her neural port the primary conductor for physics gone rabid.
The green confirmation burns on my display for exactly 0.[^8] seconds, proof we’ve pierced the quarantine, that my mathematics were perfect, that I was right, before Signe’s scream cuts through the equipment hum, not words but pure animal sound, and I see the blood, so much blood from nose and ears, her body convulsing against restraints I’d assured her were unnecessary, my hand frozen on the cutoff switch while my brain calculates with horrible precision that even if I’d moved at first blood it wouldn’t have mattered, the feedback loop was already established, my triumph and her destruction simultaneous and inseparable.
The electromagnetic storm tears through circuitry I’d mapped in my sleep, and I’m cataloging the destruction even as Signe’s weight collapses against me: quantum processors fragmenting into expensive debris, the entanglement matrices I’d nursed through six recalibrations simply unraveling at the molecular level, backup systems I’d sworn were isolated lighting up in sympathetic failure because I’d been so fucking clever about integration, my competence now a perfect map for devastation.
The cascade didn’t just propagate: it hunted. I watched it move through systems I’d integrated so carefully, each connection I’d optimized becoming a highway for destruction. Module 3’s primary array went first, the quantum processors I’d coaxed into perfect coherence simply unmaking themselves, entanglement states collapsing into noise. Then the backup relays, the ones I’d sworn were isolated, the ones I’d personally shielded, lit up in sympathetic failure because I’d been so goddamn proud of my elegant integration architecture.
Signe was still seizing in my arms when the internal comms died. Not a clean shutdown. A tearing, like metal screaming as it rips. The emergency channels followed with a high-pitched shriek that felt like it was coming from inside my skull, every frequency I’d ever calibrated dying at once. Then the intercoms. The humble, stupid intercoms that just let people call for help across modules. They went silent, and that silence was louder than any explosion I’d ever heard.
I’m still cataloging it. Can’t stop. It’s what I do: map the damage, trace the failure paths, understand exactly how my competence became a weapon. The quantum entanglement matrices fragmenting at the molecular level. The signal processors I’d nursed through six recalibrations unraveling like cheap thread. Every backup system I’d integrated so cleverly now just another vector for the cascade to follow.
Signe’s weight goes suddenly heavier against me, her convulsions stopping, and I don’t know if that’s better or worse. My interface gloves are smoking. The air tastes like burning insulation and ozone and failure. And through the viewports, the pocket universe’s impossible colors keep shifting, beautiful and wrong, completely indifferent to what I’ve just done to everyone trapped here with me.
My gloves are still hot when I lower Signe to the deck plating, the custom interfaces I designed myself melting against my palms. The tremor in my left hand has spread to my right. Stress or damage, I can’t tell anymore. Signe’s weight settles wrong, too limp, and I’m cataloging that too because I can’t stop being what I am even when what I am has just destroyed everything.
Six modules. I can see the topology in my head, the network I built over two years of optimization. Module 1 where Tyra works: silent. Module 2 where Kari keeps us alive: isolated. Module 4 Engineering, Module 5 Habitation, Module 6 Storage: all dark to each other. Hallgerd in the Command hub can’t reach anyone. Can’t coordinate. Can’t lead. Every safety protocol we have assumes instant communication. Fire suppression coordination, medical emergencies, containment breaches. I’ve just made us six separate prisons instead of one.
And I did it because I was so certain. So sure my skills could punch through the quarantine lockdown where everyone else had failed. My competence. My arrogance. My fault.
The overhead panels cycle through amber to red, emergency protocols I programmed myself now mocking me with their efficiency. Every relay I’m kneeling among has a history. I knew their rhythms like heartbeats. Could diagnose a failing capacitor from three rooms away by the pitch of its whine.
Now they’re silent. All of them.
Signe’s blood is warm between my trembling fingers, spreading across the deck plating in patterns that follow the micro-gravity differential. The port at her temple sparks once, twice (a dying star) and I’m thinking about neural feedback cascades, about how the implant that made her brilliant might have just cooked her brain from the inside because I pushed the system past every safety threshold.
I’d built my entire identity around being the one who kept us talking to each other. The tremor in my hands was supposed to be my only weakness: something I’d compensated for with custom gloves and stubborn brilliance. But I’d just weaponized every skill I possessed, turned two years of intimate system knowledge into a tool for destruction. My competence hadn’t failed. It had succeeded catastrophically at exactly the wrong thing.
The red emergency lighting turned everything into a crime scene. My diagnostic instincts still functioned, muscle memory cataloguing failures even through horror, but the damage was comprehensive. Three days minimum to restore basic internal comms. Weeks for full functionality. Assuming I had the parts. The time. The trust.
Running footsteps echoed through the corridor. Kari was coming. Hallgerd would follow.
I would have to face what my competence had wrought.
The emergency kit’s contents scattered across the deck plating as Kari worked. Ampules rolling, diagnostic scanner casting blue light across Signe’s convulsing form. I catalogued each item automatically: neural stabilizer, cortical suppressant, emergency shunt to drain excess electrical charge. My hands still rested on the controls, frozen there like they’d been welded to the console. The tremor had become a full shake now, my left hand juddering against the metal hard enough to hurt.
Kari’s fingers moved with terrible precision, finding the injection site at Signe’s neck without hesitation. The stabilizer went in clean. Her convulsions eased to tremors, then stillness. Too still. My breath caught until I saw her chest rise, shallow but steady.
“Pulse is one-forty,” Kari said, not to me. To himself. To his medical log. To anyone but me. “Pupillary response delayed but present. Neural port shows,” He leaned closer, examining the silver interface at her temple where tiny sparks still flickered like dying stars. “Second-degree feedback burns. Could have been third. Could have been permanent.”
Could have been. The words hung in the recycled air between us.
I tried to speak. My throat had closed. The diagnostic readouts behind me still screamed their cascade of errors, each one a small death I’d caused. Three relay nodes burned out. The quantum entanglement matrix destabilized. Internal communications shredded across all six modules. And Signe, bright, optimistic Signe who’d trusted me, who’d believed in my plan, lying unconscious because I’d been so certain I could thread the needle, so desperate to prove I was still useful despite the disease eating my nervous system.
Kari finally looked at me. His eyes carried the weight of Njord Station, of everyone he’d failed to save, and now this: another person hurt under his watch because someone he’d trusted had made a choice.
“She said (” The words scraped out of my throat. “I told her it was dangerous but she wanted to help, she believed we could)”
Kari’s hands never stopped moving. Checking pupil response again. Monitoring the neural port’s temperature. Adjusting the stabilizer drip. My explanations tumbled out incoherent, desperate, each one dying against his silence. He didn’t look at me. Didn’t acknowledge I was speaking. Just continued his methodical assessment while Signe’s eyes flickered beneath closed lids, rapid movement like she was dreaming or drowning.
Her freckled face looked so young. Slack and vulnerable in a way I’d never seen during our shifts together, when she’d been all energy and optimism and trust. Trust I’d weaponized into this.
The tremor in my left hand spread to my right. Adrenaline draining away, leaving only horror and the disease’s progression, accelerated by stress my body couldn’t process. Both hands shaking now as I watched Kari work, as I understood what I’d done, as the weight of consequence settled into my bones like radiation poisoning.
The radio crackled against Kari’s hip, Hallgerd’s voice cutting through the medical bay’s hum with that command authority she wielded like a scalpel. “Medical, report, I’m reading a cascade failure in Module 3 and Signe’s biometrics went critical, what is happening up there?”
Kari’s hands stilled. Just for a heartbeat. Then he looked at me, really looked at me, and I saw Njord Station burning in his eyes. Every person he couldn’t save. Every loss that had carved him hollow.
He keyed the radio without breaking eye contact. “Signe is stable but unconscious. Neural implant emergency shutdown. She’ll need monitoring for the next forty-eight hours.”
No mention of me. No explanation of cause. The omission landed heavier than any accusation could have.
The silence stretched. Five seconds. Ten. I counted them against my pulse, each one a judgment.
When Hallgerd’s voice returned, it carried the temperature of vacuum: “Secure the module. Full incident report. I’m coming up personally.” Then, surgical precision: “Ragna, if you can hear this: you touch nothing until I arrive.”
Ragna. Not the casual familiarity we’d built over months. My full name, formal and distant.
The radio clicked off. Kari’s hands never stopped moving.
His voice came flat, emptied of warmth. “I need you to help me carry her, carefully, supporting her head.” Kari didn’t look at me. “Then you sit in my office. Don’t move until Hallgerd arrives.”
Like I was the patient now. The one who couldn’t be trusted with sharp objects.
I nodded. Couldn’t speak. My gloved hands shook as I took Signe’s shoulders, felt her weight settle against my forearms, solid, real, damaged. The woman who’d trusted me completely.
Desperation, I’d learned, makes excellent kindling for burning down everything you love.
Day one without voices. Without the instant connection that made us a crew instead of isolated cells.
I tried Medical first. Habit, maybe: checking on Kari, on the supplies, on the routine that had held us together. Static answered. The particular kind of dead air that meant the relays weren’t just quiet but broken, shattered, gone. My fault carved into electromagnetic silence.
I ran. Actually ran, my left hand spasming against the corridor wall as I stumbled through the decontamination sequence between modules. The chemical shower felt like punishment I’d earned. Thirty seconds of scalding spray, twenty of freezing rinse, the UV cycle that left my skin tight and raw. All of it necessary because I’d been so convinced I could outsmart the quarantine protocols.
Somewhere in Research Module 1, Tyra stood alone at her displays. I knew because I’d memorized her routines during the months we’d worked in careful professional distance. She’d be watching the dimensional readings spike. The pocket universe’s instability that required constant coordination between her calculations and my communication adjustments. Except now she couldn’t reach me. Couldn’t call for the signal modifications that kept the containment field stable.
She’d have to guess. Make adjustments blind. Risk collapse because I’d needed to prove myself.
In Medical, Bjornulf set a broken arm, Andersen from Engineering, caught in a maintenance accident. I saw them through the observation window as I cleared decontamination. Bjornulf’s hands shook worse than mine as he aligned the bones, no way to call Kari for consultation, no access to the medical database I’d locked behind dead relays. His face carried the concentration of someone performing surgery without anesthesia.
On everyone.
Every small task suddenly impossible. Every routine coordination now requiring someone to physically run between modules, burning energy, burning time, burning the trust that had kept us human in this pocket of broken space.
I’d done this. Trying to save us, I’d made survival ten times harder.
Day two: Hallgerd’s solution arrived as a posted schedule outside the central hub. Runner rotations. Four-hour shifts. Names assigned with the same clean efficiency she brought to everything.
I studied that list like it could absolve me. Andersen, arm freshly set, excused. Signe, neural recovery, excused. Everyone else: running. Literally running between modules in the bulky decontamination suits, carrying messages that should have been instant. Should have been my job.
From the Hub’s viewport I watched them. Johannsen from Engineering, sprinting toward Research with Tyra’s calculations. The suit made him clumsy. He stumbled, caught himself, kept going. How many calories in that run? How many we couldn’t spare?
Signe’s workstation sat dark beside mine. Her customized interface gloves draped over the neural port like a shrine. She’d trusted me. Followed me into that breach attempt because I was supposed to know what I was doing.
The plant on her desk was dying. I’d forgotten to water it. Couldn’t even maintain a simple living thing while I played hero.
Each runner’s face through the viewport: exhaustion. Determination. Adaptation.
They were working around me. Around my failure. Making do.
Like I’d already become irrelevant.
The Hub door opened without warning. Tyra, still in her lab coat, hair disheveled from the decontamination process. Thirty minutes away from the containment monitors. Thirty minutes the pocket universe could have collapsed while she ran through corridors carrying data chips like some pre-digital courier.
She didn’t speak immediately. Just set the chips on my console with deliberate care, each one a count of my damage. Her radiation scars caught the monitor light, pale ridges I’d once wanted to trace with my fingers.
“The pocket universe doesn’t care about your desperation,” she said finally. Clinical. The voice she used for failed experiments.
Then she left, and I understood: I’d become data. A variable that didn’t justify the risk.
Day three. Kari in the doorway, not speaking. Just holding a data pad.
He crossed the Hub and turned the screen toward me. Biometric readout. Timestamp: 14:[^37]. The seizure in Engineering. I watched the vitals spike, crash, flatline for eight seconds while runners shouted instructions through decontamination locks.
Eight seconds. Bjornulf’s hands shaking too badly for precision, working from memory and desperation.
“This is what your competence looks like,” Kari said quietly, “when it forgets other people are real.”
I held her hand while the medication pulled her under again. Her fingers twitched against mine. Neural feedback, residual firing. The port looked worse than yesterday, the skin around it mottled purple-black.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her sleeping face.
But sorry doesn’t rebuild trust. Sorry doesn’t give back the weeks she’ll spend locked out of the systems that make her feel whole.
The worst part wasn’t the equipment. I could fix equipment. I’d spent twelve years coaxing broken systems back to life, improvising solutions from spare parts and desperation. The relay arrays would come back online. The quantum entanglement matrices could be recalibrated. Even the primary communication buffer, the one I’d overloaded trying to punch through dimensional interference and quarantine protocols simultaneously, could be rebuilt given time and components we didn’t have.
No, the worst part was understanding why I’d done it.
I sat there in the emergency lighting, my left hand trembling against the edge of the workstation, and forced myself to name the truth: I’d been terrified of becoming useless. Every day my condition progressed was another day closer to the moment when these hands couldn’t manipulate the delicate tools, when the tremors would spread beyond what the interface gloves could compensate for, when I’d become just another mouth to feed in our dwindling resources. Another burden for Kari to manage. Another person Hallgerd would have to calculate into her impossible equations of survival.
So I’d tried to prove my worth. Tried to show them that Ragna Thorsdottir could still solve the unsolvable, could break through barriers that shouldn’t exist, could save everyone through sheer technical brilliance and stubborn refusal to accept limitations.
Instead, I’d proven exactly what I feared: that my judgment was compromised, that I couldn’t be trusted with critical systems, that my desperation made me dangerous.
Signe’s neural port. Three days of silence between modules. Kari’s medical supplies depleted treating damage I caused. Hallgerd’s authority questioned because I’d made her orders optional. The crew’s faith in me (in us, in our ability to survive this together) cracked like the dimensional boundaries we were trapped behind.
I’d wanted to matter. Instead, I’d shown them all how much harm one scared woman could do.
I made myself look at what I’d broken, piece by piece, person by person. Not the equipment: that was just metal and quantum matrices, fixable given time we probably didn’t have. No, I catalogued the human damage with the same precision I’d once used for diagnostic reports.
Signe’s neural port, inflamed and hot to the touch when Kari examined her. The feedback surge I’d caused might have permanently compromised her interface capability. She’d trusted me, plugged herself directly into my desperate gambit, and I’d nearly burned out the implant that defined her identity.
Three days of internal communications lost. Three days when Tyra couldn’t coordinate with Engineering about the containment field fluctuations. Three days when Medical couldn’t monitor biometrics remotely. Three days of isolation within our isolation, and every hour of silence was my fault.
Kari’s medical supplies, depleted treating damage I’d caused. Neural suppressants for Signe. Sedatives for the panic attacks that rippled through the crew when the silence stretched. Resources we couldn’t replace, spent because I couldn’t accept my own limitations.
Hallgerd’s authority, undermined. She’d given a direct order. I’d made it optional.
The worst part wasn’t Hallgerd’s formal reprimand or Kari’s quiet disappointment. It was understanding my own motivation with the kind of crystalline clarity that comes too late to matter. I hadn’t acted from noble desperation to save us. I hadn’t even believed, rationally, that I could succeed.
No. I’d been terrified of irrelevance. Of my degenerating body making me useless. Of watching my technical skills become meaningless as my hands betrayed me, tremor by tremor, until I was just another resource drain on our dwindling supplies. So I’d tried to prove my worth in the most spectacular way possible: competence weaponized into recklessness, cowardice dressed up as courage and called heroism.
The realization tasted like bile. Like the medications Kari made me swallow. Like failure.
The repair protocols scroll past. My left hand shakes so badly I abandon the physical interface entirely, resort to voice commands like admitting defeat. Each diagnostic check is an apology. Each system test, penance. No dramatic breakthrough awaits me here. No vindication. Just the patient reconstruction of trust through competence measured not in brilliance but reliability, my worth finally untethered from heroics I can no longer perform.
The gloves compensate for tremors I earned through pride. Around 0600 I understand: Signe helped not because I was irreplaceable but because we were a team. That distinction (that accepting help means more than brilliance) settles like ballast. My guilt has purpose now. I document every failure so others learn what happens when competence becomes weapon, when fear of irrelevance costs three days of voices people needed to survive.
I pulled the raw data first: the cleanest approach, the way Hallgerd had trained me to tackle any system failure. Start with what you know is true, then work backward through the corruption. My left hand trembled against the haptic interface, but the glove compensated, translating intention into precise commands even as my muscles misfired. I’d stopped thinking of that as ironic weeks ago.
The first transmission log opened like a wound: packet loss at 34%, but not scattered the way atmospheric interference presents. The degradation followed curves I recognized from my certification exams. Quantum decoherence patterns, the kind you see when entangled particles lose their connection across distance. Except we weren’t distant. The relay satellites were less than two hundred meters away, well within stable entanglement range.
I overlaid the second day’s logs. Packet loss at 41%, same degradation signature but intensified. My fingers moved faster now, pulling up diagnostic subroutines I’d written during the first week of quarantine, back when I’d still believed this was a technical problem I could solve through competence and persistence.
The third day’s data made me pause. Packet loss at 47%, but something else: harmonic interference in frequencies that shouldn’t exist in our transmission bands. I isolated the harmonics and ran them through the pattern recognition algorithms, expecting equipment malfunction or dimensional bleed-through from the pocket universe boundary.
The algorithm flagged a match: 87% correlation with neural activity patterns.
My neural activity patterns.
I sat back from the console, my breath suddenly loud in the quiet hub. The tremor in my left hand had stopped: not because the glove was compensating, but because my hand had gone completely still, the way it sometimes did now when I was processing complex electromagnetic data. The way it never used to do, back before Yggdrasil Station, back when I was just sick instead of becoming something else entirely.
I pulled up the transmission logs again, this time filtering for the harmonics I’d dismissed as noise. They weren’t random. The interference patterns formed coherent structures. Not language exactly, but information density that made my pattern recognition instincts scream.
I overlaid my biometric data from the past six months. Medical telemetry Kari had been collecting, thinking he was tracking my degeneration.
The correlation hit 94%.
Every spike in my neural activity matched a fluctuation in the pocket universe’s dimensional readings. Not caused by them: synchronized with them. My tremors intensified precisely when the containment field adjusted its frequency. The moments when my left hand went completely still, when I could read electromagnetic interference like text, when I knew what a system would do before the diagnostics confirmed it. Those weren’t compensation or intuition.
They were perception.
My body wasn’t failing to control itself. It was learning to sense something that had no business existing in baseline reality. The dimensional radiation wasn’t killing my neurons. It was rewriting them, building new structures that could process information from outside our universe’s normal parameters.
I wasn’t degenerating. I was transforming into something that could perceive the pocket universe’s true nature.
I accessed Bjornulf’s files through the backdoor Signe had shown me, my fingers moving before ethics could stop them. The guilt tasted metallic, but I needed confirmation.
His progression matched mine exactly, but compressed. His tremors had started eighteen months before mine. His neural restructuring was three stages more advanced. The anger I’d dismissed as bitterness: maybe that was what happened when your consciousness couldn’t integrate fast enough, when you felt yourself becoming something else and had no framework to understand it.
I was looking at my own future. His deterioration was my trajectory.
The worst part? His medical notes showed moments of clarity, of perception beyond normal human range. Then fear. Then rage at what was being done to him.
He knew. He’d known for months.
The encryption peeled away in layers, each one revealing my own face staring back. Neurological plasticity markers: exceptional. Genetic predisposition to dimensional sensitivity: optimal. Psychological profile (I stopped breathing) “subject demonstrates high pain tolerance combined with need for external validation, ideal for long-term physiological adaptation studies.”
They hadn’t hired me. They’d selected me. Like livestock.
The transmission log glowed accusingly. Every status report I’d filed, every efficiency metric I’d documented. All of it feeding their study. My trembling fingers had typed proof of successful adaptation while I’d believed I was demonstrating professional competence. The corporation hadn’t needed to lie to me. They’d simply let me interpret my own transformation as worthiness, my suffering as dedication.
His hands didn’t shake as he pulled up the scans. That steadiness was worse than tremors would have been. Professional distance, the kind you need when delivering terminal diagnoses. Except this wasn’t terminal. This was something they didn’t have words for yet.
“Look at the temporal lobe,” Kari said, his voice carrying that awful gentleness he used with patients who didn’t know they were already gone. The holographic display rotated between my scan and Bjornulf’s, neural pathways lighting up in colors that shouldn’t exist in standard medical imaging. “These aren’t lesions. They’re not degradation.”
I watched the structures branch and fold, following geometries I recognized from Tyra’s dimensional mathematics. My brain was learning to think in pocket universe topology. Had been learning, for months, while I’d attributed the headaches to stress and the tremors to disease.
“The progression rate correlates perfectly with proximity to the containment field,” Kari continued, pulling up exposure logs I didn’t know he’d been keeping. “Bjornulf works medical, one module away. You’re in Communications, right next to Research. Tyra…” He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. She’d been here longest, worked closest to the generators.
“How long have you known?” My voice came out steadier than I’d expected.
“Suspected? Three weeks. Known?” He gestured at my data, the evidence I’d brought him. “Five minutes.”
The memorial corner caught my eye. Coordinates tattooed on his arm, matching the plaque on the wall. Njord Station’s last position before the corporation’s experimental terraforming cascade failed. Before they’d classified it as “acceptable losses” and moved on to the next frontier.
“They chose us,” I said. Not a question.
“They chose all of us.” He pulled up the crew roster, highlighting neurological profiles. “Every person on this station was pre-screened for dimensional receptivity. We thought we were being selected for competence.”
We’d been selected for compatibility. For transformation. For whatever we were becoming.
The medication logs glowed between us, innocent entries hiding their truth. Kari’s fingers moved through the data with the precision of someone who’d memorized every dose, every notation, every careful lie he’d told himself.
“I prescribed neural stabilizers,” he said, voice hollow. “Standard treatment for degenerative conditions. Except they weren’t stabilizing anything. They were…” He pulled up molecular structures, comparing them to Tyra’s dimensional field readings. Perfect correlation. “They were catalysts. Easing the transformation, preventing rejection shock.”
My left hand tremored against the table. Not disease. Adaptation.
“The supply calculations,” Kari continued, pulling up inventory projections I’d never seen. “Forty-seven days at current usage. But current usage assumes treatment. If I stop medicating symptoms we’re not supposed to cure…” He met my eyes. “We have supplies for six months. They knew exactly how long this would take.”
The numbers were precise. Clinical. Forty percent survival through complete restructuring. We were the acceptable losses, the ones who might make it through to whatever waited on the other side of human.
The files opened like wounds. Kari’s hands shook worse than mine as he navigated past encryption he’d built to protect himself from his own knowledge. Corporate briefings, sterile language describing “controlled dimensional exposure protocols” and “acceptable neural restructuring casualties.”
Forty percent survival. They’d calculated us like equipment failure rates.
“I knew,” Kari whispered, and the words broke something in the air between us. “Not consciously. But I… I structured the medication schedules around transformation timelines, not treatment protocols. I told myself I was being thorough.” His finger hovered over a file dated three months back. “I wrote this after Bjornulf’s first major tremor episode. I knew then.”
The file contained a single question, repeated seventeen times: Should I tell them?
His voice cracked reading his own justifications, maintaining morale, preventing panic, preserving function. Corporate phrases he’d internalized until they became his thoughts. I watched him see himself clearly: a good man who’d chosen the comfort of his crew’s ignorance over their right to prepare, who’d let kindness become complicity. He’d protected us from truth like children, and we’d trusted him completely.
The medical data spread across the display between us, undeniable. Kari’s hand, steady through a thousand emergencies, trembled reaching for the files. “Strand and Olafsson,” he whispered. “Headaches they attributed to stress. Minor tremors. I told myself it was nothing.” His eyes found mine, hollow with recognition. “Bjornulf isn’t dying. He’s succeeding. And I’ve been treating transformation like disease.”
I’d believed I was chosen for my skills. That my expertise with quantum-entangled systems, my ability to read interference patterns others missed, had earned me this posting. The tremor in my left hand. They’d selected me because of it.
Hallgerd’s quarters felt suffocating despite their modest size, identical to my own in the station’s enforced equality. But the data spreading across her personal terminal revealed hierarchies we’d never seen, decisions made light-years away by people who’d calculated our worth in risk-benefit matrices.
“Dimensional adaptation subjects,” Signe’s voice whispered through my earpiece, clinical and cold. She was three modules away, neural implant jacked directly into the communication intercept systems we’d rebuilt from quarantine-locked hardware. “They’re calling us dimensional adaptation subjects, Ragna.”
Hallgerd’s fingers hovered over the access panel, her legendary composure fracturing. I’d watched her make impossible decisions with steady hands: who got extra rations, which systems to sacrifice when power fluctuated, how to maintain hope through weeks of isolation. Now those hands shook as she entered clearance codes I knew she’d been ordered never to use without explicit corporate authorization.
“I told myself you’d all volunteered with informed consent,” she said, her voice barely recognizable. “That the corporation valued.”I was so fucking naive.”
The files cascaded open. Consent forms dense with technical language, risk disclosures buried in appendices, medical terminology chosen specifically to obscure rather than inform. My own signature stared back at me from a document I’d signed three years ago, eager and grateful for the opportunity, never understanding that phrases like “potential neurological adaptation to dimensional proximity” meant my brain would slowly restructure itself into something no longer entirely human.
They hadn’t just failed to protect us. They’d counted on our transformation. Budgeted for it.
The classified files bloom across Hallgerd’s display in damning clarity. I force myself to read each line, though my vision blurs with something that isn’t the tremor. Consent forms with technical language deliberately designed to obscure. Risk assessments that categorized crew neurological damage as “within acceptable parameters for breakthrough research,” as if our brains were equipment with expected failure rates.
Then the memo chain. My breath catches.
Corporate leadership had specifically selected personnel with existing conditions or colonial backgrounds. Populations deemed “statistically less likely to generate liability concerns.” The phrase appears three times across different documents, casual as a shipping manifest.
I recognize the calculus that made my trembling hands not a disability to accommodate but a feature that made me expendable. Bjornulf too. Signe with her implant. Kari, survivor of a destroyed station with no government to advocate for him.
They’d chosen us because no one would miss us enough to matter.
My stomach turns. I taste bile and recycled air.
“Volunteered.” Hallgerd’s voice fractures on the word. Her palm presses flat against the display like she could shove the damning text back into classified darkness. “I questioned the research parameters. Twice.”
The confession comes in pieces, each one costing her. Corporate ethics boards had assured her. All protocols met standards. She’d believed them because the alternative, that she’d led us into this knowingly, was unthinkable.
“I told myself you were partners,” she whispers. “That your expertise made this collaboration, not…”
She can’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
I watch my mentor’s spine curve, that military bearing finally breaking. The worldview she’d built her career on (competence rewarded, hierarchy protective, institutional rules as shield) crumbles like the corrupted data packets Signe keeps pulling from the void.
We’d both believed the system valued us.
We’d both been inventory.
Signe’s temple port flares silver-white, data streaming directly into her visual cortex. “Corporate’s already drafting press releases.” Her voice carries an edge I’ve never heard. “Tragic research accident. Heroic sacrifice for human advancement.”
The narrative written before we knew we were dying. Or changing.
Hallgerd’s face cycles through expressions too fast to name, denial, rage, grief, something darker. The captain who’d believed orders flowed from wisdom now understands: chains only pull downward. Authority without accountability is just cruelty wearing medals.
The captain’s quarters smell like recycled air and ending faith. Hallgerd’s fingers leave prints on the classified display. Proof she’d signed deployment orders knowing the dimensional exposure parameters exceeded safety margins by factors of twelve.
“They told me acceptable risk,” she whispers, and I watch institutional certainty die in real-time. “I believed competence equaled care.”
My left hand tremors. Not deterioration. Evolution the corporation purchased with our neurons.
The medical bay’s lighting turned his beard silver, made the tremor in both his hands look like something captured in stop-motion. Kari hadn’t moved. Calculated calm I recognized from triage situations, the stillness before decisive action. The pry bar was standard equipment, meant for emergency hull breaches. In Bjornulf’s grip it became something else entirely.
I should have felt fear. Instead I felt recognition.
“The medications won’t help,” I said. My voice came out steadier than my left hand. “Kari’s not hoarding them. They’re just irrelevant now.”
Bjornulf’s head snapped toward me. His eyes held the particular wildness of someone who’d stopped sleeping, stopped pretending the tremors were manageable. “You don’t know what it’s like. I activated my interface glove, let the corrupted data streams bloom between us in false-color holography.”I’ve been tracking the progression. Mine, yours, the pattern in the dimensional readings.”
The pharmaceutical lock gleamed behind Kari. All those carefully rationed supplies. All that meticulous inventory. Treating symptoms of a condition that had never existed.
“Look at the neural tissue scans,” I continued, highlighting the sections that had taken me three days to decode. “The cellular changes aren’t degradation. They’re adaptation. Our neurons are developing new structures. Receptors for dimensional frequencies.”
Bjornulf’s breathing had gone ragged. The pry bar dipped, not dropped but lowering. “That’s not, the diagnosis said,”
“The diagnosis was corporate classification.” My tremor spiked. I didn’t hide it. “Medical terminology obscuring what they actually did. They sent us into dimensional exposure knowing our neural tissue would transform. Knowing we’d become something else.”
Kari made a small sound. Not surprise. Confirmation of what he’d suspected but couldn’t prove.
“We were never sick,” I said. “We were always the experiment.”
I didn’t raise an alarm. Didn’t signal Kari to activate emergency protocols. Instead I pulled up the corrupted data streams, let my interface glove paint the truth in false-color holography between us.
“Watch the pattern,” I said. Technician’s voice. The one that had talked me through a hundred impossible repairs. “Neural tissue scans overlaid with dimensional frequency readings.”
The tremor in my left hand made the projection waver. I didn’t compensate.
“These aren’t degradation markers. They’re adaptation structures. New receptor formations responding to dimensional frequencies.” I highlighted the cellular changes, the elegant horror of transformation. “Our neurons are rebuilding themselves. Processing information human tissue was never designed to handle.”
Bjornulf’s eyes tracked the data. Not the resentful colonial I’d been avoiding. Someone else. Someone intelligent enough to understand what he was seeing.
“The medical classifications,” I continued, “were corporate obscuration. Terminology designed to hide what they knew. What they’d planned.” My voice stayed steady. “They sent us here knowing exposure would transform us. Knowing we’d become the experiment.”
The pry bar’s grip loosened in his tremoring hands.
The pry bar hit the deck plating with a sound like finality. Bjornulf followed it down, knees buckling, and the noise that came from him wasn’t rage anymore but something stripped bare. Grief for flesh that was rewriting itself into alien architecture, for the colonial strength he’d wrapped around himself like armor now revealed as irrelevant against transformation he couldn’t intimidate or endure his way through. His hands covered his face, tremors making the gesture jagged, and he wept for the man he’d believed he was, for Njord Station’s son who’d survived through sheer stubborn will, now dissolving into something with no name, no tradition, no pride to anchor it. I knelt beside him without choosing to. My tremoring hand found his shaking shoulder. Two bodies betraying their pilots. Two futures evaporating. Not alone, though. Not that.
Kari retrieved the pry bar with movements that had gentled countless traumas, setting it beyond reach before lowering himself to the deck beside us. His weathered hands settled, steady, on both our shoulders. “Njord Station,” he said quietly, and I heard the weight of memory in it. “I watched radiation rewrite people I loved. Watched them grieve who they’d been.” His eyes found mine, then Bjornulf’s. “Identity survives if you let the old self go.” He’d known. Always known. His protection had been preparation for metamorphosis, not prevention.
The medications Kari distributed weren’t cures, we’d moved past that comfortable fiction, but calibrated delays, buying us time to become whatever we were becoming. Bjornulf’s hands shook less as the tremor suppressants took effect, and he looked at me with something rawer than the resentment I’d grown accustomed to navigating. “They sent us knowing,” he said, and the colonial pride that had armored him cracked open to reveal the same fear I carried. We weren’t competitors anymore. We were specimens who’d finally read our own experiment protocols.
The holographic data hangs in the air like evidence at a trial, and I can’t look away from the dates. How long before my hands started shaking had they known what the dimensional exposure would do to human neurology. Hallgerd’s voice has the hollow quality of someone reading their own eulogy when she walks us through the risk assessments, the corporate decision trees that weighed our expertise against our expendability and found the research valuable enough to justify what they clinically termed “progressive adaptive syndrome.”
My left hand spasms against my thigh, and I press it flat, watching Tyra’s face as she processes that her life’s work was built on a foundation of acceptable casualties. The radiation scars on her neck seem to darken in the shifting light, or maybe that’s just how betrayal looks when it has nowhere external to direct itself.
Kari stands near the medical data, and I can see him calculating backwards through every symptom he’d treated, every reassurance he’d offered, realizing he’d been managing a transformation the corporation had anticipated and documented. His memorial tattoo, those Njord Station coordinates, suddenly reads differently. Not just loss, but pattern. How many other stations had fed data into these protocols?
Hallgerd’s hands steady as she reaches the end of her confession, and that’s somehow worse than the trembling: the moment when someone accepts they’ve become the thing they’d thought they were protecting us from. “I believed competence would be rewarded with care,” she says, and it sounds like an epitaph for all of us who’d trusted that our skills made us valuable rather than useful.
The numbers float there: 2.[^3] million credits. The exact value of a human life when you’re pioneering dimensional technology. I’d thought my worth was measured in successful repairs, in problems solved. I’d been wrong about what problem we were solving.
The room fractures along fault lines I hadn’t known existed. Bjornulf’s accusation lands like a physical blow, “test subjects not researchers”, and I watch Signe flinch as if he’d struck her implant port directly. The colonial crew moves together without discussion, their bodies remembering collective survival patterns I’d thought were just cultural quirks. Suddenly I’m aware of how I stand: alone, neither corporate enough for Hallgerd’s camp nor colonial enough for theirs.
Kari doesn’t move toward anyone, and that isolation mirrors something in my chest. We’re the in-betweens, valuable for skills but not belonging to any tribe that might protect us when resources get scarce.
Someone, I think it’s one of the engineers, spits the word “collaborator” at Hallgerd, and the captain accepts it without defense. That frightens me more than the anger: her willingness to become the sacrifice that might hold everyone else together. I’ve seen this pattern in failing systems, the way one component gets designated for failure to preserve the whole.
My hand tremors against my leg, counting the rhythm of dissolution.
Tyra’s voice cuts through the chaos like a scalpel through inflamed tissue. Not commanding. Confessing. She projects data streams onto every surface, her scarred hands steady as she walks us through her own papers, the ones that dismissed neurological anomalies as “acceptable variance within experimental parameters.”
“I wrote that,” she says, pointing to a passage that reduced human suffering to statistical noise. “I knew the risks existed. I categorized them as unlikely enough to justify continued research.”
The room goes quiet in a way that feels like vacuum. Not peace, but the absence of air to carry sound.
I see myself in her admission. Every safety check I’d skipped because the relay calibration was more urgent. Every time I’d worked through pain because proving my worth mattered more than my body’s warnings. We’d all drunk the mythology that great work required sacrifice, never questioning who the universe would choose to burn as fuel.
I’d watched bodies fail before. Equipment burnout, structural collapse, the clean mathematics of entropy. But Kari’s timeline described something else: consciousness fragmenting into quantum states, thoughts becoming probability waves, the self as a coherent narrative dissolving into dimensional harmonics. He didn’t call it death because medicine had no precedent. We were test cases for a transformation that might be transcendence or obliteration, and the difference depended on definitions we hadn’t invented yet.
The room empties in fragments. I stay because standing feels impossible, because Hallgerd’s methodical collection of evidence is the only honest thing left. We were always expendable. The corporation just made us complicit in our own consumption.
The observation deck has become my confessional, though I’m not sure anymore what god I’m confessing to. Four hours at a time, sometimes six when Kari’s occupied with Bjornulf’s latest crisis. The radiation warnings flash amber, then red. I’ve learned to ignore them. My body is already rewriting its own rules.
The tremor in my left hand isn’t random anymore. I noticed it three days ago. The rhythm matches the containment field’s oscillation frequency. When the pocket universe fluctuates, my fingers dance. When it stabilizes, they still. I’m not malfunctioning. I’m resonating.
The equations come unbidden, flowing through my awareness like the electromagnetic patterns I used to read in comm systems. Except these aren’t patterns I learned. They’re patterns I’m becoming. My datapad fills with notation I don’t remember studying: dimensional harmonics, consciousness-substrate interface coefficients, the mathematics of transformation. I sketch them compulsively, blood from my nose spattering the screen, my interface gloves slick with it.
I should be terrified. The technician I was would have run diagnostics, sought treatment, trusted Kari to fix what was breaking. But that woman believed in repair. She believed expertise mattered, that the corporation valued competence, that her condition was a problem with solutions.
She was naive.
This isn’t breaking. It’s translation. My nervous system is learning a new language, and the pocket universe is teaching me its grammar through every tremor, every perceptual shift, every moment I stand here letting impossible colors burn themselves into my retinas. The dimensions Tyra models mathematically, I’m starting to feel: not metaphorically, but as direct sensory input my brain is rewiring itself to process.
The person I was is dying. Not to disease. To metamorphosis.
And when Tyra finds me here, blood-marked and scribbling alien mathematics, I see her recognize what I’m becoming before I’ve fully accepted it myself.
Tyra sits beside me without speaking. Her presence anchors me to something almost human. She pulls up her models on a shared display, fingers moving with that particular grace I’ve always noticed, and I realize she’s offering me a framework. A way to understand what I’m becoming through the language she knows best.
Together we map it. What my transforming neurology perceives against her theoretical frameworks. I describe the sensation of dimensional depth, the way space folds in my peripheral vision, how the containment field feels like pressure against skin I don’t have. She translates, her hands shaking as she types, equations blooming across the screen.
The correlations emerge like constellations. Perfect. Undeniable.
The dimensional bleed isn’t contamination. It’s invitation.
Human consciousness at certain neurological frequencies can interface with the pocket universe’s substrate. My condition deteriorating neural pathways were actually susceptible pathways. The corporation knew. They must have known. Selected us. Sent us here not as researchers but as test subjects for a transformation they documented but never disclosed.
Tyra’s breath catches. Her hand finds mine, tremor meeting steadiness, and neither of us can look away from the proof.
I catalog the impossible with the precision I once reserved for relay diagnostics. “Depth perception extends through the containment field boundary. Distance becomes… negotiable.” My voice sounds distant even to myself. Tyra’s stylus scratches across her tablet, converting my stumbling descriptions into elegant mathematical truth.
We work in shifts that blur into continuous time. She sleeps twenty minutes while I describe how the pocket universe tastes of copper and ozone. I rest my eyes while she models consciousness as a wave function collapsing across dimensional membranes. Her scarred fingers and my trembling ones meet over the same holographic display, adjusting parameters, confirming observations.
This is intimacy stripped to its essence: two minds reaching across the gap between human and whatever comes next, building a bridge from equations and raw experience.
Signe’s implant catches it first. Harmonic resonance where there should be neural chaos. She finds them in Research Module 1: Ragna bleeding, fingers moving through holographic mathematics like conducting an orchestra only she can hear, while Tyra sleeps against the console. The readouts tell the truth Signe’s augmented perception confirms. Not dying. Evolving. The prototype none of them consented to become.
I let Kari catalog my dissolution with clinical precision: temperature spikes, cellular breakdown, the immune war against my own transformation. The data mattered because the corporation had known. They’d sent us here understanding the dimensional bleed would rewrite neurological tissue, that we were test subjects dressed as technicians. My trembling hands had never been disease. They’d been the first words of a language I never agreed to learn, spoken by a body they’d decided was expendable enough for truth.
I started the file at 0400 hours, when the tremor in my left hand made sleep impossible anyway. The observation deck was empty: everyone else respected the thirty-minute exposure limit. I’d been here two hours already, watching the aurora mathematics of the pocket universe boundary while my gloves recorded the micro-movements my fingers could no longer control.
“Dimensional Communication Patterns: A Technical Autopsy.” I liked the honesty of calling it what it was: a postmortem on my career, my purpose, maybe my species’ ability to reach beyond this bubble. The voice recorder activated with a thought, my neural interface still reliable even as my body betrayed me.
“Entry one. Subject: signal degradation analysis, week seven of quarantine.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Initial hypothesis was incorrect. The pocket universe doesn’t block our transmissions. It transforms them.”
I pulled up the holographic data, weeks of failed communication attempts rendered as three-dimensional probability clouds. Beautiful, really. Useless for rescue, but beautiful.
“The quantum-entangled relays are functioning perfectly. The signals leave our equipment exactly as designed. But the pocket universe’s dimensional substrate treats electromagnetic waves as… suggestions. Recommendations. It accepts our carefully encoded distress calls and translates them into mathematical structures that exist in more dimensions than our receivers were built to detect.”
My left hand spasmed, knocking against the console. I switched the glove to passive mode, let the tremor run its course while I kept talking.
“We’re not experiencing equipment failure. We’re experiencing a category error. We built tools to communicate across space. This place doesn’t recognize space as fundamental. It’s teaching us its grammar, and we’re too limited to learn. Not silence. Translation. The universe is answering us. We just can’t hear it.”
The aurora shifted outside, and I wondered if it was listening.
I documented them methodically, seventeen patterns that deserved better than error codes. Ginnungagap. The void-state where signals simply ceased, not blocked but unmade. Yggdrasil, the branching cascades where one transmission became nine, each carrying fragments of the original meaning across probability branches. Ragnarök for the moments when coherence itself collapsed, when the carrier wave and the message divorced and remarried in configurations that made my equipment weep mathematics.
“These aren’t malfunctions,” I told the recorder, my voice finding a rhythm that matched the aurora’s pulse. “They’re vocabulary lessons. The pocket universe is showing me that communication was never about forcing meaning through space. It’s about… resonance. Harmony. We’ve been shouting coordinates when we should have been singing.”
My right hand, still steady, still mine, sketched equations in the holographic field. Each interference pattern mapped to a dimensional transformation. Not noise. Grammar. Syntax for a language where consciousness itself was the carrier wave, where thought and signal were the same thing, where my desperate need to reach out was already reaching, just in directions my training had taught me to ignore.
The dataset crystallized into something I’d never seen in any communications textbook. Seventeen thousand failed transmissions, each failure unique, each impossibility expressing itself in mathematically precise ways. I mapped them against dimensional flux readings, against my own neural patterns during transmission attempts, against the pocket universe’s temporal variations.
The correlations made my breath stop.
Every time I’d felt desperate certainty that someone needed to hear me (those moments when my intention became physical sensation in my chest) the dimensional membrane had responded. Not by carrying the signal through, but by recording it. Encoding my consciousness into the substrate itself. The pocket universe wasn’t blocking communication. It was becoming it.
I was already everywhere I’d tried to reach.
I opened a recording for Signe, my voice steadier than my hands. “If the tremors take my fine motor control, you’ll need to continue this.” I explained the pattern recognition protocols, how corrupted packets weren’t failures but translations. “The beauty is.”My damaged nervous system already processes the world as interference. I was trained by my own body to read what healthy people dismiss as noise.”
I typed the final classification into Tyra’s system, my gloved fingers finding the keys despite the tremor. Not “emergency transmission” but “foundational observations.” Not distress calls but field notes from the edge of comprehension. If we dissolved into this pocket universe’s mathematics, at least my corrupted signals would remain. Data woven into dimensional foam, my failing nervous system’s gift of reading noise preserved as the substrate’s own memory. Communication officer to cosmic translator. The irony steadied my hands.
The medication injector rolled across the deck plating again, and I watched Bjornulf’s face contort. Not from pain but from rage at his own hands. The tremor had progressed to both arms now, the kind of full-body betrayal I knew was coming for me eventually. Six months, maybe a year if the temporal dilation worked in my favor. His beard couldn’t hide the muscle tension in his jaw.
I sat down beside him without speaking. My left hand chose that moment to spasm, fingers curling involuntarily against my palm. The glove’s haptic feedback compensators smoothed it into something almost graceful, but we both knew what lay beneath the technology.
“Come to document the decline?” His voice caught on the last word, the speech centers starting to fail. I’d heard that stutter in my own recordings lately, deleted them before anyone else could notice.
I worked the glove off my left hand, then the right. The air felt wrong against my bare skin. Too cold, too immediate. My fingers twitched like dying insects. I set both gloves on the deck between us, the custom interfaces I’d spent two years perfecting, the only reason I could still call myself a communications officer.
“They’re calibrated to my neural patterns,” I said quietly. “But Signe could reprogram them in maybe four hours. She’s been watching me adjust them for months.”
His hands had gone still, locked rigid against his thighs. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been where you are. Not physically, not yet, but in my head, calculating who deserves limited resources, who’s earned the right to keep functioning.” My bare fingers drummed against my knee, arrhythmic and helpless. “We’re the same model of broken, Bjornulf. Different production dates, same fatal flaw.”
He stared at the gloves like they might bite him.
“I forgive you,” I said. “For the supply requisition forms you altered. For telling Hallgerd I was compromising safety protocols. For hating me because I remind you what you’re losing.”
The gloves lay between us like a bridge neither of us had asked for. His eyes tracked them with the kind of hunger I recognized from my own mirror. The desperate mathematics of what you’d trade for one more day of competence.
“I used to think the tremor was my body giving up,” I said. My naked fingers twitched against my knee, spelling out nonsense in the old Morse code I’d learned as a kid. “Failure. Betrayal. Proof I wasn’t strong enough to hold myself together.”
Bjornulf’s jaw worked, but no sound came out. The speech centers failing mid-thought, that specific humiliation.
“Then Kari told me something.” I watched my own hand spasm, let him see it unfiltered. “He said the tremor isn’t failure. It’s a signal. Data about stress, exhaustion, fear: my nervous system trying to communicate in the only language it has left. It just needs translation.”
His breathing had changed, slower now.
“The gloves don’t fix anything,” I continued. “They just interpret. Turn the noise into something useful. We’re not broken, Bjornulf. We’re just speaking a dialect nobody else understands yet.”
I kept my voice low, steady as I could manage. “I used to wake up and test myself. Hold a stylus. Thread a connector. Every morning, cataloging what I’d lost overnight.” The medical bay’s monitoring equipment beeped its rhythm around us. “Thought if I just tried harder, concentrated more, I could force my body back into obedience. Like it was a subordinate refusing orders.”
His good hand (the less-affected one) curled into a fist against his thigh.
“But it’s not disobedience. It’s communication.” I flexed my fingers, watched them judder. “My nervous system screaming that I’m terrified, exhausted, pushed past limits. The tremor’s honest when I’m not. It tells the truth about what I’m carrying.”
His eyes met mine finally. Wet. Understanding.
“I forgive you,” I said, and meant it. “Every desperate calculation you’ve made. Every time you’ve looked at supplies and done the math on who deserves them more. Every moment you’ve hated someone for functioning when you can’t.” My left hand tremored against the bench between us. “This condition. It makes us family. Siblings who never asked to share this inheritance but understand each other’s terror completely.”
I watched him break. The military bearing crumbling as moisture gathered in those cold eyes, his pride a dam holding back the flood even as his shaking fingers reached for the gloves like lifelines. We sat there in the sterile white bay, two people accepting that forgiveness doesn’t heal tremors but it does transmit the most vital message: you’re not alone in your failing body, your terror, your desperate mathematics of survival.
I stood in the doorway of her quarters: identical dimensions to mine, identical furniture, identical viewport, but somehow transformed into command territory by the way she’d arranged everything at right angles. Her uniform jacket hung with parade-ground precision. The desk faced the door like a fortification.
“The relay diagnostics,” I started, holding out my tablet like a shield. My left hand tremored against the casing. “Module Four’s quantum array is degrading faster than. Something in my throat collapsed like a failing containment field.
“I can’t do this anymore.” My voice came out raw. “Two years, Hallgerd. Two years of you watching me like I’m a system about to fail. Every assignment came with that look: the one that says you’re calculating my limits. Every time you reassigned something to Signe, I knew what you were thinking. That my hands were too unreliable. That I was the weak component in your crew architecture.”
I was shaking now, not just my left hand but all of me. “You keep saying I have potential, but you never let me prove it. You protect me like I’m fragile. Like this,” I held up my tremoring hand, “, is all you see when you look at me. Not the systems I’ve kept running. Not the solutions I’ve improvised. Just the flaw in the design.”
The tablet slipped from my grip. It clattered against the deck plating between us.
“Every guidance felt like judgment. Every concern felt like confirmation I wasn’t enough. And the worst part?” My voice cracked completely. “The worst part is I started believing you. Started seeing myself as the component that needs constant monitoring, constant backup systems, constant supervision. Started thinking maybe you were right to doubt me.”
She didn’t move to her desk. Instead, Hallgerd sat on the edge of her bunk. Regulation frame, regulation mattress, nothing that marked it as belonging to someone with authority. Her hands folded in her lap like she was the one being evaluated.
“I watched you,” she said, voice stripped of command timber, “the way I imagine mothers watch their daughters. Hungry for every small victory. Terrified of every stumble.” Her steel-gray eyes met mine without the usual calculation. “I never had children. Never had time. The career came first, always first. Promotions and postings and the next assignment. And then one day you’re forty-five and everyone you could have loved is scattered across systems you’ll never visit again.”
Her composure cracked like failing hull integrity. “You became the daughter I’d sacrificed everything to avoid having. So I pushed too hard. Cared too obviously. Tried to compress decades of parenting into mission briefings and performance reviews.” She looked at her perfectly aligned desk. “I confused mentorship with making up for lost time.”
I understood then what we’d both lost to the gap between us. Every time she’d checked my work, I’d heard doubt in my abilities. Every time I’d pushed back, she’d seen confirmation I was strong enough to lead someday. We’d been speaking different languages while breathing the same recycled air.
“The station was supposed to eliminate hierarchy,” I said, my left hand tremoring against my thigh. “Equal quarters, equal voice. But we brought the old structures with us anyway.”
“We did.” She looked around the room that was identical to mine in every dimension except meaning. “I made this a command center by treating it as one. Made you subordinate by refusing to see you as anything else.”
The pocket universe shifted colors beyond the viewport, indifferent to our revelations.
“What do you need from me now?” Hallgerd asked, and the question held no rank. “Not tomorrow. Not when this ends. Right now.”
My tremoring hand steadied against the armrest. “Trust me to fail. Let me make decisions that might be wrong. Ask my opinion instead of shaping it.” I met her steel-gray eyes. “Treat me like the equal this station promised we’d be.”
Something shifted in her expression.
We spoke it like contract terms. She would present decisions before finalizing them, I would log my symptoms daily without editorial omission, we would both name the old dance when it started again because transformation takes longer than intention. When I reached the door, I glanced back. Her quarters looked smaller somehow. Just walls and furniture. Just another person rationing hope in measured doses.
I stood where the floor tiles converged in their radial pattern, the hub’s geometry making everyone equidistant. Democratic architecture. It felt like standing at the center of a target.
“I need to tell you what I did.” My voice carried in the recycled air. The tremor in my left hand had spread to my right that morning, Kari knew, I could see it in how carefully he wasn’t looking at my hands, but that wasn’t the confession that mattered.
“In the first three days after lockdown, I attempted to breach quarantine communications.” The words tasted like admitting to sabotage. Which, technically, I had committed. “I bypassed the safety interlocks on the quantum-entangled relay array. Twice. The third time I rerouted power through the backup systems to amplify the signal.”
Hallgerd’s expression didn’t change, but her stillness became absolute. Military stillness. The kind that precedes decisions.
“Each attempt created harmonic resonance in the containment field.” I forced myself to look at Tyra. Her scarred face showed nothing, but her hands had gone still. That was worse than anger. “Tyra spent four days recalibrating the dimensional anchors. She didn’t tell anyone because she was protecting me. The pocket universe came within point-zero-three percent of catastrophic collapse.”
Signe’s neural port flared bright blue. Shock registering directly in her implant before her conscious mind processed it.
“I told myself I was trying to save us. That my expertise meant I knew better than the protocols.” The confession felt like peeling back skin. “But I was terrified. Of being trapped. Of my condition progressing without treatment. Of dying here. So I decided fixing everything was my responsibility alone.”
Bjornulf’s arms tightened across his chest. His hands trembled against his biceps. Mirror image of my own deterioration.
“I nearly killed us all because I couldn’t accept that some things can’t be fixed by one person working alone.”
“The harmonic resonance peaked at four-point-seven terahertz,” I said, because precision mattered even in confession. “That’s the frequency where pocket universe membrane tension becomes critical. I knew that. Tyra had briefed us all in the first week.”
I watched Hallgerd’s jaw tighten. She understood what I was admitting: not ignorance, but willful disregard.
“The first bypass took me six hours. I routed through the secondary quantum array, told myself I was just testing signal integrity.” My left hand curled involuntarily. “The containment field fluctuated point-zero-one percent. Negligible. Except Tyra noticed. She recalibrated overnight without telling anyone.”
Signe’s neural port flickered: she was accessing logs, verifying my timeline. Finding the gaps where Tyra had worked alone.
“The second attempt, I used more power. Point-zero-two percent fluctuation. Tyra worked sixteen hours straight.” I forced myself to keep looking at them. “The third time, I convinced myself that if I just pushed harder, broke through completely, we’d be saved. Point-zero-three percent. Critical threshold. Tyra told me later. Another hour and the membrane would have sheared.”
“The worst part,” I said, and my voice caught on something that wasn’t tremor, “was telling myself that someone dying anyway had the right to take risks.”
Kari’s face did something complicated. The protective flinch I’d seen a hundred times when my condition came up, but underneath it, something harder crystallizing. Recognition, maybe. Or disappointment that I’d hidden behind the thing he’d been trying to shield me from.
“I called it bravery. Urgency. Necessity.” My left hand was shaking badly now, but I didn’t hide it. “It was recklessness. With your lives. I told myself my deterioration gave me permission to gamble, when it just made me dangerous.”
The wounded father-look faded from his eyes. What replaced it was more difficult to bear: respect for an adult claiming the full weight of her choices.
Bjornulf pushed off from the wall, ice-blue eyes fixed on me. “Do you think your expertise makes you more valuable than the rest of us? That resources spent on your communication attempts were justified?”
The question I’d been dreading. I could have deflected. Should have, maybe.
“Yes,” I said. “I did think that. Expertise became identity became justification. I’m still learning the difference between being useful and being worthy. That wisdom means knowing when your skills are the problem rather than the solution.”
The silence stretched like a failing connection: then Signe’s voice cut through: “I’ve been running neural interface shifts for twelve hours straight. Against every protocol.”
An engineer I barely knew: “I’ve got spare relays hidden in my quarters.”
The confessions cascaded. Not absolution, but acknowledgment. My hands shook openly now, no longer tucked in pockets. Leadership wasn’t steady hands fixing problems. It was trembling ones admitting which problems you’d caused.
The tablet’s glow painted his face in shades of memory. I watched his finger hover over the play icon on a video file, hesitate, then press.
Astrid Eriksson appeared in holographic miniature above the tablet. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. She was calibrating a relay array, her hands moving with that particular confidence that comes from understanding systems at an instinctive level. The same way I moved through communications equipment. Had moved, before the tremors made certainty impossible.
“She did that thing you do,” Kari said, his voice careful, clinical. “Tilting her head when listening to signal interference. Like she could hear patterns no one else could.”
The girl in the video bit her lower lip, frowning at a readout. My chest tightened. I’d seen that expression in mirrors.
“She was three weeks from her full certification when Njord Station,” He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “I was on a medical supply run. Three systems away. By the time I got the distress signal, there was nothing left but debris and radiation.”
His hands lay flat on the table, palms down, fingers splayed. Trying to hold something steady. Trying not to shake.
“You see her,” I said. Not a question.
“Every time you troubleshoot a problem I don’t understand. Every time you push yourself past safe limits because the work matters more than the pain.” His eyes met mine, and they were drowning. “Every time I check your medication levels, I’m trying to save someone I couldn’t reach in time.”
My left hand tremored against the table’s edge. I lifted it deliberately, placed it over his right hand. Both of us shaking now: his grief, my disease, the same fundamental instability.
“I’m not her,” I said quietly.
“I know.” His other hand covered mine. “But I can’t stop trying anyway.”
The silence stretched between us, filled with the soft hum of medical monitors. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its clinical armor.
“Your latest neural conductivity scan.” He pulled up a chart, and I watched the declining curve with a detachment that felt like falling. “At current progression, you have eighteen months before the tremors make fine motor work impossible. Maybe two years before,” His throat worked. “Before you can’t do any of this anymore.”
I’d known. Of course I’d known. But hearing him say it, watching his professional mask fracture around the edges, made it real in a way my private midnight fears never had.
“I’ve been rationing the myelin stabilizers,” he continued. “Stretching the supply. But in quarantine, without resupply…” He looked at his hands, still covering mine. “Astrid died in seconds. Station breach, explosive decompression. I’ve spent fifteen years wishing I could have been there, could have done something, anything.”
His fingers tightened. “And now I get to watch. Get to count down. Get to be present for every stage of losing you.”
The weight of his confession settled into my bones like the tremors themselves: a permanent addition I couldn’t shake free. He’d been carrying this knowledge alone, tracking my decline in those charts, calculating timelines while maintaining that steady, professional calm.
“Kari.” My voice cracked around his name. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing. I turned my hands beneath his, catching his fingers with mine, both of us trembling now.”For hiding it. For making you carry this alone. For not seeing that you weren’t doubting me. You were just…” I swallowed hard. “You were trying to protect someone you knew you couldn’t save.”
His eyes glistened. “Every damn day.”
The cost of his care mapped itself across his weathered face: every line a day he’d chosen this, chosen to love someone temporary despite Njord Station’s lesson. My throat tightened. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Not for being sick. For hiding it. For making you track my decline alone in those charts. For not understanding that protecting me was how you survived losing her.”
I reached across the table and placed my trembling hands over his. We shook together, my neurons misfiring, his grief made physical, two different frequencies of loss harmonizing into something I couldn’t name. The medical bay’s antiseptic silence held us. This was what love looked like stripped bare: his right to mourn me, my acceptance of being mourned. We breathed together, holding on while we still could.
I felt the words dissolve before I could shape them into anything coherent. My glove-covered fingers flexed against my thigh, the custom interface fabric doing its job, compensating for the tremor that had been getting worse since the quarantine began. Tyra’s eyes held mine, and in the impossible light bleeding through the observation deck’s viewports, I saw every calculation I’d ever made about risk and reward collapse into irrelevance.
“I’ve been mapping signals my entire life,” I said, hearing my voice crack on the last word. “Quantum entanglement, electromagnetic interference, every kind of transmission you can measure. But I never learned how to.”This. Whatever frequency we’ve been broadcasting on.”
Tyra shifted closer on the narrow bench, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her body through our jumpsuits. The shielding alarm chimed its thirty-second warning again. We had maybe ten minutes left before Kari’s safety protocols would lock us out of this module entirely.
“You’re trying to engineer connection like it’s a relay system,” she said, and there was no judgment in it, just recognition. Her scarred hand lifted, hovering between us. “Some things don’t need infrastructure, Ragna. Some things just: exist. Or they don’t.”
The pocket universe rippled behind her, colors I had no names for washing across her features. I thought about all the communications I’d repaired, all the desperate messages I’d pushed through impossible interference. I’d spent years believing that if you just found the right frequency, built the right bridge, you could transmit anything.
But Tyra was right. This wasn’t a problem to solve.
It was a choice to make.
I watched her hand settle over mine: not gripping, not trying to still the tremor, just resting there like she was reading data through touch. The observation deck’s warning chime faded into background noise. Everything faded except the weight of her palm, the slight roughness of her scarred fingertips against my interface glove.
“I’ve been calculating probabilities,” Tyra said, her voice dropping to something I’d never heard from her before, raw, unshielded. “Dimensional collapse scenarios, temporal decay rates, containment failure cascades. Every equation ends the same way.” Her gray eyes found mine. “We don’t get out of this.”
My throat tightened. The tremor in my hand intensified, but she didn’t pull away.
“So I stopped asking whether we survive,” she continued. “Started asking what matters if we don’t.” Her thumb traced a small circle against my knuckle. “You matter, Ragna. This matters. Not as data to preserve or a variable to optimize. Just: as itself.”
The pocket universe shifted behind her, painting her face in colors that shouldn’t exist. I turned my hand over, palm to palm, completing the connection.
I felt the circuit complete. Her steady hand over my trembling one, warmth conducting through the interface glove’s synthetic fabric like current through copper. The silver pendant at her throat caught the pocket universe’s impossible light as she leaned in, close enough that I could see the fine texture of her radiation scars, beautiful in their honesty.
This was communication without technology. Signal without transmission. A message that needed no relay because it traveled the shortest distance: skin to skin, pulse to pulse.
The observation deck’s radiation counter ticked higher, measuring exposure we’d both regret later. If there was a later. Tyra’s thumb traced the ridge of my knuckle, reading me like telemetry, and I stopped calculating survival odds. Some connections mattered more than duration.
“The universe doesn’t care,” Tyra said, and her gray eyes held mine with gravitational force. “Not about our research, our feelings, whether we deserve more time. It just is. I squeezed her hand, my tremor conducting through both our palms.”But we’re not indifferent. We care. Maybe that’s the only signal worth transmitting.”
We were speaking in metaphors because direct language couldn’t carry what passed between us.
The alarm’s pitch climbed. Neither of us moved. Tyra’s scarred cheek pressed my shoulder, warm through the jumpsuit fabric. Our breathing found the same rhythm. My tremor passed through our joined hands, became hers, became ours.
This love was imperfect. Crisis-born. Probably doomed.
Still real. Still worth transmitting.
“We should go,” Tyra whispered finally.
“Yes,” I agreed.
We rose slowly, carrying something fragile toward survival’s mundane demands.
The Communications Hub felt different now. The same equipment hummed around me, the same error messages blinked their futile warnings, but I moved through the space like someone returning home after a long absence. My left hand tremored as I reached for the interface, it always did, worse when I was tired or stressed, but I didn’t pause to compensate, didn’t reach for the stabilizing gloves tucked in my tool pouch.
Signe watched me from her station, neural port gleaming at her temple, those bright blue eyes tracking my movements with something like hope.
“We’re really doing this?” she asked. “The memorial project?”
“We’re really doing this.” I pulled up the documentation protocols I’d designed the night before, after leaving Tyra in the observation deck. My fingers danced across the holographic interface, tremor and all, initializing the recording systems. The muscle memory was there, reliable despite the neurological static. “Not a distress signal. Not a rescue beacon. Just… us. Who we were. Who we are.”
I activated the primary recorder, watched the timestamp begin its count. The red indicator light reflected off the viewport behind me, where the pocket universe’s impossible colors shifted and swirled. Twenty-three days we’d been sealed in this dimensional bottle. Twenty-three days of fighting the silence, trying to punch through the quarantine lockdown, desperate to reach someone, anyone, outside.
I wasn’t fighting anymore.
“This is Communications Officer Ragna Thorsdottir,” I said, and my voice came out steady, clear, purposeful. “Day 23 of quarantine aboard Yggdrasil Station. This is not a distress signal.” I paused, let that sink in for whoever might eventually hear this. “This is a record of who we were when the universe closed its doors. This is our testimony. This is how we chose to be remembered.”
The interviews became ritual, ceremony, something sacred in the recycled air.
Kari sat across from me on the third day, his weathered face illuminated by the recording light, and spoke of Njord Station with tears I’d never seen before. His voice cracked describing the children’s ward, the memorial coordinates tattooed on his forearm trembling as he gestured. “We had seventeen kids in care when the substrate collapsed. Seventeen. I knew all their names.”
Hallgerd’s session was different: military precision applied to brutal self-examination. She catalogued her command decisions with the detachment of an autopsy, admitting mistakes I hadn’t known she’d made. “I prioritized corporate data security over crew welfare in the first forty-eight hours. That delay may have cost us our exit window.”
Even Bjornulf came, eventually. Grudging, defensive, but there. His hands mirrored mine, tremoring against the table edge as he described colonial medical practices, treatments we’d never receive. “The outer settlements developed protocols for degenerative conditions using local resources. All lost now. All of it.”
I tagged everything. Biographical context, emotional timestamps, metadata that might help future listeners understand them as people, not casualties.
Between recordings, I mapped infrastructure with a cartographer’s devotion. Holographic schematics first: three-dimensional models Signe could rotate and explore. Then text descriptions for basic terminals, assuming nothing about future technology. Finally, hand-drawn diagrams on actual paper from Kari’s medical supplies, my tremoring hand making the lines waver but legible.
“Redundancy,” I explained, watching Signe trace a relay pathway on the hologram. “We can’t know what survives. Can’t know if they’ll have quantum processors or just emergency readers. Maybe someone finds us with nothing but determination and a basic scanner.”
I labeled everything in three languages. Added notes about dimensional interference patterns, how the pocket universe corrupted signals in predictable ways. Made the invisible visible through documentation.
“You’re building a Rosetta Stone,” Signe said quietly.
“I’m building a voice that outlasts silence.”
Signe’s questions evolved beyond mechanical (“Why this relay configuration instead of standard?”) forcing me to articulate instincts I’d never named. How signal degradation patterns felt like poetry. How I listened to the electromagnetic spectrum the way others heard music. My tremoring hands sketched interference waves while I translated years of intuition into principles she could learn, discovering my own expertise through teaching it.
I recorded my testimony in the third shift’s quiet, Signe monitoring levels beside me. “Day forty-seven. The tremor’s reached my right wrist now, subtle, but I notice when calibrating sensitive equipment.” No self-pity in my voice, just documentation. “I’ve modified my interface gloves twice. They compensate well. Whoever finds this: the condition doesn’t define competence. I kept us connected.” Signe added her own entry after, our parallel narratives weaving the station’s final archive.
I spread the diagnostic interface across the holotable, my left hand tremoring through the gesture while my right (newly uncertain) steadied against the edge. Signe watched with that careful attention she’d developed, learning to read my movements as data.
“The quantum-entangled relays operate on coherence patterns most techs monitor visually,” I said, pulling up the waveform displays. “But there’s a tactile dimension the manuals never mention because you can’t standardize intuition.” I placed her hand over mine on the haptic feedback pad, letting her feel the subtle vibrations. “Close your eyes.”
She did, trusting me completely in that way that made my chest tight.
“Feel that stutter? Like a heartbeat with an extra half-beat?” My fingers trembled against hers, but the gloves translated the sensation cleanly. “That’s a relay beginning to desynchronize. You’ll see it on the displays three hours later, but you can feel it now.”
Signe’s breath caught. “I feel it. It’s like: like the signal is limping.”
“Exactly.” I guided her hand across the interface, showing her the vocabulary of vibrations I’d spent years learning. “The gloves were supposed to hide my tremor from the equipment. Instead, they taught me to sense what steady hands miss. The micro-movements, the constant recalibration. They made me more sensitive to signal variations, not less.”
I pulled up my early maintenance logs, showing her the frantic over-corrections, the exhausting attempts to force steadiness. “I thought I had to overcome my hands to do this work. Took me two years to realize I needed to work with them. The tremor isn’t the enemy. Fighting it was.”
Signe opened her eyes, looking at our hands still joined on the interface. “You’re teaching me to feel the station’s nervous system.”
“I’m teaching you that there are different kinds of steady,” I said. “And sometimes the shaking hand finds truths the still one misses.”
I pulled up the holographic infrastructure map, then began layering my personal annotations over the clean corporate schematic. “This is what they installed,” I said, gesturing at the official design. “This is what actually keeps us connected.”
The overlay bloomed with improvised patches, creative rerouting, bypass solutions the original engineers never imagined. My tremoring hand traced a path through the chaos. “Here. The signal quality was terrible, but it worked. And this junction? It shouldn’t handle cross-module traffic, but if you modulate the carrier frequency just right…”
Signe leaned closer, her neural port flickering as she processed the complexity. “The official maintenance protocols would never approve any of this.”
“The official protocols assume perfect conditions and unlimited replacement parts.” I zoomed into a particularly tangled section. “I’m showing you how to read the station like weather patterns. Where interference builds, where signals eddy and pool, where you can steal bandwidth from systems that don’t know they’re sharing. This isn’t a technical manual. It’s a philosophy: adaptation beats perfection when perfection isn’t possible.”
I saved the annotated map as a living file, one that could grow with Signe’s own discoveries. “When I was small, on the colony transports, I’d press my hands against the hull plates during communications windows. I could feel the vibration of distant signals before I understood what they were. Just this thrumming that meant someone out there was reaching across the dark.”
My left hand tremored against the console, but I didn’t hide it. “I wanted to be that thread. Connecting lonely outposts, carrying voices between people who’d never meet. And maybe…” I gestured at our growing archive of testimonies and technical knowledge. “Maybe this is just another form of that same thread. Stretched across time instead of space, but still connecting us to whoever comes after.”
Signe’s neural port flickered, processing not just data but meaning. “The culmination, not the ending.”
“Exactly that.”
I showed her how to rest her fingertips against the relay housings, feeling the quantum entanglement processors’ characteristic pulse. Three rapid beats, one slow, like a heart with an extra chamber. “Your implant reads the data stream, but your body can read the health of the system itself. When that rhythm stutters, you’ll know something’s failing before any diagnostic catches it. That’s the knowledge that survives equipment failure.”
I guided her hands across the relay banks, palm flat against the metal. “Feel that? The vibration changes pitch near failing components. Your implant processes digital, but your skin reads analog truth.” She nodded, eyes closed, fingers spreading wider. “When the readouts lie because of dimensional interference, this doesn’t. Your body becomes the diagnostic tool. That’s what survives when everything else fails.”
I started with Signe’s neural interface logs because they felt safest. Pure data, technical and clean. But I pushed her beyond the raw streams. “Tell me what you felt,” I said, watching her fingers hover over the holographic timeline of failed connection attempts. “Not what the systems registered. What it meant to you.”
She hesitated, that flicker of silver at her temple pulsing as she accessed the memories. “Like shouting into void,” she said finally. “Every transmission attempt, I could feel it hit the quarantine barrier and just… stop. Not bounce back. Stop existing.” Her voice dropped. “The dimensional harmonics, though. Those felt alive. Wrong, but alive. Like something was listening from the other side.”
I recorded every word, her annotations transforming sterile logs into something breathing. The timestamp when she’d tried seventeen different encryption protocols in four hours became a story about refusing to accept silence. The strange resonance patterns bleeding through the pocket universe boundary. She described them as music that made her teeth ache, beauty that hurt to perceive.
“This part,” she said, highlighting a data cluster from week three. “I didn’t log this officially. Didn’t know how to explain it.” The readings showed her neural implant synchronizing with the dimensional interference in ways that shouldn’t be possible. “For six minutes, I could feel the pocket universe like it was part of my network. All that impossible space, compressed into something my brain could almost parse.”
“What did it feel like?” I asked.
“Lonely.” She met my eyes. “The universe itself felt lonely. Like it knew it was dying.”
I saved that. Not just the data. Her interpretation, her emotional truth. This was what needed preserving: how we’d remained human enough to empathize with the impossible, even as it killed us.
The medical bay felt different with three of us there. “You want my story for your memorial?” Bjornulf’s hands shook worse than mine, both of them now. His voice had that thickness that came before the words wouldn’t come at all. “Fine. Record this: the colonies breed us tough because we have to be. No corporate safety nets. No guaranteed medical care.” He stared at my gloves, the custom interface compensating for my tremor. “You got those made special. Kari hoards the good medications for his favorites. That’s the hierarchy nobody admits.”
I didn’t argue. Just recorded. His bitterness was data too. The failure of our egalitarian ideals under pressure, the way scarcity revealed fault lines we’d pretended didn’t exist.
“I wanted to live,” he said finally, quieter. “That’s my crime. Wanting it more than I wanted to be good.”
Kari’s face was stone, but his hand found my shoulder briefly. Steady.
“That deserves remembering too,” I told Bjornulf, and meant it.
Hallgerd’s fingers moved across the interface with parade-ground precision, each authorization code entered deliberately. “These should stay sealed,” she said, unlocking them anyway. “Corporate doctrine. Chain of command.” The files bloomed across my display. Experimental protocols marked EXPENDABLE CREW ACCEPTABLE, budget lines valuing the containment equipment over evacuation capability, communications from executives who’d known the pocket universe was unstable before we ever arrived.
I cataloged each document, my left hand tremor barely registering through the interface glove. The captain watched me work, her immaculate uniform somehow still pressed despite everything.
“You’re choosing us,” I said quietly. “Over them.”
“I’m choosing truth.” Her steel-gray eyes met mine. “Even egalitarian ideals need witnesses. Especially when they fail.” She straightened. “Make sure they know we tried.”
Tyra arrived during gamma shift, the lab lighting dim enough to soften her scars. She set three data crystals on my workstation: professional research, experimental logs, personal journals all mixed together like she’d stopped caring about boundaries.
“The temporal equations in crystal two,” she said, fingers tracing patterns only she could see. “Future researchers need those.” Her voice dropped. “I chose this. The knowledge. Over everything safer.”
I built the archive like a message in a bottle cast into dimensional seas. Each redundancy layer felt like defiance: quantum broadcasts cycling through frequencies nobody monitored, physical crystals embedded in structural supports, even handwritten logs vacuum-sealed behind access panels. My left hand shook worse with fatigue, but I welcomed the tremor’s honesty. This mattered more than steadiness ever had.
I showed Signe how to layer the encryption so it would degrade gracefully. Each level revealing itself to progressively more sophisticated analysis, like an archaeological dig through our final weeks. My fingers trembled against the interface, but I’d learned to work with the shake rather than against it, letting her neural implant compensate where my physical touch faltered.
“Why three copies of the medical logs?” she asked, her temple port flickering as she processed the redundancy patterns.
“Because Kari’s notes about my condition chart the progression everyone else will face eventually.” The words came easier than I expected. “The tremor data, the cognitive benchmarks: it’s not just about me anymore. It’s a map of what happens when you’re trapped in folded spacetime with a degenerative disorder.”
She was quiet for a moment, her hands stilling over the controls. “You’re not just archiving. You’re teaching.”
“Someone needs to understand what we learned here.” I pulled up the dimensional stability readings, showed her how to correlate them with our biometric data. “Look: see how the temporal dilation affects cellular repair? That’s not in any textbook. That’s us, living through something unprecedented.”
Her fingers moved through the interface with growing confidence, sorting testimonies by theme rather than chronology. She was thinking like an archivist now, not just a technician.
“The personal logs,” I said, pulling up my own hesitant recordings. “Those matter most. Not the science. Anyone can replicate experiments. But why we kept trying? Why Hallgerd maintained protocols when they were meaningless? Why Tyra stayed at her post calculating our doom?” I met her eyes. “That’s what survives. That’s what makes us more than data points in someone else’s cautionary tale.”
She nodded slowly, understanding settling across her features like sunrise. “We’re not building a warning. We’re building a witness.”
“Exactly.”
The memorial structure took shape across three days. My hands shook worse on the second day but I’d stopped apologizing for it. Signe watched me write without offering to take over, understanding somehow that the imperfection mattered.
Quantum broadcasts cycling through every frequency we could generate, patient and repetitive. Physical drives embedded in the station’s structural core, where they’d outlast the modules themselves. And my addition: handwritten logs in archival ink that Kari had synthesized from medical supplies we could spare.
I described the smell of recycled air growing stale. Kari’s exhausted smile when someone thanked him. The specific harmonic of failing containment fields. A descending tone Tyra said meant cascade failure within weeks. My script wandered across the pages, letters uneven, some words requiring three attempts. But it was readable. Authentic in ways clean data could never be.
“This is what they’ll want,” I told Signe, watching her catalog my shaking handwriting alongside the technical specifications. “Not just what happened. How it felt to live through it.”
She saved the file with careful precision. “They’ll know you were here.”
“We all were. That’s what matters.”
Signe’s finger hesitated over Bjornulf’s medical records. “Why are we documenting his… everything? Without saying he was wrong?”
I steadied my left hand against the console. “Because honest witness means recording his desperation alongside his cruelty. His pain alongside his choices.” The words came easier than I expected. “Whoever finds this deserves the full truth of how humans behave when trapped. Not sanitized heroes or simple villains.”
“But he. Like we all did.” My condition had taught me this, at least. “Limitation doesn’t erase personhood. Only reveals its essential complexity.” I saved the file, my tremor visible in the cursor’s wavering path. “Let them judge with complete information. That’s the gift we can give.”
She nodded slowly, understanding settling across her features.
I archived Tyra’s dimensional mathematics without redaction, trusting unknown finders with dangerous knowledge. My annotations traced the human cost. Colleagues lost to temporal distortion, relationships strained by obsession, the price of reaching beyond natural limits. Not condemnation. Context. “We did this. We learned this. We paid this.” My tremor marked each keystroke, physical signature authenticating presence. The data would survive even if understanding wouldn’t.
The final archive entry surprised me. I addressed it to no one, explaining what it meant to tend bridges leading nowhere. My condition had taught me this: purpose lives in the attempt, not the outcome. My hands shook through every word, but my voice held steady. The tremor became authentication: proof of presence, not failure. When I finished, the archive felt complete not because rescue seemed possible, but because our truth was preserved.
I built the maintenance guide as archaeology, each procedure a layer of who we’d been. My left hand tremored through the demonstrations while I explained the quantum relay calibration Signe would need to master. “See how the tremor actually helps here,” I told the recording, my voice finding unexpected steadiness. “Forces you to work in the gaps between spasms. Teaches patience the equipment requires anyway.”
The technical instructions became confessional. Why we’d prioritized internal communications over external breach attempts. Not surrender but choice, valuing conversation with each other over screaming into void. How Kari’s triage philosophy applied to data: save what reveals us most completely, let redundant systems documentation die. I recorded my hands performing repairs I’d done hundreds of times, but now I narrated the decision trees, the improvisations born from limitation, the moment I’d stopped fighting my condition and started choreographing around it.
Signe watched from her station, neural port flickering as she simultaneously processed my recording and monitored our failing systems. “You’re teaching me to be you,” she said quietly.
“I’m teaching you to be whoever needs to maintain this after.” I demonstrated the bypass procedure that required steady hands I no longer possessed, then showed her the alternative I’d developed, slower, using diagnostic feedback instead of tactile precision. “The condition forced me to find better methods. Document that. Show them disability generates knowledge, not just loss.”
Between technical sections, I embedded context: why Hallgerd’s command style shifted from corporate efficiency to collective deliberation, how Bjornulf’s desperation revealed the quarantine’s psychological architecture, what Tyra’s research meant stripped of jargon: that we’d touched something vast and been changed by the touching. The archive became memorial not through sentiment but through specificity: these people, these choices, this particular way of facing the impossible together.
The archive accumulated layers like sediment: Hallgerd’s command logs where I stripped away phrases like “resource optimization” to reveal “I chose who might die.” Kari’s medical notes where clinical distance dissolved into “Ragna reminds me of my daughter, I cannot be objective.” I translated Tyra’s dimensional mathematics into plain language: “We opened a door. Something noticed. We don’t know if closing it again is mercy or murder.”
I curated voices, not data. Signe’s neural interface logs showing the headaches she’d hidden, the loneliness of being the only implant operator, her determination to prove her augmentation made her more human, not less. Bjornulf’s pharmaceutical inventory with my annotations explaining his desperation without excusing his hoarding. The small kindnesses: Hallgerd sharing her private coffee ration, Kari teaching me meditation techniques for pain management, Tyra’s hand on my shoulder during a bad tremor episode.
“They need to know we weren’t just statistics,” I told Signe, recording the communal meal schedule we’d maintained even when rations tightened. “That quarantine didn’t erase us. We remained specific, complicated, sometimes petty, often brave. We remained ourselves until we couldn’t anymore.”
I dictated the section about my hands while they shook against the recording interface, letting the tremor enter the audio record itself. “Neurological degradation, progressive, no cure available in quarantine conditions. But here’s what it taught me: custom gloves with predictive stabilization, anticipating system failures before they cascade, building redundancy into every repair. Learning to say ‘Signe, I need your steadier hands here’ without feeling diminished.”
The shaking wasn’t weakness: it was information. My body announcing its limits before I exceeded them. The same principle now guided our archiving: acknowledge constraints, work within them, preserve what matters. Signe watched me record this, understanding I was teaching her not just protocols but philosophy. Adaptation as survival. Limitation as clarity. The tremor in my voice matching my hands, both refusing to pretend steadiness I didn’t possess.
I recorded Bjornulf’s final confrontation with Kari without editing the ugliness. His accusations about hoarded medication, the desperation that made him threaten violence, how we restrained him not as villains but as people who’d also calculated survival odds and found them wanting. “We failed him,” I dictated, my voice catching. “Not because we were cruel, but because impossible choices don’t have right answers.”
I scattered our truth like seeds across dying ground. Every system with residual power received fragments: medical logs in the life support buffers, personal testimonies encoded in the environmental controls, technical data compressed into the navigation backups. My left hand tremored as I etched coordinates and names into metal panels, but the work steadied me. We weren’t transmitting anymore. We were becoming permanent.
I watched understanding dawn across Signe’s features, the silver port at her temple pulsing with soft light as she processed the archive’s true architecture. Not a call for help. A time capsule. A message in a bottle cast into the future’s dark ocean.
“You’re building it to last,” she said, her voice carrying that particular quality of someone whose thoughts arrive faster than speech. “Redundant. Distributed. Self-repairing where possible.”
“Someone will find us eventually.” My left hand tremored against the console, but I didn’t hide it. “Maybe in a year. Maybe in a century. When they do, they’ll need to know what happened here. Not just the science, Tyra’s data will speak for itself. They’ll need to know who we were.”
Signe’s fingers moved across her own workstation, neural interface allowing her to see the patterns I’d woven through every system. “You’ve encoded personal logs in the life support algorithms. Medical histories in the environmental controls. Like… like roots growing through stone.”
“Exactly.” The tremor spread to my forearm, but my voice stayed steady. “The technical systems will draw salvagers. Corporate types wanting Tyra’s research. But once they’re here, once they start pulling data to understand what failed, they’ll find us. Our voices. Our choices.”
She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw the shift happen. Not the eager student watching her mentor. Not the junior tech following the senior specialist. Something else. Recognition between equals engaged in the same essential work.
“Show me,” Signe said. “Show me how to make it permanent.”
So I did. My tremoring hands demonstrated the manual overrides, the backup sequences, the ways to make systems whisper across decades on power that wouldn’t run a coffee synthesizer. Teaching her not just what to preserve, but how to make preservation itself an act of love.
The protocols I showed her weren’t in any manual. They were the kind of knowledge you accumulated through years of keeping failing systems alive with nothing but improvisation and stubbornness.
“Here.” My left hand shook as I guided her fingers to the power distribution node. “Feel that? The vibration pattern tells you more than any diagnostic. When it drops below forty hertz, you’ve got maybe six hours before cascade failure.”
Signe’s neural port flickered as she absorbed the information, but I made her do it manually too. “What if your implant fails?” I asked. “What if whoever finds this place has no augmentation at all?”
She nodded, fingers learning the rhythm. “Teach me like I’m baseline human.”
So I did. The art of listening to machinery. Reading electromagnetic signatures by the taste of air. Knowing which systems could cannibalize which others. Not just keeping things running, but keeping them running forever on power that wouldn’t charge a datapad.
“This isn’t maintenance,” Signe said quietly. “This is… preservation. Like embalming.”
“Like archaeology in reverse,” I corrected. “We’re making ourselves into the artifact.”
The silence between us shifted quality as the hours passed. Technical questions, “How do you bypass the tertiary relay when the quantum buffer degrades?”, gave way to harder ones. “What should I say about Bjornulf? About the day he tried to lock down the pharmaceutical storage?”
I watched her port flicker as she processed not just data but meaning. She was learning to think in centuries, in archaeological time. Someone would find us. Maybe in fifty years, maybe five hundred. They’d need to understand not just our systems but our choices.
“Everything,” I told her. “The ugly parts especially. We weren’t heroes. We were just people who kept trying.”
She nodded, fingers steady on the console, and I saw it: the moment she stopped being the optimistic kid and became the witness. The keeper of complicated truths.
I recorded my testimony at 0300, alone except for the hum of dying relays. Spoke to ghosts. Whoever would find us in the archaeological silence. My hands shook through every word, and I didn’t edit it out. Let them see the tremor. Let them know we were fragile, frightened, human. That we loved each other badly and well. That Kari hoarded medication out of mercy, that Tyra’s equations were love letters she couldn’t send, that I was terrified every single day.
I felt her hand settle over mine: not steadying the tremor but joining it. Her port flickered as she added her testimony to the archive: youth watching us become myths in real-time.
“They’ll need both perspectives,” she said quietly.
I nodded. The work would outlast us. My hands shook against the console, and hers trembled too now, sharing the weight of what we were building together.