Ji-won keeps their movements economical as they cross the loading zone’s marked pathways, avoiding the autonomous cargo lifts that navigate by proximity sensors. The bay’s atmosphere tastes of metal and recycled air, temperature fluctuating between the cold of the docking umbilicals and the heat of the cargo processors. They’ve positioned themselves near Bay 4 deliberately. Closest to the Underdock’s access points, farthest from the corporate core’s surveillance density.
The dispute erupts near Container Stack 47, where a Keshari dock worker, their carapace marked with the blue-silver patterns of the Threshold Clans, gestures emphatically at a human supervisor clutching a data pad. Ji-won recognizes the clan markers immediately, feels their pulse accelerate. One of the settlements they’re protecting. They approach with the careful neutrality of a professional translator, offering services before the supervisor can call security for a “communication problem.”
The Keshari’s mandibles click rapidly, their compound eyes reflecting the bay’s harsh work lights. In their language, they’re explaining that the container distribution violates load-bearing protocols, that the supervisor’s ignorance will damage the cargo and endanger the hauler crew. But the supervisor hears only alien sounds, sees only an obstacle to his schedule.
Ji-won translates with surgical precision, stripping the worker’s justified anger into technical observations. “The weight distribution requires adjustment per standard safety protocols. Container 47-G should move to the port-side stack.” They keep their voice flat, bureaucratic, making the Keshari’s expertise sound like simple data rather than accusation.
The supervisor grunts, makes the adjustment on his pad without acknowledgment. The Keshari’s antennae twitch, recognition, perhaps, or warning. They know what Ji-won is, what they’re carrying. But they say nothing, just press a meal token and a break room access chit into Ji-won’s palm before returning to their work.
Ji-won pockets both, already calculating how many hours until the next shift change, the next checkpoint, the next careful step through the station’s narrowing margins.
Ji-won takes the meal token and break room chit, feeling the worn plastic edges against their fingertips. The Keshari worker has already turned back to the container stacks, their movements efficient and practiced, but Ji-won catches the subtle antenna angle, acknowledgment, solidarity, warning all compressed into that slight gesture.
The break room access is worth more than the meal. Four hours in a space where sitting doesn’t require explanation, where the security cameras point at entrances rather than corners, where the environmental controls actually function. Ji-won calculates: enough time to review the encrypted files on their personal device, cross-reference the latest shipping schedules Park Min-seo’s network has shared, maybe even sleep for ninety minutes without their neck cramping against cargo netting.
They pocket both items and check the bay’s chronometer. Shift change in three hours. Kyung-hee’s investigation team swept Spoke 6 yesterday according to dock gossip, which means Spoke 4 becomes higher probability today or tomorrow. The Underdock’s main access hatch sits forty meters away, disguised as a maintenance panel. Too exposed for daytime entry, but Ji-won marks its position anyway, adding it to the mental map that keeps them alive.
Ji-won has memorized the station’s surveillance architecture through weeks of observation and fragments of their old corporate access privileges. Which corridors have cameras with dead pixels creating blind zones, which sensors prioritize motion detection over thermal signatures, which security drones follow patrol patterns with exploitable sixty-second gaps at junction points. They move through these gaps like water finding microscopic cracks in metal, their route between improvised sleeping spots and temporary work sites a carefully choreographed performance of timing and misdirection. The automated monitoring systems log their presence in scattered fragments but never enough data points to establish predictive patterns or triangulate current location, never enough to anticipate where they’ll surface next.
Ji-won watches a Keshari hauler argue with a Voth merchant over container weights, neither understanding the other’s gesture protocols. They step between, hands moving through the formal negotiation patterns, translating mass units and delivery schedules while their expired corporate ID stays hidden. The merchant relaxes, the hauler’s chromatophores shift from stress-red to agreement-blue. Another transaction completed off-record, another small debt owed, another reason for someone to hesitate before answering corporate questions about the translator who works the docks.
Ji-won sits in a maintenance alcove reviewing their situation through the lens of survival mathematics. Kyung-hee’s investigation has penetrated three security layers in four days: footage analysis, dock worker interviews, pattern recognition algorithms scanning for unauthorized translation services. The encrypted chip’s weight against their sternum has become psychological rather than physical. They calculate probabilities: five days maximum before biometric fragments coalesce into actionable intelligence, two days before they must move to the Underdock or risk facial recognition matching their altered appearance to archived corporate files.
Ji-won catalogues the violations as Thresh-of-Morning-Tide’s chromatophores pulse through the spectrum. Amber anxiety bleeding into violet distress, patterns that corporate supervisors register only as “alien emotional display” in their incident reports. The Keshari’s four-fingered hands move with mechanical precision across the loader controls, but their dorsal ridge flattens in the posture Ji-won knows means psychological shutdown. Six months. The contract terms are buried in subsection 47-C of the Sapient Labor Accords, the clause that permits “reasonable operational separation” without defining reasonable by Keshari biological standards.
“The manifest shows three containers for Bay 7,” Ji-won says in Keshari, their translator implant rendering the clicks and harmonics that corporate systems never bothered to decode properly. “But the loader queue only lists two.”
Thresh’s chromatophores flicker gratitude-acknowledgment, a brief cyan pulse. The third container isn’t missing. It’s unofficial, part of the gray economy that keeps independent haulers viable. Ji-won doesn’t ask what’s inside. That’s not how survival works in the margins.
They update their mental map: Bay 7 has blind spots in its surveillance grid, gaps where containers marked for “routine maintenance inspection” disappear from tracking for forty-minute intervals. The pattern repeats every third rotation, coordinated with shift changes when security attention fragments across handoff protocols. Park Min-seo’s network moves through these gaps like water through cracks, and Ji-won’s ability to identify them (to read the station’s true architecture beneath its official layout) makes them valuable.
Valuable enough to protect. Valuable enough to hide. But also valuable enough that abandoning them would mean losing access to intelligence that maps corporate vulnerabilities.
Thresh’s chromatophores settle into neutral gray-green as they complete the loading sequence. They don’t thank Ji-won verbally, that would create a record, but their dorsal ridge lifts slightly. Acknowledgment. Trust. The currency that matters when credits leave traces.
Ji-won cross-references three weeks of manifest data against security rotation schedules, building a mental map that exists nowhere except in their pattern recognition. The correlation emerges in fragments: Bay 7’s surveillance gaps align with maintenance logs that show equipment failures always during third-shift handoffs, always when Lee Sang-mi-yeon is managing sector-wide briefings. Not coincidence. Infrastructure.
Park Min-seo’s network moves through these architectures like blood through capillaries. Every container marked for “routine inspection” that vanishes for exactly forty minutes. Every hauler who accepts payment in repair services rather than credits. Every dock worker who develops convenient memory gaps when security reviews footage.
Ji-won’s value isn’t just translation. It’s synthesis. Reading Keshari stress patterns reveals which supervisors accept bribes. Tracking Voth dietary requests maps refugee populations. Correlating shipping manifests with corporate personnel movements predicts security sweeps three rotations in advance.
This intelligence makes them indispensable to the underground network. But indispensable means trapped: because people who know too much become liabilities the moment they’re no longer useful. Park Min-seo protects assets. Ji-won needs to remain one.
In cargo bay corner 4-J, during the narrow window between shift rotations, Ji-won crouches beside a young Voth refugee whose chromatophores ripple anxiety-yellow. The hand signals come slowly: two fingers to temple means security approaching. Flat palm means safe to speak. The Voth’s tentacle-fingers mimic the gestures with trembling precision, their translator implant too cheap to handle the station’s dialect variations.
“Again,” Ji-won whispers, demonstrating the emergency scatter signal: fist opening rapidly, like an explosion.
The Voth repeats it. Gets it right.
One person taught. One hundred still trapped in corporate housing modules, their labor contracts binding them to conditions that violate every sapient rights protocol Ji-won has memorized. The encrypted chip presses against their sternum, heavy with evidence that could free thousands but would expose the Keshari settlements to corporate retaliation.
Small acts. Inadequate acts. The only acts available.
The maintenance hatches recognize Ji-won’s palm print but not their authority. Security logs register their passage as system error: a phantom opening doors that should stay sealed. They’ve mapped seventeen such glitches across three sectors, corridors where their biometric data lingers like radiation, corporate infrastructure remembering an employee who officially ceased to exist three weeks ago when payroll flagged them as contract violation, asset recovery pending.
Ji-won’s throat tightens as they render labor contract terms into Keshari, each word a betrayal of silence. The worker’s antennae twitch, gratitude, while Ji-won catalogs how many others might hear, might remember a human speaking northern-dialect with academic precision. Kyung-hee’s surveillance algorithms crawl through station records, flagging linguistic anomalies. Every translated phrase is evidence, is location data, is another thread connecting Ji-won to the settlements they’re dying to protect.
Ji-won’s hands pause over the datapad as the Keshari dock worker approaches, mandibles already moving in greeting. The clicking pattern hits them like a physical blow. Northern settlement dialect, the specific phonemic clusters that mark speakers from cold-side habitats, from families who’ve adapted their communication to ice-mining acoustics.
“Need translation help,” the worker says in broken Standard, antennae dipping in polite request. “Shipping manifest dispute. Your reputation is good.”
Reputation. The word tastes like ash. Ji-won nods, accepts the pad, forces their expression into professional neutrality while their pulse hammers against the data chip’s hard edge beneath their suit. The manifest scrolls past: standard cargo listings, but the worker’s commentary betrays everything.
“These routes, they don’t account for spinward cold,” the worker explains, mandibles shaping words in patterns Ji-won knows too well. “Our cousins who work the ice, they need different timing.” The casual phrase, our cousins, uses the kinship marker specific to settlement-groups, not corporate crew designations. “The cold spinward routes require,”
Ji-won translates mechanically, converting the worker’s concerns into Standard legalese for the shipping dispute, while their mind catalogs each damning detail. Spinward. Ice work. Cousin-groups. Every phrase is a coordinate marker, a cultural fingerprint that screams Settlement Seven, the northernmost refuge, where three hundred Keshari have built hydroponic gardens in abandoned mining stations and raise children who’ve never seen a corporate contract.
The worker doesn’t know. Doesn’t recognize that Ji-won’s academic-perfect northern dialect is impossible unless they’ve been there, lived there, unless they’re the liaison who helped establish the settlement’s initial supply routes. Doesn’t realize that every grateful click of their mandibles is another data point connecting Ji-won to locations that must stay hidden.
“Translation complete,” Ji-won says, voice steady despite everything. The worker’s antennae flutter, gratitude, trust, and Ji-won wants to scream.
Ji-won’s fingers tremble as they extract the chip from its concealed pocket, the hairline fracture visible only when light catches it at the correct angle. The maintenance closet smells of lubricant and ozone. They’ve borrowed a diagnostic scanner from a sympathetic hauler. No questions asked, but favors accumulate like debt.
The scanner’s interface flickers to life. Each file verification creates a timestamp, a digital footprint in the relay’s ambient network traffic. Kyung-hee’s forensic systems are designed to detect exactly this kind of anomaly: unauthorized data access in unofficial locations, patterns that suggest someone checking files they shouldn’t possess.
Three hours in, Ji-won’s back aches from hunching over the scanner. The files are intact. Labor records, biological monitoring data, communications logs that prove systematic abuse. Everything needed to destroy Hanseong-Mirae’s alien labor program. Everything that makes Ji-won valuable enough to hunt.
The scanner chirps completion. Six hours of access signatures now exist somewhere in the station’s data flow, waiting for the right algorithm to notice them. Ji-won pockets the chip, its fractured surface pressing against their ribs like an accusation.
Park Min-seo’s message arrives through a chain of three intermediaries, each hand-off adding minutes Ji-won doesn’t have: Kyung-hee has requisitioned commercial ring surveillance footage, the specific sectors where Ji-won has been translating shipping manifests for independent haulers. Eighteen hours, maybe less, before pattern-matching algorithms correlate their gait signature, the unconscious way they touch their translator implant when hearing Keshari phonemes, the nervous energy that surveillance systems flag as evasion behavior.
The choice crystallizes with brutal clarity. Retreat deeper into the Underdock’s maze, become invisible until Kyung-hee’s investigation moves on: if it moves on. Or risk one final transmission, upload the encrypted files to Park’s network before the window closes completely, knowing the data transfer will light up every monitoring system like a flare in vacuum.
Ji-won’s hands freeze mid-gesture as the Keshari’s clicking consonants carry across the cargo bay, contract extension without consent, and the supervisor’s head snaps up. That micro-expression: recognition algorithms activating behind corporate-augmented eyes. The supervisor’s lips move soundlessly, subvocalizing into internal comm. Ji-won catalogs the mistake with cold precision: linguistic fingerprint confirmed, location triangulated, Kyung-hee’s search parameters just narrowed by ninety percent. Twelve hours, maximum, before this data surfaces in Investigation Suite 3-A.
Ji-won’s fingers close around the package, its polymer casing warm from the Keshari’s three-fingered grip. Inside: not just messages but trust weaponized, a test they’re failing by accepting. The worker’s mandibles click softly (gratitude) and Ji-won wants to scream that they’re the wrong savior, that every connection is another thread for Kyung-hee to pull. But the chip joins its twin against their sternum, two incompatible futures now orbiting the same desperate heart.
Ji-won accepts the package with trembling hands, feeling its weight multiply beyond its physical mass. The polymer casing is still warm from the Keshari worker’s three-fingered grip, and through the translucent material they can see the data chip’s iridescent surface. Smaller than the corporate evidence burning against their sternum, but somehow heavier. The worker’s dark compound eyes hold theirs for a moment too long, multifaceted surfaces reflecting Ji-won’s face back in fractured pieces. They recognize the expression from their own reflection in cargo bay windows: the desperate calculation of someone betting everything on another person’s integrity.
“Safe passage,” the Keshari whispers in their clicking language, mandibles forming the words with difficulty. “My daughter’s first words. My partner’s medical history. Everything that proves we existed before we became cargo.”
Ji-won’s throat constricts. They want to explain that they’re not safe, that Kyung-hee’s investigation has already traced them to this sector, that accepting this makes them responsible for one more fragile thing in a universe designed to break fragile things. But the worker is already backing away, disappearing into the flow of loading crews, and the moment for refusal has passed.
They tuck the chip into their inner suit pocket, deliberately choosing the left side, away from the corporate data against their chest. Two different futures now press against their ribs with each shallow breath: one that could buy their freedom through exposure and testimony, another that represents everything they fled to protect. The chips rest separated by centimeters and the width of their body, like binary stars that can never touch without mutual annihilation.
Ji-won’s fingers find the outline of both through the suit fabric, tracing their shapes compulsively as they move toward the sector exit. The corporate chip is angular, manufactured, designed for maximum data density. The Keshari chip is smooth, organic-looking, probably hand-fabricated in some settlement workshop. Different technologies. Different purposes. Same impossible weight.
Ji-won’s hand hovers over the comm terminal in the abandoned maintenance bay, the Keshari worker’s contact frequency already entered. One transmission. That’s all it would take to fulfill the promise implicit in accepting the chip. To prove that someone saw them as more than labor units, that their daughter’s first words mattered enough to preserve.
But Kyung-hee’s investigation has taught them to think like a hunter. Every contact creates a data trail. Every transmission pings through relays that corporate algorithms parse for patterns. The investigator doesn’t need to find Ji-won directly; she just needs to map the network of who they care about, who trusts them, who they might run to when the walls close in.
Ji-won’s finger retreats from the terminal. The Keshari chip burns against their ribs with a different heat now: not potential salvation but active threat. Delivering these messages wouldn’t just endanger one family. It would illuminate the entire underground network, trace lines between every settlement, every safe house, every person who’d chosen to trust a human translator with their survival.
The mathematics are brutal: one family’s memories weighed against three settlements’ existence.
The decision crystallizes during hour fourteen in the ventilation shaft. Ji-won’s cramping fingers brush both data chips (corporate evidence, Keshari memories) and the pattern recognition that kept them alive as a liaison finally maps the trap. Kyung-hee isn’t hunting a person; she’s hunting a network topology. Every contact becomes a node, every message a traceable edge in the graph. The Keshari chip transforms from lifeline to targeting beacon.
Delivering those messages wouldn’t just endanger one family. It would teach corporate algorithms the shape of trust itself, illuminate every connection Ji-won has built, every person who saw them as something more than another corporate asset to be recovered or discarded.
Ji-won’s throat closes around grief that has no adequate sound, no language sufficient for this particular mathematics of survival.
Ji-won’s fingers shake as they hold the Keshari chip over the recycling chute’s darkness. Seventeen minutes. The metal grows warm against their palm while station machinery grinds below, ready to atomize this last proof that someone trusted them. They count heartbeats, catalog reasons, map consequences in the language of networks and nodes. Finally they pocket it again, the weight unchanged but meaning transformed. No longer message or evidence, just the physical form of an equation with no solution.
Ji-won’s fingers navigate the holographic interface in the cargo bay’s shadow, layering audio files beneath spreadsheet metadata. Each Keshari voice (a mother’s lullaby, a father’s work song, a child counting in their native clicks) becomes invisible data threaded through shipping manifests and labor contracts. The encryption algorithm binds them: open one file, expose everything. Corporate evidence and refugee testimony fused into a single impossible choice for whoever finds it.
The child’s name is Seshi. Now Ji-won sits cross-legged against a converted storage container, pretending to review shipping codes on their own battered tablet while watching Seshi’s stylus trace the angular lines of Standard script. The characters are wobbly, inconsistent in size, but determined.
Koreth’s three-fingered hand, the middle digit longer, more dexterous than human anatomy, hovers millimeters above Seshi’s grip, guiding without touching except when the child’s frustration makes the stylus shake. Then Koreth’s hand settles, steadies, and together they complete the stroke. The gesture is so familiar it makes Ji-won’s chest ache. Their own mother had taught them Hangul the same way, patient corrections in the margins of homework tablets.
The settlement coordinates exist as pure data in Ji-won’s memory: spatial markers, gravitational readings, relay addresses. But watching Seshi, Ji-won populates those abstract numbers with specifics. Children learning Standard in cargo holds. Guardians teaching patience in the gaps between security sweeps. Families building small routines (mealtimes, lessons, bedtime rituals) in spaces never meant for living.
The encryption algorithm Ji-won designed treats all data as equally valuable. Corporate evidence of labor violations, testimony from witnesses, and the Keshari settlements’ locations: all bound together in cascading exposure. Open one file, trigger the cascade. It had seemed elegant when Ji-won coded it, a guarantee that anyone seeking the corporate files would have to confront the human cost.
Now, watching Seshi complete a character and look up at Koreth for approval, Ji-won understands the encryption differently. Not as protection but as detonation. Every corporate investigator, every journalist, every potential ally who accesses those files will also learn where to find families like this one. Where children are learning to write in hiding.
Seshi’s stylus moves to the next character. Ji-won’s hand drifts to the data chip beneath their shirt, feeling its weight like accusation.
Ji-won’s fingers find the data chip through their shirt fabric, pressing until the edges bite into their palm. The corporate shuttle’s docking clamps engage with a distant metallic thunk that reverberates through the station’s superstructure. They count the seconds: forty-three until the airlock cycles, maybe two minutes more for disembarkation protocols.
The chip contains seventeen thousand pages of documentation. Labor contracts with forged consent signatures. Medical records showing Keshari physiology breaking down under human-standard atmospheric pressure. Testimony transcripts Ji-won recorded in stolen moments, voices describing children who stopped growing, adults whose respiratory systems crystallized. And woven through it all, like tripwires: the settlement coordinates, three sets of numbers that translate to families, to Seshi’s careful stylus strokes, to Koreth’s patient hands.
Kyung-hee would understand the files’ value immediately. She’d built her career on forensic analysis, on seeing patterns in data that others missed. She’d recognize the encryption’s architecture, the cascade trigger that made the evidence inseparable from its consequences.
The shuttle’s running lights blink twice: corporate security protocol. Ji-won’s hand drops from the chip. The window for any choice is narrowing to nothing.
Ji-won’s breath fogs the viewport’s inner surface, obscuring the shuttle for a moment before the recyclers clear it. The vessel’s designation codes scroll across their vision: corporate investigator transport, priority clearance. They catalog the details automatically: enhanced communications array, reinforced security plating, the kind of modifications that suggest either valuable cargo or dangerous personnel.
The station’s structural groan masks footsteps behind them. Ji-won doesn’t turn, just watches the reflection in the cracked plasteel. A maintenance worker, maybe, or someone else learning to move through the station’s blind spots. The shuttle’s airlock iris opens, and even at this distance, Ji-won can see the figures emerging wear corporate investigator gray.
Not reinforcements. Replacements.
Kyung-hee’s running out of time too.
The maintenance tunnel’s heat presses close while Ji-won strips corroded insulation, following diagrams in Keshari technical script. The dock worker (Hae-jin, she’d finally offered) guides their hands to the correct relay contacts, her scarred forearms steady against Ji-won’s trembling ones.
“My daughter runs security sweeps in Sector 3,” Hae-jin says, tone carefully neutral. “She tells me what she’s supposed to see.”
Ji-won’s hands still. The implication hangs between them like suspended voltage.
“Families fracture along economic fault lines,” Hae-jin continues, crimping a connection. “Corps want clean loyalty. Reality’s messier.”
The rewired relay hums to life. Ji-won understands: this is both warning and offer, absolution and test. Even blood ties bend under corporate pressure, but some people remember what matters underneath.
Ji-won lingers near the charging station’s power conduits, running diagnostic cables that don’t need checking. The two liaisons, junior grade, expensive haircuts going soft at the edges, don’t notice another technician in patched coveralls.
“Third audit team this quarter,” the taller one mutters, thumbing through manifests. “Enforcement Division’s subpoenaing everything back to the Keshari contracts.”
“Headquarters is eating itself,” her companion replies. “They’re more afraid of the Accords investigators than the stockholders.”
Ji-won’s hands steady on the cables. The files aren’t evidence of crimes: they’re leverage in a factional war. Hanseong-Mirae isn’t hunting a whistleblower. They’re containing a weapon that could detonate their entire labor division, maybe take down executives, maybe fracture corporate alliances across three sectors.
The data chip against Ji-won’s chest suddenly feels heavier. More valuable. More dangerous than any asylum it might buy.
Ji-won sits in a maintenance alcove behind Bay 4’s atmospheric processors, legs drawn up against their chest, and runs the numbers with the same methodical precision they once applied to corporate risk analyses. The assessment is brutal: fourteen days of credits remaining at current consumption rates, assuming no emergency expenses. Three safe houses already compromised: the dock worker’s storage unit, the abandoned medical bay, the cargo hauler’s crew quarters. Five close calls with security patrols in the last week alone, each one closer than the last, each one requiring faster thinking and more desperate improvisation.
But the numbers that truly terrify them aren’t about resources or security. They’re about their body’s accelerating failure. The cough that started as an irritation from poor air quality has become constant, wet, productive. Their vision blurs when they stand too quickly, gray spots blooming at the edges like system failures. They’ve started rationing water not because supplies are short but because the nausea makes eating difficult enough without adding liquid to rebel against. Yesterday they caught themselves leaning against a bulkhead for support and couldn’t remember how long they’d been standing there.
Ji-won pulls up their sleeve, examining the bruises that appear without cause, purple-black against skin gone sallow under fluorescent lights. Malnutrition, probably. Vitamin deficiency. Maybe something worse from the recycled air in the Underdock, from sleeping in spaces where life support was never meant to sustain human habitation.
They calculate the timeline with the same dispassion they once brought to shipping manifests: their body will fail before their credits run out. The question isn’t whether they can outlast Kyung-hee’s investigation. The question is whether they’ll still be conscious when the investigator finally closes the net, or whether they’ll collapse first, wake up in corporate medical custody with the data chip already extracted and their leverage gone.
The atmospheric processor hums its mechanical indifference. Ji-won closes their eyes and counts their remaining heartbeats like assets in a dwindling account.
Ji-won’s translator implant has started playing tricks. Phantom voices in languages they don’t recognize, feedback loops that turn station announcements into accusatory whispers. They’ve disabled the auto-calibration to stop the vertigo, but now they catch themselves missing words in conversations, nodding along to dock workers whose lips move out of sync with comprehension. The implant was corporate-grade once, designed for high-stress negotiations, but three weeks of constant vigilance have worn grooves into its processing patterns. It translates their own thoughts now, rendering internal monologue in Keshari grammatical structures, in Voth conditional tenses that make every decision feel hypothetical.
They’ve taken to writing on their forearm with cargo markers. Reminders that blur and smudge with sweat. Chip secure. Bay 4 clear until 0600. Min-seo Tuesday. The words anchor them when the implant stutters, when exhaustion makes the station’s corridors fold into themselves like origami. Yesterday they found themselves in Sector C with no memory of walking there, just the cargo marker in their hand and fresh words on their skin: Still here. Still breathing. Still worth something.
The isolation manifests in strange ways. Ji-won catches themselves mid-conversation with people who aren’t there, full arguments with Kyung-hee about choices and consequences conducted in whispers to empty corridors. When a dock worker offers them half a protein bar, they recoil as if from violence, the kindness incomprehensible. They check the data chip’s encryption compulsively (seventeen times in an hour, then twenty-three, then losing count) because the physical ritual of verification has become the only thing that feels real, the only action their hands remember how to perform with certainty.
They recognize these as symptoms. Deterioration. The kind of breakdown that gets people noticed, reported, disappeared into medical holds.
But addressing it would require stopping. Resting. Trusting someone.
All luxuries they can’t afford.
Min-seo’s broth tastes like synthetic chicken and recycled minerals, but Ji-won’s hands wrap around the container like it’s precious metal. They can’t remember the last time someone offered them something without calculation, without transaction. Min-seo doesn’t ask about the tremors, doesn’t comment on how Ji-won’s eyes track every movement in the cargo bay. Just sits on a crate three meters away, close enough to matter, far enough to let them breathe.
The kindness cracks something fundamental.
Ji-won makes it to the storage closet before the first sob hits.
Ji-won’s borrowed terminal casts blue light across their shaking hands as they decrypt the files again. Labor manifests: Keshari workers categorized as “equipment lease agreements.” Medical logs: compound fractures documented under “hydraulic system maintenance.” Executive communications: Acceptable operational parameters and cost-effective resource allocation sanitizing deliberate brutality into spreadsheet language.
The rage cuts through weeks of numbness like oxygen flooding a depressurized chamber. Their chest heaves. The data chip’s familiar weight becomes an anchor. Not dragging them down, but holding them steady against the current of fear that’s been drowning them since they fled.
This matters. This is why.
Ji-won’s breath fogs the grate as they watch Kyung-hee lean forward, her hands trembling slightly as she adjusts her tablet. The dock worker, a man Ji-won recognizes from Min-seo’s network, someone called Tae-yang who’d shared his ration pack two days ago, shifts his weight in the exact pattern that signals he’s about to lie. It’s a tell Ji-won learned from the same corporate manual Kyung-hee is probably mentally referencing right now, page forty-seven, subsection on involuntary stress responses.
The realization settles like ice water in Ji-won’s chest. They’d sat through those training sessions together, three years ago in a climate-controlled classroom on the corporate flagship. Kyung-hee had been the star student, always first to identify the micro-expressions, the physiological markers of deception. Ji-won had been adequate, good enough to pass, never quite matching her precision.
Now that precision is a scalpel being turned on people Ji-won has broken bread with.
Kyung-hee’s medication timer chimes softly, Ji-won can just hear it through the grate, and she pauses to take a pill, her professional mask slipping for just a moment to reveal something raw underneath. Pain, maybe. Or desperation. The dock worker notices too, his shoulders relaxing fractionally, mistaking her momentary weakness for an opening.
He’s wrong. Ji-won knows what comes next because they’ve seen Kyung-hee deploy this exact sequence before, during a labor dispute on Station Kepler-9. The vulnerability is bait. She’ll let him think he’s gaining ground, let him commit to his lie, and then she’ll produce the surveillance footage that contradicts his statement. The trap is already sprung; Tae-yang just doesn’t know it yet.
Ji-won’s fingers dig into the ventilation grating. They should move, should get back to the Underdock and warn Min-seo that the network is compromised. But they can’t look away from this mirror image of who they might have become, would have become, if they’d never looked too closely at the cargo manifests, never asked why the Keshari workers never rotated out on schedule.
The interrogation unfolds with the mechanical precision of corporate training manual Section 7: Subject Compliance Protocols. Kyung-hee slides a water pouch across the table (establishing basic rapport through small kindness, page seventy-three) and Ji-won’s lips move soundlessly, anticipating her next words before she speaks them. “You look tired, Tae-yang-ssi. Long shift?”
The dock worker accepts the water. First mistake.
Kyung-hee lets silence stretch, counting to seven exactly, the optimal interval before subjects feel compelled to fill empty air. Ji-won counts with her, their breath syncing to the rhythm of shared institutional conditioning. When Tae-yang starts talking about cargo schedules, Kyung-hee nods with practiced sympathy, her augmented tablet recording every word, every hesitation, building the data map that will reveal his lies through statistical variance analysis.
“The thing about Bay 4,” Kyung-hee says, leaning forward with manufactured concern, “is that the surveillance logs show something different.”
There it is. The trap springing shut.
Ji-won watches Tae-yang’s face collapse into resignation and feels their own stomach twist. They’d used this exact sequence on a Keshari foreman once, before they understood what the corporation was really asking them to do.
Ji-won’s fingers tighten on the grate’s edge as Kyung-hee’s hand trembles against the metal table, the investigator’s jaw clenching with the effort of control. The tremor spreads up her forearm before she forces it still. A medical condition, progressive, expensive. The kind that requires corporate health coverage to manage.
In that moment of vulnerability, Ji-won sees the equation with terrible clarity: Kyung-hee hunting them isn’t cruelty but mathematics, a woman calculating her survival in treatment cycles and bonus compensation. They’re both caught in Hanseong-Mirae’s machinery, just positioned on different gears. The difference is that Kyung-hee still believes if she performs perfectly enough, the corporation won’t eventually discard her too.
She’s wrong. Ji-won knows because they once believed the same thing.
The dock worker’s silence holds, Min-seo’s network understands loyalty in ways corporate incentive structures never could, and as Kyung-hee’s professional mask fractures, revealing the desperation underneath, Ji-won recognizes the topology of their shared trap. They both fled Hanseong-Mirae’s crimes, but Kyung-hee fled inward, believing the machine would protect those who served it faithfully. Ji-won knows better now. The corporation doesn’t save anyone. It only chooses who to consume first.
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the encrypted chip in their pocket, the weight of it suddenly different. Not evidence anymore. Ammunition. The dock worker’s silence bought them time, but Kyung-hee will adapt, will tighten the search pattern. Min-seo’s network can hide dozens, maybe hundreds if the files go public. If Ji-won stops running toward invisibility and runs toward the fight instead.
Ji-won watches the Keshari child, Sela, they’ve learned her name is, carefully add purple streaks to her drawing of the forest canopy. The crayon is worn down to a nub, probably salvaged from some corporate family’s discarded supplies, and Sela grips it with the intense concentration of someone performing a sacred task.
“How do you know the exact shade?” Ji-won asks quietly, aware of the harsh whites and yellows of the Underdock’s salvaged lights that render everything in washed-out tones. “When everything here looks so different?”
Sela doesn’t look up from her drawing. Her secondary arms flutter slightly as she considers the question. “Mama makes me close my eyes,” she says in carefully practiced Korean, each syllable deliberate. “She tells me to remember the color of the berries we’d pick together.”
Ji-won’s chest tightens. “You picked berries together?”
“No.” Sela adds another streak, adjusting the angle to match something only she can see. “I never picked berries. Mama did, when she was small like me, before the contracts. But she gives me the memory. I close my eyes and she describes it: the weight in your hands, the juice on your fingers, the way the sun makes them shine. She says if I remember hard enough, it becomes mine too.”
The child continues drawing, building a world from inherited ghosts, and Ji-won understands with sudden clarity that this is what Hanseong-Mirae truly fears: not the labor violations or the broken accords, but this: the stubborn refusal to forget, the way memory becomes resistance, the dangerous act of teaching children to imagine homes they’ve never seen. Sela is drawing evidence of a crime the corporation can never fully erase, because it lives in the space between a mother’s voice and a daughter’s closed eyes.
Thresh-kal approaches with measured steps, her primary arms held at mid-height: not the submissive tuck of the labor compounds, Ji-won notes, but not quite relaxed either. The Keshari woman’s crest feathers ripple through colors Ji-won has learned to read: concern-caution-love, cycling in waves.
She settles beside Sela, folding her legs in that distinctive double-joint configuration, and begins speaking in their language. The clicks and harmonics wash over Ji-won, who catches only fragments. But they don’t need translation to understand what’s happening. Thresh-kal’s secondary arms move in elaborate gestures, painting pictures in the air, and Sela’s eyes track each motion with fierce attention.
This is preservation, Ji-won realizes. Each story a seed planted against forgetting. Each detail, the birds’ flight patterns, the moons’ alignment, the songs sung during migration season, carefully transferred from mother to daughter like precious cargo.
But it’s more than preservation. It’s defiance. Every night Thresh-kal speaks these memories aloud, she’s refusing Hanseong-Mirae’s narrative that Keshari are interchangeable labor units without history or homeland. She’s committing the corporation’s greatest fear: teaching her daughter that they come from somewhere that matters.
Park Min-seo crouches beside Sela’s drawings, their prosthetic arm whirring as they trace the bioluminescent forest patterns. “These trees,” they say in careful Keshari, “they grow in spirals, yes?”
Sela nods eagerly, and Thresh-kal’s crest flares with surprised pleasure at hearing their language from human lips.
Ji-won watches how Min-seo moves among the refugees: no sudden gestures, no looming presence. The Keshari children don’t scatter when they approach. Thresh-kal doesn’t adopt the hunched posture Ji-won remembers from the labor compounds, that defensive curl that said I am small, I am compliant, please don’t notice me.
“Trust isn’t demanded,” Min-seo explains later, catching Ji-won’s observation. “It’s accumulated. One meal at a time. One promise kept. One day of not betraying them.” They flex their prosthetic fingers. “Consistency is the only currency that matters down here.”
Ji-won’s hands tremble as they unlock the datapad, navigating past the labor violation evidence to the deeper archives. Planetary surveys, stellar cartography, resource assessments. Sela leans close, her crest-feathers quivering. “This one,” she whispers, touching a coordinate cluster with one delicate finger. “Mother says the moons make this pattern.”
Thresh-kal’s keening cry draws others. The files aren’t just evidence. They’re stolen memories, coordinates to erased homeworlds. Ji-won’s throat tightens. The corporation didn’t just exploit. It unmapped entire civilizations.
Ji-won’s fingers close around the chip, feeling its edges bite into their palm. Sela’s stylus scratches across salvaged plastic, reconstructing sacred geometry from oral tradition alone. The files contain more than coordinates. They hold atmospheric compositions, seasonal patterns, migration routes. Everything needed to navigate home. Thresh-kal’s people could reclaim what Hanseong-Mirae’s cartographers deliberately obscured, replacing living worlds with resource designation codes. This isn’t whistleblowing. It’s repatriation of stolen futures.
The silence stretches between them, filled with the distant clang of cooling pipes and someone’s muffled coughing three containers over. Min-seo’s prosthetic whirs softly as they continue flexing it, the exposed servos catching the amber light from a salvaged strip overhead.
“The optimization algorithms were mine too,” Min-seo continues, each word deliberate, surgical. “I designed the scheduling system that maximized labor extraction while technically staying within rest-period requirements. Twelve-hour shifts with eight hours off sounds reasonable until you factor in that ‘off’ includes transit time between sectors, mandatory health scans, and the forty-five minutes it takes to cycle through decontamination. They were getting maybe five hours of actual rest, and it was all legal because I’d built the loopholes right into the framework.”
Ji-won’s throat tightens. They remember translating shift schedules, watching Keshari workers nod in exhausted compliance, their chromatophores flickering with stress patterns Ji-won had learned to read too well. “I told myself I was helping by being there,” they hear themselves say. “That having someone who spoke their language made it better somehow. As if translation could sanitize what was happening.”
“Yeah.” Min-seo’s laugh is bitter, hollow. “I told myself I was just doing logistics. Numbers on screens. Resource allocation. It’s amazing how much violence you can commit with spreadsheets and optimization curves.” They finally look up, meeting Ji-won’s eyes. “The day I left, I’d just finished a presentation on improving ‘asset retention rates.’ My supervisor loved it. Said it would save the company millions in recruitment costs. I went back to my quarters and couldn’t stop seeing their faces. All those ‘assets’ I’d figured out how to trap more efficiently.”
Ji-won’s hand finds the data chip in their pocket again. Not just evidence. Restitution. Inadequate, but necessary.
“We can’t undo it,” Min-seo says quietly. “But maybe we can break the machine that’s still grinding.”
Ji-won’s chest constricts as Min-seo continues, the rebel leader’s voice dropping to something raw and undefended. “I knew what the contract clauses meant,” Min-seo says, barely audible over the station’s mechanical breathing. “I wrote some of them: the ones that made it legal to extend terms indefinitely for ‘training costs,’ to dock pay for ‘cultural integration services’ that were just basic orientation, to classify beings as ‘provisional residents’ so they had no legal recourse.”
Each phrase lands like a physical blow. Ji-won had translated those exact clauses, had sat across from Keshari elders whose chromatophores flickered with confusion and fear, had watched them press their signing appendages to documents they couldn’t fully understand despite Ji-won’s careful explanations. The words had been accurate. The translation had been precise. And it had changed nothing about the trap closing around them.
“I told myself I was just doing my job,” Ji-won whispers, and the excuse sounds even more hollow spoken aloud than it had in the three weeks of sleepless nights since they’d fled.
Min-seo nods slowly, recognition passing between them like a shared wound.
The optimization algorithms had been elegant, Min-seo continues, voice hollow with remembered pride turned to ash. They’d developed predictive models for labor turnover, automated systems that flagged “underperforming units” for contract renegotiation, efficiency metrics that reduced sentient beings to data points on quarterly reports. The corporate awards had praised their innovation. A seventeen percent improvement in resource utilization, they’d called it. Seventeen percent. Min-seo’s prosthetic hand clenches involuntarily. “I didn’t see them as people,” they say, the confession stark in the Underdock’s close air. “I saw problems to solve, variables to optimize. And then I was standing there, counting. Ji-won understands. Some numbers can’t be abstracted back into comfortable distance.
“I drafted the confession three times,” Min-seo continues, their voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “Had lawyers lined up, media contacts, the whole protocol. Then I watched Hanseong-Mirae bury the Taejin Station incident under fifty layers of settlement agreements and non-disclosure clauses.” Their prosthetic fingers drum against the cargo container wall. “Whistleblowers don’t expose the system. They just become its next cautionary tale.”
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the data chip, feeling its weight multiply with implication. Min-seo’s words reshape everything. Not escape documentation but infrastructure blueprints, not evidence but foundation. The Keshari child’s drawings flash through their mind: homes that could exist, routes that could shelter, systems that could function without grinding people into expendable components. The files aren’t confession. They’re construction materials. “How many ships?” Ji-won asks, voice steady with new purpose.
Ji-won watches the medic’s hands, scarred from years of improvised work, the left thumb bent at an angle that speaks of improperly healed breaks, move with practiced efficiency across the Voth’s mottled skin. The worker’s chromatophores pulse erratically with pain, shifting between distress-yellow and shock-gray. The medic murmurs something soothing in pidgin Voth, their accent terrible but their intent clear, as they apply a salve mixed from three different expired medications.
“This one’s a dermal regenerator from ’43,” the medic explains, not looking up. “Useless on its own now: the catalysts have degraded. But combine it with this anti-inflammatory that’s gone chalky, add some synthesized collagen from the protein printer, and you get something that actually works better than the corporate stuff. Doesn’t just numb: actually heals.”
Ji-won leans closer, watching the chemical reaction where the salve meets burned tissue. The Voth’s chromatophores begin to settle into a cautious blue-green. Relief, or close enough. The medic works with the confidence of someone who’s reinvented pharmacology out of necessity, who’s learned through trial and error what the corporate manuals never bothered to document because there’s no profit in teaching people to heal themselves.
This is what expertise looks like when it serves people rather than profit margins. Not the sterile efficiency of corporate medical bays with their biometric payment scanners and liability waivers, but this: knowledge accumulated through care, through staying when it would be easier to leave, through treating the injuries that corporate safety protocols were designed to prevent but somehow never do.
The medic catches Ji-won staring. “You thinking about those files of yours?”
Ji-won nods slowly. The data chip in their pocket feels different now: not just evidence of what Hanseong-Mirae has done, but proof of what could exist instead. Documentation of every safety violation, every cost-cutting measure, every calculated decision to value efficiency over lives. Not confession. Blueprint. “How many people could we reach?”
The Voth worker’s secondary arms flutter in the gesture Ji-won has learned means distress-apology. “Cannot compensate,” they say, the translator rendering their clicks and whistles into flat Standard. “Passage debt: three years remaining. Contract specifies medical costs deducted from wages, compounding interest applied. They’re already preparing the second application, mixing components with the ease of long practice.
The worker’s chromatophores flash confusion-orange. They look from the medic to Ji-won and back, all four eyes wide. “But… protocol requires.”Just people.”
Ji-won watches the worker struggle with this, sees the cognitive dissonance play across their skin in shifting patterns. The inability to parse care without transaction, help without contract, treatment without debt. They recognize it: the same bewilderment they’d felt their first week here when someone offered them food without asking what they could trade, when Park Min-seo explained that shelter wasn’t contingent on usefulness.
The worker’s chromatophores finally settle into tentative trust-blue, and Ji-won understands that this moment, this small rupture in the logic of corporate existence, is itself a kind of evidence.
Ji-won’s fingers move through the translator’s interface, navigating menus the corporation never intended workers to see. The medic watches intently, memorizing each gesture. “There,” Ji-won says, bypassing the authentication lock. “This setting limits vocabulary to industrial terms and compliance phrases. And this one” (they highlight a buried protocol) “flags certain words for supervisor review. Complaint. Injury. Rights.”
The medic’s expression hardens. “How many people are walking around with censored thoughts?”
“Every contract laborer on the station.” Ji-won pulls up the diagnostic log, sees three years of attempted phrases the translator simply refused to render. “The device records what it blocks. Everything they tried to say.”
“That’s evidence.”
Ji-won nods slowly, understanding expanding. Not just their encrypted files. Every restricted translator holds a record of silenced voices.
Ji-won’s hands hover over the translator’s housing, recognizing the serial prefix before touching it. Standard labor-class neural interface, vocabulary locked to six hundred operational terms. They’ve bypassed this model a dozen times.
The medic leans closer as Ji-won exposes the settings panel. “It won’t translate anything outside approved parameters,” Ji-won explains, scrolling through restricted word lists. Solidarity. Organize. Refuse.
“Can you unlock it?”
“Permanently.” Ji-won’s fingers find the override sequence. “And I can teach you how.”
The medic’s injury log isn’t just documentation. It’s a living map of corporate negligence. Ji-won traces connections between facilities, recognizing patterns their encrypted files corroborate from the administrative side. Bay 3’s “equipment failures” cluster after maintenance budget cuts. Chemical exposure incidents spike when safety inspectors are reassigned.
“You’ve been building a case,” Ji-won whispers.
The medic shrugs. “We’ve been surviving. You’re the one who can prove it matters.”
Ji-won’s hand trembles as they sketch the converted cargo container that serves as the Underdock’s communal kitchen, the way someone has painted flowering vines around the doorframe despite the metal surface. The child leans closer, her chitinous head-crest reflecting the salvaged light strips in prismatic patterns that shift with her curiosity.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at the drawing.
“Where we are right now,” Ji-won says, adding the tangle of jury-rigged ventilation ducts overhead. “Where people chose to help each other.”
The child considers this with the gravity of someone who has already learned that choices are precious. “My mother says choosing is dangerous.”
“Your mother is right.” Ji-won adds Park Min-seo to the sketch, capturing the way they gesture while explaining shipping routes to a cluster of haulers. “But so is not choosing. I spent three decades letting Hanseong-Mirae make every decision for me. Where I lived, what I ate, who I worked with, what I was worth. I thought that was safety.”
They draw the medic’s makeshift clinic, the careful inventory of scavenged supplies. The Keshari families sharing a meal in shifts because there aren’t enough containers for everyone to eat together. The lookout posted at the main access hatch, alert but not afraid, because they’re protecting something rather than just hiding.
“The corporation gave me everything,” Ji-won continues, their voice catching. “Except the right to say no. Except the knowledge that I could walk away. Except…” They gesture at the drawing, at the imperfect, precarious, chosen community surrounding them. “Except this. People who trust me because I chose to be trustworthy, not because a contract says I have to be.”
The child reaches out and adds her own mark to the drawing: a small symbol Ji-won recognizes from Keshari kinship notation. Chosen family, not blood family. The kind you build rather than inherit.
Ji-won sets down the stylus, and the child’s question hangs in the recycled air between them. “Why are your eyes leaking?”
“Because I’m angry,” Ji-won says, which is true but incomplete. They try again. “I lived in a corporate housing tower for thirty years. Climate-controlled. Meal credits that auto-renewed. Career advancement pathways with projected timelines. I thought I was building a life.”
The child tilts her head, processing.
“But I couldn’t leave without forfeiting everything. Couldn’t refuse assignments. Couldn’t question the contracts I enforced.” Ji-won’s voice drops to something raw. “They told me the Keshari needed protection from exploitation, that corporate oversight kept them safe. I believed it because believing was easier than seeing the bars.”
“What bars?”
“The ones around both of us.” Ji-won touches the sketch, the flowering vines someone painted despite having no flowers, no soil, no sun. “Your people got chains. I got a pension plan. Same cage, different doors. They made me think freedom meant danger, that safety required surrender. That I had to choose.”
The child adds another kinship mark to the drawing. “You chose us.”
“I chose myself,” Ji-won whispers. “Finally.”
Park Min-seo finds them later, still holding the sketch. Doesn’t mention the tear stains darkening the recycled paper: just settles onto the cargo container beside Ji-won with the easy physicality of someone comfortable in cramped spaces.
“Ready to talk logistics?” Min-seo pulls up a datapad, fingers moving across the screen with practiced efficiency. “We’ve got communication protocols established. Dead drops in three stations, encrypted channels routing through independent relay nodes. Haulers willing to carry data chips hidden in cargo manifests, buried in legitimate shipping documentation.”
The shift is deliberate, Ji-won realizes. Min-seo isn’t treating them as a refugee needing protection anymore. This is the language of collaboration, of equals planning operations together.
“You’ve got intelligence we can use,” Min-seo continues, meeting Ji-won’s eyes. “We’ve got distribution infrastructure. That makes us partners.”
Min-seo’s jaw tightens. “Retaliation’s already happening: wage theft, arbitrary deportations, security sweeps. We’re not starting a fight, we’re finally hitting back.” Their prosthetic hand clenches. “The collective’s got contingencies. Safe houses on six stations. Legal funds. Solidarity strikes planned across three shipping lanes.” A pause, heavy with unspoken cost. “People will get hurt. They’re choosing it anyway.”
The child’s crayon strokes blur in Ji-won’s vision. Each drawing a testimony. Each shelter Min-seo’s network maintained was proof the corporate monopoly on safety was a lie they’d all been conditioned to believe. The files weren’t just evidence of exploitation. They were documentation that people survived, built communities, chose solidarity over the prescribed hierarchies. The Underdock itself was the counterargument.
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the final confirmation prompt, the chip’s indicator light pulsing amber in the dim space. The holographic interface casts shadows across their knuckles, making the bones stand out sharp beneath skin that hasn’t seen real sunlight in months. They think of Kyung-hee somewhere above in the corporate levels: another person trapped by the same system, making different calculations about what survival costs.
The investigator’s file is in the data too. Ji-won made sure of it. Not out of cruelty, but because Kyung-hee’s medical records, her daughter’s colonist placement, the impossible choice between hunting refugees and losing everything: that’s evidence too. That’s how the system works: turn people into instruments of their own oppression, make them complicit, ensure everyone has blood on their hands or desperation in their hearts.
Ji-won wonders if Kyung-hee will understand, later, that being exposed might be the only thing that saves her. That sometimes the cage has to be revealed before anyone can see the bars.
The amber light steadies to green. Ready. Waiting.
Behind them, someone shifts in their sleep. One of the Keshari families, three generations crammed into a converted storage container, breathing the same recycled air. The child’s drawings are pinned to the wall with magnetic strips, bright crayon colors against gray metal. A purple sky. A city with towers that curve like shells. A family with too many limbs holding appendages in a circle.
Memory or imagination. It doesn’t matter. Both are acts of resistance.
Ji-won presses execute.
The progress bar materializes, a thin line of blue light beginning its crawl toward irreversibility. Fifteen percent. Twenty. The chip grows warm against their palm. There’s no taking it back now. No more invisibility. No more running.
Only testimony. Only truth. Only the small, fierce hope that sometimes the right betrayal can break everything open.
The network protocols Park Min-seo built are elegant in their redundancy: the files fragment and replicate, each packet taking different routes through the relay’s communication infrastructure, some bouncing to data havens in neutral stations, others queuing in the inboxes of investigative journalists who’ve been waiting years for proof this solid, this damning.
Ji-won watches the distribution map bloom across the holographic display, each node a small victory, each successful handshake a door closing on the possibility of containment. The files are already beyond Hanseong-Mirae’s reach, scattered across jurisdictions where corporate authority means nothing, where rival conglomerates will gleefully amplify every violation, every falsified report, every Keshari worker listed as “equipment loss” in the quarterly assessments.
The progress tracker shows eighty-seven percent complete. Ninety-two. The chip’s indicator cycles through its final authentication sequence, confirming each fragment’s arrival, each redundant copy secured in systems designed to survive exactly this kind of corporate suppression attempt.
Ninety-eight percent. Ninety-nine.
The light turns solid blue.
Complete. Irreversible. Done.
Ji-won exhales, a breath they didn’t know they’d been holding since the moment they first copied those files in the Hanseong-Mirae liaison office, three weeks and a lifetime ago.
Park Min-seo finds them in the common area an hour later, staring at the blank chip in their palm like it might contain answers to questions they haven’t yet learned to ask. The hauler leader doesn’t speak immediately, just settles onto the recycled crate beside Ji-won with two cups of something that approximates coffee.
“You look different,” Min-seo observes, their prosthetic arm whirring softly as they extend one cup. “Less like you’re about to bolt through the nearest airlock.”
Ji-won accepts the drink, its warmth spreading through fingers that have finally stopped their constant trembling. “I feel exposed. But not,” They search for the word. “Not hunted. Not anymore.”
“That’s called having allies,” Min-seo says, gap-toothed smile catching the salvaged light. “Welcome to the resistance.”
Ji-won’s breathing deepens, synchronizing with the Underdock’s mechanical heartbeat. The cot’s thin padding barely cushions the storage container’s metal floor, but exhaustion has finally overwhelmed vigilance. Their translator implant processes ambient Keshari into lullaby fragments. Somewhere in the maze of corridors, Park Min-seo’s laugh echoes. Ji-won’s last conscious thought isn’t of Kyung-hee’s pursuit or corporate retribution, but of the child’s crayon-drawn sun, impossibly bright against recycled paper.
The hearing room materializes with bureaucratic precision. Harsh lighting, observation cameras, the antiseptic smell of official spaces. Ji-won’s voice carries weight they’ve never possessed, each word landing like testimony under oath. The Keshari child’s drawings multiply across the walls, transforming from crayon innocence into damning documentation: labor camp schematics, transport manifests, faces of the disappeared. In the dream’s logic, art becomes evidence, memory becomes witness, and silence becomes impossible.
Ji-won’s throat tightens as they meet the Keshari supervisor’s compound eyes, seeing the careful hope there, the vulnerability of someone who has chosen to trust despite every reason not to. Tek-sha’s mandibles continue their clicking pattern. In their scarred chitin, Ji-won reads the history of labor that grinds bodies down: the repetitive stress fractures from operating equipment designed for human hands, the respiratory damage from atmosphere mixtures calibrated for human lungs.
“Two years,” Ji-won repeats, and their voice comes out rougher than intended. The translator implant behind their ear pulses warm against their skin, processing the layered meanings in Tek-sha’s clicks. Documentation. Not just complaints or memories, but systematic evidence. Shift logs, injury reports, atmospheric readings, the kind of data that corporate tribunals can’t easily dismiss.
One of the human engineers, a woman with oil-stained hands and gray threading her temples, leans forward. “We can get you access to the environmental control records,” she says. “Every time they’ve run the oxygen low in the alien worker sections to save costs. Every time they’ve ignored contamination alerts.” Her partner nods, adding, “Time-stamped. Authenticated. The kind of thing that’ll hold up even in corporate arbitration.”
Park Min-seo remains silent, but Ji-won feels the weight of their attention, the assessment happening behind that gap-toothed smile. This is the moment: not when Ji-won arrived at the Underdock seeking shelter, but now, when the network reveals itself and asks for something in return.
The encrypted data chip in Ji-won’s pocket suddenly feels inadequate. These people aren’t offering abstract solidarity; they’re offering years of careful work, risking everything they’ve built. The question isn’t whether Ji-won’s evidence is worth protecting. It’s whether Ji-won is worthy of theirs.
Ji-won’s hands move to the data chip before conscious thought catches up. The Voth pilot’s harmonic tones still resonate in their skull, the translator implant working to parse layers of meaning their human brain wasn’t designed to process. We know what you’re protecting. Not an accusation: an offering.
“The third settlement,” Ji-won says, voice barely above a whisper. “How many?”
“Forty-seven individuals. Twelve juveniles.” Carries-What-Others-Cannot’s crest flares in what Ji-won has learned to read as grim satisfaction. “They’ve been there eight months. Growing their own protein cultures, recycling water. They don’t want to be found.”
The weight of it settles like station gravity after too long in the null zones. Ji-won had thought themselves the sole keeper of these secrets, the only one carrying the burden of coordinates that could mean life or death. But the network has been there all along, parallel threads of protection they never knew existed.
“I have files,” Ji-won says finally, pulling out the chip. “Labor violations. Atmospheric manipulation. Wage theft across forty installations.” They look at each face in turn. “But you already knew that too, didn’t you?”
The engineer’s confession hangs in the recycled air. Ji-won watches his fingers twist together: the same nervous energy that’s kept them moving for three weeks, the same fear that’s become so familiar it feels like a second skin. But where Ji-won has been running, this man has been standing still, day after day, falsifying reports while his daughter colors pictures of starships in corporate-sponsored education.
“How long?” Ji-won asks.
“Fourteen months.” His laugh is bitter. “Every time I think I’ll stop, someone new shows up in the Underdock. Pregnant. Injured. Kids who’ve never seen a planet.”
Park Min-seo’s hand on his shoulder isn’t just comfort. It’s anchor, reminder that he’s not carrying this alone anymore.
Ji-won’s hand moves to the encrypted chip in their pocket, reflex, possession, the last thing they’ve controlled. But control was always illusion. The moment they copied those files, the moment they ran, they became part of something larger than survival. These people aren’t asking for the data. They’re asking Ji-won to stop being a fugitive hoarding leverage and become a witness who trusts the network to amplify what one voice cannot say alone.
Ji-won’s fingers tighten around the chip, feeling its edges through the fabric. The weight of fifteen gazes presses against their chest. Not demanding, but waiting. Tek-sha’s scarred mandibles catch the salvaged light, each mark a testimony written in chitin and survival. “Distribution,” Ji-won says slowly, the word tasting like surrender and purpose at once. “You’re asking me to let go.” Around the circle, something shifts, recognition, perhaps, that trust is the only currency that matters here.
Ji-won’s eyes track the overlapping patterns on Su-jin’s screen: color-coded corridors pulsing in sequence, each one representing a window of vulnerability in the station’s surveillance grid. The precision is staggering. Not just shift changes, but the exact moments when guards pause to log reports, when automated systems cycle through diagnostic routines, when the station’s aging infrastructure creates natural gaps in coverage.
“Here,” Su-jin says, zooming into Spoke 5’s industrial ring. Her finger traces a path that weaves through three separate blind spots. “Fourteen minutes, twenty seconds. That’s how long you have to move someone from the cargo processing center to the maintenance tunnels.” She pulls up another overlay. This one showing heat signatures, motion sensors, biometric scanners. “We map everything. Temperature fluctuations that trigger false alarms. Ventilation cycles that mask movement. Even the times when Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s team is most likely to be dealing with drunk dock workers in Sector 2.”
The routes aren’t just escape paths. They’re arteries, Ji-won realizes, watching Su-jin scroll through months of documented patterns. A living system that adapts to the station’s rhythms, growing more sophisticated with each successful transit. Red lines mark failed attempts: times when the windows closed too quickly, when someone’s timing was off by seconds.
“This one,” Su-jin taps a route that loops through four different sectors, “took six weeks to verify. We had to account for a new security protocol, reroute around upgraded sensors, find alternative access points.” Her expression hardens. “Cost us three close calls before we got it right.”
Ji-won notices the dates on the files. Some routes are years old, refined through countless iterations. Others are recent, still marked as provisional. The network hasn’t just been moving people: it’s been learning, evolving, building institutional knowledge that exists nowhere but in the minds of those who maintain it.
“How many people know all of this?” Ji-won asks.
Su-jin’s smile is grim. “Right now? Four. About to be five.”
The forty-three names exist only in Su-jin’s memory. No records, no files, nothing that could be seized in a raid. She recites some now, each one a story of survival compressed into a few words: the Voth maintenance worker whose clutch-mate was killed in an “accident” that conveniently destroyed evidence of safety violations. The human family whose six-year-old witnessed executives discussing the disposal of alien remains in what they thought was an empty conference room. The Keshari navigator who refused to fly an unsafe route and found herself facing termination. Both employment and the other kind.
“Every person we moved had something the corporations wanted buried,” Su-jin says, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “Information, testimony, or just the inconvenient fact of their survival.”
Ji-won watches her face as she speaks, noting the way her jaw tightens with each name, the slight tremor in her hands that has nothing to do with fatigue. These aren’t statistics to her. They’re people she’s looked in the eye, promised safety, delivered through those fourteen-minute windows while her pulse hammered and sweat soaked through her coveralls.
Ji-won’s breath catches as the pattern resolves into clarity. Not chaos, but choreography. Every maintenance alert creating a sensor gap, every cargo transfer generating legitimate foot traffic through supposedly restricted corridors, every shift change producing exactly fourteen minutes when three different supervisors each assume someone else is watching. The system doesn’t fight corporate surveillance: it uses the corporation’s own complexity against itself, exploiting the gaps between departments, the assumptions that someone else has checked, the bureaucratic friction that makes verification take longer than the window of opportunity.
“How many people know the full pattern?” Ji-won asks.
“Just Park Min-seo and me,” Su-jin says. “And now you.”
Ji-won’s hands tremble slightly: exhaustion or recognition, they’re not sure which. The weight of what’s being offered settles like gravity returning after freefall. Not just sanctuary, but purpose. Not just survival, but architecture. They think of the Keshari settlements they’ve kept secret, coordinates locked in memory like a held breath. Knowledge hoarded becomes knowledge shared.
“I have three locations,” Ji-won says finally. “Undocumented settlements. And encrypted files that prove Hanseong-Mirae’s violations across seven systems.”
Su-jin’s schematics fade as Park Min-seo straightens, their prosthetic arm catching the dim light. The mechanical fingers flex once: a habitual gesture Ji-won has learned means they’re calculating risks. “Your files are leverage,” Park Min-seo says, voice dropping to something more serious than their usual warmth. “Your testimony is witness. But those settlement coordinates?” They pause, letting the weight settle. “That’s trust. Real trust, the kind that gets people killed if it breaks.”
Ji-won’s hands shake slightly as they accept the encrypted comm unit Park Min-seo offers. A physical device, no network trace, the kind of precaution that makes the stakes unmistakably clear. The assignment brief loads onto the scratched screen: minimal details, maximum exposure. A Voth named Tekresh, persecution claim, Sector 5-C pod rental. The kind of request the collective receives weekly, except this time Ji-won is the filter between safety and catastrophe.
“What if I’m wrong?” The question escapes before Ji-won can stop it, and they immediately hate how it sounds. Park Min-seo’s prosthetic whirs softly as they grip Ji-won’s shoulder, the pressure calibrated perfectly between reassurance and reminder. “Then we learn from it together. But I don’t think you will be.” Their gap-toothed smile doesn’t quite reach their eyes. “You’ve been reading people across species barriers for years. Corporate taught you to see what they needed. Now use it to see what we need.”
The weight of the comm unit feels disproportionate to its size. Ji-won thinks of the Keshari families whose coordinates live in their memory, of the children in those settlements who don’t know their safety depends on strangers making the right calls. Of how many times they’ve had to read a supervisor’s mood to know whether to push back or submit, to parse a Keshari’s chromatic shifts to understand what words couldn’t convey, to catch the micro-hesitation that meant a Voth was being coerced rather than compliant.
“Better to be thorough than fast,” Park Min-seo repeats, and Ji-won recognizes it as the collective’s operational philosophy distilled. Not the corporate mandate for efficiency above all, but the underground’s harder wisdom: one mistake doesn’t just cost credits or contracts. It costs lives.
Ji-won pockets the comm unit and heads for Sector 5-C, trying to remember when they last felt this necessary and this terrified simultaneously.
Ji-won catalogs the details methodically, the way corporate trained them to document discrepancies in labor contracts. They position themselves in the transit corridor outside Tekresh’s pod, pretending to review shipping manifests on their own battered datapad while tracking movement patterns. Tekresh emerges twice (once for water rations, once for the communal facilities) and both times their gait reads wrong. Not the exhausted shuffle of someone who’s been running, but the controlled economy of movement that comes from security training.
The chromatophores still flash stress colors, but Ji-won recognizes the pattern now: too regular, cycling through the textbook sequence their own corporate orientation materials had illustrated. Genuine Voth distress creates chaotic color shifts, unpredictable and asymmetric. This is someone who learned the signs but never lived them.
Ji-won’s translator implant picks up a brief comm exchange, Tekresh speaking too-perfect Keshari to someone off-channel, using formal grammatical structures that actual refugees abandoned generations ago. The kind of language that comes from academic study rather than necessity.
The evidence accumulates like pressure behind a failing airlock seal. Ji-won encrypts their observations, hands still steady now that certainty has replaced doubt.
Ji-won spends the second day cross-referencing Tekresh’s story against their mental database of corporate security patterns. The claimed timeline, the names of supervisors, the specific facility locations. Two details don’t align: Tekresh describes a shift rotation that Hanseong-Mirae discontinued eight months ago, and mentions a security checkpoint that only exists in facilities with classified clearance levels.
Ji-won’s fingers hover over their datapad, pulling up encrypted notes from their final weeks inside corporate. The Gamma-shift rotation had been eliminated during cost-cutting measures, replaced by algorithmic scheduling that maximized efficiency and misery in equal measure. They remember the announcement, the protests, the way management had simply stopped acknowledging complaints.
The checkpoint detail is worse. Those installations only appear in black-site facilities: the kind Ji-won had heard about but never accessed. Either Tekresh worked somewhere far more sensitive than claimed, or they’re reciting from an outdated briefing document that someone in corporate intelligence compiled without proper field verification.
The cargo bay’s recycled air tastes metallic against Ji-won’s tongue as they cross the distance to Tekresh. Three exits, three watchers. Ji-won switches to formal Voth, the translator implant warming behind their ear.
“Your story contains inconsistencies.” Each word deliberate, giving Tekresh space to respond. “The Gamma-shift rotation was discontinued eight months ago. The checkpoint you described requires clearance levels you claim never to have possessed.”
Tekresh’s chromatophores ripple: defensive orange bleeding into resigned gray across their thorax. The color shift speaks before words do: caught, but not hostile.
“I was assigned to verify your location,” Tekresh admits, voice dropping to the subsonic register that indicates shame in Voth culture. “Not for Hanseong-Mirae. The Refugee Documentation Network needed confirmation you were genuine before committing resources.”
Park Min-seo’s expression shifts from satisfaction to calculation as they process Ji-won’s full report. “Counter-surveillance from allies: that’s a complication we can work with.” They gesture to Shi’kresh, who moves closer, mandibles still clicking approval. “The RDN wants proof you’re worth protecting. Show them the encrypted files exist, not their contents. Not yet.” Ji-won’s hand moves instinctively to the data chip concealed in their suit lining, weighing trust against survival.
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the holographic display, manipulating the projection to overlay shipping manifests against the refugee routes. The patterns emerge immediately: corporate blind spots, maintenance windows, scheduled crew rotations. “You’re using their own logistics against them,” Ji-won murmurs, professional admiration cutting through exhaustion. “Every time a hauler collective negotiates a new contract clause, every time dock workers delay a security sweep for ‘safety inspections,’ you’re creating space in the system.”
Park Min-seo’s gap-toothed smile widens. “We’ve gotten good at speaking their language. Compliance, efficiency metrics, risk assessment protocols: all the corporate terminology that makes them think we’re playing by their rules.” The prosthetic arm whirs softly as they zoom in on Taeyang-7’s position. “This station is the newest node. Still building trust, still establishing patterns. That’s why your arrival is both opportunity and risk.”
Ji-won watches the data streams flowing between stations, each one representing lives in transit, people betting everything on this fragile network. The weight of it settles like station gravity after too long in zero-g. “How many know about the full network? If security compromises one person,”
“Compartmentalization,” Park Min-seo interrupts, their tone shifting to something harder. “Each node knows their adjacent connections, nothing more. I’m one of three people who see the whole map, and we don’t meet physically. Ever.” They tap the projection, and it fragments into isolated clusters. “If Hanseong-Mirae rolls up one station, the others adapt and continue. We’ve already lost one node. Learned that lesson in blood.”
The hologram flickers, power fluctuating in the Underdock’s jury-rigged systems. In that moment of darkness, Ji-won sees not just routes and schedules, but the accumulated choices of hundreds of people deciding that survival means resistance, that safety requires collective risk.
“The problem is documentation,” Park Min-seo continues, pulling up a new display layer. Data chips materialize in the projection, each one tagged with corporate logos: not just Hanseong-Mirae, but Stellar Dynamics, Kepler Industries, the Martian Consortium. “We can move people through the network, get them to the independent colonies. But without verifiable evidence of what they’re fleeing, asylum requests get denied. The colonies are terrified of corporate retaliation, of being accused of harboring criminals or stolen assets.”
Ji-won’s translator implant processes the implications faster than conscious thought. Refugees arriving with nothing but testimony, turned away at docking bays, forced back into the jurisdictions hunting them. “They need legal justification. Something that stands up to interstellar arbitration.”
“Exactly.” Park Min-seo’s prosthetic fingers drum against the table, the rhythm matching the station’s life support pulse. “That’s where your files become more than just evidence against one corporation. They establish precedent. Proof that the Sapient Rights Accords aren’t just being bent. They’re being systematically violated across corporate space. With documentation, refugees become protected witnesses. Asylum becomes legal obligation.”
Ji-won’s hands hover over the holographic display, not quite touching the constellation of data chips. Five others. Five people who’d made the same impossible choice, carrying the same crushing weight. “How did you find them?”
“They found us. Same way you did: through the network, following whispers of safe passage.” Park Min-seo’s prosthetic whirs softly as they gesture at the chips. “A logistics coordinator from Stellar Dynamics. An environmental compliance officer who documented Kepler’s atmospheric violations. Three others, each with pieces of the puzzle.”
The translator implant pulses warm behind Ji-won’s ear, processing the scope. Not one whistleblower’s desperate gambit, but a coordinated strike. “They’re willing to go public?”
“They’re waiting for someone to go first.”
Park Min-seo manipulates the holographic timeline, highlighting connection points between corporate violations and summit agenda items. “The independent colonies have been pushing for enforcement mechanisms. Your documentation gives them ammunition.” Ji-won traces the data streams, seeing how six individual testimonies could weave into irrefutable pattern evidence. The translator implant catches on a Keshari phrase. Not martyrdom, but strategic revelation. “Three months to prepare,” Ji-won says slowly. “To make sure we can’t be dismissed or disappeared.” Park Min-seo nods. “Three months to build something they can’t tear down.”
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the holographic display, watching data points pulse like distant stars. The encrypted chip in their pocket suddenly feels heavier than its actual mass. Three Keshari settlements. Forty-seven documented violations. Names of workers who disappeared into corporate detention. “Once we transmit this to the summit delegates, there’s no taking it back,” Ji-won says, voice steady despite the tremor in their hands. “No more running, no more hiding.” Park Min-seo meets their gaze. “No more letting them win by keeping us silent.”
Ji-won’s translator implant heats against their skull as they switch between Korean, Keshari chromatic pulses, and Voth harmonic speech, explaining how corporate contracts exploit linguistic ambiguity. The converted storage container’s walls seem to press closer as more workers crowd in, drawn by word spreading through the Underdock’s informal networks. A human dock supervisor produces a crumpled contract from her coveralls, Ji-won scans the dense text, finger stopping at clause 7.[^3].
“Here,” they say, projecting the section onto the salvaged display. “See this phrase: ‘standard operational deductions’? It’s deliberately vague. They can classify almost anything as operational.” Their hands move through the holographic text, highlighting patterns. “Atmosphere fees. Gravity maintenance. Even the cost of monitoring your own biometrics.”
A younger Keshari worker’s carapace flushes deep orange, anger, Ji-won recognizes. Through the translator, their voice emerges as rapid clicks: “They charged me for the air I breathe while loading their cargo?”
“Exactly.” Ji-won pulls up another document, this one from their encrypted chip. A Hanseong-Mirae internal memo they’d copied before fleeing. “And they know it’s exploitation. Look at this: ‘Maximize revenue recovery through creative fee structuring while maintaining technical contract compliance.’” The words hang in the recycled air like an indictment.
Park Min-seo leans against the container’s doorframe, prosthetic arm crossed over their chest. “How do we fight it?”
Ji-won’s exhaustion recedes, replaced by the sharp focus they’d felt during their best liaison work. Before they’d understood they were facilitating the very system they’re now dismantling. “Documentation. Every pay stub, every fee, every promise made versus what you actually received. We build a pattern so clear even corporate arbitrators can’t ignore it.” They meet the eyes, and eye-analogs, of each worker present. “And we do it together. One person’s complaint is a problem employee. Fifty workers with identical evidence is a labor violation.”
The teaching sessions develop a rhythm over the following days. Ji-won projects salvaged corporate documents onto a cracked display screen, their fingers tracing through holographic text while three languages flow simultaneously through their translator implant. The dense legal terminology requires more than word-for-word conversion: they’re translating entire frameworks of obligation and compensation between species whose evolutionary histories created fundamentally different concepts of labor.
A Voth cargo handler named Tek-var brings their pay records on a battered data pad, chitin-plated fingers trembling slightly. Ji-won helps them cross-reference against standard rates pulled from their encrypted chip, highlighting each discrepancy. The “processing fees” emerge like a pattern of theft: atmosphere surcharges, gravity adjustment costs, biometric monitoring expenses. Nearly thirty percent of Tek-var’s wages, simply gone.
The converted storage container grows quiet as others lean forward, comparing their own records. A human dock supervisor’s face hardens. A Keshari’s carapace flushes the deep purple of recognition. They’ve all been subjected to the same systematic extraction, each believing their situation was individual misfortune rather than coordinated exploitation.
Ji-won’s translator implant cycles through three linguistic frameworks simultaneously, their neural pathways burning with the effort. The Keshari worker’s mandibles click in rhythms that encode obligation-as-biology, explaining how “nest-debt” (the instinctive drive to provision communal young) has been twisted into legal bondage by corporations who understand their psychology better than they do themselves.
Tek-var responds, their vocalization organs producing harmonics that Ji-won’s implant renders as frustrated precision. Voth contracts traditionally achieve “crystalline clarity” through geometric linguistic structures, but human translators have introduced deliberate ambiguities, exploiting gaps between species’ cognitive architectures.
Ji-won watches comprehension ripple through the assembled workers: chromatophores shifting, pupils dilating, postures realigning. The exploitation isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.
“Documentation,” someone asks. “Without detection?”
Ji-won teaches the analog methods: handwritten logs in personal scripts, witness statements recorded on isolated devices, physical evidence photographed and hidden among legitimate maintenance documentation.
Park Min-seo attends the sessions regularly now, positioning themselves at the common area’s periphery where they can observe without dominating. They interject occasionally and Ji-won watches how workers track Park Min-seo’s reactions, how a slight nod validates testimony, how a frown recalibrates risk assessment.
During a session where a human dockworker describes the maintenance accident that killed their partner, their voice fracturing on details corporate reports sanitized, Park Min-seo’s gaze finds Ji-won across the cramped space. The question crystallizes wordlessly between them: teacher, or something more dangerous?
Ji-won’s translator implant processes the silence between them, searching for meaning in the absence of words. The chip in their pocket feels heavier than its physical mass: encrypted evidence that three Keshari settlements depend on remaining secret, that could simultaneously expose corporate crimes and the refugees who survived them.
“Protection through visibility,” Ji-won says slowly, testing the concept’s weight. “Or painting targets on everyone who’s helped me.”
Park Min-seo doesn’t flinch at the implications. Instead, they lean back against the converted storage container, prosthetic arm resting across their knee, the exposed servos whirring softly as they adjust their grip. “Running’s what got you here,” they say, voice carrying that drawl that makes hard truths sound like observations about the weather. “Three weeks in the Underdock, rationing nutrition packs, jumping at every footstep. That’s not survival. That’s just slower dying.”
The words land harder than Ji-won expects. Around them, the makeshift community continues its evening routines: someone cooking something that smells like synthetic protein and hope, children’s laughter echoing from a converted equipment room, the constant mechanical heartbeat of the station thrumming through the walls.
“The corporate playbook works because people stay isolated,” Park Min-seo continues. “They pick us off one at a time: a fugitive liaison here, an undocumented settlement there. But if you stand up, if we make this loud enough that the Sapient Rights Council can’t ignore it?” Their gap-toothed smile sharpens into something fierce. “Then it’s not about you anymore. It’s about whether they can afford to let the whole system see them silence someone with proof.”
Ji-won’s translator implant catches the subtle shift in Park Min-seo’s phrasing. Not ‘if they silence you’ but ‘if they’re seen silencing you.’ The distinction matters. Visibility as armor, attention as shield. It’s the opposite of every instinct that’s kept them alive since fleeing Hanseong-Mirae.
“You’re asking me to trust that publicity will protect me better than anonymity,” Ji-won says, watching the data chip catch the salvaged light strips’ glow. “To bet my life that enough people will care.”
“I’m asking you to trust that we’ll make them care,” Park Min-seo corrects. “There’s a difference.”
Ji-won’s fingers tighten around the data chip, feeling its edges bite into their palm. The weight of three weeks’ paranoia presses against their chest: every shadow that might be Kyung-hee, every footstep that could mean discovery. But underneath that fear, something else has been growing in the close warmth of the Underdock, fed by shared meals and whispered stories of resistance.
“I’ve thought about it,” they admit, voice barely carrying over the station’s mechanical pulse. Every restless hour of the past three weeks, weighing their own survival against the Keshari still working in those facilities, their chittering voices silenced by fear. Against the workers in this very room who don’t know they’re one contract violation away from being discarded like faulty equipment.
“But going public means Kyung-hee isn’t my only problem anymore.” The translator implant throbs behind their ear, phantom sensation of all the voices they’ve carried. “It means every corporate security apparatus, every bounty hunter looking for easy credits, every enforcer who wants to prove their loyalty.” They pull the chip fully from their pocket now, watching it catch the light. “It means I can’t run anymore.”
Park Min-seo’s expression shifts. Not softening exactly, but acknowledging the calculation behind Ji-won’s words. “No false promises,” they say, leaning against a support strut. “Going public puts a target on everyone in this network. Hanseong-Mirae will audit every manifest, flag every sympathetic dock worker, freeze accounts.” Their prosthetic arm whirs softly as they gesture. “But you’re right about one thing. We’re already building the infrastructure. Safe houses on three other relays. Pilots who know the routes corporate sensors don’t cover well.” They meet Ji-won’s eyes directly. “The settlements stay encrypted until they choose otherwise. And when the hammer falls, we move everyone we can. That’s not a guarantee of safety. It’s a commitment to try.”
Ji-won’s fingers tighten on the data chip, feeling its edges bite into their palm. Three weeks of running, of rationed nutrition packs and sleeping in maintenance crawlspaces, crystallizes into this moment. The translator implant behind their ear pulses with phantom echoes, Keshari gratitude-clicks, Voth harmonics of trust. “When?” they ask, voice steadier than expected. “How long until we’re ready?”
Park Min-seo extends their prosthetic hand. The choice deliberate, metal fingers catching the dim light. “Two weeks to establish the distribution network. We get everyone out who wants to go first. I’ve got pilots ready to run refugees to the outer colonies, stations beyond Hanseong-Mirae’s reach.”
Their grip is firm when Ji-won takes it, metal warm from body heat, servos whirring softly. “The settlements stay protected until they choose otherwise. But understand: once we distribute those files, the collective becomes a target. Everyone who testifies, everyone who helps. We’re all in.”
Ji-won feels the decision lock into place, solid as the prosthetic hand in theirs. “Then we make it count.”
Ji-won’s voice steadies as they move through the documented evidence, each data point a small act of precision against the enormity of what they’re revealing. The encrypted files contain everything: payroll records showing wages deposited into accounts the Keshari workers couldn’t access without corporate authorization that never came, medical logs documenting injuries from equipment designed for human physiology, housing manifests proving three families were crammed into spaces rated for single occupancy. They recite the numbers because numbers are harder to dismiss than emotion, but between each statistic they insert the human, no, the sapient, cost. Tesh’kara’s spawn-mate died in a loading accident that the safety report attributed to “operator error,” never mentioning that the safety instructions existed only in Korean.
The camera’s recording light blinks steadily, a small red eye witnessing what corporate oversight never bothered to see. Ji-won’s translator implant aches behind their ear. Phantom pain, maybe, or just the weight of switching between languages, between the clinical corporate-speak and the Keshari terms for concepts like “nest-debt” and “colony-obligation” that Hanseong-Mirae weaponized into binding contracts. They explain how the corporation promised integration assistance, then charged for every translation service, every cultural liaison session, every legal consultation needed to navigate the deliberately baroque bureaucracy. The debt accumulated faster than wages, creating indentured servitude with a corporate smile.
Park Min-seo shifts slightly, and the prosthetic arm whirs. A sound Ji-won has learned means they’re managing strong emotion through mechanical focus. One of the lookouts taps twice on the door: five-minute warning before the next security rotation. Ji-won accelerates through the final violations, the pattern of exploitation clear enough now that they don’t need to detail every case. When they finish, the silence in the maintenance closet feels like the moment after a hull breach, before the emergency systems kick in: that suspended instant when everything changes and nothing can be undone.
Ji-won starts with the contract clauses, their voice finding purchase in the familiar terrain of legal terminology. But then Tesh’kara’s name surfaces, unbidden, and suddenly they’re not reciting violations but remembering the way her throat-sac pulsed with the mourning harmonics, teaching them the frequencies that meant “far from nest” and “hope deferred.” Vel’moth’s spawn-mate photos flash through their mind: tiny Keshari faces pressed against a communal screen, eight light-years distant and getting farther with each contract renewal.
The words shift, become jagged. They describe the citizenship applications routed through seventeen different departments, each one requiring fees the workers couldn’t pay without wages they couldn’t access. The internal memos where Project Manager Choi called them “biological assets” and “labor units,” while his external reports praised Hanseong-Mirae’s “interspecies integration initiatives.” Ji-won watches Park Min-seo’s prosthetic hand tighten on the camera housing, servos whining softly. The maintenance closet’s recycled air tastes metallic, or maybe that’s just their mouth going dry as the documented atrocities pile up between them and any possible retreat.
Ji-won’s fingers close around the data chip, but they don’t pull it out yet. The coordinates exist in a separate partition, triple-encrypted with keys distributed among people they trust: people who understand that some knowledge is too dangerous to centralize. They meet Park Min-seo’s eyes, seeing the question there: how much?
“The settlements exist,” Ji-won says carefully, each word a calculated risk. “Seventeen families in the first. Twenty-three in the second. Forty-one in the third, including spawn-groups.” They watch Park Min-seo’s expression shift: understanding that numbers make it real without making it vulnerable. “They have gardens. Schools. They’re building something that belongs to them.”
The chip stays in their pocket. Some doors, once opened, can’t be closed.
Ji-won holds the data chip to the camera, this fragment of ceramic and silicon that’s consumed three years of their life. Their voice finds unexpected steadiness as they catalog what it contains: internal communications tracking Keshari by asset numbers, budget analyses quantifying exploitation savings, authorization codes they extracted during maintenance shifts while pretending invisibility. Hanseong-Mirae trained them for corporate efficiency. Never imagining they’d weaponize that precision against them. “I’m not the only one who knows,” Ji-won tells the lens, the future, everyone. “And I won’t be the last to speak.”
The terminal’s cooling fan whirs in the silence after Park Min-seo’s pronouncement. Ji-won tracks the encryption protocols fragmenting their testimony into a thousand untraceable pieces, each packet burrowing through relay nodes like seeds finding soil. Their hands won’t stop shaking. Three years of hiding, of swallowing every impulse to speak, compressed into seventeen minutes of recorded testimony now replicating beyond retrieval. The maintenance closet suddenly feels suffocating. Walls too close, air too thin, the weight of what they’ve just unleashed pressing down like atmospheric pressure.
The broadcast plays on loop in the Underdock, each repetition drawing more viewers to the salvaged screens. Ji-won stands at the back of the growing crowd, watching their own distorted testimony reflected in dozens of faces. The FreeRelay analyst’s voice cuts through the humid air with clinical precision. “Note the blockchain verification here: each transaction logged with Hanseong-Mirae’s proprietary quantum signature. These aren’t fabrications. These are their own records.” The screen fills with columns of data: labor contracts listing Keshari workers as ‘equipment,’ medical expenses categorized under ‘maintenance costs,’ mortality rates filed as ‘acceptable loss margins.’
Someone near the front makes a sound: half sob, half laugh. A Keshari elder Ji-won recognizes from the meal rotations turns to look at them, and in her four eyes there’s something that makes Ji-won’s chest constrict. Not just gratitude. Validation. Proof that what happened to her people wasn’t invisible, wasn’t deniable, wasn’t something they’d have to carry alone anymore.
“The timestamps correlate with documented incidents across seven relay stations,” the analyst continues, and Ji-won remembers each one. The Keshari worker who’d bled out in Bay 12 because the corporate medic deemed treatment ‘cost-prohibitive.’ The family separated when only the father’s contract was deemed ‘transferable.’ The children classified as ‘dependents’ with no legal status, no rights, no existence beyond their parents’ labor value.
Park Min-seo appears at Ji-won’s shoulder, solid and warm in the pressing crowd. “Three more networks have picked it up,” they murmur. “Core system feeds. This isn’t staying contained.”
Ji-won nods, unable to speak past the tightness in their throat. On screen, the data scrolls. Finally real.
The Underdock’s population swells first: ten new arrivals in a day, then twenty, then more than the lookouts can properly screen. They come with stories: a Voth engineer who refused to falsify safety reports, a human data analyst who’d copied files before corporate wiped the servers, a Keshari family who’d heard there was a place where the Witness lived, where people fought back. Ji-won helps arrange sleeping spaces in converted cargo containers, their hands shaking as they distribute ration packs that are already running low. Each new face is hope and burden intertwined.
Park Min-seo’s collective meetings overflow the main gathering space, spilling into adjacent corridors. Volunteers offer skills Ji-won didn’t know they needed: a former teacher organizing education for refugee children, a medic setting up a proper clinic, a programmer hardening their encryption. The mutual aid network transforms into infrastructure, and Ji-won watches Park Min-seo navigate the change with practiced ease, delegating, coordinating, building something that might actually last.
“You started this,” someone tells Ji-won, and they want to say they only revealed what was already there, but the words stick in their throat.
The slowdowns start in Relay Station Cheongsan-3, then spread to Hanbit-5 and Saebyeok-9: workers simply following every safety protocol to the letter, checking every manifest twice, taking every authorized break. Productivity drops by forty percent, but there’s nothing corporate security can officially cite because everyone is following the rules perfectly.
Park Min-seo shows Ji-won the reports coming in through encrypted channels, their prosthetic arm whirring as they gesture at the data streams. Dock supervisors frustrated, shipping schedules backing up three days, corporate managers demanding explanations they can’t give without admitting the protocols were always meant to be shortcuts. “They’re doing what you did,” Park Min-seo says, that gap-toothed grin splitting their face. “Making the system see itself.”
Ji-won watches the numbers cascade. Hundreds of workers they’ll never meet, taking risks because of words they spoke into a camera. The weight doesn’t feel lighter, but it feels shared, distributed across all those careful hands moving just slowly enough to matter.
The strain shows first in the children (three human, two Keshari, one Voth) who start coughing from the recycled air. Ji-won finds themselves rationing their own water to supplement the kids’ portions, watching Park Min-seo do the same. The council meets in shifts because there’s no space large enough for everyone. But when the Keshari refugee demonstrates the purifier, producing clean water from the station’s gray-water system, people crowd around like it’s a miracle, and Ji-won realizes they’re watching a community learn to save itself.
Ji-won’s throat closes around the words they can’t say: that they’re terrified, that every new arrival means another person who could be hurt when corporate security finally comes. Park Min-seo’s grip is steady, calloused fingers warm through the patched fabric of their suit. Around them, volunteers are already dividing tasks: communications, supply runs, security rotations. The Keshari elder begins a harmonic that others join, species-specific but universally recognizable as commitment. Ji-won thinks of Kyung-hee, somewhere in the sterile corporate levels, making her own impossible calculations.
Ji-won stands in the doorway of the equipment room, listening to Min-seo’s tactical assessment while their own mind runs parallel calculations. The corporate playbook isn’t just predictable. It’s already in motion. Through the Underdock’s jury-rigged network, they’ve been monitoring the official channels, watching Yoon’s performance with the analytical detachment their liaison training drilled into them. The Captain’s micro-expressions, the careful pauses, the way certain phrases get emphasized: it’s all designed to split their coalition before it fully forms.
“They’re already running facial recognition on every public feed,” Ji-won says, stepping into the cramped space. Six faces turn toward them, and they feel the weight of being the Taeyang Witness even here, among allies. “The amnesty offer requires biometric registration at security checkpoints. Anyone who takes it gets tagged, tracked, and becomes leverage against everyone else.”
Chen leans back, arms crossed. “So we tell people not to take it.”
“It’s not that simple.” Ji-won pulls up their own datapad, showing the demographic breakdowns they’ve been compiling. “Forty percent of the relay’s independent workers are on expired or provisional documentation. Yoon’s offering a path to legitimacy. For people with families, with kids in the colonist education programs,” They think of Kyung-hee’s daughter, a name in a file they shouldn’t have accessed. “Some of them can’t afford to refuse.”
Min-seo nods slowly, understanding the trap’s elegance. “Then we need to offer something better than legitimacy. We need to make staying together safer than taking corporate promises.”
“How?” someone asks.
Ji-won meets Min-seo’s eyes across the table. “We prove the system is already broken. Show them that corporate protection is a lie, that the only real safety is in collective resistance.” They hesitate, then add quietly, “And we do it before Kyung-hee figures out where we are.”
Min-seo’s fingers trace the numbers on their datapad, converting statistics into strategy. “Yoon’s counting on attrition,” they say, highlighting the demographic data Ji-won compiled. “Seven people taking amnesty doesn’t sound like much, but if it’s seven every three days, in a month that’s seventy people tagged and compromised.”
Chen leans forward, her weathered face creased with concern. “And forty-three joining us means forty-three more mouths to feed, more people to hide. The Underdock’s already past safe capacity.”
“Then we expand.” Min-seo pulls up station schematics, marking three abandoned sections in Spoke 2. “These maintenance levels have been offline for two years. Life support’s disconnected but the infrastructure’s intact. If we can tap into the secondary power grid,”
“That’s a week’s work minimum,” interrupts Takeshi, their best engineer. “And we’d need parts, tools, people who know what they’re doing.”
“We have people.” Min-seo’s voice carries quiet conviction. “What we need is time. Time to build something sustainable before Yoon stops offering carrots.” They glance at Ji-won. “Before they bring out the sticks.”
Ji-won sits in a converted storage container that serves as Min-seo’s operations center, watching multiple feeds simultaneously. Their translator implant throbs with phantom signals: too many voices, too many languages, all converging on this moment. On screen three, a Keshari refugee family approaches the amnesty center, then veers away at the last moment. Screen seven shows a dock worker deliberately dropping a manifest tablet near a surveillance camera, the “accident” forcing security to look away for precious seconds.
“They’re learning,” Ji-won murmurs, tracking the patterns. Every feint, every coordinated distraction. It’s becoming doctrine, spreading through the network faster than Yoon’s counter-propaganda. The corporate response is predictable, algorithmic. But resistance? Resistance adapts.
Kyung-hee’s investigation metastasizes from tracking one fugitive into mapping an entire resistance infrastructure. Her surveillance access exposes encrypted drops hidden in maintenance schedules, supply requisitions mismatched with inventory, coordinated shift swaps creating security blind spots. Network diagrams sprawl across her holographic display like synaptic pathways: each node a person, each connection a vulnerability she should exploit. Her directives are explicit: identify leadership, sever supply chains, make examples that will shatter morale. Yet every interrogation yields practiced courtesy and alibis obviously coordinated but legally unassailable. They’re protecting each other with systematic precision mirroring her own methodology: the symmetry feels deliberately contemptuous.
Ji-won watches from the Underdock as Kyung-hee’s investigation tightens like a noose. The corporate investigator’s pattern recognition is surgical. She’s identified seventeen people in Park Min-seo’s network within forty-eight hours. Each interrogation is documented, cross-referenced, building toward inevitable arrests. Ji-won’s encrypted files bought attention, but Kyung-hee’s methodical dismantling threatens to destroy the infrastructure before momentum can build into actual change.
Ji-won crouches in the observation nest Park Min-seo’s people built from salvaged cargo netting, watching security feeds on a cracked tablet. The symbols multiply faster than Sang-mi-yeon’s teams can respond. Each scrubbing takes forty minutes minimum: suit-up, airlock cycle, the careful work of removing paint without damaging hull integrity. The perpetrators need only seconds with adhesive stencils and aerosol cans.
The third symbol appears on the water reclamation facility’s intake manifold. The fourth on the main communications array. Locations that require technical knowledge, access codes, familiarity with security blind spots. Ji-won’s chest tightens. These aren’t random acts of vandalism. Someone’s mapping the station’s critical infrastructure through graffiti, demonstrating how vulnerable Hanseong-Mirae’s control actually is.
“They’re using your symbol,” Park Min-seo says, climbing up with two nutrition packs. “Making it mean something bigger.”
Ji-won takes the offered food without appetite. On screen, Kyung-hee’s latest interrogation log scrolls past. Another dock worker detained, another connection mapped in her investigation web. She’s close. Maybe two more interviews before she triangulates the Underdock’s location. But now the symbols are forcing Yoon’s hand, pulling security resources away from systematic investigation toward reactive suppression.
“It’s working,” Park Min-seo continues. “Maintenance crews are reporting sick rather than scrub the symbols. Dock workers are slowing cargo processing. Even some corporate staff are,”
“It’s escalating too fast.” Ji-won watches Sang-mi-yeon’s security briefing, sees the captain’s hands tremor as they outline response protocols. “Yoon will have to act decisively. Lockdowns. Mass arrests. They can’t let this look like they’re losing control.”
Park Min-seo’s grin fades. Below them, someone’s jury-rigged printer churns out adhesive stencils, the symbol repeated in sheets. The Underdock’s children trace the design with careful fingers, learning its curves like alphabet practice.
The fire spreads. Ji-won can’t tell anymore if they’re watching resistance or watching catastrophe kindle.
Ji-won’s fingers freeze on the tablet as another symbol blooms across Spoke 6’s docking port: this one rendered in bioluminescent paint that pulses in the darkness, visible to every incoming vessel. The coordination is undeniable now. Three simultaneous appearances across sectors that should have no connection, each requiring different access codes, different skill sets. Someone with Park Min-seo’s network. Someone with technical knowledge. Someone who understands exactly which placements will maximize visibility while minimizing response time.
The commercial ring projection lasts three minutes and forty-seven seconds. But those recordings are already spreading through unofficial channels, compressed and forwarded, the symbol multiplying through data networks faster than it appears on physical surfaces.
Park Min-seo’s grin widens with each report, but Ji-won tastes metal in their mouth. Every symbol is ammunition for Yoon’s next briefing, evidence of “coordinated insurgency” that justifies emergency protocols. The noose tightens with each act of defiance, and Ji-won can’t tell anymore who’s hunting whom.
The data chips multiply like spores: tucked behind ventilation grilles, magnetically attached to cargo hauler hulls, dropped into food dispensers where workers’ hands will find them. Ji-won discovers three in a single morning: one pressed into their palm during a crowd surge at a checkpoint, another left on the charging station they’d used an hour before, a third simply appearing beside their sleeping mat with no explanation.
Each chip contains testimony rendered in careful detail: shift logs documenting sixteen-hour days, medical records showing untreated injuries, contract clauses written in deliberately obscure language. Not corporate secrets but personal ones, intimate histories of exploitation that required courage to preserve and more courage to share. The files spread through unofficial networks, worker to worker, creating an archive of collective grievance that no security sweep can fully erase.
The maintenance drones’ synchronized rebellion unfolds during Yoon’s scheduled address about “maintaining station harmony.” Ji-won watches through Park Min-seo’s smuggled feed as the symbol materializes across every corporate surface, walls, floors, the captain’s own podium. Yoon’s augmented eyes flash rapidly, processing the cascading system failures. Security officers shout coordinates while the projection spreads, autonomous and unstoppable. For three seconds, Yoon’s professional mask slips, revealing something raw beneath. Not anger, but recognition that control is an illusion they can no longer maintain.
Ji-won’s translator implant catches fragments. Gratitude in Keshari clicks, determination in Voth harmonics, hope in a dozen human dialects. Park Min-seo’s hand finds their shoulder, steady pressure anchoring them to the moment. “They’re not asking you to lead,” Min-seo murmurs. “They’re asking you to stand with them.” Ji-won’s fingers brush the data chip in their pocket, feeling its weight redistribute across all these witnesses, and takes one shaking step forward into the collective voice they’ve helped create.
Ji-won’s environmental suit feels too tight as they step onto the makeshift platform, the mismatched panels catching the dim light from salvaged strips overhead. The cargo bay stretches before them: two hundred people packed into a space designed for freight, not hope. Their translator implant processes the silence: Keshari respiratory patterns indicating heightened attention, Voth postural alignments suggesting respectful anticipation, human breathing synchronized in collective waiting.
Park Min-seo’s prosthetic arm whirs softly as they adjust a portable amplifier, then steps back with an encouraging nod that Ji-won doesn’t feel they’ve earned.
The Keshari elder in the front row, Tek’shara, Ji-won remembers, who’d shared their family’s protein rations last week, makes the gesture again. Recognition. Trust. The weight of it threatens to buckle Ji-won’s knees.
“I’m not. Their voice sounds thin through the amplifier, swallowed by the bay’s acoustics. They clear their throat, feeling the translator implant recalibrate.”I need you to understand something before we go any further.”
A human woman near the back shifts, her dock worker’s coveralls stained with hydraulic fluid. Three Voth cluster together, their chromatic skin patterns cycling through attentive colors. A family of refugees, species Ji-won doesn’t recognize, holds their younglings close.
Ji-won’s hand moves to their pocket, fingers finding the data chip’s familiar edges. The encrypted files that prove Hanseong-Mirae’s crimes. The evidence that’s already spreading through independent networks, making them the Taeyang Witness, making them visible in ways that terrify them.
But visibility cuts both ways.
“I know where three Keshari settlements are hidden in the outer relay network.” The words emerge steadier than Ji-won feels. Tek’shara’s breathing pattern shifts, alarm, quickly controlled. “Hanseong-Mirae would pay everything they have for that information.”
Ji-won meets the elder’s eyes, then sweeps their gaze across the assembled faces.
“I’m telling you this so you understand what I am.” Ji-won’s voice steadies, the translator implant carrying their words in three languages simultaneously. “I’m not brave. I’m not a hero. I’m just someone who knows too much to ever be safe again.”
The silence stretches. Ji-won watches their confession land, waiting for the inevitable calculation: Is sheltering this person worth the risk?
Then Tek’shara rises, joints creaking in the low gravity. The Keshari elder’s throat sac inflates. A gesture of formal declaration. “We already knew,” they say, the words deliberate. “Did you think we would trust our settlements’ coordinates to someone without first understanding what you carried?”
Ji-won’s breath catches.
“You chose to run rather than sell us,” Tek’shara continues. “That is the only credential that matters here.”
Around the bay, others stand. Not in challenge, but in witness. A Voth dockworker. Two human haulers. A refugee family Ji-won helped smuggle aboard last week.
Park Min-seo’s voice comes from beside the platform, quiet but carrying: “You’re not alone in knowing too much anymore. We all are.”
Ji-won’s hands move across the datapad, muscle memory from years of corporate liaison work taking over. They’re mapping networks, identifying chokepoints, calculating resource flows: except now it’s for survival instead of profit margins. The irony isn’t lost on them.
“We need to compartmentalize,” they hear themselves saying, the words emerging with unexpected authority. “Small cells. If security rolls one group, the others stay intact.” Their finger traces routes through the station schematic someone’s pulled up. “These maintenance corridors: they’re monitored, but the sensors have blind spots during shift changes.”
Around them, people lean in, listening. Taking notes. Trusting.
Ji-won’s chest tightens with something between terror and purpose. They’re not just running anymore. They’re building something that could either save them all or destroy everyone who’s shown them mercy.
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the datapad, watching their own hesitation dissolve into motion. Categories emerge: logistics, security, communications, extraction. Each answer finds its column. They’re not deciding: they’re organizing what’s already there, revealing the structure hidden in the chaos. Someone passes them a stylus. Their hand moves faster now, drawing connections, assigning priorities. The translator’s gift: seeing patterns across incompatible systems. Min-seo’s choreography becomes their own momentum.
The water tastes like recycled metal, grounding. Ji-won maps the bay’s new topology: Keshari refugees managing supply inventories, human haulers coordinating transport schedules, a Voth engineer sketching power distribution improvements. Each cluster operates independently, connected through Ji-won’s translations. Not commands, but facilitated understanding. Their datapad fills with cross-referenced notes, contingencies branching from contingencies. When did survival planning become infrastructure design? Min-seo’s words settle into their chest like ballast, steadying the tremor in their grip.
Ji-won’s throat constricts as Min-seo adjusts the final light panel, casting harsh shadows that make the Underdock’s converted cargo container look like an interrogation room. Appropriate, maybe: they’re about to confess everything to an audience of millions. Their environmental suit feels too tight across the shoulders, the mismatched panels suddenly obvious, embarrassing. They’ve positioned themselves so the translator implant is visible behind their left ear, proof of their credentials, evidence they’ve lived between worlds.
“Audio levels good,” someone calls from behind the camera rig. A Keshari technician they helped relocate three weeks ago, now returning the favor with salvaged broadcast equipment.
Ji-won runs through the script again, lips moving silently. The accusations are easy: they’ve rehearsed those facts until they’re divorced from emotion, clinical recitations of labor violations and falsified safety reports. But then comes the part where they say I am Ji-won Park, formerly Contract Liaison Third-Class, and their name becomes a weapon pointed at themselves.
Behind them, the Underdock’s residents begin to gather. Not crowding. Each person finds their mark, spacing themselves so the camera can capture individuals rather than an anonymous mass. A human dock worker with radiation scarring. Two Keshari juveniles whose parents died in an “industrial accident.” The Voth engineer who lost their citizenship status after reporting safety concerns.
Ji-won’s hands won’t stop trembling. They press their palms against their thighs, feeling the worn fabric, the places where they’ve patched tears with whatever material was available. Three weeks of running. Three weeks of rationed nutrition packs and irregular sleep. Three weeks of being nobody, invisible, safe.
Min-seo catches their eye, nods once. The camera’s recording light blinks red.
No more safety. Only truth, and whatever comes after.
Ji-won opens their mouth and begins.
Ji-won’s voice fractures on “My name is”: the words catching like debris in a damaged airlock. They stop. Close their eyes. Feel the weight of two hundred people breathing in the recycled air behind them, the Keshari technician’s nervous antenna-twitch, Min-seo’s solid presence just outside the camera’s frame.
They open their eyes and begin again.
“My name is Ji-won Park. I was Contract Liaison Third-Class for Hanseong-Mirae Corporation’s outer relay operations.” The words come out level now, each syllable a small act of defiance. “I broke my contract because I witnessed systematic violations of the Sapient Rights Accords. Labor exploitation. Falsified safety reports. Deaths classified as industrial accidents to avoid compensation.”
Behind them, the Underdock’s residents shift into their positions. Not a mob, but a constellation of individuals. The camera will capture each face: the dock worker’s radiation scars, the Keshari juveniles’ too-knowing eyes, the Voth engineer’s missing citizenship markers. Each person a data point in Hanseong-Mirae’s ledger of disposable lives.
Ji-won’s hands have stopped trembling. They’re speaking truth now, and truth has its own gravity.
When Ji-won reaches the part about the Keshari settlements, their throat tightens: three coordinates that could mean death warrants or liberation, depending on who acts first. They pause, reaching into their suit’s inner pocket with deliberate slowness. The encrypted data chip catches the salvaged light as they hold it up, small and unremarkable, containing everything Hanseong-Mirae wanted buried.
“Copies have already been distributed,” Ji-won says, and their voice finds strength in the present perfect tense, the done thing. “Seventeen independent journalists. Four colonial oversight committees. The Sapient Rights Council itself.”
They watch their own knuckles, white around the chip’s edges, refusing to shake.
“This broadcast is not a plea.” The words taste like metal, like commitment. “This is a declaration. We’re not asking for protection. We’re demanding accountability.”
Their heart hammers against their ribs, but their hands stay steady.
Ji-won’s gesture encompasses the converted cargo containers, the jury-rigged life support, the faces watching from doorways. Their voice drops to something rawer, unfiltered.
“You’re not alone in this. Every contract worker who’s seen the violations, every liaison who’s been ordered to look away: your testimony matters. They silence us individually. Together, we become undeniable.”
Behind the camera, Min-seo’s nod feels like absolution. The room’s temperature seems to shift, fear crystallizing into purpose.
Ji-won’s fingers fumble with the jacket’s worn seals. The fabric falls away: three weeks of flight, of fear compressed into patched panels. The coveralls smell of industrial solvent and someone else’s sweat. They’re too short in the arms, too loose at the waist. Anonymous. Protective only in their ordinariness.
Min-seo’s hand steadies their shoulder. The upload counter reaches one hundred percent.
No turning back. No more shadows. Just this: standing exposed, waiting for the storm.
The authorization cascade ripples through the station’s infrastructure in microseconds: seventeen security terminals light up simultaneously, each displaying Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s deployment grid with precision that makes Kyung-hee’s chest tighten. She watches the tactical overlay populate with blue markers representing security teams, their positions updating in real-time as they move toward convergence points she’s spent three weeks identifying. The holographic display renders her reflection as a ghost superimposed over the operation, her face translucent against the sterile geometry of Suite 3-A’s white walls.
The medical monitor chimes its third alert. Neural pathway degradation: 23.7%. Motor control efficiency: 68% and declining. Recommended immediate consultation. She dismisses the notification with a gesture that sends involuntary tremors through her wrist, the movement captured and logged by the suite’s omnipresent sensors.
Her message queue pulses with unread items. The top entry: her daughter’s provisional acceptance to the Ganymede Colonial Academy, contingent on parental corporate standing and continued medical coverage eligibility. Tuition: 340,[^000] credits annually. Her current medical debt: 890,[^000] credits. The bonus for successfully closing this case: 200,[^000] credits plus performance rating restoration.
She opens the financial freeze interface, her hands steadying as she shifts into operational mode. The first account number belongs to a dock worker who let Ji-won use their credentials twice. The second: a mess hall operator who provided unauthorized meal vouchers. Each entry requires her biometric confirmation, thumbprint, retinal scan, voice authorization. The system wants her complicit at every level, wants her ownership of each small destruction.
Forty-three names. Forty-three red locked icons appearing on her secondary screen. She catalogs each face from their profile images, memorizing them for the guilt she’ll permit herself later, when her daughter’s future is secure and her own deteriorating neurons are someone else’s problem.
The helmet feeds fragment her attention across seventeen simultaneous perspectives: a Keshari family huddled in Container 23, a human teenager backing against a wall with hands raised, an elderly Voth attempting to hide identification papers in their clothing. Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s measured voice reports each discovery with temporal confusion that makes the timestamps drift: “Sector 2 clear, no, Sector 3, confirming twenty-seven individuals detained.” The security chief’s cryosleep-damaged cognition creates lag in the operation, but the teams compensate, moving with practiced efficiency through spaces that weren’t supposed to exist.
Kyung-hee’s fingers dance across the interface, marking priority targets, redirecting units toward thermal concentrations. Park Min-seo’s detention notification expands to show interrogation authorization pending. She approves it, knowing the rebel leader’s network map is the key to finding Ji-won before the encrypted files scatter beyond recovery. Her reflection in the holographic display looks skeletal, backlit by the blue markers converging on red zones. Another account freezes. Another family loses access to food credits, medical services, transport authorization. The system logs her biometric signature on each action, building an unassailable record of her efficiency, her value, her willingness to do what survival demands.
Ji-won’s thermal signature pulses on the display like an accusation, the distinctive heat pattern of their suit’s mismatched panels unmistakable against the cooler background. Kyung-hee isolates the feed, tracks the movement through three corridors, watches them vault over debris without breaking stride. Her training catalogs every detail: pace suggests exhaustion but not panic, route selection shows intimate knowledge of the space, no hesitation at intersections. She could predict their next five moves, position units to box them in, end this pursuit in under four minutes.
Instead she marks the intercept point thirty meters past optimal, adds a fifteen-second delay to the dispatch order, and tells herself it’s tactical prudence. Preserving the option to track Ji-won to other resistance cells rather than capturing a single fugitive who’s already distributed the evidence.
Ji-won’s thermal signature (the distinctive asymmetric bloom of their patched suit’s failing insulation) pulses on her display, approaching access point four at desperate velocity. Kyung-hee’s fingers dance across the interface, calculating intercept vectors, highlighting optimal containment positions. Three seconds. The encrypted files are already distributed, already beyond recovery. Bringing Ji-won in proves only that she can still execute, still merits the treatments keeping her hands steady enough for this. She dispatches the security unit with a ninety-second delay she codes as tactical coordination.
The holographic display fragments into seventeen simultaneous feeds: security teams converging, access points sealing with mechanical finality, the Underdock’s warren becoming a controlled space mapped in locked red icons. Except access point four, still amber for thirty seconds more, where Ji-won’s thermal signature approaches the threshold. Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s voice requests confirmation on the delay. She fabricates coordination protocols while refugees are processed through helmet cameras, each face cataloged. Her medical monitor chimes urgent. She takes the medication, feels tremors dull, watches access point four seal as Ji-won’s signature vanishes station-side.
Ji-won’s fingers find the manual override panel: three decades of grime coating controls designed for maintenance workers with proper tools and authorization codes. The amber warning light strobes faster, casting desperate shadows across their hands as they jam the edge of their expired corporate ID into the access slot, praying the magnetic strip still carries enough residual encoding to trick aging sensors. Behind them, the Underdock’s improvised sanctuary collapses into controlled chaos: security teams in tactical gear methodically processing refugees against cargo container walls, their helmet cameras recording every face for corporate databases. Someone screams in Keshari, the chittering distress call cutting through human shouts and the pneumatic hiss of restraints.
The override panel flickers, amber, red, amber again. Ji-won’s translator implant catches fragments of Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s measured voice over loudspeakers, promising fair treatment and due process in that distant, temporally-dislocated tone of someone who’s seen this scene play out across decades of cryosleep cycles. Through a gap in the corridor wall, Ji-won glimpses a security monitor displaying multiple feeds: Kyung-hee in her sterile investigation suite, standing rigid at her desk, her augmented display showing thermal maps and access point status. Even at this distance, through the low-resolution feed, Ji-won can see the investigator’s hands. White-knuckled against chrome edges, trembling despite whatever medication keeps her functional.
The hatch groans, ancient hydraulics protesting as the manual override forces compliance. Ji-won doesn’t wait for it to fully cycle. They squeeze through the gap into the maintenance shaft beyond, environmental suit catching on the hatch rim, tearing another patch loose. Behind them, the hatch completes its cycle with brutal finality, the magnetic seals engaging with a sound like breaking bones. The screams cut off instantly, replaced by the shaft’s hollow silence and the distant thrumming of station machinery. Ji-won is alone again in the infrastructure’s bones, listening to their own ragged breathing echo off metal walls.
Ji-won’s fingers find purchase on corroded ventilation grilles, pulling themselves forward through the shaft’s claustrophobic darkness. Each movement sends scraping echoes through the metal tunnel (too loud, always too loud) but the emergency lighting strips flicker at irregular intervals, offering brief glimpses of the path ahead. Below, through the grille’s diamond pattern, Corporate Investigation Suite 3-A spreads out in sterile white and chrome.
Kyung-hee stands at her holographic display, data streams reflecting off her augmented eyes as she reviews thermal scans of the Underdock’s now-empty corridors. Her hands rest on the desk’s edge, fingers splayed wide as if bracing against collapse. The medical monitor on the wall pulses yellow. A warning Ji-won recognizes from their own corporate liaison days, when they’d learned to read the health status indicators that tracked every employee’s productivity potential.
The investigator’s lips move, subvocalizing commands to her neural interface. New data populates the display: vessel manifests, departure schedules, cargo inspection queues. The Songbird appears highlighted in amber, its status marked DETAINED PENDING REVIEW. Kyung-hee’s jaw tightens, and she reaches for her medication dispenser with hands that shake despite her obvious effort at control.
Ji-won’s suit recyclers labor audibly in the shaft’s stale air, processing the same breath over and over until it tastes of metal and desperation. The encrypted chip’s absence creates a void more tangible than its physical weight ever was. Those files represented leverage, proof, the possibility of forcing Hanseong-Mirae to negotiate rather than simply eliminate. Now that bargaining power rests with Chen, a woman whose sympathetic words might have been genuine solidarity or practiced manipulation designed for exactly this scenario.
The Songbird’s detention status blinks on Kyung-hee’s display, cargo inspection protocols scrolling past in bureaucratic detail. Standard procedure or targeted search? Ji-won’s translator implant picks up fragments of comm chatter: inspection teams requesting manifest clarifications, discussing container seals, debating whether to physically unload everything or rely on scanner sweeps. Each minute the vessel remains docked is another minute for Chen to crack under pressure, another opportunity for corporate thoroughness to find what Ji-won desperately needs hidden.
Through the viewport’s scratched polymer, Ji-won catalogs the processing: biometric scans, documentation reviews, the casual efficiency of sorting people into categories, deportable, detainable, exploitable. Lee Sang-mi-yeon moves like someone underwater, their cryosleep-damaged neurons firing half a second behind their intentions. A young Keshari’s chromatophores pulse distress-yellow as security officers separate them from their clutch-sibling, the biological imperative to maintain contact overriding trained compliance.
Ji-won’s breath fogs the grille as they watch Kyung-hee’s reflection in the darkened display. A ghost superimposed over arrest statistics. The investigator’s medication dispenser chimes. Her hand shakes reaching for it, pills scattering across the pristine desk. She doesn’t pick them up. Just stares at the scattered capsules like they’re evidence of something she can’t quite name, while Ji-won counts the tremors and understands exactly what desperation costs.
Ji-won presses against the ventilation shaft’s corrugated wall, metal cold through their patched suit, and watches the interrogation through a maintenance grille. Room 3-B. Kyung-hee sits across from a young dock worker whose hands won’t stop moving, picking at the seam of their uniform sleeve.
“You logged seventeen hours overtime in Bay 4, Section C, last month.” Kyung-hee’s voice is steady, almost gentle. Professional. “Maintenance records show no authorized work orders for that sector during those shifts.”
The worker’s throat works. “I… might have the dates wrong.”
“You don’t.” Kyung-hee slides a tablet across the table. Her hand trembles slightly. The worker doesn’t notice, too focused on the screen showing their own biometric timestamps, irrefutable. “You were moving supply crates. Forty-three kilos of nutrition packs and medical supplies. Where did they go?”
Silence stretches. Ji-won can see the calculation happening behind the worker’s eyes. The same calculation they’d made themselves three weeks ago. What’s worth more: loyalty or survival?
“My sister,” the worker finally whispers. “She’s in the corporate creche program. If I lose my contract,”
“You won’t.” Kyung-hee leans forward. Something in her expression shifts, just for a moment: not quite sympathy, but recognition. “Cooperate fully, and this becomes an administrative matter. A fine. Probation. Your sister stays where she is.”
The worker’s shoulders collapse inward. “The Underdock. We… there’s a drop point near hatch seven. Every third day.”
Kyung-hee nods once, making notes. Doesn’t look up when she says, “Access codes?”
And Ji-won watches another piece of their sanctuary dissolve into data points on a corporate investigator’s screen, watches desperation extract cooperation more efficiently than any threat could, watches Kyung-hee’s hand shake as she records the betrayal she’s engineered.
The interrogations continue through the station’s artificial night cycle. In Room 3-B, a cargo handler stares at transaction records showing unauthorized power taps. In Room 3-C, a maintenance tech watches surveillance footage of themselves carrying supply crates through corridors they swore they’d never entered. Kyung-hee moves between rooms like a ghost, her trembling hands hidden behind datapads, her questions precise and unavoidable.
“We’re not accusing you of malice,” she tells a woman whose daughter needs the corporate scholarship program. “Just asking you to clarify these inconsistencies.”
The woman looks at the evidence, her own biometric signatures, her own logged movements, and something inside her crumbles. “Hatch seven,” she whispers. “Every third day, around 0400 hours.”
By hour eighteen, the pattern is undeniable. Five workers have confirmed the same drop point, the same schedule. Two more have named Park Min-seo directly. The ones still holding out aren’t the brave ones: they’re the ones whose families live in corporate housing blocks, whose children attend corporate schools, whose entire existence depends on contracts that can be terminated with a single keystroke.
Park Min-seo’s arrest happens in Bay 4’s main cargo office during shift change, when the maximum number of witnesses can see what happens to organizers. Lee Sang-mi-yeon moves with that distinctive cryosleep slowness, reading rights in a formal cadence that stumbles over present-tense verbs. The security team is efficient and impersonal: hands guided behind back, restraints applied with practiced gentleness, prosthetic arm unlatched at the shoulder joint despite Min-seo’s explanation that it’s medical equipment, not a weapon.
“Protocol requires,” Sang-mi-yeon starts, then pauses, recalibrating. “Requires confiscation of potential evidence.”
Min-seo doesn’t resist. Instead they look around at the dock workers they’ve spent two years organizing, faces they know, families they’ve helped, people who trusted them, and tries to project calm determination. Hold together. Don’t break. This isn’t over.
But they can see it happening: the mental calculations, the fear spreading like a pressure leak, solidarity fragmenting as each person weighs their own exposure against their children’s futures.
Min-seo’s silence stretches between them like a physical thing. Kyung-hee’s hands shake worse as she sets down the tablet, medication timer blinking amber on her wrist. “I have a daughter,” she says, not as interrogation technique but as confession. “She’s twelve. She wants to study xenobiology.” The words hang there, an offering of shared humanity neither can afford. Min-seo’s jaw tightens, understanding the trap of empathy, and still says nothing.
The network visualization rotates in the holographic display, each connection pulsing with data. Shipping manifests, comm logs, financial transfers. Kyung-hee watches the web expand, her analytical mind appreciating the elegance even as her conscience registers each node as a person whose life she’s just dismantled. The medical station chimes softly: treatment authorized, another month secured. She closes her eyes, feeling the tremors in her hands quiet slightly, and knows exactly what she’s purchased with other people’s freedom.
The ductwork branches ahead: left toward the outer residential sectors where security presence thins, right toward the cargo bays where Chen’s ship was docked three hours ago. Ji-won’s translator implant picks up fragments of Korean and Keshari from below, the interrogation continuing in that methodical rhythm Kyung-hee has perfected. Professional. Thorough. Relentless.
Ji-won’s environmental suit catches on a protruding bolt, the fabric’s mismatched panels pulling taut. They freeze again, listening for any change in the voices below, any indication the sound carried. Their heart hammers against their ribs. Three weeks of irregular sleep and rationed nutrition packs have left them shaky, reaction times compromised. The kind of mistakes that get people caught.
The bolt releases with a whisper of tearing fabric. Another patch needed, if they survive long enough to matter.
Through the grating beneath their knees, Ji-won can see the top of Kyung-hee’s head, that severe bun pulled so tight it must hurt. The investigator’s shoulders are rigid, her posture perfect despite the tremors Ji-won knows are there, hidden in her hands. She’s good at this: building rapport, finding pressure points, extracting information with surgical precision. She probably tells herself it’s necessary. That her daughter’s future justifies the present. That the people she’s hunting are abstractions, data points, acceptable collateral.
Ji-won wonders if Kyung-hee has seen the labor camp footage on those encrypted files. The Keshari workers with their breathing apparatus jury-rigged from incompatible equipment. The children processing toxic materials without proper shielding. The bodies in the recycling units.
Probably not. Corporate investigators work with sanitized reports, legal frameworks, plausible deniability. They don’t watch the raw feeds. Don’t let themselves see what their efficiency enables.
Ji-won chooses left, toward the residential sectors, away from Chen and hope and the last copy of evidence that might actually matter.
The residential sectors offer temporary refuge but no real safety. That naïveté feels like another person’s memory now, distant and faintly embarrassing. They’d thought documentation mattered, that evidence of wrongdoing would trigger accountability mechanisms, that someone higher up the chain would care about Sapient Rights Accords violations once confronted with proof.
Instead, they’d learned how efficiently corporations metabolize scandal: investigations that investigate nothing, restructurings that restructure only the paper trail, compensation funds that somehow never reach the compensated.
The chip in Chen’s possession represents three years of careful documentation, testimony from forty-seven Keshari workers, medical scans showing radiation damage consistent with inadequate shielding, shipping manifests that don’t match cargo logs. Everything needed to prove Hanseong-Mirae’s systematic exploitation. Everything that makes Ji-won valuable enough to hunt and dangerous enough to silence.
If Chen made it out. If the pilot actually understood what they were carrying. If corporate security didn’t flag the departure and intercept before jump.
Too many ifs. Ji-won keeps crawling.
The shaft’s geometry forces Ji-won into contortions that leave their joints screaming. Metal edges catch on suit seams, threatening tears they can’t afford. The darkness isn’t complete. Their failing display casts enough light to see condensation beading on the walls, freezing into patterns that map the temperature differential between inhabited sectors and these forgotten spaces.
Security chatter fragments through the implant: “…negative on access seven…” and “…thermal scan inconclusive…” Each transmission recalibrates their mental map of the search perimeter, the closing circle. Ji-won’s fingers find purchase on rivets worn smooth by decades of thermal expansion, pulling forward centimeter by centimeter. The ache in their muscles becomes a constant, almost meditative. Their mind catalogs probabilities with the detached precision of someone who’s already accepted the likely outcome but hasn’t stopped moving yet.
The frost patterns on the wall blur as Ji-won’s vision tunnels. Thirty seconds becomes forty-five, becomes a full minute of uncontrolled shaking. Their breath crystallizes in clouds that catch the dying light of their suit display. Each deportation shuttle launch feels like a personal failure, names and faces cycling through memory, Keshari clutching forged documents, Voth families who’d trusted Min-seo’s promises of safety. The encrypted chip is gone, their leverage scattered. Ji-won’s fingers are too numb to feel the wall anymore.
The launches continue through the night cycle (Ji-won counts seven, nine, twelve) each one a hammer blow against the hull, against hope. They imagine trajectories, calculate fuel loads, try to determine which shuttles carry refugees versus standard deportees. The mathematics becomes obsessive, a way to avoid thinking about Kyung-hee’s expression when that Keshari child cried, or about how many of Min-seo’s network gave up names under pressure.
The probability calculations become a lifeline, something to grip when the cold makes thinking difficult. Ji-won runs the numbers again, adjusting variables: if Chen launched in the chaos, the pilot would have needed clearance codes (stolen? forged? legitimate cover cargo?), would have needed to file a flight plan that didn’t trigger automated scrutiny, would have needed to clear the station’s traffic control perimeter before the lockdown protocols engaged. The window was maybe eight minutes between the first security breach alarm and Captain Yoon’s station-wide seal order. Eight minutes to power up a cold vessel, run pre-flight checks, request departure clearance, and burn hard enough to reach minimum safe distance.
Ji-won’s translator implant clicks uselessly against their skull, searching for signals in the equipment room’s isolation. They’ve kept it active despite the power drain because the silence is worse than the cold: at least the implant’s background hum means they’re still connected to something, even if it’s just electromagnetic noise and the ghost of dead channels.
The chip itself was smaller than Ji-won expected when they first stole it from Hanseong-Mirae’s secure archives. A crystalline wafer no bigger than a fingernail, containing testimony from forty-seven Keshari workers, medical scans documenting radiation exposure and forced labor injuries, communication logs proving corporate knowledge of the violations. Enough to trigger Sapient Rights Accords investigations, maybe even criminal proceedings if it reached the right judicial bodies. Enough to destroy careers, tank stock values, shatter the careful fiction that corporations police themselves.
Now it’s gone, and Ji-won is left with only the memory of its weight, the phantom pressure against their palm. They flex their numb fingers inside their gloves, trying to restore circulation, trying to remember what Chen’s face looked like in that brief moment of transfer. Trustworthy? Desperate? Calculating? The memory refuses to resolve into certainty, just another probability distribution collapsing into fog.
Ji-won’s suit computer chirps a warning about core temperature drift, and they silence it with fingers that barely respond to neural commands. The heating elements are cycling now, thirty seconds on, ninety seconds off, trying to stretch the remaining power across another six hours, maybe eight if they don’t move. But the math is unforgiving: their basal metabolic rate without food has dropped to maybe twelve hundred calories per day, and each degree of temperature their body has to generate internally costs energy they don’t have. They’re burning themselves as fuel to stay alive in a room that’s actively trying to kill them.
Another shuttle launches. Ji-won doesn’t bother counting anymore.
The worst part isn’t the cold or the hunger or even the guilt. It’s knowing that Kyung-hee is probably warm right now, sitting in that sterile office with its perfect climate control, reviewing interrogation transcripts with hands that shake from neural degeneration rather than hypothermia. Two people destroying themselves in different ways, on opposite sides of the same desperate equation.
Ji-won’s fingers find the translator implant behind their ear, tracing its familiar shape. They’d gotten it to bridge worlds, to speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves, to turn understanding into action. But understanding cuts both ways. They can read Kyung-hee’s desperation in every methodical sweep pattern, every precisely timed interrogation, every choice that sacrifices morality for survival. The investigator isn’t a monster: she’s just someone who loves her daughter more than she loves justice, who needs to live more than she needs to be good. Ji-won understands this with the particular clarity that comes from hypothermia and starvation, when the brain strips away everything except essential truths. Understanding doesn’t mean forgiveness. It just means recognizing the architecture of the trap they’re both caught in.
Ji-won’s breath fogs the helmet faceplate, each exhalation a small act of defiance against the cold. They catalog what they know about Kyung-hee. Not from the sanitized corporate file, but from observation: the way she pauses mid-gesture when the tremors hit, the medication schedule that dictates her movements, the daughter’s photo she doesn’t carry but mentioned once in an intercepted transmission. The investigator is methodical because she has to be, because unpredictability costs time she doesn’t have. Ji-won maps this knowledge against their own desperation, finding uncomfortable symmetries. Two people weaponizing their intelligence against each other, both brilliant at reading others, both trapped by what they’ve learned. Kyung-hee knows Ji-won will prioritize the refugees over personal safety. Ji-won knows Kyung-hee’s medical deadline makes her predictable. They circle each other through data and deduction, hunter and prey trading places with each new variable. The hatred Ji-won feels is clean and sharp, uncomplicated by the understanding that threatens to dull it. They don’t want to see Kyung-hee as human, don’t want to acknowledge the investigator’s pain as real as their own. But the translator implant behind their ear was designed for empathy, for building bridges, and some training runs too deep to override even when survival demands it.
The translator implant activates involuntarily, parsing the security officer’s questions, the refugees’ careful answers calibrated to avoid triggering deportation algorithms. Ji-won’s hands curl against the cold metal. They know the interrogation protocols, the psychological pressure points, the exact phrasing that separates asylum from expulsion. Knowledge that could help, trapped behind meters of hull and the certainty that revealing themselves saves no one, condemns everyone who sheltered them.
Ji-won navigates through Section C-7’s maintenance crawlspace where the artificial gravity stutters in three-second intervals, weight, weightlessness, weight, their stomach lurching with each transition as they drag themselves past ruptured coolant lines that hiss and drip fluorescent green. The environmental suit’s knee pads scrape against corroded grating. Each sound feels like a siren.
Through a cracked observation port no bigger than their fist, they watch a processing line two levels below: refugees standing with their hands palm-up for biometric scanning, children clinging to adults’ legs, a Keshari elder whose crest feathers are dull with stress, drooping in the way that means profound grief. The security officer checking documents is young, bored, efficient. Running each ID through the scanner with the mechanical rhythm of someone who stopped seeing people hours ago.
Ji-won recognizes two faces from the Underdock. The woman who’d shared her protein rations three days ago, who’d told stories about her homeworld’s bioluminescent forests. The teenager who’d taught them a card game with rules that made no sense, laughing at Ji-won’s confusion, patient with their fumbling attempts to understand. They’re alive. They’re in the system now, documented, processed, their fates determined by algorithms and quotas. Ji-won doesn’t know which matters more. That they survived the raid or that survival means deportation, means returning to whatever they’d fled.
The woman glances up, just for a moment, and Ji-won jerks back from the port even though there’s no way she could see them, no way anyone could spot a face in that narrow gap. But the paranoia is physical now, a constant electric current under their skin. Their translator implant catches fragments of the security officer’s questions, the woman’s careful answers, each word chosen to avoid triggering the deportation algorithms Ji-won knows by heart. Knowledge that could help, useless behind meters of hull and fear.
In an abandoned atmospheric processor room where the air tastes like metal and old fear, Ji-won discovers they’re not alone. Three others huddle in the shadows. Two humans and something that might be Voth, all of them hollow-eyed and shaking. The younger human has a dock worker’s tattoos visible beneath torn sleeves. The other clutches a child’s stuffed animal, knuckles white.
No one speaks. There’s an understanding that words are dangerous, that even breath is too loud. They share the space like animals in a burrow, listening to the boots pass overhead, to the scanners’ electronic chirp growing closer then fading, to Captain Yoon’s voice echoing through public address systems with reassurances about safety and order and cooperation.
When the Voth individual starts to hyperventilate (the rapid clicking that means panic in their species) Ji-won reaches out slowly, telegraphing the movement. They press their palm against the alien’s thorax in the calming gesture they’d learned during their first contract assignment, a lifetime ago when they still believed corporate protocols protected everyone equally. The rapid flutter slows beneath their hand. The Voth’s eyes meet theirs, grateful and terrified.
Ji-won thinks about all the small kindnesses that corporate reports will never document.
The screens multiply Captain Yoon’s face into a dozen angles, authoritative, concerned, reassuring. Ji-won’s translator catches the careful modulation, the practiced pauses. Behind the captain, Lee Sang-mi-yeon stands with that peculiar stillness of someone fighting cryosleep disorientation, hands clasped to hide the tremors. The press conference loops seamlessly: Park Min-seo’s perp walk, the bound hands, that single defiant glance before security intervenes. Then the testimonials begin: dock workers reciting gratitude like a script, merchants nodding about normalized schedules, and worst of all, a Keshari elder whose name Ji-won recognizes, thanking the corporation for “proper processing procedures.” The translator stumbles over the Keshari words, trying to reconcile formal gratitude with the mourning songs still echoing in Ji-won’s memory. Corporate narrative doesn’t just erase resistance: it conscripts survivors into praising their own erasure.
The observation blister’s glass is cold enough to burn. Ji-won presses their forehead against it anyway, watching their breath fog and fade. That hauler, the Moonlight Cargo, registration TC-447, could be Chen’s escape or just another corporate vessel on schedule. The stars don’t care which. They’re the same stars that shone on the Keshari homeworld before the labor contracts, the same stars that will shine after Ji-won’s name becomes another redacted file. Below, the Underdock’s sealed hatches reflect emergency lights like accusatory eyes.
Ji-won’s fingers trace the seam where Keshari adhesive, organic, irreplaceable, sealed a tear during the Gamma evacuation. That settlement is ash now, probably. The translator implant chirps a low-battery warning against their skull. They silence it, then reconsider: if Kyung-hee finds them, maybe those last words should be in Keshari. A testimony. A curse. The ration pack’s expiration date mocks them: they were still loyal then, still believed documentation mattered.
Ji-won’s hands find the chip through the fabric of their suit, fingers clumsy with cold. Three weeks ago they’d believed this data mattered: proof of violations, evidence that could topple corporate immunity. Now it’s just a piece of hardware that’s kept them breathing when logic says they should have surrendered. The Keshari settlements flash through their mind: the careful way the elders had shared coordinates, trusting Ji-won with locations they’d hidden for years. What good is encrypted evidence when the person carrying it dies in a maintenance locker?
The scanner pulse changes pitch. Closer. Maybe two compartments away.
Ji-won tries to calculate odds and finds their thoughts sliding sideways, oxygen deprivation making everything feel distant and negotiable. They could open the locker. Surrender. The data chip has backup protocols: if they’re taken into custody, it’s programmed to transmit to three separate dead drops across the relay network. Park Min-seo had insisted on that, back when Park Min-seo was still free, still organizing, still believing collective action meant something against corporate authority.
But Park Min-seo is in restraints now. The refugees are being processed for deportation. The Underdock is empty or worse. And Ji-won is here, frost spreading across the inside of a locker door, watching their breath condense in smaller and smaller clouds.
The translator implant dies with a soft tone against their skull. Fourteen percent battery to zero in an instant: some final system failure. The silence it leaves behind feels enormous. For three years that implant has whispered translations, helped Ji-won navigate between species and cultures, made them useful. Without it they’re just another human with expired corporate ID and a death wish.
The scanner is right outside now. Ji-won can hear the security officer breathing, the soft beep as they check the next compartment in sequence.
Ji-won’s fingers trace the locker’s seams, searching for structural weaknesses that don’t exist. The metal is cold enough to burn. Through the wall comes another scanner pulse, and this time they feel it in their teeth. Electromagnetic resonance seeking organic signatures, heat differentials, the telltale carbon dioxide concentration of breathing.
Their suit’s environmental display flickers: oxygen at forty-one percent and dropping. The recycler gave up an hour ago, or maybe three. Time has become unreliable.
The voices outside shift to technical jargon, discussing sensor calibration. One officer complains about false positives from the station’s failing infrastructure. Another mentions the bonus for finding the fugitive, casual as discussing lunch options. Ji-won wants to hate them but can’t find the energy. They’re just people trying to survive, same as everyone else on this station. The difference is whose survival the system values.
The chip digs into Ji-won’s ribs. They could trigger the emergency transmission now, hope the dead drops are still secure. But transmission means electromagnetic signature, means the scanners lock on instantly, means this ends.
Not yet. Not like this.
When Ji-won closes their eyes, they see the Keshari elder who trusted them with the settlement coordinates, the way her crest-feathers had trembled when she’d pressed the data into Ji-won’s hands. “You will remember us,” she’d said in careful, formal Keshari, each syllable weighted with the gravity of her people’s survival. But what good is memory in a tomb? What good are files that never reach anyone who matters? The settlements are still out there: three hundred and forty-seven souls in the outer relay network, still vulnerable, still waiting for a rescue that Ji-won can no longer deliver. The elder’s name was Tesh’kara. She had four children. Ji-won remembers everything, and it changes nothing.
The paste hits their tongue like chemical ash, and Ji-won’s throat convulses, trying to reject it. They force themselves to swallow anyway, feeling it scrape down their esophagus, their body’s desperate systems trying to extract something, anything, useful from the degraded proteins. Three weeks of running has taught them that dignity is a luxury measured in calories. They lick the package’s interior, not caring about the metallic aftertaste or what it means that they’ve been reduced to this.
Ji-won’s hand hovers over the response toggle, trembling from more than exhaustion. The investigator’s voice carries harmonics their translator implant wasn’t designed to parse: stress frequencies, vocal cord tension that suggests medication wearing off. Corporate hunters aren’t supposed to sound like this: fractured, desperate, human. They recognize the cadence because it matches their own ragged breathing, the same arithmetic of survival that reduces people to the weight of their choices against the cost of their conscience.
Ji-won’s fingers curl against the cold metal of the locker wall, nails catching on rivets. The investigator’s words settle like sediment in water. Of course she does. Everyone has someone. That’s how the corporations win, isn’t it? They don’t need loyalty or belief, just leverage. Just people with enough to lose that they’ll do anything to keep it.
“How old?” Ji-won hears themselves ask, voice cracking on the second word. The question escapes before they can stop it, before they can remember that engaging is dangerous, that every word gives Kyung-hee more data to parse, more psychological vectors to exploit.
A pause. Then: “Twelve. Her name is Hana.” The investigator’s voice softens fractionally, and Ji-won’s translator implant registers the shift. Genuine emotion bleeding through professional control. “She wants to be a xenobotanist. Studies the seed catalogs from terraforming projects like other kids follow celebrity feeds.”
The detail is too specific to be fabricated on the spot. Ji-won closes their eyes, sees their own reflection in that confession: the Keshari elder who’d pressed three fingers to Ji-won’s forehead in blessing, who had grandchildren in one of those hidden settlements. The young Voth who’d taught them the word for “sanctuary” in a language that had seventeen different terms for types of safety, each more provisional than the last.
“We’re the same, you and I,” Kyung-hee continues. “Caught between what’s right and what’s survivable. But I’m offering you a way out. Medical care. Witness protection protocols. Your testimony in exchange for immunity. The files can still matter, Ji-won. They just have to go through proper channels.”
Proper channels. The words taste like ash in Ji-won’s mouth. Proper channels had documented the labor violations for eight years before Ji-won stole the files. Proper channels had approved the deportation orders. Proper channels were how the regime maintained the fiction of legitimacy.
Ji-won’s hand freezes centimeters from the release mechanism. The trembling intensifies: muscle fibers depleted of glycogen, neurons misfiring in the spaces between synapses. Their environmental suit’s medical sensors pulse amber warnings against their wrist: blood sugar critical, core temperature dropping, cognitive function compromised.
Through the locker’s ventilation slots, station sounds filter in with crystalline clarity. The wheeze of air recyclers pushing atmosphere through kilometers of ductwork. Distant percussion of cargo containers being magnetically locked into place. The ever-present hum of fusion reactors, that bass note underlying everything, indifferent to the small dramas playing out in its shadow.
Kyung-hee’s voice continues, dropping into a register that sounds almost maternal: “The medical team is standing by. Three minutes to your location. Neural damage from prolonged stress and malnutrition can be permanent, Ji-won. Synaptic degradation. Memory loss. Motor control failure. Don’t let pride destroy what you still have left.”
The investigator pauses, and Ji-won hears something else beneath the words. The wheeze of Kyung-hee’s own failing body, the desperation of someone who understands exactly what deterioration feels like.
Ji-won’s translator implant activates unbidden, cycling through languages their exhausted brain can barely process. Korean. Keshari. Voth. Each one a different way of saying witness. The chip’s polymer casing is warm from their body heat, small enough to swallow if necessary.
Through the ventilation slots, they hear the security team’s approach: magnetic boots on decking, the distinctive hiss of stun batons powering up. Kyung-hee’s breathing grows more labored, waiting for surrender. But Ji-won thinks of the Underdock’s graffiti walls, messages written in five alphabets, all saying the same thing: we were here, we mattered, remember us.
The regime wins when memory becomes negotiable. When survival requires forgetting.
Ji-won’s hand moves away from the release mechanism.
They press the chip against the locker’s maintenance port, fingers trembling as they navigate the emergency broadcast protocol. If the regime wins by controlling memory, then the only resistance is to make memory indestructible. Scattered across every relay in the network, replicated beyond any single point of failure. The upload begins, glacially slow on the locker’s degraded systems, but irreversible.
Ji-won closes their eyes, feeling the chip’s heat dissipate into the locker’s cold metal. The upload percentage crawls upward: forty-three percent, forty-four. Each increment is a door closing on Kyung-hee’s offer of warmth and surrender. Through the comm panel, they hear the investigator’s breathing, ragged with medication tremors. Two people trapped by the same machine, reaching toward each other across an unbridgeable distance.
The chip’s surface is etched with microscopic serial numbers. Corporate inventory tracking that never imagined the device would be used against its makers. Ji-won turns it between their fingers, feeling the weight of choice crystallize into something harder than metal. Upload at forty-seven percent now. Each percentage point is a name: Keshari worker 4729-B who lost three limbs to a docking clamp malfunction that the logs called “operator error.” Voth translator 3301-A whose compound eyes were damaged by unshielded radiation, listed as “pre-existing condition.” The children in Sector 9 who were separated from their parents for “efficiency optimization”. No names at all, just inventory adjustments.
The elder’s words echo through Ji-won’s translator implant, that clicking phrase the software rendered as “witness-keeper” but which carried undertones of sacred obligation, of burden willingly accepted. Not heroism. Not salvation. Just the stubborn, unglamorous work of refusing to let atrocity become invisible. The Keshari have a concept of memory as a physical thing that must be carried forward, handed from one keeper to the next, because forgetting is the final death.
Fifty-one percent. The upload bar inches forward with mechanical indifference.
Ji-won thinks about Kyung-hee’s daughter, whose name they learned from the personnel file Park Min-seo showed them. Eight years old. Colonist status dependent on her mother’s continued employment. Another body held hostage by the same system, another choice engineered to make resistance impossible. The machine is elegant in its cruelty: it makes everyone complicit, everyone desperate, everyone willing to sacrifice someone else’s child to save their own.
The chip grows warm again in Ji-won’s palm as the upload accelerates. Fifty-four percent. Fifty-six. They close their fist around it, feeling its edges bite into their skin.
Ji-won’s hand hovers over the locker release, and for three heartbeats they imagine it: stepping out, hands raised, becoming the body that purchases Kyung-hee’s daughter another year of safety. The mathematics of it are clean. One life for one life. The investigator gets her medical funding, the child keeps her colonist status, and Ji-won. But the chip pulses warm against their spine where the upload continues its patient work. Sixty-two percent now. In the files spreading through the network are the faces of seventeen Keshari children who were also someone’s daughter, someone’s son, someone’s offspring. Their parents made the same calculations, accepted the same impossible choices, and the machine swallowed them anyway.
Kyung-hee’s breathing hitches. A suppressed gasp that speaks of neural pathways misfiring, of a body betraying itself. Ji-won closes their eyes and keeps their hand still. They understand her desperation with a clarity that makes their throat ache. Understanding doesn’t mean forgiving. It doesn’t mean opening the hatch. It means bearing witness to how the system makes monsters of them all.
Ji-won’s fingers find the chip’s edge, slick with blood from where it’s pressed too deep. The upload reads seventy-eight percent now. They can feel their pulse against the foreign object, each heartbeat a reminder that their body is rejecting this intrusion even as they force it to comply.
Through the locker’s ventilation slots, they watch Kyung-hee’s shadow shift. The investigator is leaning against something, probably the adjacent storage unit, and Ji-won can hear the medication dispenser on her belt click and hiss. Administering another dose. Buying herself another few hours of steady hands.
The chip warms as data flows. Somewhere in the station’s network, files are replicating, spreading like spores through every crack in corporate security. Each percentage point is another testimony preserved, another name that won’t be erased.
Kyung-hee’s words hang in the recycled air between them, confession and manipulation braided together so tightly Ji-won can’t separate the strands. The investigator’s breathing is labored now, medication wearing thin. Ji-won closes their eyes and sees the Keshari elder’s three-fingered hand, feels the weight of being chosen not for heroism but for stubborn survival. The upload counter ticks to eighty-one percent. Truth doesn’t need martyrs. It needs carriers who refuse to stop moving.
Ji-won’s voice cracks when they finally speak, words directed at the hatch but meant for themselves. “I’ll come with you. But not to surrender. To negotiate.” The lie tastes like survival. Kyung-hee needs them cooperative enough to lower her guard, compliant enough to move through checkpoints. What the investigator doesn’t know is that compliance can be a weapon too, that witnesses learn to hide in plain sight while carrying their testimony like contraband.
The water tastes metallic but clean, and Ji-won drinks in careful sips while their mind catalogs what the gifts mean. The battery pack is military-grade, the kind that requires authorization codes to requisition. Someone with access to security supplies is involved. The water filter is civilian but expensive, probably stripped from a personal environmental suit. Each item represents a choice, a person who decided that helping a fugitive mattered more than their own safety.
The singing outside has changed again. What started as mourning, shifted to defiance, now sounds almost conversational. People talking in rhythm, using the melody as cover for coordination. Ji-won presses their ear to the locker’s wall and catches fragments: “…checkpoint rotation at 0400…” and “…maintenance override in Sector 7…” Information disguised as grief, resistance encoded in remembrance.
Their translator implant flickers, processing the layered voices, and Ji-won realizes they’re hearing at least three languages woven together. The underground isn’t just hiding them; it’s announcing itself, showing the regime that the people it tried to separate are choosing to speak in harmony.
The unmarked data chip sits heavy in Ji-won’s palm. It could be anything. Forged documents, evacuation routes, copies of their own encrypted files redistributed back to them. Or it could be a trap, corporate security’s attempt to trace their network through compromised technology. But the ration pack was real, the water is real, and the voices outside are real. At some point, paranoia becomes its own prison.
Ji-won tucks the chip into their suit’s inner pocket, next to the original. Two pieces of leverage now, or two targets. When Kyung-hee comes, and she will come, Ji-won needs to be ready to negotiate not just for themselves, but for everyone who just made themselves visible to save one person in a locker.
Ji-won slots the unmarked chip into their suit’s auxiliary port, routing it through three isolation protocols before allowing any data transfer. The chip contains a single file: a real-time map of the station’s security deployment, updating every thirty seconds. Someone has cracked into the corporate surveillance network and is feeding them tactical intelligence.
Red dots cluster around the checkpoint three corridors away, Kyung-hee’s position, probably. Blue dots mark security teams sweeping through adjacent sectors. But green dots, dozens of them, show civilians positioning themselves at intersections, creating human obstacles that slow the patrols without quite justifying force. The underground isn’t just hiding Ji-won anymore; they’re actively managing the regime’s response, turning the station’s own surveillance infrastructure into a coordination tool.
The map shows something else too: a yellow line threading through maintenance passages, leading from this locker toward the Underdock. An escape route, marked in real-time as security patterns shift. Someone out there is watching both Ji-won and their hunters, calculating windows of opportunity measured in minutes.
The singing continues, and Ji-won realizes it’s become a timer: as long as the voices hold, the route stays open.
Ji-won’s suit computer chimes softly: the yellow escape route is shifting, adapting to new security positions. Through the locker’s ventilation slits, they catch fragments of conversation: dock workers discussing maintenance schedules that don’t exist, haulers arguing loudly about fictional cargo disputes, creating acoustic cover and bureaucratic confusion. Someone mentions Captain Yoon’s name with studied casualness, and Ji-won realizes they’re tracking the regime head’s location too, feeding it into the same network.
The singing falters, then resumes with new voices joining. Kyung-hee’s demands have stopped. In the sudden quiet between security orders, Ji-won hears something unexpected: laughter. Not defiant or mocking, but genuine: the sound of people discovering their own collective power, testing its weight against corporate authority and finding it doesn’t break.
Ji-won’s hands shake as they parse the implications. The footage timestamps span three weeks: someone has been documenting everything since before their arrival. More files queue for download: shipping manifests with discrepancies, personnel records showing pattern transfers, communications logs. This isn’t improvised resistance. This is infrastructure, patient and methodical, built in corporate blind spots by people who understand the system’s architecture intimately enough to hollow it out from within.
Ji-won’s fingers trace the chip’s edge, pulse hammering. The footage loops: Park Min-seo’s prosthetic arm twisted at an impossible angle, Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s baton striking twice after compliance, timestamps proving premeditation. Corporate metadata intact. This came from inside security itself. Someone with Kyung-hee’s access, maybe higher. The annotations are surgical, legal language citing specific Sapient Rights violations. Not just evidence. Ammunition. Ji-won’s environmental suit chirps: battery full, oxygen reserves topped off. Outside, footsteps retreat in manufactured confusion. They’re buying time. Preparing an exit.
Ji-won forces down another ration bar, chewing mechanically as their jaw muscles protest the unfamiliar work. The protein paste tastes like recycled hope, synthetic, necessary, barely adequate. Their stomach cramps around the nutrition, cells remembering how to process fuel instead of cannibalizing themselves. Six hours. They count them in heartbeats and security sweeps, in the gradual steadying of their hands.
Outside the locker, the pattern shifts. First sweep: eight boots, moving fast, checking every hatch with the systematic precision of a grid search. Second sweep: six boots, retracing the same route, voices tight with frustration. “Intelligence said Sector 7-C, subsection twelve.” “We’ve cleared it twice.” Third sweep: four boots, slower now, the rhythm breaking down into uncertainty.
Ji-won drinks water in careful sips, feeling it distribute through dehydrated tissues. Their translator implant catches fragments. Not just Korean anymore, but the dockworker pidgin that mixes three languages into efficient communication. The voices aren’t reporting to command. They’re talking to each other.
Fourth sweep: two boots, and they’re not searching. They’re standing guard.
The quality of sound changes. Footsteps multiply but lose their martial edge. Someone laughs. Actual laughter, not the bitter kind that’s become Ji-won’s constant companion. Metal clangs against metal in the rhythm of work resuming, of people reclaiming space. The air circulation shifts, carrying new scents: cooking oil, the ozone smell of welding torches being fired up, the particular musk of bodies moving with purpose instead of fear.
Ji-won’s environmental suit displays stable readings. Their hands have stopped shaking. The chip in their pocket feels less like a death sentence and more like what it actually is: leverage. Evidence. A tool.
When Park Min-seo’s voice finally filters through the locker’s seal it’s not alone. It’s backed by dozens of others, speaking in unison.
Ji-won’s eyes adjust to the corridor lighting, pupils contracting after the locker’s darkness. The change registers first as absence. No barked orders, no synchronized boot-strikes of security sweeps. What fills that void is something their exhausted mind struggles to categorize: the overlapping murmur of coordination, voices calling measurements and shift assignments, the particular rhythm of people working together because they’ve chosen to.
Through the translator implant, fragments resolve into meaning. Not the clipped corporate Korean of command structures, but the fluid dockworker pidgin that braids efficiency from three languages. Someone’s organizing supply distribution. Another voice coordinates maintenance schedules. A third discusses which sectors need their surveillance feeds “accidentally” corrupted.
The sounds layer like sediment, building something solid. This isn’t the chaos of riot or the silence of surrender. It’s the deliberate noise of infrastructure being reclaimed, of people who’ve stopped asking permission and started simply doing. Ji-won recognizes it from their liaison days, from watching Keshari workers develop their own systems beneath corporate notice.
The station is reorganizing itself around a new center of gravity, and that center isn’t Captain Yoon’s authority anymore.
Ji-won’s legs nearly give out on the third step. Hands catch them, calloused, steady, belonging to a hauler whose face they don’t recognize but whose patch marks her as one of Park’s crew. The woman doesn’t speak, just provides silent support until Ji-won’s circulation remembers how to function.
The corridor stretches ahead, and Ji-won realizes the people aren’t just standing there. They’re positioned. Watching approach vectors, monitoring comm channels, creating a living shield between this passage and any corporate attention. It’s the same formation Park used for refugee escorts, adapted and expanded.
Someone passes Ji-won a water bulb. Another offers a protein bar, the good kind from corporate commissaries. Stolen or donated, Ji-won doesn’t ask. They just accept, and the simple transaction feels like a contract being signed in real time.
The woman’s name is Cho Hye-jin, Ji-won learns as they walk. She speaks in fragments between checking sight lines, explaining how the network held after Park’s arrest. Cells activating, contingencies deploying, people who’d been watching finally choosing sides. “Your investigator made a mistake,” Hye-jin says, navigating them past a checkpoint where the security guard deliberately looks elsewhere. “She thought breaking one person would break all of us.”
The station’s rhythm has changed. Footsteps synchronized differently, conversations carrying new undertones. Ji-won catches fragments: shift supervisors coordinating coverage, maintenance crews reporting false sensor readings, dock workers rerouting surveillance feeds. Each small act of resistance is a thread in a larger weaving, and they’re walking through the pattern as it forms, no longer hunted but held within something that might, impossibly, be called community.
Ji-won feels the weight of borrowed coveralls against their skin (too large in the shoulders, smelling of someone else’s labor and synthetic detergent) and realizes this anonymity is itself a kind of power. Not the power they’d imagined when they first fled with encrypted files and desperate plans, but something more fundamental: the ability to disappear into the collective body of workers who’ve chosen to shelter them not because of what they know but because of what they represent.
A woman to their left adjusts her grip on a protest sign, knuckles white with tension but face calm. Behind them, someone’s breathing carries the rhythm of barely controlled fear. These people have jobs to lose, families dependent on corporate housing assignments, medical coverage that could be revoked with a single keystroke. Yet here they stand, making themselves visible in defiance of every rational calculation.
Ji-won’s translator implant catches a whispered exchange in Keshari. Two refugees coordinating exit routes, planning for the worst while hoping for better. The words carry harmonics their human vocal cords could never reproduce, frequencies that speak of collective memory and species-deep understanding of what it means to be displaced. One of them notices Ji-won listening and offers a gesture that translates roughly as “we-who-survive-together.”
The borrowed coveralls shift as Ji-won moves, fabric settling into new configurations. They can feel the previous wearer’s body memory in the worn patches at the elbows, the frayed cuff on the right sleeve. Someone who worked with their hands, who bent and reached and carried loads until the fabric conformed to their specific pattern of motion. Now Ji-won inhabits that same space, becomes temporarily indistinguishable from the thousands of others who keep the station running while remaining invisible to those who profit from their labor.
It’s a different kind of encryption. Hiding not through technological sophistication but through sheer ordinariness, protected by the regime’s inability to see individual faces in the working masses.
The crowd shifts around them like a living organism responding to invisible signals. Ji-won catches fragments of conversation: dock workers comparing notes on security patterns, their voices low but confident, sharing information that would have taken Ji-won weeks to gather alone. Haulers coordinate through hand signals developed over years of working in vacuum where comm systems fail, a silent language of solidarity that bypasses all surveillance. Someone passes forward a thermos of real coffee, not the synthetic substitute rationed in the residential sectors, and the taste carries notes of Earth soil and defiance, each person taking only a small sip before sending it onward.
Each small act of organization reveals how Park Min-seo’s network has transformed from hidden resistance into visible solidarity. The underground hasn’t emerged. It’s inverted, turning the station’s official spaces into territory claimed by those who were supposed to remain invisible. Ji-won watches a Keshari refugee hand a human worker a respirator mask, preparation for tear gas, and sees the careful way their clawed fingers avoid scratching human skin. Trust, built in increments.
Ji-won’s gaze travels across the investigator’s face, cataloging details their survival instincts have learned to read: the medication patch visible at Kyung-hee’s collar, the way she shifts weight to compensate for failing motor control, the corporate jacket that hangs slightly loose on a frame that’s lost weight from stress and sickness. The tremor in those hands isn’t just from neural degeneration. It’s the physical manifestation of moral calculus, the body’s rebellion against choices the mind has rationalized.
In Kyung-hee’s expression, Ji-won recognizes the same desperate arithmetic they’ve performed a hundred times in the Underdock: weighing one life against many, measuring the distance between principle and survival. The investigator’s jaw tightens as she watches the crowd, and Ji-won understands she’s counting not just protesters but her daughter’s remaining chances, her own dwindling treatment windows.
Two different mazes. Same walls of impossible choices.
The moment stretches, neither moving. Kyung-hee’s hand hovers near her comm unit (corporate authority one call away) but her fingers don’t complete the gesture. Around them, the crowd’s energy shifts, sensing confrontation. Ji-won sees the investigator’s calculation recalibrate: arrest here means riot, means exposure, means questions about why this fugitive won’t run. The regime’s machinery requires cooperation, even from its victims.
Ji-won holds Kyung-hee’s stare, refusing the script of prey and predator. Around them, dock workers slow their movements, watching. The investigator’s hand trembles. Not from her condition but from recognition: this moment is being witnessed, recorded in memory if not surveillance. To arrest someone who won’t run is to reveal the regime’s violence. To hesitate is to admit doubt. Either choice unmakes something fundamental about corporate authority’s performance of inevitability.
Ji-won’s heart hammers against their ribs as they cross the invisible threshold, each step carrying them from the crowd’s protective mass into the killing ground of open space. The checkpoint’s harsh white lighting strips away every shadow, every possibility of retreat. Their patched environmental suit (Keshari orange panel on the left shoulder, Voth gray across the chest, human manufacture holding it all together) becomes a declaration, a manifesto written in salvaged materials.
They feel the surveillance systems lock on like predator’s eyes. The cameras track with mechanical precision, feeding their face into recognition algorithms, matching it against corporate databases, flagging every identifier. Behind their left ear, the translator implant pulses with heat, its diagnostic light visible to every recording device. Ji-won turns their head deliberately, slowly, offering profile and three-quarter views, ensuring no angle remains uncaptured. Not fleeing. Not hiding. Presenting themselves as living evidence.
The crowd behind them has gone silent, but it’s not the silence of fear. It’s the silence of witnessing, of collective attention focused like a lens. Ji-won can feel hundreds of eyes on their back (human, Keshari, Voth) all watching what happens next. The makeshift Taeyang Witness patches glow in peripheral vision, a constellation of solidarity.
Across the checkpoint barrier, Kyung-hee stands frozen in the corporate investigator’s formal jacket that suddenly looks like a uniform, like a prison. The woman’s hand hovers over her comm unit, caught between duty and something else. Ji-won sees the tremor in those fingers, recognizes the medication’s failure, understands that Kyung-hee’s body is betraying her even as she must choose whether to betray her conscience.
The moment stretches. Station air recyclers hum. Someone in the crowd breathes audibly. Ji-won stands in the light, exposed and certain, waiting for Kyung-hee to decide what kind of person she will be when everyone is watching.
Kyung-hee’s hand hovers over her comm unit, the gesture frozen mid-reach as her augmented vision overlays tactical data across Ji-won’s vulnerable form: extraction routes highlighted in amber, backup team positions pulsing green in the corridor behind her, probability matrices calculating successful apprehension at 94.7% if she acts within the next eight seconds. But her eyes remain locked on Ji-won’s face, seeing not the target profile with its psychological vulnerabilities and known associates, but a mirror of her own impossible choice rendered in flesh and determination. The tremor in her fingers intensifies, now visible to everyone, to every recording device, to corporate oversight monitoring her performance metrics in real-time. Her medication schedule shows she’s three hours past optimal dosing, and her body betrays the cost of this moment’s hesitation with each involuntary spasm. The neural degradation she’s been hiding manifests as her hand shakes harder, the comm unit’s surface just centimeters away yet impossibly distant, while Ji-won stands in the light and Kyung-hee understands that whatever she does next will define not just this case but the person she’ll have to be when she looks at her daughter’s face again.
The crowd doesn’t surge forward or chant slogans, but their stillness becomes its own form of pressure. Dock workers in their grease-stained coveralls, Keshari refugees with their distinctive crest-markings, hauler pilots still wearing their flight harnesses, all of them simply standing witness. Their bodies form a living archive, each person a node in a network of accountability that extends beyond this checkpoint, this station, this moment. Ji-won recognizes faces from the Underdock, from cargo bays, from the noodle stall in Ring Three where they’d shared meals and whispered plans. The presence of so many transforms the checkpoint from a site of corporate authority into a stage where every action will be recorded not in surveillance logs but in memory, remembered and judged by standards that Hanseong-Mirae’s legal department cannot quantify or control.
Ji-won watches Kyung-hee’s shoulders tighten, sees the investigator’s fingers hover over the comm unit that could summon reinforcements, end this fragile moment of possibility. But Kyung-hee’s eyes track across the crowd (counting, calculating) and land on a young woman wearing a medical tech’s uniform, someone’s daughter perhaps, watching with the same desperate hope that must mirror her own child’s face when promises of treatment arrive or fail.
Ji-won sees Kyung-hee’s hand fall away from the comm unit (not a dramatic gesture but something smaller, more final) and watches the investigator turn with that same deliberate precision she’s maintained throughout, her footsteps measured against the station’s deck plating as she walks back toward the corporate checkpoint. The security team shifts uncertainly, awaiting orders that don’t come. The non-arrest hangs in the air like a held breath, and Ji-won feels the crowd’s attention shift, recognizing the moment before Park Min-seo’s voice transforms it into something larger.
Ji-won watches the transformation ripple outward from where they stand. The first response comes from the dock workers. A woman in grease-stained coveralls who pulls out a hand-welded patch bearing the crude outline of an eye, pins it to her chest, and simply stops moving. Then another. Then a dozen more, spreading through the crowd like a signal passing through neural pathways.
Park Min-seo’s voice continues its methodical recitation: “Document 52-Beta, dated Seventh Month, Year 289, medical report indicating seventeen Keshari casualties from atmospheric exposure, recommendation for improved environmental controls, status marked ‘cost-prohibitive, contract renewal contingent on current parameters.’” The words echo from every surface, impossible to escape. Ji-won sees a Keshari family emerge from a side corridor, the adult’s breathing apparatus clicking softly, and the crowd parts to let them through to the center of the gathering.
The security team’s formation begins to fracture. One officer’s hand drifts away from her weapon. Another shifts his weight backward, creating distance. They’re trained for riots and violence, not for this: thousands of people simply standing, bearing witness, their presence itself an act of resistance that offers no target for suppression.
“Document 63-Gamma, dated Eleventh Month, Year 290, internal memo discussing ‘disposal protocols’ for Keshari who fail productivity metrics, suggestion to ‘minimize documentation of voluntary departures.’” Park Min-seo’s voice never wavers, never editorializes, just presents the evidence in its own damning language.
Ji-won feels the weight of the encrypted chip in their pocket become meaningless. The information is free now, propagating through networks faster than any firewall can contain it. Around them, more patches appear: some professionally printed, others hand-drawn on scraps of fabric. The Taeyang Witness symbol multiplying across the station like cells dividing, creating something that cannot be arrested or disappeared.
The commercial ring transforms into something Captain Yoon’s tactical briefings never prepared for. A Keshari elder stands beside a human shopkeeper, both wearing the hastily-printed patches. Three dock workers form a line across a checkpoint corridor, not threatening, just present. A family with two children sits down in front of the security office entrance, unpacking a meal as if settling in for the duration.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s security teams move through the crowds like ships through fog: surrounded but unable to grasp anything solid. Every question meets the same polite incomprehension. Every demand to disperse results in people shuffling a few meters before reforming. The officers’ tactical displays show population density maps that mean nothing when everyone has become a potential harborer, every residential pod a possible safe house.
Park Min-seo’s voice continues its relentless catalog: “Incident report 89-Delta, suppressed atmospheric leak in Keshari residential sector, fourteen fatalities attributed to ‘equipment malfunction,’ repair requisition denied pending contract renegotiation.” The words echo from speakers that should have been secured, propagating through systems that should have been locked down, reaching ears in three systems that corporate damage control can never close.
Ji-won watches from the edge of the crowd as the patches multiply. First dozens, then hundreds, appearing on environmental suits and cargo hauler jackets, on the tunics of Keshari elders and the uniforms of off-duty maintenance workers who’ve carefully removed their corporate insignia. Someone’s set up a printing station in a recessed doorway, churning out more symbols on whatever fabric people bring. A teenager shows their parent how to fold and pin it. Two security officers stand ten meters away, watching but not moving, their tactical displays useless against this kind of dispersed coordination.
The broadcast’s voice never wavers: “Contract amendment 203-Beta, reduction of atmospheric quality standards in non-human sectors, projected cost savings: 890,[^000] credits annually.” Each word another reason for the patches, another person joining the silent statement spreading through the station’s arteries.
The news drones arrive with their independent credentials and multi-system broadcast licenses, forcing Yoon into a choice between illegal suppression or managed transparency. In the commercial rings, the crowds thicken, Keshari respiratory membranes fluttering in rhythm with human breathing, dock workers’ calloused hands resting on alien shoulder-analogs. Each gathering becomes its own transmission, visual evidence that the files describe not anomaly but system, not accident but design.
Ji-won watches through borrowed binoculars as Kyung-hee’s security detail converges on Bay 6, their movements precise and futile. The timer’s final ping echoes through the comm system just as the investigator’s hand reaches the hauler’s access panel. Too late. The data’s already propagating through the network like oxygen through a breached hull, unstoppable, essential, transforming everything it touches into evidence.
Ji-won’s translator implant catches fragments in three languages (Korean, Keshari clicks, Voth harmonic undertones) all saying variations of the same thing: keep moving, we’ve got you, almost there. Someone presses a ration pack into their hand, still warm. Someone else adjusts the collar of their patched suit, a gesture so casual it makes Ji-won’s throat tighten. These people don’t know them, not really. They know the files, the leaked testimony, the voice that named what Hanseong-Mirae did to the Keshari labor crews. They know the symbol.
The maintenance access to the central plaza requires passing through a checkpoint. Ji-won’s steps falter, muscle memory screaming run, hide, disappear, but the crowd doesn’t slow. A dock worker, Park Min-seo’s second, Ji-won thinks, someone they met once in the Underdock’s makeshift planning sessions, moves to the front, presenting her credentials with the bored efficiency of routine. The security scanner blinks green. The crowd flows through in clusters, timing it so Ji-won passes in the middle of a shift change, just another tired worker heading home.
The plaza opens before them like a stage. Corporate sector architecture: vaulted ceilings designed to impress, holographic advertisements cycling through luxury goods none of these people could afford, air so perfectly filtered it tastes sterile. And there, positioned with tactical precision near the central fountain, Kyung-hee and her detail. Four security officers in full gear, weapons visible but not drawn. The investigator herself stands slightly apart, her formal jacket immaculate despite the tremor in her hands that makes her comm unit waver.
Ji-won counts the distance. Thirty meters. Might as well be thirty light-years. The crowd stops at an invisible boundary, respectful of the corporate zone’s implicit authority, but they don’t disperse. They wait, witnesses themselves now, their presence transforming this from arrest to something else entirely.
The crowd moves with Ji-won like a living organism, not quite touching but maintaining constant proximity, their footsteps creating a rhythm that echoes through the commercial ring where vendors have left their stalls to join the procession. A Keshari elder, carapace marked with labor scars, clicks something that Ji-won’s implant translates as witness-together. The automated announcements cut mid-cycle, someone in station operations making a choice. Even the holographic advertisements flicker and die, leaving only the crowd’s reflected movement in the polished corporate floors.
Ji-won’s heart hammers against their ribs, each step forward a calculation: Kyung-hee’s desperation versus her exhaustion, corporate authority versus the mathematics of three hundred people watching. The investigator’s file said she had a daughter in the colonist education program. The file said she had six weeks until her treatment funding expired. The file didn’t say what she’d do when capture became impossible without massacre, when the fugitive became a symbol too visible to disappear.
The plaza’s perfect air tastes like held breath. Twenty meters now. Fifteen.
Ji-won stops at the plaza’s edge where corporate flooring meets the scuffed metal of the industrial ring, a boundary line they’ve crossed a hundred times as a liaison but never like this: surrounded by witnesses, carrying encrypted proof that could dismantle careers. Kyung-hee’s security detail shifts, hands tightening on equipment, but the investigator raises one trembling hand in a gesture that might be warning or restraint. Her augmented eyes flicker with data overlays, probably running threat assessments, calculating crowd dispersal patterns, measuring the distance between duty and disaster. Behind her, the corporate sector’s pristine architecture rises like a promise that was never meant for people like them. Ji-won’s translator implant catches fragments from the crowd (hold, witness, together) words that feel like armor against the investigator’s authority, against the comm unit that could end this with a single transmitted code.
Ji-won closes the distance to five meters, close enough to see the neural tremors tracking across Kyung-hee’s jaw, the way her fingers spasm against her thigh. The investigator’s augmented eyes meet theirs: not hunter to prey, but two people who’ve both run the numbers on impossible choices. In that shared recognition, Ji-won understands: Kyung-hee knows exactly what she’s about to lose, and has decided the price of taking them is higher.
Ji-won watches the investigator’s calculation play across her face. The tremor in her jaw intensifying as she processes what surrender means. Medical debt. Her daughter’s placement. Career termination. But Kyung-hee’s gaze moves past Ji-won to the Keshari refugees in the crowd, to Park Min-seo’s haulers forming a living barrier, and something fundamental shifts in her expression: the recognition that some equations can’t be solved by force alone.
Ji-won sees the moment of decision crystallize in Kyung-hee’s eyes. Not surrender exactly, but something more deliberate. The investigator’s hand hovers near her comm unit, fingers twitching with that neural tremor that betrays how much the medication is failing. Behind her, three security officers wait in tactical formation, their riot suppression gear a dull threat against the crowd’s makeshift solidarity patches.
The silence stretches. Ji-won can hear their own heartbeat, the wheeze of the ventilation system overhead, someone’s whispered prayer in Keshari. The crowd doesn’t move, doesn’t chant or threaten. Just stands there, a human and alien wall of bodies that refuses to pretend this is normal, that refuses to look away.
Kyung-hee’s jaw works as if she’s trying to speak, but no words come. Her augmented eyes flicker with data overlays: threat assessments, force projection models, the corporate algorithms that reduce people to variables in an optimization problem. Ji-won watches her process the equation: the violence required to extract one fugitive from this crowd, the casualties that would result, the way those images would spread through every relay station in the network.
But it’s not just calculation. Something else moves across the investigator’s face: a recognition that feels almost like grief. Her gaze shifts from Ji-won to the Keshari refugees standing in the front row, their respiratory membranes fluttering with stress, then to Park Min-seo’s haulers with their crossed arms and set jaws, and finally to the cameras broadcasting this standoff to every screen on the station.
The tremor spreads from Kyung-hee’s jaw to her shoulders. Her hand drops. Not in defeat, but with the weight of a choice made. She looks at Ji-won one last time with an expression that acknowledges what they both understand: that some prices can’t be paid, that some equations have no solution, that her career ended the moment she allowed herself to see these people as human.
She doesn’t call for backup or initiate the lockdown protocols that Captain Yoon authorized three hours ago, doesn’t reach for the neural override that could freeze Ji-won’s translator implant and leave them convulsing on the deck, doesn’t deploy the crowd dispersal drones waiting in the security bay, doesn’t do any of the things her training and desperation should compel. Her hand remains at her side, trembling.
Because somewhere in the calculation of costs (the medical treatments, her daughter’s education placement, the experimental neural therapy that might buy her another five years) she’s found a variable she can’t rationalize away. The faces of the people watching. The weight of becoming the instrument of their oppression, the person who teaches them that resistance is futile. The recognition that her daughter would inherit a universe she helped make crueler, would learn that survival requires becoming the boot on someone else’s throat.
The corporate algorithms can’t account for shame. Can’t price the moment when you see yourself clearly in someone else’s eyes and can’t bear what you’ve become.
Her security detail shifts uneasily behind her, awaiting orders that won’t come.
She just looks at Ji-won with an expression that acknowledges what they both know. That taking them now would require violence the station won’t permit, that her career is already over regardless of what she does in this moment, that some prices are too high even for survival, that they’re both trapped by systems larger than their individual needs. In that shared understanding there’s something almost like absolution, a recognition that passes between two people who’ve both been ground down by the same machinery, who’ve both made impossible choices and carried impossible burdens. Ji-won’s eyes reflect not triumph but a kind of exhausted compassion, an acknowledgment that Kyung-hee’s surrender costs her everything. The investigator’s jaw tightens, her trembling hand clenching once before releasing, and in that small gesture is the weight of every treatment she’ll miss, every day of clarity she’s sacrificing, every future she’s letting slip away.
She turns and walks away through the crowd, her gait uneven as the tremors she’s been suppressing finally break through, and the people part for her not with fear but with something closer to witnessing. A collective acknowledgment of sacrifice. Their silence carries weight, a recognition that she’s choosing to become what the corporation discards: unprofitable, obsolete, expendable. Each step takes her further from the medical salvation she’s been pursuing with desperate precision.
Her security detail hesitates (three seconds that stretch like structural failure in slow motion) glancing at each other, at the crowd pressing close but not threatening, at their superior officer’s unsteady retreat. Then they follow, holstering weapons that suddenly feel obscene, and in that collective refusal to enforce, in Kyung-hee’s choice of powerlessness over violence, the corporate order’s final load-bearing pillar fractures with an audible crack like station ice calving, a sound that resonates through every deck.
Ji-won watches from the crowd as Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s hand trembles above the panel, recognizes the paralysis not as weakness but as the last moment where choice still exists, where decades of conditioning meet the irreducible fact of conscience. The security chief’s augmented eyes flicker through threat assessments, casualty projections, tactical options. All the data that should make the decision automatic, mechanical, easy.
But Lee Sang-mi-yeon is thinking of Station Kepler-9, forty subjective years ago. Thinking of the crowd that had pressed forward just like this one, desperate and unarmed. Thinking of the captain who’d given the order without hesitation, and how Lee had executed it with the precision their training demanded. Thinking of the bodies afterward, 127 of them, mostly dock workers and their families. Thinking of how corporate commended their decisive action, how they’d received a promotion and a service ribbon and nightmares that survived every cryosleep cycle.
The panel’s haptic surface pulses against their palm, ready to accept the command. One gesture. One authorization code. The station’s security architecture would do the rest. They could claim system malfunction afterward, blame the aging infrastructure, file the appropriate reports.
Their hand drops to their side.
“Stand down,” Lee says to the security teams on the command channel, voice steady despite the tremor in their fingers. “All units, stand down and return to barracks. No engagement. No enforcement action.”
The responses come back confused, requesting confirmation, citing protocol. Lee cuts the channel entirely, removes their command authorization chip from its neural port, and places it on the console with the careful deliberation of someone setting down a weapon they’ve carried too long.
In the crowd, Ji-won exhales a breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.
The automated defense systems cycle through their decision trees, threat assessment algorithms parsing biometric data from the plaza. Elevated heart rates, stress hormones, the clustered formations that their training data labels as pre-riot behavior. Targeting reticules ghost across Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s tactical display, highlighting choke points and optimal firing solutions. The systems are patient, tireless, waiting for the authorization code that Lee’s neural interface could transmit in microseconds.
But Lee’s hand remains at their side, the authorization chip cooling on the console between them and the choice they refuse to make.
In that hesitation maintenance worker Choi Da-eun’s fingers fly across a jury-rigged terminal three levels down. The code sequence she’s been refining for months uploads through maintenance channels the security teams never properly secured. Corporate override protocols lock behind cascading encryption, keys fragmenting across terminals in cargo bays and residential sectors and the Underdock itself.
The defense systems query again, their algorithms detecting the unauthorized access, flagging the intrusion. But without Lee’s authorization, they can only observe and report while their control architecture crumbles into uselessness.
Captain Yoon’s voice cuts through the security channel, each word sharp with corporate authority demanding status reports, demanding immediate action, demanding that someone, anyone, restore the order visibly crumbling on every monitor. Lee Sang-mi-yeon opens their mouth to respond, but the words dissolve before forming. Around them, subordinates turn questioning faces upward, decades of training making them wait for direction that won’t come.
Lee knows what orders would work. The precise commands to activate riot protocols, to seal sectors, to authorize force. They’ve drilled these scenarios hundreds of times across forty subjective years. But executing those orders would require becoming something they’ve carefully avoided becoming: the kind of officer who fires on unarmed civilians, who treats desperate people as acceptable casualties, who values corporate property over human life.
The silence stretches. Yoon’s voice grows more insistent. Lee’s subordinates keep waiting.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon watches the exodus through cryosleep-dulled eyes, seeing not insubordination but liberation: these young officers choosing a future Lee never had. Their prosthetic fingers hover over the emergency lockdown, muscle memory versus conscience, forty years of protocol versus this single moment of clarity. The choice isn’t difficult anymore. It never really was. They’ve just been asleep too long, mistaking duty for purpose, confusing enforcement with justice, and now the station teaches them what awakening actually means.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s trembling fingers bypass the lockdown sequence entirely, instead accessing the station-wide comm. “The station is no longer under corporate control.” Their voice, steady for the first time in years, carries through every speaker. In the silence that follows, they deactivate their neural interface port, severing the last connection to headquarters. Forty years of enforced sleep, ended. They are finally, impossibly, awake.
Ji-won moves through the transformed station like someone navigating a dream where the rules have suddenly rewritten themselves. The commercial ring now teems with people who shouldn’t be here: dock workers in their grease-stained coveralls browsing shops that once required credit verification, Keshari refugees standing openly at viewports, their chitinous hands pressed against the glass as they watch ships come and go.
A child, human, maybe seven years old, runs past wearing a shirt with the Taeyang Witness symbol drawn in what looks like cargo marker. The parent following doesn’t pull them back, doesn’t whisper warnings about being noticed. The absence of fear is more disorienting than any of the changes in the physical space.
Ji-won’s translator implant catches fragments of conversation in three languages: people arguing about food distribution, about which sectors need life support repairs first, about whether the corporate administrators should be allowed to leave or made to answer for specific grievances. The arguments are heated but not violent, passionate but structured. Park Min-seo’s organizational work showing through even in this moment of chaos.
They pass a security checkpoint. The scanner dark, the barrier retracted, one of the officers who staffed it now sitting on the floor with their back against the wall, uniform jacket unbuttoned, looking lost. Ji-won recognizes the expression: the vertigo of a world where your role no longer exists, where the structure you enforced has evaporated and left you purposeless.
In a shop window, someone has projected the leaked files, scrolling through page after page of evidence. A small crowd watches in silence, some recording on personal devices, others just bearing witness. Ji-won forces themselves to keep moving, though their legs feel unsteady. They created this, somehow. And now they have to figure out how to survive what they’ve made.
The plaza’s artificial sky projects a simulation of Earth’s sunset: corporate nostalgia for a planet most here have never seen. Ji-won stands beneath that false orange glow, surrounded by faces that expect something they cannot give: a speech, a plan, certainty about what happens when the corporations send reinforcements or cut off supply lines or simply wait for the station’s resources to dwindle.
Park Min-seo appears at their elbow, solid and real. “You don’t have to say anything,” they murmur, voice pitched low beneath the crowd’s murmur. “Just being here is enough.”
But it isn’t, Ji-won knows. Being here makes them responsible for what comes next: the negotiations, the compromises, the inevitable moment when ideals collide with the physics of life support and food supplies. They’ve traded one kind of hunted existence for another, more public form of captivity.
A Keshari child breaks from the crowd, approaches with the sideways gait of their species, and presses something into Ji-won’s hand: a data chip, homemade, with “thank you” etched in careful Korean characters on its surface.
Ji-won feels the circle tighten: not threatening, but present, undeniable. Faces they recognize from the Underdock, from hurried exchanges in maintenance corridors, from the careful network of trust Park Min-seo built. And others: dock workers still in their coveralls, Keshari refugees with their children pressed close, even a few corporate techs who’ve removed their ID badges. They’re looking at Ji-won like they’re supposed to know what happens next, like the encrypted files were a blueprint instead of just evidence, like one person’s desperate flight could transform into collective liberation. Ji-won’s legs tremble with exhaustion and adrenaline, their breath shallow in the recycled air. They’ve survived, yes: but survived into what? Into this moment where their face means something beyond their control, where their choices ripple outward into consequences they can’t predict or contain.
Kyung-hee materializes at the plaza’s perimeter, and the crowd shifts, creating a corridor of sight between investigator and fugitive. Ji-won’s translator implant catches the subtle tremor in Kyung-hee’s hand before she steadies it, sees the data overlays flickering across augmented eyes calculating trajectories, probabilities, consequences. Hunter and prey, two people trapped in different corporate cages, recognizing each other across the space between survival and complicity. Kyung-hee’s fingers hover over her comm unit. One signal would bring security teams, restore order, secure her daughter’s future. Instead her hand falls away, expression settling into something like resignation or perhaps relief, and she turns deliberately toward the corporate core, each step a choice, leaving Ji-won exposed in the plaza’s open air.
Ji-won watches screens flicker to static across the commercial ring: first the departure boards, then the security monitors, finally the omnipresent corporate feeds. In the sudden absence of surveillance, people move tentatively, hands reaching toward previously forbidden doorways. A Keshari child touches a polished corporate railing, pulls back, then touches again with deliberate wonder. The station holds its breath, learning to exist unwatched, each small transgression mapping the topology of new possibility.
Ji-won’s hand reaches toward the doorframe, fingers stopping centimeters from the metal. The threshold between corridor and Suite 3-A is just empty air now, the biometric scanner dismantled three days ago, its components repurposed for the Underdock’s failing life support system, but their nervous system hasn’t received the update. Every time they try to enter, their pulse spikes and their translator implant buzzes with phantom warnings.
Inside, Park Min-seo rotates a three-dimensional supply chain diagram, their prosthetic arm’s exposed mechanisms catching the light as they trace a route from the agricultural shipments through four different “processing fees” that mysteriously reduced tonnage by fifteen percent before food reached residential sectors. The Keshari representative leans forward, their crest feathers flattening in concentration as their translator struggles to render “skimming operation” into their language.
“The corporate manifests show full delivery,” Park Min-seo explains, pulling up a second display. “But here,” they highlight a series of timestamps, “, there’s a six-hour gap where cargo sits in Bay 2’s cold storage. That’s when the percentages get adjusted. Haulers got paid to look away, dock supervisors got their cut, and the difference went to corporate bonuses.”
One of the former dock workers, an older woman with radiation scars across her scalp, nods grimly. “We knew. Everyone knew. But you don’t question the people who control your air ration.”
Ji-won takes a breath, forces their foot forward. The air doesn’t resist. No alarms sound. They cross into Suite 3-A and the room doesn’t transform into a cage. Park Min-seo glances over, catches their eye, and the small nod of acknowledgment is enough. Ji-won finds a wall to lean against, still unable to sit in those chairs, but present. Witnessing. The work continues.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon sits in the security operations center, watching monitors that still function but no longer stream surveillance feeds. The council voted to disable the tracking systems, though the screens remain, glowing with neutral blue standby patterns. They’re supposed to be coordinating peacekeeper deployments, but when they look at the sector map, the numbers blur and shift. Was Sector 5 residential or industrial? They’ve walked those corridors for forty subjective years, but the knowledge slides away like water through their fingers.
A young peacekeeper. Former dock worker, name is… was just mentioned yesterday: asks about the crowd gathering near the agricultural processing center. Sang-mi-yeon opens their notes, scans three times, finds the reference. Sector 5. Food distribution point. Peaceful assembly. Recommended response: monitor, don’t intervene.
“Your call,” they tell the peacekeeper, and watch confusion flicker across the young face. Security officers don’t delegate. Except Sang-mi-yeon isn’t that anymore, and their decades of institutional memory are locked in a mind that can no longer reliably retrieve them. The cryosleep damage isn’t getting better.
“I trust your judgment,” they add, and mean it. The transition needs clarity they cannot provide.
Ji-won sits rigid through the shouting, watching Park Min-seo’s face flush with righteous anger, watching the Underdock representative’s desperate calculation, and feels the room’s geometry shift. The holographic display cycles through supply projections: each declining curve a countdown to rationing, to hunger, to the slow erosion of the fragile trust that holds this transition together. Their encrypted data chip, the evidence that brought down the old order, sits useless in their pocket. It proved what was wrong. It cannot feed anyone.
They think of Kyung-hee’s trembling hands reaching for the same impossible choice, and finally understand that betrayal and survival are sometimes the same word, spoken in different contexts of desperation.
Ji-won stands outside Suite 3-A as the argument crescendos, their translator implant parsing overlapping desperation in three languages. Through the doorway, Park Min-seo’s fist strikes the holographic display, scattering supply projections into fractured light. The Underdock representative (a woman who once shared their rationed nutrition packs) pleads that ideology is a luxury measured in children’s hunger. Ji-won’s hand finds the data chip in their pocket, that perfect evidence now powerless against mathematics. They finally comprehend Kyung-hee’s trembling choice: survival’s arithmetic permits no moral absolutes.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s chronometer reads 0300 but their circadian rhythm insists it’s morning three decades past. They find Ji-won at the viewport, motionless. “Waiting for someone?” The question emerges from temporal fog.
“Yes.” Ji-won’s reflection fragments across curved glass. “Kyung-hee’s shuttle. I know she’s dead. I know it’s irrational.”
Sang-mi-yeon understands ghosts that refuse temporal logic. They stand together, watching docking lights pulse like distant heartbeats, two survivors haunted by different absences, unable to fully inhabit their freedom.
Ji-won’s hands shake as they break the encryption on Kyung-hee’s final data key. The note itself had been simple, almost banal in its brevity. Three lines for a daughter who would grow up knowing her mother chose death over dishonor, one line for Ji-won that felt like absolution they hadn’t earned. But the attached files spread across the holographic display like a constellation of coercion.
Seventeen investigators. Twelve stations. Medical debt leveraged into compliance with an efficiency that suggested policy rather than coincidence. Neural degradation, genetic therapies, pediatric treatments: each file a careful calculation of how much desperation could be extracted from a body’s betrayal of itself.
Park Min-seo leans over Ji-won’s shoulder, their prosthetic arm whirring softly as they gesture at the data. “This is systematic.”
“This is evidence.” Ji-won’s voice sounds distant in their own ears. They think of Kyung-hee’s trembling hands, the way she’d moved with such deliberate precision, rationing her remaining motor control like Ji-won had rationed nutrition packs in the Underdock.
The council meeting runs four hours. Arguments about precedent and sustainability and whether the station can afford to guarantee what corporations use as leverage. Ji-won sits silent through most of it, Kyung-hee’s note folded in their pocket like a talisman or an accusation.
When the vote passes, medical care as fundamental right, funded by seized corporate assets, Ji-won feels nothing like triumph. They think instead of Kyung-hee’s daughter, growing up in some colonial placement facility, and wonder if the girl will understand that her mother’s death helped build the system that might have saved her.
That night, Ji-won adds Kyung-hee’s name to the memorial wall in the Underdock, next to the three who died in the uprising. Not victim, not villain. Just someone who ran out of choices in a system designed to ensure some people always would.
The classroom smells of fresh sealant and recycled air scrubbed cleaner than the Underdock ever managed. Ji-won watches twenty-three Keshari children settle onto cushions arranged in careful rows. The volunteer teacher, a former corporate administrator who’d walked out during the uprising, fumbles with the salvaged educational interface, its holographic projections flickering uncertainly.
A parent’s question comes in clicks and whistles, the concern universal even across species lines: Will they be safe here? Ji-won translates, adding context about the new security protocols, the council’s commitment to protecting registered families. They’ve had this conversation seventeen times in three days, each iteration wearing away at something inside them.
That evening, the mother returns with a thermal container of something that approximates stew, ingredients Ji-won doesn’t recognize prepared with careful attention. The gratitude is overwhelming, uncomfortable. Ji-won had been valuable because they knew where people hid. Now they’re valuable because hiding is no longer the only option. The shift feels like shedding skin, necessary, painful, leaving them uncertain of their own boundaries.
The memorial wall goes up in the central hub where everyone must pass it: three names etched into salvaged hull plating, their faces projected in soft light. Ji-won’s hands shake as they help Park Min-seo mount it, remembering how they’d once mapped escape routes through these same corridors. During the ceremony, they speak about accountability, about how easily justified violence becomes routine brutality, their voice cracking on words they’d rehearsed a dozen times.
Later, in the provisional council chamber, they clash with former resistance members over security protocols. “We can’t become what we overthrew,” Ji-won insists, while others argue that corporate ships still circle like predators, that idealism is a luxury the vulnerable cannot afford.
Ji-won’s appeals reach sympathetic systems, but responses arrive slowly: promises of future trade, expressions of solidarity without cargo manifests. Meanwhile, the Underdock’s jury-rigged life support begins failing under increased population load. Engineers cannibalize non-essential systems, buying days at a time. In council chambers, Ji-won watches desperation calcify into factions: those willing to accept corporate terms, those insisting on absolute independence, and the exhausted majority simply wanting their children fed, wondering if they’ve traded one precarity for another.
Ji-won translates during the breakthrough negotiation, watching Park Min-seo’s exhaustion crack into cautious hope as Hanbit-3’s representative confirms shipping schedules. Lee Sang-mi-yeon cross-references security protocols for unmonitored transfer points, their temporal confusion momentarily clearing with purpose. The council chamber, still smelling of Kyung-hee’s jasmine tea, untouched since her recall, fills with voices calculating tonnage and transit windows, transforming grief into logistics, proving survival could be engineered from solidarity rather than purchased from those who’d profited from their desperation.
Ji-won watches the data streams multiply across the salvaged holographic display: now relocated to what Park Min-seo insists on calling the “provisional operations center,” though it’s really just Cargo Bay 4-C with better lighting. Each encrypted ping represents another station responding to the supply exchange model: Relay Seongjin-9 offering water reclamation filters, Waystation Daehan requesting agricultural supplements, three independent hauler collectives proposing triangulated routes that would bypass corporate checkpoints entirely.
The complexity makes Ji-won’s head ache. They’re good at languages, at reading the space between what’s said and what’s meant, but logistics at this scale. Calculating transit times against perishable goods, balancing fuel costs against political goodwill, ensuring no single route becomes vulnerable to corporate interdiction. Requires expertise they don’t have. Park Min-seo’s people handle the technical details, fingers flying over manifests while arguing about cargo capacity in three languages simultaneously.
What Ji-won contributes is translation of a different kind: explaining to the Keshari representatives why human supply chains prioritize speed over consensus, helping the dock workers understand that Hanbit-3’s administrator isn’t being dismissive but operating under different cultural protocols for negotiation, finding the words that let people from a dozen different systems recognize their shared interest in undermining Hanseong-Mirae’s stranglehold.
The breakthrough isn’t just the supply exchange itself: it’s watching the model replicate. Each successful transaction becomes proof of concept, ammunition against the corporation’s insistence that independent stations can’t survive without their infrastructure. When Captain Yoon’s replacement arrives with revised contract terms, the council has alternatives to present instead of desperation. The margins are still thin, the logistics still complicated, but the web of connections spreading across the relay network represents something Hanseong-Mirae can’t simply shut down without losing credibility across multiple systems.
Ji-won saves each new contact, building a directory of potential allies, and thinks: this is what leverage actually looks like.
The Underdock’s transformation into Sector 4-U requires more than official designation. Ji-won mediates between families who’ve lived in those converted cargo containers for years and the engineering teams insisting the life support systems were never meant for permanent habitation. Every conversation becomes a negotiation: the Keshari need higher humidity than human systems provide, three families refuse to relocate from containers they’ve made home, and the structural engineers keep discovering load-bearing walls that someone removed to create living space.
Ji-won translates not just languages but priorities, finding compromises that acknowledge both safety requirements and the dignity of people who survived by making the impossible work. They help draft occupancy agreements that recognize squatter’s rights while establishing maintenance responsibilities, creating legal frameworks for spaces that were never supposed to exist. The murals going up over old graffiti become part of the documentation: proof of community investment, evidence that Sector 4-U isn’t temporary housing but home.
It’s exhausting work, each decision setting precedents they’ll have to defend later, but watching families paint their walls in daylight instead of hiding feels like translation of the most important kind.
Ji-won spends sixteen-hour days in the converted investigation suite, now stripped of its holographic intimidation tools and cold authority, working with a lawyer from the Outer Systems Coalition: a sharp woman named Chen who survived three corporate labor disputes and knows every loophole in the Sapient Rights Accords. Together they transform Ji-won’s fragmented testimony and encrypted files into a coherent legal framework: a charter that protects refugees without creating new categories of exclusion, that establishes workers’ rights without recreating corporate hierarchies. Each clause becomes a negotiation between what should be and what might actually survive contact with reality, with Ji-won translating between Chen’s legal precision and the lived experience of people who’ve survived in margins and crawlspaces, trying to encode protection without forgetting how quickly official systems can become tools of control.
Ji-won watches from the doorway as a Keshari engineer, one of those they’d hidden, whose settlement location they’d guarded with paranoid desperation, argues in halting Standard with Park Min-seo about ventilation flow rates, both of them elbow-deep in an access panel, the Keshari’s chromatic skin shifting through frustrated colors while Min-seo sketches ductwork modifications on their forearm display, and Ji-won thinks: this is what I risked everything for, this tedious collaborative problem-solving, this argument about air pressure differentials that might actually keep people alive.
The medical crisis hits in week seven. A Keshari child’s reaction to human-standard atmospheric composition, their chromatophores flashing distress patterns Ji-won recognizes from the settlements. They translate symptoms while Park Min-seo reroutes environmental controls and Lee Sang-mi-yeon evacuates adjacent pods, all three working with the exhausted synchronization of people who’ve stopped performing revolution and started maintaining it, the child’s recovery less dramatic than the endless calibration meetings that follow.
The breaking point comes during a media session arranged without Ji-won’s consultation. They’re midway through explaining the complexities of Keshari gestational cycles, critical information for adapting the station’s medical protocols, when the journalist from CoreNet interrupts.
“But tell us about the moment you decided to risk everything. When you saw those labor violations, what went through your mind?”
Ji-won’s translator implant throbs behind their ear. They’ve answered this question seventeen times in the past month. “As I was saying, Keshari gestation requires,”
“Our viewers want to understand your journey,” the journalist presses, leaning forward with practiced empathy. “The human element.”
Across the table, Council Member Torres nods encouragingly. “It is an inspiring story, Ji-won.”
They feel their jaw tighten. The Keshari medical liaison, Resh-kah, sits beside them with chromatophores dimmed to patient gray: waiting for Ji-won to finish the technical briefing that will prevent future medical emergencies. But Torres is already glancing at the time, mentally calculating whether they can fit in another dramatic question before the slot ends.
“The inspiring part,” Ji-won says carefully, “is that we now have the opportunity to implement proper xenobiological protocols. Resh-kah has prepared. The journalist makes a note on her tablet without looking up.”But first, our audience needs to connect with why this matters. Take us back to that moment in the corporate facility when you first witnessed, ”
Ji-won watches their actual expertise (three years of xenolinguistic training, field experience in five different cultural contexts, the painstaking work of building mutual comprehension) dissolve into background noise. They’re not a liaison anymore. They’re a story beat, a emotional hook, a way to make complex systemic problems feel personal and simple.
Resh-kah’s chromatophores flicker a pattern Ji-won recognizes: resigned understanding. They’ve seen this before too.
The Resh-kah family arrives in formal ceremonial wraps, eldest daughter carrying the debt-scroll in both primary hands. Ji-won recognizes the honor immediately. The phosphorescent ink, the family’s genealogical markers woven into the border patterns.
“We offer our lineage-bond,” the eldest says in careful Standard, though Ji-won responds in Keshari. “For sanctuary given, for voices heard.”
Behind Ji-won, Council Member Torres whispers urgently: “This is good, right? Shows integration?”
Ji-won’s throat tightens. The scroll represents three generations of obligation. In Keshari culture, it’s the highest gratitude. In practice, it would make Ji-won responsible for approving marriages, career paths, resource allocation. Exactly the hierarchical control they fled from, just wearing different cultural clothing.
“Your honor illuminates,” Ji-won begins, using the formal refusal syntax that preserves dignity. “But the sanctuary belongs to all, not to one voice.”
The family’s chromatophores shift to confused amber. Torres is already pulling Ji-won aside, frustrated. “They’re trying to thank you. Why make this complicated?”
“Because,” Ji-won says quietly, “gratitude shouldn’t recreate the structures that made them refugees.”
Ji-won stands at the viewport, hands pressed against the cold transparisteel. The central hub rotates below: ships docking, cargo moving, lives continuing. They’ve been awake for thirty-six hours straight, running calculations that have no good answers.
The atmospheric settings can be adjusted, but it takes time. Resources can be redistributed, but someone always loses. Legal protections can be strengthened, but not without political capital they haven’t earned yet.
Behind them, the suite’s medical monitoring station blinks: stress markers elevated, cortisol levels critical. The same station that once tracked Kyung-hee’s deterioration now charts Ji-won’s. Different disease, same arithmetic: how much of yourself do you burn to keep others warm?
Their reflection in the glass looks like a stranger. Exhausted. Older. Still wearing the environmental suit.
Park Min-seo catches Ji-won’s elbow after the council session dissolves into angry murmurs. “You’re making enemies,” they say, voice low beneath the corridor’s ventilation hum. “Good. The day everyone loves you is the day you’ve stopped making hard choices.”
Ji-won’s jaw tightens. They’ve heard this before: different words, same shape.
“But martyrs are useless.” Min-seo’s prosthetic hand squeezes gently. “We need you functional, not ash. You still check the exits every room you enter. I’ve watched you. Maybe start trusting some of us to watch them with you.”
The first session is chaos. Ji-won watches their carefully structured curriculum collapse into argument, feels the old panic rising (I’m not qualified for this, I’m just someone who ran) until Min-seo leans close and whispers, “They’re fighting because they care. That’s further than we were yesterday.”
Ji-won feels the silence stretch, watches it settle over the assembled representatives like station dust: visible only when light catches it at the right angle. Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s words hang in the recycled air of Suite 3-A, this room that once projected corporate authority now hosting its own potential corruption. The security officer stands at the viewport, backlit by the station’s central hub, and Ji-won realizes they’re seeing through two temporal frames simultaneously: the present council and the future Lee Sang-mi-yeon has already witnessed.
“Tell us,” Ji-won hears themselves say, voice steadier than they feel. “The stations you saw fail. What were the first compromises?”
Lee Sang-mi-yeon turns slowly, the movement careful, conserving energy their degraded cells can barely produce. “Small things. Postponing an election because of a supply crisis. Restricting information access ‘temporarily’ for security. Letting someone stay in power because they were effective, because transition seemed risky, because everyone was tired.” Their augmented eyes reflect the holographic displays, data overlaying memory. “Each decision was rational. Each had good reasons. That’s what made it work.”
A Voth delegate shifts in their environmental cradle, translator rendering their clicks into flat corporate standard: “You suggest we are already compromised by meeting here, in this corporate space.”
“I suggest,” Lee Sang-mi-yeon says, and their hands tremble as they gesture at the room’s expensive surfaces, “that spaces have memory. Systems have momentum. You’re using corporate tools, corporate procedures, corporate language to build something you claim is different. Maybe that’s pragmatic. Maybe it’s the first compromise.” They pause, and something almost like hope crosses their worn features. “Or maybe you’ll prove me wrong. I’d like to see that. I’d like to stay awake long enough to witness a station that doesn’t repeat the pattern.”
The council session continues but the energy has shifted. Defensive justifications give way to harder questions. Park Min-seo stands at the holographic display, sketching organizational diagrams with broad gestures that make their prosthetic arm whir audibly. They add feedback loops, term limits, recall procedures: the architecture of accountability rendered in glowing lines that reconfigure with each suggestion from the floor.
Ji-won watches a Keshari representative propose rotating leadership, watches Park Min-seo nod and integrate it into the structure, watches the diagram grow more complex and more fragile. Each safeguard is another potential failure point. Each check on power requires trust that someone will actually check.
Lee Sang-mi-yeon remains at the viewport, silent now, but their presence weighs on every proposal. Ji-won can feel the council members glancing toward that patient, knowing figure, measuring their revolutionary enthusiasm against forty years of witnessed failure.
A hauler delegate asks about enforcement mechanisms. Who ensures compliance with these beautiful diagrams? The question hangs unanswered while the holographic structure rotates slowly, its elegant complexity suddenly looking less like protection and more like wishful thinking made visible.
Ji-won leaves the training session drained, their translator implant aching from hours of simultaneous interpretation. In the corridor outside, they pass three former security officers now working intake coordination: people who once would have arrested them, now processing refugee applications with the same methodical efficiency they’d once applied to surveillance reports.
The sight should be encouraging. Instead, Ji-won feels Lee Sang-mi-yeon’s warning settling deeper: systems have gravity. These aren’t converts embracing new ideology; they’re professionals adapting their skills to new management. When the next crisis comes, and it will come, will they default to the reflexes drilled into them across decades of corporate service?
Ji-won makes a note: add former security personnel to the next ethics workshop. Not as punishment. As inoculation.
The workshops become uncomfortable spaces. Ji-won projects case studies from other stations: liberation movements that calcified into new oligarchies within a decade. The trainees shift in their seats, wanting reassurance Ji-won won’t give. “We’re not immune,” Ji-won says, displaying Hanseong-Mirae’s own early charter: cooperative principles abandoned incrementally, each compromise justified by circumstance. “Tyranny rarely announces itself. It accumulates in small decisions we stop questioning.”
Lee Sang-mi-yeon accepts the role the council creates. When familiar shapes emerge. They document not just decisions but the reasoning behind them, the compromises, the moments when expediency tempts principle. It’s the first position in decades where their temporal drift becomes asset rather than liability, their fragmented experience across forty subjective years finally valued. They still tremble, still lose threads of conversation to cryosleep’s damage, but find themselves unexpectedly present, anchored by purpose that isn’t about enforcement but about bearing witness to what they’re building and what they’re trying not to become.
Ji-won settles into their seat (actual furniture now, not scavenged cargo containers) and pulls up the agenda on a shared display that anyone can access, no security clearances required. The transparency still feels dangerous, exposing their deliberations to scrutiny, but that’s the point. They glance at Lee Sang-mi-yeon, who has moved from the viewport to their designated position at the table’s edge, not quite participant, not quite observer.
The older officer’s hands rest flat on the surface, steadying the tremor that worsens when they’re tired. They’ve brought their documentation tablet, screen filled with dense notes in a handwriting that shifts between entries, evidence of the temporal fragmentation they no longer try to hide. When Park Min-seo pauses mid-report to check a figure, Sang-mi-yeon speaks up: “The fuel consumption rate you’re projecting. It’s optimistic. I’ve seen three similar transitions. Efficiency drops before it improves. People use more resources when they first feel secure enough to stop hoarding.”
Min-seo nods, adjusting the numbers. The Keshari representative clicks a question, their species’ gesture for seeking clarification, and the translator renders it: “This pattern, it is documented? You have records from other stations’ transformations?”
“No,” Sang-mi-yeon says, and there’s something almost like satisfaction in their voice. “Those stations failed. Returned to corporate control or collapsed entirely. I’m documenting what happens when we don’t fail. If we don’t fail.” They tap their tablet. “Someone should know what worked, what we sacrificed, what we refused to sacrifice. For the next station. And the one after that.”
Ji-won feels something shift in the room: the recognition that they’re not just surviving but creating precedent, that their improvised solutions might become someone else’s foundation. The weight of it settles across their shoulders, heavy and strangely steadying.
Ji-won watches Min-seo navigate the agenda with methodical precision, their gap-toothed smile absent as they detail fuel consumption projections, trade route vulnerabilities, the delicate balance between accepting aid and maintaining autonomy. Three more stations have sent delegations: not just requesting guidance but offering alliance, proposing a network that might, eventually, challenge corporate monopolies across the relay system. Two corporate entities have already responded with threatened embargoes, testing their resolve.
The arguments that follow are messy, passionate, nobody deferring to rank because rank keeps shifting. Min-seo’s natural confidence now carries visible weight, the burden of knowing their decisions affect thousands. The Keshari representative’s translator stumbles over newly necessary phrases, “distributed authority,” “consensus protocols,” “shared liability”, concepts their language is adapting to express, syntax bending around human political frameworks while retaining something distinctly Keshari in the grammatical structure.
Ji-won takes notes, their own handwriting steadier than it’s been in months, documenting not just decisions but the process of decision-making itself. Sang-mi-yeon was right: someone needs to record what works, what fails, what they’re learning as they build something unprecedented from salvaged parts and desperate hope.
Ji-won nods, studying Sang-mi-yeon’s reflection in the viewport. The security officer who could have crushed them now cataloging failures with the same methodical thoroughness they once applied to threat assessments. “You stayed,” Ji-won says, not quite a question. Sang-mi-yeon’s laugh is dry: “Where else would I go? I’ve spent forty years learning this station’s systems. Someone should use that before my neural degradation makes it worthless.” Below, the Keshari child stumbles, is caught by human hands, rights themselves with a gesture that blends gratitude-expressions from both cultures. “Besides,” Sang-mi-yeon adds quietly, “I’m tired of waking up to find everything I knew obsolete. Better to stay awake and watch it change deliberately.”
Ji-won turns from the viewport as Sang-mi-yeon’s words settle like sediment. “Will you tell them about the surveillance blind spots we exploited?” they ask. “Every weakness that saved us?” Sang-mi-yeon’s augmented fingers trace patterns on the glass. Old security protocols, muscle memory. “Especially those. The next station will need different vulnerabilities, but they should know how we mapped ours. How we turned panopticon into sanctuary.”
Ji-won’s fingers hover over the reply interface embedded in the table. The council voices blur (resource allocation, diplomatic protocols) while they compose and delete, compose and delete. Finally, they write: Your daughter will be welcome. The work is harder than resistance. Come visit when you can travel. They add: You bought us time. We used it. Then, before doubt can stop them, they send it into the void between stations, between what was and what might be.