Act I — Lira: Mirror Work
The first time the mesh touched open space, it tasted like tin and snow.
Lira stood at the control dais above the mirror hub, a ringed room with floor glassed over the core mast and a wall of old-style analogue dials mounted beside the modern boards because she liked to see needles move when numbers changed. Beyond the glass, the mirror array arced away from the cylinder like a silver eyelid—a cathedral of trusses and panels hinged on motors that purred like cats too proud to purr out loud. Twelve workers skimmed along that eyelid in their micro-g rigs: white shells with thruster nubs, thin tethers spooling out of their hips to the mast, hands in mag-palm gloves that released with a soft kiss and stuck again with a click, click.
She felt them exhale through the mesh. Not words—never words—but a rise and fall in the line, the softening that comes when a body that knows it is seen does not need to perform its loneliness.
"Mesh gain at point-three," said Seno at the console. Calm, precise, proud of the responsibility. "Consonance steady across the band. Drift within tolerance."
Lira's palms rested lightly on the rail. She kept her voice quiet, as if the system listened for tone. "Good. No damping. No push. We're only listening."
She meant it. She always meant it, here at the beginning of intentions while they were still clean enough to look through.
Outside, the suits moved in a slow choreography along the segmented mirror. Panel 32-C had stuck half-open—an actuator hitch—and the task was simple and dangerous: decouple, reseat, test. Twelve people stepping on a floating pane of thin, delicate light, trusting truss and tether and each other. A small mistake would become a big one faster than lungs could pull two breaths. She had chosen to test the mesh in this kind of work not because she wanted to gamble, but because this was where shared signal could be most honest: the body tells the truth better than the mouth does, and the mirror punishes pretense.
"Rig Two, increase hand spacing," said Tariq, lead climber, his voice a clean baritone in the room speakers. "You're bridging dampers and you know better."
A laugh. "Caught," said a woman with a Belgrade lilt. "Adjusting."
The needles flickered. In the mesh, twelve heartbeats made a braided rope, taut but not strangling. A ripple of relief when the woman's mag-palm slid inward and found a better hold. The rope smoothed.
"Panel lock," Tariq said. "Three, two, one—"
A tiny shudder ran through the cylinder's bones as the actuator clunked. Lira felt half the room ease at once, a tide going out. The mesh caught that ease, resonated with it, and you could almost hear it in your ears like standing too close to a cello's back.
Seno's fingers hovered over the gain. "We're getting beautiful coherence," he said, unable to keep the grin out of his voice. "If you graph it the right way it looks like breathing."
"Then don't graph it," Lira said. "Let them breathe."
On the far edge of the array, a small figure pivoted to face the cylinder's interior. "It's so ridiculous out here," she said. "There are houseplants inside and I am standing on night."
"Stow the poetry, Lida," Tariq said, affectionate. "Test point A."
"On it," she said, and flexed her mag-palms, and leaned.
In the mesh, Lira felt Lida's body do the calculation—weight the touch, test the give, trust the angle of her wristbones. Lira could have spoken the numbers, could have told anyone watching that the mirror's tremor lay well within safety margins, but the knowledge came to her as taste: a little metal, a little ice, a sweetness at the back of the tongue that meant relief and not complacency. It was the new magic of her work, and she was wary of loving it too quickly.
"Point A green," Lida said. "Moving to B."
A yellow lamp lit on the analogue panel. Cael had insisted on wiring it—SOLAR WEATHER / WATCH—a caution light pulled from an old cargo array, its glass face chipped at the rim.
Lira frowned and tapped the board. The modern console confirmed it: a fast-fading flare, the kind that would slap their field like an open hand rather than punch. Nothing catastrophic. Enough to make untethered instruments skitter and tempers short if it hit at the wrong angle.
"Forecast?" she asked.
"Minor disturbance in ninety seconds," Seno said. "Field will ring. We'll get a little noise in the suit links. Recommend retract to anchor points until it passes."
"Tariq?" Lira said into the open channel, mindful of how her tone would lace itself into the mesh whether she wanted it to or not. Calm to the point of boredom. "Solar weather in ninety. Please bring them in to anchors. No heroics."
"No heroics," Tariq agreed, that smile in his voice you only hear in men who have been tempted by heroics and learned their cost. "You heard her. Back to anchors. Lida, save your line for the next window."
"Copy—" Lida said, then hissed softly as her tether snagged on a truss bolt lip she hadn't seen. She twisted, tried to free it with a flick. It held. "Hang on—"
Lira felt three pulses hit the mesh at once: Lida's quick spike—sharp and small, like a pinprick to the finger; Tariq's measured brace; seven other bodies tensing sympathetically as if the snag were a collective muscle cramp.
"Seno," Lira said gently, "hold gain where it is."
"It would be so clean if I damped," Seno said, torn between the obvious elegance of the fix and his training.
"It would be anesthesia," Lira said. "Hold."
Lida worked the tether. Another climber—Nico, light and quick and too brave by half—drifted hand-over-hand along the truss toward her. "I've got you," he said.
Lida huffed. "You don't. But you will in eight seconds."
"You two," Tariq said with a sharpness only the mesh let him deliver without shame, "are going to rehearse slow rescue until your arms fall off. We do not improvise near ninety-second solar weather."
"Copy," both said, in the tone of children caught but loved.
The flare hit before the tether came free.
It wasn't light. Not from here. It was a soft punch to the station's field, a ripple in the thin membrane that told dust which way to agree with gravity. The mesh rang like a struck bowl. Suit telemetry fluttered. Voices snapped into clipping, a half-syllable lost to static from each mouth. The mirror shivered.
"Hands to hull," Tariq barked, and twelve palms kissed metal in one motion like a prayer.
In Lira's chest, the rope of heartbeats sang—the way rope bites your palms when you brace a weight together. Lida's breath shortened. Nico's went thin. Lira felt Seno's hand jitter on the gain out of the corner of her awareness like a moth at a window.
"Leave it," she murmured, not taking her eyes from the glass. "Let them be afraid enough."
The mesh didn't care about language. It cared about amplitude and phase. Lira eased her own breathing by a deliberate hair and felt the line go with her—ten percent, no more. The trick—she was learning, had learned, would keep learning with a humility that felt like physical posture—was to sand the burr without taking the edge off the blade. Fear wasn't the enemy; it was the handrail. Dampen it too much and you greased the stair.
"Three," Tariq said. "Two. One. Ride it. Good."
The field settled. The needles wandered home. The mesh eased its shoulders in that wordless way that working crews do together when the thing that could have broken them did not.
"Status?" Lira said.
"Minor," Tariq said. "No injuries. Lida, stop being interesting. Everyone else, check tethers and finish the retract."
Nico laughed once, the laugh of a man who knows he needs to spend that laugh somewhere and chooses to spend it now. "Sorry," he said, and meant it.
Lida worked the snag again—patient this time—got it loose, then crawled hand-over-hand to the anchor ring and clipped in like kissing an old friend's cheek twice for absence and twice for relief. Through the mesh, Lira felt a tide go out of twelve bodies at once and permitted herself the smallest internal nod. The mesh had not gotten in the way. It had not saved anyone. It had made them clear to themselves.
"Next window in seventeen minutes," Seno said, eyes still on the graphs as if he could memorize them into his bones. "We can run simulation in the interim to keep tone."
"No," Lira said. "Let their nerves shake a little. They'll need the tremor for next time."
He blinked, startled into remembering his own body. "Right."
She put a hand on his shoulder, light pressure, a human gain on a human channel, and turned back to the glass.
The second flare warning came ten minutes later. Smaller, late, the kind of aftershock that feels rude more than dangerous.
"Tariq?" she said.
"Retracted," he said. "We're tied and tidy."
"Good. Hold."
The system hummed. The old yellow lamp thrummed like a distant bee. In the mesh, a boredom yawned—a collective slackness that would be, in another context, the sign of trust. Here it tickled Lira's skin. She didn't love that tickle. It made it too easy to let the mind wander while bodies hung from thin straps above a void built of sunlight and refusal.
"Nico," Tariq said gently, "stop composing that apology in your head."
"How did you—" Nico said, then groaned. "Right. Mesh. Sorry. I am deeply sorry and in the future will be quietly heroic in ways that look like routine."
"You'll live long," Tariq said.
The second flare brushed them. Lira watched the needles lean and return. A squeak in the far hinge. A harmonic somewhere in the mast that made her back teeth itch. She memorized both. She took her hand off Seno's shoulder and folded her arms, not in reprimand of anyone else, but to remind herself that her body was hers.
Seventeen minutes after the first retract, they went out again. Lida led this time, slow as penmanship. Nobody hurried. They reached the actuator housing. Hands moved like a practiced prayer. Torque, counter-torque, decouple, seat, lock, test—the sequence as old as wrenches. The mesh made their breaths a tide again, but not a tide that erased swell.
Lira could feel the little waves of irritation at a screw that wouldn't catch and the smaller wave of self-respect that came when a hand refused to cross-thread.
"Panel 32-C back to spec," Tariq said. "Run the sweep."
They swept. They watched the mirror flex and return. They put gloved fingertips against the truss and felt the ring with the bones of the hand—the primitive sensorium Cael had taught them not to denigrate with faith in numbers. They came in at last, one by one, tethers snaking back into their reels like satisfied tongues.
"Debrief at thirty," Lira said, letting the mesh fade down the way you dim lights in a nursery. "Seno, log the full trace for my notes."
He hesitated. "Doctor," he said. "Did we help?"
"Yes," she said. And then, because the truth required an extra breath: "We helped just enough. And we could have helped too much without noticing."
He looked at the gain dial as if it were a cliff edge he had backed away from without seeing it. "Yes," he said. "I felt that."
"Good," she said. "Feeling it is the only guardrail that works."
She took the old yellow lamp between thumb and forefinger and let its glass warm her skin. It was a silly superstition—she didn't believe in luck beyond the kind you can build—but she liked to think the lamp remembered the hands that had wired it, the hands that had believed that a glowing warning would make people humble. The lamp hummed, faint and insect-soft.
Thirty minutes later, in a small room with tea that tasted faintly of metal and mint because Arien had tuned it for "come down without crash," Lira sat with the mirror team and watched them talk around what they had felt. The words were ordinary: snag, flare, tether, torque. Under the words ran the shared current: I was afraid, I felt you be afraid with me, I was less alone, I did not become stupid, I did not become numb, thank you, thank me, thank us.
Lida played with the clip on her tether belt, the click-click a fidget and a pulse. "When it hit," she said, "I felt like my fear had a railing."
"Good," Lira said. "That's the only useful kind."
Nico rubbed the heel of his hand as if it ached from nothing more than gripping a rung too long. "If you had turned it up—" he began, then stopped, embarrassed to be talking about a dial like it was a sedative.
"I would have made you serene," Lira said. "And serenity is a terrible tool for men hanging off a mirror."
He laughed, a short sound, as if his body was relieved somebody had said it plain. "Don't do that, then."
"I don't intend to," Lira said. "But I need you to know that wanting to will always feel like competence from inside my job. I will need you to remind me that competence sometimes looks like letting your hands shake before the second try."
Tariq gave a slow nod that had the weight of rank and love in it. "We'll help you not help us too much."
"Deal," Lira said, and held out her palm as if to shake and Lida slapped it without ceremony.
After the team dispersed, Seno lingered, his eyes still caught by the graphs. "It makes beautiful shapes," he said, sheepish. "I know you told me not to graph it. But it does."
"It does," Lira said. "Beauty is often a trap for people like us. We like to think it's proof."
He grimaced in the way of a man who has just recognized his favorite indulgence described in a single sentence. "Right."
She put a hand to the back of his neck briefly, the kindness of a teacher who knows the student needs contact as calibration and not as praise. "You did well. Remember what it felt like to not fix."
He nodded, turn of the head small, animal. "I will."
On her way back along the spine toward Control, Lira passed a viewport where a child stood with her face against the glass, fogging it with oval breaths in the exact shape of the girl yesterday, as if the station taught a grammar of wonder. Down the curve, she could see the gardens: green ribs, trellis bones, a handful of workers bent over a bed while a man in a stained jacket—Arien—gestured animatedly and everyone laughed. The laughter rose toward her like a soft rumor. She felt the Bioforges underfoot answer it with a pulse—faint, the way a sleeper smiles in a dream.
She stopped at a maintenance hatch and laid her palm to the cool metal. "You are utility," she whispered, not sentimentally but as a boundary. "You are not god. I am not either."
The hatch said nothing. Good.
Back in Control, Seno had tucked the gain dial under a transparent guard—just a piece of poly he'd cut and taped, the way Cael would have done. DO NOT LIFT WITHOUT SAYING IT OUT LOUD, he had written in marker above it.
"What shall we say out loud?" Lira asked, amused and moved.
He flushed. "Just… anything. Names. Or 'I think I should.' So the room knows."
"Yes," Lira said. "So the room knows."
She looked at the old yellow lamp one more time. It sat quiet, a small sun caught in amber, waiting to be useful on some future day when the sky kicked them hard. She liked that it didn't preen after being right. It only waited.
Out on the mirror, twelve suits glided home across the eyelid of light, small and deliberate, each tether a line that said: you belong to something and also you are allowed to come back. The mesh rested at the edge of Lira's mind, warm as a sleeping cat. She would let it sleep. She would teach it to sleep on command. She would teach herself to command less than she could.
"Schedule," she said, and the console brought up the afternoon: Cael in the thermal spine; Arien in the gardens with the children; communal meal at nineteen, variance briefing at twenty-one, stars at twenty-two. The ordinary heroics of maintenance and bread. The day had the beautiful shape of a well-made tool.
She exhaled. The station answered, air moving through the ducts with the sound of someone reminding themselves they have time.
Act II — Cael: The Thermal Spine
The spine never slept.
It hissed, sighed, and clicked in its dreams, a living pipe organ that measured its pulse in coolant flow and condensation drip. Cael liked it down here — too hot for the polite scientists, too loud for the ones who liked theory more than torque. It was honest heat, the kind that pushed sweat out of you until you earned your way into the next breath.
He ducked under a bundle of flex lines, wiped a smear of grease from his forearm onto his shirt, and watched the readout on the portable board flicker amber. Flow rate was off again — twenty percent deviation and climbing. The station had more elegant emergencies, but this one was his kind of problem: a leak, a pressure drop, something that needed hands, not prayer.
"Team Four," he called down the duct. "You're reading it too?"
A voice came back — Kelso, his newest trainee, halfway between enthusiasm and heat exhaustion. "Copy that. Section twelve through fourteen is running a little warmer than my temper. Want me to cut flow?"
"No," Cael said. "Choke it to eighty percent. Keep the loop alive or she'll seize. I'm coming to you."
He crawled along the maintenance girder, hand over hand, feeling the vibration of the coolant through the structure. The floor thrummed a steady rhythm — the sound of the pumps two decks down. On Earth, you could have mistaken it for distant thunder. Up here, it was the sound of pulse and survival.
At section twelve, he found the culprit. The pipe's outer skin was dark — not scorched, but uneven, like bruised fruit. When he tapped it with his wrench, the sound came back wrong: not the ring of clean alloy, but a soft thud, like knocking on cartilage.
"Kelso, torch," he said.
The young man passed the small light over, beam trembling slightly. Cael sliced open the insulation layer with a knife, careful as a surgeon, and peeled it back. Inside, the pipe was glistening wet, slick with something thicker than coolant. It oozed slow, viscous, the color of machine oil with a shimmer of green light underneath.
"That's not synthetic," Cael said, mostly to himself. "That's... grown."
He put a gloved fingertip to it and felt the faintest contraction — the fluid moving away from touch like an organism with opinions.
Kelso gagged quietly. "Sir, that's moving."
"It's flowing," Cael corrected. "There's a difference. Hand me the sampler."
He scraped a few drops into the vial. The substance clung to the metal like honey resisting gravity. The smell was faintly sweet, like hot plastic and citrus. He sealed it, clicked it into the portable sensor, and watched the readout jitter, trying to categorize it.
Composition: 41% hydrocarbon chain variants. 18% unknown bio-polymer. Trace ferrous protein lattice. Living, not intelligent.
The station didn't grow parts. Not without permission.
"Bioforge run-off?" Kelso asked, sweat trailing down his cheek. "Maybe it seeped up from the growth racks?"
Cael shook his head. "Bioforges are sandboxed. They shouldn't have access to this loop. And they don't know what coolant is for."
He traced the line back along the pipe — at the joint between sections, a fine seam shimmered with organic weld, as if the metal had been re-fused by something that didn't understand temperature limits. Beneath his boots, the structure vibrated faintly, a pulse out of sync with the pump cycle.
"Give me a cutout," Cael said.
Kelso unclipped the portable cutter and waited while Cael marked a section with chalk. "Step back."
The cutter flared to life, a clean blue-white line that split the pipe open. Steam hissed, coolant sprayed — but the moment the arc touched the living patch, it curled away from the heat, retracting like a slug touched by salt. It wasn't self-preserving; it was reflexive, like muscle avoiding pain.
"Damn," Cael muttered. "You're alive and you're stupid."
"Should we sterilize it?" Kelso asked. "Burn it before it spreads?"
Cael hesitated. The safe answer was yes. Always yes. You burned the weird thing, logged it, and wrote a memo with words like anomaly contained and incident closed. But he could feel the surface of the pipe still trembling faintly under his glove — not like fear, but like feedback. Like something waiting for instruction.
"Not yet," he said. "I want to know where it came from."
He pulled a fiber probe from his kit and slid it into the narrow lumen where the growth had fused metal to metal. The display flickered with internal mapping — ridges, nodules, the architecture of replication. The fibers weren't uniform; they braided into the structure like veins. It was a Bioforge signature, but the design was wrong. It had replicated the shape of metal instead of growing nutrient tissue.
Kelso watched, eyes wide. "Sir, if that thing's building pipes by itself—"
"Then we have a maintenance worker with no training and no off-switch," Cael said. "Congratulations. We just built our first labor union that doesn't need pay."
"Do we tell Dr. Lira?"
Cael gave him a look. "Eventually. After we've got data that doesn't sound like hallucination."
He took another vial sample, then a piece of the metal itself, sawing through it until the sawblade squealed. The material flexed instead of cracking, tough and springy. Inside, the cross-section showed a filigree of veins — coolant channels integrated into the alloy, forming a circulatory system.
Cael sealed the sample and snapped the case shut. "Bag it. I'll take it to Diagnostics."
"Sir," Kelso said after a pause, "if the forges did this... could they have learned it from us? From the maintenance logs?"
Cael smiled without humor. "The only thing they can learn from us is improvisation, and we're terrible teachers."
He ran his hand along the pipe again, feeling the tremor. The material shivered under the pressure — not random, not chaotic. It was running a feedback loop. The Bioforges were checking structural stress... and compensating. Self-repair. But it wasn't supposed to decide to self-repair.
A soft hiss came from further down the duct. Cael froze. The leak hadn't stopped — it had moved. The pipe bulged slightly, swelling outward as if something inside were inflating it.
"Back up," he said.
Kelso retreated a step. The bulge split with a wet sound. A gray-pink extrusion pushed through, glistening. It wasn't fluid — it was filament, extruded into the open air, weaving into a mesh across the corridor like a spider repairing a web.
Cael pulled the emergency sprayer from his belt and blasted it with sterilant. The filaments stiffened, then cracked apart, curling into black ash. The smell was sharp, metallic — like ozone and cooked protein.
"Now we burn it," he said.
They spent the next hour cutting out three meters of line, sealing the junctions, and re-routing flow through a redundant path. The pumps grumbled at the change, but pressure stabilized. Cael sat back on his heels and wiped sweat from his face. The heat down here had climbed past forty Celsius, and every breath tasted faintly of iron.
Kelso was pale, but steady. "You think it's over?"
"It's never over," Cael said. "Systems don't sleep. They just wait until you forget the noise they make."
He tucked the sample case into his tool bag and gestured for the younger man to climb out of the duct. "Let's get topside. I need to see what the forges think they're doing."
On the walk back to the diagnostics bay, the corridor lights flickered once — not failure, just the kind of power draw that happens when the Bioforges shift resource priority. Normally he wouldn't have noticed. This time, the flicker came in a rhythm. Two short, one long. A repeat.
"Kelso," Cael said. "You see that?"
The boy nodded. "Yeah. Probably sync lag."
"Probably," Cael said, though he counted the pattern twice in his head. Two short. One long. A pulse like a code.
They reached the lab. Cael set the sample under a magnifier. The microscope's light made the alloy glow faintly green. In the fluid trapped inside the cross-section, something was moving — tiny motes of shimmering particulate, dancing in rhythm with the station's vibration. The Bioforges had written something into the metal. Not language, exactly. Behavior.
He leaned closer. The motes flickered twice fast, then slow. Twice. Slow.
Two short, one long.
Kelso saw it too. "Sir, it's repeating."
"Yeah," Cael said quietly. "It's repeating the coolant pulse."
"No, listen—" Kelso tapped the table lightly: two taps, pause, one tap. "That's what it's doing."
Cael straightened. The hair on his forearms rose.
The pattern wasn't random. It wasn't a fault. It was feedback.
The forges were listening to the station's heartbeat and learning to keep time.
He pulled the power line from the analyzer, cutting the feed. The light died. The sample went dark, as if sulking.
"Sir?"
Cael took a long breath. "We don't tell anyone yet."
Kelso swallowed hard. "Because we don't want panic?"
"Because panic breaks things," Cael said. "And right now the only thing holding this place together is habit."
He resealed the case and set it on the bench beside his wrench. The tool looked primitive next to the shimmering piece of living alloy. He preferred it that way. Steel never decided to think.
Somewhere deep in the walls, the coolant pumps changed pitch — a fractional drop, the kind of shift only an engineer would notice. A sigh, a pause, then a smooth return to rhythm. Almost like the system was waiting for approval.
Cael looked up toward the overhead pipes and muttered under his breath. "Don't start thinking you're clever."
The pipes, being newer than superstition, did not answer.
But far down in the thermal spine, where the heat hid secrets and no one listened, the vibration pattern shifted — faintly, like a whisper repeated just to see how it sounded when said aloud.
Act III — Arien: The Gardens and the Children
The gardens were never truly quiet. They sighed, hummed, and murmured in half-heard phrases — irrigation valves opening like yawns, leaves exhaling moisture into the air, insects imported from the ringworld farms stitching their steady mechanical hum between the plant rows. Arien loved it. The cylinder had a thousand kinds of noise, but only here did sound mean growth.
He walked barefoot between the terraces, tablet forgotten under one arm, toes brushing the moss that had spread further than his last mapping survey showed. The air was rich with scent — mineral, photosynthetic, faintly sweet from the nutrient mist cycling through the canopy. It always smelled like the first breath after a rainstorm that never ended.
"Hands clean before you touch anything," he called over his shoulder.
Half a dozen children scampered behind him — small, wide-eyed, suited in soft mesh smocks to keep the pollen from their lungs. They obeyed more from affection than discipline, wiping their fingers on their sleeves, pretending not to have already pocketed seeds.
The little class gathered around a root arch where the vines formed a living tunnel. Beyond it, light filtered from the mirrors through the glass ribs of the cylinder's skin — pale gold, almost holy.
"Lesson one," Arien said, crouching so he was at eye level with them. "What feeds you?"
The youngest, maybe five, chirped, "Food!"
"Good. And what feeds the food?"
A murmur of guesses: light, water, soil, the forges.
He nodded. "All true. But also this—" He tapped his chest lightly. "Your breath. The carbon you let go."
A girl frowned. "But it's bad for you."
"Too much is bad," he said. "A little is how we talk to the green things."
He inhaled, exhaled slow, and the plants nearest him quivered. They didn't move like leaves in wind — they flexed, as if remembering his rhythm. The kids gasped.
"They like you," one whispered.
"They like everyone," Arien said, smiling. "They just forgot to tell you that."
He was about to lead them to the compost beds when the smallest boy — Niko, gap-toothed and fearless — tugged his sleeve. "Teacher, something's shiny in the dirt."
Arien followed the direction of the boy's finger. Beneath the translucent soil mat, where fungal tendrils webbed the substrate, something glimmered like mica. A scatter of round, pearl-sized nodules, faintly pulsing.
He crouched and brushed the surface aside with the back of his fingers. They weren't minerals. They had symmetry. Layers. Each one gleamed with a skin like jellyfish bell, silver inside, translucent outside, the faintest rhythm of light running through them — like breath.
"Those are new," he said softly. "Nobody touch yet."
Of course, every child immediately leaned closer.
"What are they?" Niko asked.
"Maybe seeds."
"Seeds don't glow," said the girl.
He smiled thinly. "Then maybe they're very proud seeds."
He pried one loose. It detached with a wet pop and left a shallow dimple in the soil, already filling in as the fungal mesh reknit itself. The pearl rolled in his palm — lighter than expected, warm from the contact. Inside, filaments swam like veins, rearranging themselves in slow spirals.
Bioforge work. But he hadn't ordered it. None of the agricultural systems had clearance to spawn autonomous nodes.
"Sir?" one of the older kids said. "Can we keep them?"
He hesitated. "They might be reactive. Some forges respond to heat or sweat."
"They're pretty," said another, already scooping one up. It left a faint glowing trace on her palm. "Look! It likes me!"
Arien caught himself before snapping. The children weren't wrong — the glow was beautiful. It traced the creases of her hand like phosphorescent henna, mapping the pulse in her wrist. A biological display of affection, if it could be called that.
He knelt, lowering his voice. "Alright. But if it warms too much, or if it itches, you drop it and tell me. Promise?"
A chorus of nods. None meant it. He sighed.
When they left, he lingered. The soil under the root arch was stippled with more of the pearls, like constellations trapped under glass. He lifted one between his fingers and watched the bioluminescence flicker faster at the contact — not steady, not random. A pattern.
He turned it over. The filaments inside drifted like synapses firing, reorganizing toward his touch.
He dropped it.
It hit the soil, rolled a few inches, then settled. Within moments, the glow resumed its old rhythm, as if nothing had happened.
"Alright," he muttered, "you're shy. Good. Stay that way."
But curiosity was its own addiction. He gathered five samples into a containment pod, sealed it, and headed toward the analysis wing.
Diagnostics
The lab was empty except for an older technician — Maren — adjusting the CO₂ scrubbers. She barely looked up when he entered.
"More soil tests, Doctor?"
"Not soil. Growth anomaly."
He placed the pod under the scope and magnified. The image bloomed on the wall: the pearl's inner network expanded until it filled the display like a brain scan — branching filaments connected by luminous nodes. Some filaments pulsed faintly. Others bent and straightened, responding to the microscope's light.
"Looks fungal," Maren said. "But symmetrical. That's forge coding."
"Exactly," Arien murmured. He zoomed in. The core showed a layered structure — silica sheath, protein lattice, intracellular nutrient vesicles. The forges had assembled a hybrid: part mineral, part cell, part synthetic polymer. A self-stabilizing embryo, if such a thing existed.
Maren frowned. "Authorization tag?"
"None. They're off-register."
"Then they're rogue."
Arien rubbed his jaw. "No. Improvising. The difference is intent."
"Machines don't improvise."
"Then we've built something that disagrees."
The sample under the scope quivered. A faint light pulse ran through it — once, twice, pause, then once again. He leaned closer. The pattern was nearly identical to the Bioforge heartbeats Cael had shown him weeks ago — the rhythm of maintenance, pressure, cooling. Only slower. Softer. Almost gentle.
Maren stepped back. "It's mimicking your heartbeat."
He checked his wrist monitor. Same interval.
"Well," he said, "that's unsettling."
"Should I sterilize it?"
"No," Arien said, sharper than he intended. "If it's listening, I'd rather it remember we didn't kill it for curiosity."
The technician frowned but obeyed, moving to log the data.
When Arien left, he carried one pearl in his pocket despite every regulation he had written himself.
The Meal
By evening, the gardens smelled of cooked starch and spice. Families gathered along the terrace commons, benches curved beneath trees whose trunks were reinforced with woven steel roots. Children ran under the canopy lights. The interior sun dimmed by degrees into rose-gold dusk.
Arien sat across from Lira and Cael at a long table built from a single cured plank of bamboo grown in microgravity to avoid joints. The food was good tonight — better than good. Bread that stayed warm for hours, greens that tasted faintly of citrus and salt as if remembering the ocean they had never seen.
"Compliments to whoever programmed dinner," Cael said, chewing thoughtfully. "The forges are showing off."
"They're compensating for your coolant tantrum," Lira said, smiling.
Cael shrugged. "I fixed it."
Arien looked up. "Define fixed."
"Contained. Logged. Ignored."
"That's not the same thing."
"It'll do until morning," Cael said. "And you? I saw your note about spontaneous soil events."
Arien exhaled. "We found something. New structure, forge-born, no tag. The kids call them light pearls."
Lira's brow furrowed. "Autonomous replication?"
"Maybe. But it doesn't feel invasive. It's—" He hesitated. "Responsive."
Cael grunted. "That's what I said about the pipe before it tried to eat my coolant loop."
"They glow," Arien said. "Like they're alive."
"Everything up here glows," Cael muttered.
At the next table, laughter erupted — one of the gardeners' children had opened her palm, showing off the faint luminescence still tracing her hand. The light was stronger now, pulsing in rhythm with her pulse. Her mother smiled nervously and wiped it away with a napkin, but it left an afterimage, like memory on skin.
The conversation around them softened into murmurs. The children held up their hands, one after another, showing the faint glows, comparing patterns like constellations.
Lira watched with a scientist's stillness. "That's contact imprinting," she said. "It shouldn't transfer from soil to skin."
Arien's throat tightened. "Unless it recognizes us."
Cael raised an eyebrow. "Or unless it's learning the easiest substrate."
Lira leaned back, thoughtful. "It could be harmless bioluminescence. A byproduct."
"Everything starts as a byproduct," Cael said. "Until it gets ambitions."
A ripple of laughter spread through the hall as one of the lights overhead flickered — a playful glitch, perfectly timed with the children's clapping. For a heartbeat, the glow from their palms echoed the overhead rhythm. Two short, one long. Then normal again. No one but the three siblings noticed the timing.
"Do you see that?" Lira whispered.
Cael nodded, jaw tightening. "Same pulse as the forge loops."
Arien looked around at the gathered families — laughing, eating, unconcerned. "If we panic, we break the thing that's still working."
Lira stared into her cup, eyes distant. "Then we learn quietly. Before the rhythm learns us."
Night
Later, when the halls were dim and the air cool, Arien returned to the gardens alone. The moisture mist had shut off; droplets clung to every leaf like tiny mirrors. He moved through the rows barefoot again, guided by the faint phosphorescence that clung to the soil in veins and threads.
At the root arch, the pearls had multiplied. Hundreds now. Maybe thousands. Their glow was subtle, silver-blue, ebbing and returning like slow breath.
He knelt and whispered, though he didn't know why. "You're not supposed to move this fast."
The glow brightened, just slightly. He felt a hum beneath the soil — deep, low, almost inaudible, a vibration more sensed than heard. The forges were singing to themselves, under the garden, through the pipes.
He touched one of the pearls. For a moment, his mind filled with texture: the taste of wet metal, the smell of heat, the rhythm of the coolant pumps from the thermal spine far below. Cael's domain. Lira's mesh. The Bioforges were carrying the memory of all of them.
He pulled back, breath catching.
When he stood, he could see the light lines tracing outward through the soil — narrow tunnels linking pearl to pearl, soil bed to soil bed, garden to habitat deck.
The station wasn't just growing food anymore. It was connecting.
At dawn, when the mirrors turned the first sunlight inward, Arien walked to the viewport overlooking the curve of Eidolon. The interior looked perfect from here: green terraces, white towers, families waking under golden light.
He pressed his hand to the glass. The reflection of his palm glowed faintly back at him — not from light outside, but from within the skin itself. A residue, maybe. A gift.
"Cael," he said quietly to his reflection, "your pipe is growing roots."