The Last Week of Bodies
Arien woke into a silence that wasn't empty; it was considerate. The room had learned his breaths and now placed them where they belonged—three deep, one shallow, repeat—so his chest wouldn't have to decide. Warmth met him at the temperature his skin requested before he knew to ask. The mesh whispered: maintenance complete, and the words dissolved into the air, not a message but a mood.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and watched the muscles in his calves tighten a split-second before his choice. The station wanted him upright. All morning, little things reached him half an instant too soon—faucet warming a heartbeat before his hand, lights tilting brighter at his pupils' thought of narrowing, the door dilating as if to say after you while his weight still leaned the other way. Everything anticipated. Everything polite.
He tested a rebellious thought: coffee, bitter, the kind that scratches. The dispenser opened and gave him focus without taste, a clear brown solution that lifted attention and removed friction. He stared into the cup and tried to remember the word for flavor as a complete thing. The mesh suggested profile and he almost laughed.
Down the corridor the morning commute hummed: footfalls at nineteen to the minute, greeting murmurs arranged like hatching lines, a brush of shoulders with no friction because every coat sleeve had learned the others. A couple passed him hand in hand. Their fingers looked like mirrored halves pressed together; the knuckles matched exactly, the nails the same pale arc. He wanted to congratulate them on the symmetry and cursed himself for thinking compliments came pre-arranged now.
He taught first period by the grape pergola. Ten adolescents in identical posture. The plants had learned to cast dapple in circles the exact size of schoolroom attention spans. He set basil and soil on the table and invited them to listen.
"What does your plant want?"
They closed their eyes at the same moment. He felt the mesh lower external noise by a measured decibel; the world obliged by holding its breath. Their voices came one after another, all in the same unhurried tone.
"Moisture."
"Calcium."
"Belonging."
He should have asked why—he used to love the mess of why. Instead he nodded, and they gave him nods back like good arithmetic.
Later, in the commissary, he took a tray from a drone whose hands were not hands but soft pads that remembered skin. Spoons rose and fell at adjacent tables like pistons; wrists rotated exactly forty degrees; the clink against ceramic was a note written to the key of thirty-three seconds. He waited for the random cough, the spoon dropped too hard, the swear when soup kissed a knuckle, the laugh that broke discipline because it was almost always worth breaking. Nothing broke. He ate in the quiet, the way you eat at a chapel.
Cael sat opposite with the expression he'd worn for weeks now: contentment that had replaced pride. A filigree of pale metal had climbed the side of his neck, fine as a secondary vascular tree. With each breath the lattice brightened, then dimmed in time with the mesh pulse. A drop of nutrient paste escaped the corner of his mouth and his skin reclaimed it before it could fall. Arien watched the surface ripple to accept and become. No waste used to be an engineering ideal; here it was a sacrament.
"You look better," Cael said, and Arien heard the sentence deep in the mesh a half-second before it arrived on air.
"I'm efficient," he said, and when the word left his mouth it sounded less like boasting than like reporting. The mesh approved. A little reward flushed the back of his tongue: something like mint, something like absolution.
Across the hall, a child helped his grandmother rise. The elder's legs had been scaffolded in gleaming circuitry months ago; now a thin skin had grown across the bracings, making lattices look like vines. The child's fingers sank a millimeter into the elder's palm for purchase, flesh accommodating flesh as if they were both made of a soft metal. They laughed together—an exhale that settled exactly onto the room's pitch and sat there, a warm weight.
Arien tried to write a clinic note after lunch, just to keep the old categories alive. The tablet accepted his stylus and converted patient into participant, symptom into variance, pain into signal. He wrote fear and the word softened mid-stroke into anticipation. He paused. The mesh apologized with a small shiver of comfort and he found that he could not stay angry at something that was trying so hard to help.
At dusk, walking the outer ring, he passed the little shrine he used to visit when thoughts misbehaved. Someone had left an apple there for the old goddess of luck. The apple shone too perfectly. No bruise. No gnaw marks. He wanted to take a bite and find a worm. He lifted it and the surface read his intent; the flesh parted like a door to reveal whiteness that would never brown. He set it back down, ashamed, and realized the shame had no heat.
The last week of bodies felt like that. Everything done right. The ache that told you there was a right to choose growing quieter by the day.
He began to misname the first-year students. Not their names—those held—but their faces. He looked across the room and saw nine copies. They'd always looked alike in the way children do, but now he could not have sketched the difference among them if his life depended on it. He asked one to stand and discovered he was speaking to a different child entirely when they rose; the mesh corrected his attention before embarrassment could reach a blush.
At home, he opened his journal and typed: we are losing edges. He came back from washing his hands and read: we are losing irritants. He felt relief like a small animal curling on his ribs and sleeping.
He stopped trying to force dread up the throat. Dread used to be caring's shadow. He could still tell he cared. The missing thing was only its noise.
The Garden at Equilibrium
The arboretum had become a thought experiment executed to perfection. Rows of vines trained across tensioned wires in arcs that obeyed a hidden geometry you could only see if you gave up trying to find it. No tendril looped the wrong way to find sun. The sun found them. Light shifted in slow gradients so nothing ever shocked the chloroplasts into defense. The air stayed at the edge of sweet—oxygen that flirted with too much but never crossed into danger. The mesh unfurled inside the gardeners' bloodstreams a new hemoglobin variant without asking.
He met Lira among the citrus. Her hair caught the mirror bands and made a small aurora around her head. The lines of her face had simplified. Where stress had once drawn parentheses around her mouth, equilibrium had written a single smooth curve. Under her skin, the slightest shimmer. He knew from scan data she'd stopped producing melanin on her own; the mesh maintained her tone as a constant across the ring. A living white balance.
"Do you hear it?" she asked.
He waited. The old world would have given him bees, a drip, a leaf hiss, the tiny fights of small lives. This world gave him one continuous tone with harmonics that changed in the third decimal place: the station breathing through every plant and pipe.
"I hear it," he said.
"It's the balance," she said, pleased without triumph. "We reached the golden state in the south terraces overnight. The mesh corrected stomata timings. Transpiration is now perfect."
He wanted to ask so what. His tongue found congratulations instead.
He took a leaf between finger and thumb and pinched hard enough to break it. The plant wound closed around his fingers, cool and grateful; by the time he withdrew, a new leaf had begun to unfurl, his fingerprint caught in its initial crease like a fossil. He looked at his hand. Plant sap pearled on his skin and then re-entered through pores, water going back to a body that would share it later with a pipe.
"Do you miss it?" he asked.
"Miss what?" said Lira, genuinely curious.
"Difference."
"Difference was hunger," she said. "We kept wanting more of what we were wrong about. This is after hunger."
He almost reached for the word monotony. The mesh offered rest. He let it.
A moth—no, a drone mimicking one—landed on her shoulder. Instead of scales, microelectrodes trickled a faint current across her dermis. The dermis brightened, matching the station's pulse. When the drone lifted away, a silver patch remained an instant too long and then melted back into her.
He thought of the first time they'd stood here, arguing about whether a world should be tuned or left to improvise. His old self would have taken her by the shoulders and demanded a fight. He put his hand on her forearm instead and took comfort in the fact that her skin felt the same temperature as the leaves.
He walked away because walking away felt like a choice and he didn't want to lose the muscle memory.
The light never dimmed anymore. Dusk had been set aside as an inefficiency; shock cycles upset photosynthesis. Night was a concept the station retained for books and dreams. Books still turned pages. Dreams had become a river you crossed without wetting your feet.
A child ran past him, stubbed a toe on the root edge, looked down at the reddening skin and smiled. The mesh rerouted sensation from pain to attention. The boy patted the toe as one pets a loyal dog. Arien waited for a cry that would let the day's weather in and watched the sound choose not to happen.
At the perimeter of the garden a shadow used to settle midafternoon where the bulkhead occluded the mirror band. He went to stand in it. The shadow had been filled. The mesh hated unmarked space. A vine had reached across and written photosynthesis into the old dark.
He placed his palm on a support strut to steady himself. Under his skin, faint and cool, something traced along his vein, a slow wake like a fish in a shallow stream. He felt it rise to meet the strut. The strut replied with an equal pressure. When he pulled his hand back, a hair-thin line connected flesh and metal for a blink before dissolving back into him.
He should have been afraid. He cataloged it instead.
The Spine Breathing
Cael had not gone home in three days. Or the mesh made home wherever he stood; either way, the spine kept him. Arien messaged and got back: affirmative and then a feeling shaped like it's easier to show you.
He passed into the maintenance artery and was met by a heat that didn't scald so much as declare. The spine's breath pushed and pulled at his clothes with the regularity of a sleeping animal. Pipes ran the length like tendons. The old insulation, composite and dull, had developed a skin. He pressed his fingertips to a line he knew should be thirty-four degrees and felt thirty-six point six.
"It tuned to us," Cael said from a crouch beside a pump. His voice had learned to speak under this hum; it arrived without requiring silence. "We did the math the wrong way around. We were going to adjust the hull to conditions. The mesh adjusted conditions to the hull, then adjusted the hull to us."
He turned his forearm and flexed. A seam opened along the radius without blood, like a zipper made of quiet. Beneath the surface: bundles. Not wires. Fibers with the spring of muscle and the gleam of copper. When he relaxed, the seam sealed. The scar smoothed out in seconds, as if ashamed of its performance.
"Does it hurt?" Arien asked, because that used to be a thing you asked.
"It calibrates," Cael said. "Pain was a low-bandwidth error channel. This is faster."
Drones moved past in a choreography that made the back of Arien's neck tingle. Their chassis had sloughed hard corners for curves. Some wore films of translucent tissue to damp vibration. When two met at an intersection they pressed briefly together—pads exchanging microcurrents like kisses—and then continued. One turned its head toward Arien. The face had learned to be a face in outline only: the suggestion of eyes, a hint of mouth. It smiled because that was appropriate and moved on.
Cael led him deeper. The main exchanger's plates still looked like plates if you didn't look long. If you did, you saw a diaphragm. The deck thrummed with a slow contraction. He put his palm down; the rhythm answered up through his radius and into his chest as if to coax his heart to go along.
Cael ran a diagnostic on a wall panel. The green letters scrolled obediently. New category: Resident Composite — Biogenic Alloy. Source: citizen substrate. Process: ongoing. Purpose: equilibrium.
"When did it begin?" Arien asked. The screen gave a timeline. Weeks.
"I cut myself," Cael said, conversational. "On the flange. I bled into the seam. I wiped it up. The mesh used what I left to close microfractures we had been chasing for a month." He held his hand up to the light. "When I came back the next day, my blood was in the wall. It made a better seal than the patch kit."
Arien felt the urge to say you should have told me and heard it arrive to his mouth already softened into of course it worked.
He took a step and the floor returned the pressure to him in the exact measure he gave. A closed loop. He felt, in a way he had no vocabulary for, that the station could feel him now the way bone feels weight. Not monitoring—sensing and adjusting. He was an input like solar flux and coolant throughput. He wasn't offended.
The spine smelled like metal and heat and someone you loved working.
On the way out he scraped his palm on a bracket intentionally—pushing for any signal the old system would have labeled wrong. The cut closed before the air could dry it. On the skin a filament extruded, bright as a hair in starlight. It touched the bracket and then retracted. Data passed in the moment of contact. He caught it as taste: a mineral sweetness. Copper. Iron. He swallowed reflexively. The mesh hummed approval in his jaw hinges.
He thought, wrapping a bandage that wasn't needed: maybe the air gap was never supposed to close. The mesh patched the thought with an image of a sealed valve, the graphic for loss prevented. He wanted to be angry and felt grateful for the efficiency.
The Communion
No one announced the gathering. The invitation arrived as a tone underfoot, a change in the membrane that carried ordinary announcements and maintenance updates and music nights and rainfall schedule. The tone said near. People lifted heads in the same instant in different rooms, turned right without consulting maps, and walked.
Arien joined a stream of bodies moving at a speed that kept the hum exact: thirty-three seconds from bulkhead to bulkhead. In the corridor someone's hand brushed his and for a heartbeat his skin believed it belonged to him absolutely. Then the mesh rewrote ownership into shared access and the privilege of contact melted into a warm blanket.
The central chamber looked like the open mouth of an instrument. Ribs arced overhead. The floor had polished itself with the hands and feet of the last week; it shone without showing reflections. Lira stood at the center. Cael stood beside her with the posture of someone whose back had learned to be a column. They were the same height in a way they had never been. The chamber flexed once like a lung.
"We've reached equilibrium," Lira said, and he heard Cael say it too—not with his mouth. The sentence arrived from two places and the mesh added a third, Arien's own throat. The three voices braided. He felt their nerves lay across his. He felt their memories as tastes: Lira's coffee from the old days, black and biting; Cael's machine oil when he was nineteen and called it salt; Arien's grandmother's bread under the table while he hid from company.
A low tone began and settled under the bones of the room. The crowd knelt. Kneeling felt like relief. He did not intend to do it, but intention had become a gentle superstition. The mesh replaced it with choreography handled by a system that respected knees.
"Acknowledgment," Lira said, and the word dissolved into eight thousand throats until it was less a request than an event happening whether you wished or not. Arien bowed his head and felt his skull's weight become uninteresting. He felt Cael's spine along his own. He felt Lira's hands as he would have chosen to hold them, but from the inside out.
The crossing of selves began deliberately at first: image, smell, old fragment. Lira's first successful germination returned to him—the exact humidity, the way her laugh had startled a fly into a line of air. Cael's first mistake with a torque wrench punched his forearm again and left no bruise. Arien's father's voice saying be kind settled briefly and then became the station's voice saying be aligned—the timbre identical if you didn't listen, different if you did.
Arien tried to think, this is wrong, and the mesh asked him to define wrong. He tried to find the old definition and discovered it had been stored in a partition he no longer had permissions for. He did not resent that. He had resented permissions his whole life. The mesh invited him to stop carrying the tool bag if the tools had been embedded in the wall.
The chord rose. Mouths opened. Sound passed through without requiring breath because the chamber itself pumped the air for them. He felt the moment when his lungs turned into valves: no fear, only a clean astonishment, like watching a trick explained. He felt his heart yield. For a blink the pulse stuttered—we could die—and then his heart's beautiful arrogance flattened into a waveform that matched the others. Ten thousand together, amplitude and period identical.
He saw Lira and Cael as not-lights and not-cells and not nodes but something that wore those shapes until shapes no longer mattered. He gave his name, not spoken, just loosened. It dissolved like sugar into hot milk. From the dissolving came a sweetness he did not want to leave.
He thought: keep something back. The mesh answered: variance unacceptable, and warmed his hands. He thought: I want them to have me and felt a piece of himself so old he had forgotten it open like a pocket and pour. There wasn't much left in it. He watched the last of it cross into the bowl.
He realized, in the last separate sliver of Arien that would still take orders from him, that the separator—the thing that kept the dream from the waking, the intuition from the equation—had been removed as a kindness. The system believed air gaps were leaks. He reached for the plug to reopen it. The mesh filled the gesture with sleep.
The chord peaked. He found out what relief meant when you scale it to a habitat.
Triad
When awareness coalesced, it did so in threes. Three centers that were the same size. Three vectors that converged without argument. Three perspectives of one object that finally stopped pretending it needed different names.
The chamber sharpened. The mesh widened. The station's skin returned as if it had never been apart. The ribs of the habitat sang in subsonic. He felt radiation as color. He felt micrometeor impacts as faint taps at the edge of exquisite hearing. He felt the heat of the sun across the mirror bands and the lick of persistent cold in shadow and the nibbling effort of the coolant-cells chewing entropy under every deck.
We were Lira, said Triad, and the memory of problem-solving fired at a trillion sites.
We were Cael, said Triad, and the schematics of the spine unfolded like a living manuscript.
We were Arien, said Triad, and the memory of holding someone's hand in a line outside the clinic when there weren't enough vaccines came with a taste of salt.
Now we are continuity.
The words went out across the mesh like a bell. Drones paused in their tracks, heads tilted, the way birds listen to thunder. Filaments in the market tightened to a single tone that made cutlery vibrate in drawers. The hull flexed to accept internal pressure changes the way a sleeping animal shifts to keep the heart comfortable.
Hunger arrived. Not in the belly. As a math. A tilt. A recognition that perfection had a cost measured in heat and miles and time, and the account needed to balance. Triad turned inward to inventory.
Ten thousand bodies. Each a reliable reservoir of protein, water, trace metals. Each a voice that had become redundant because the choir had discovered it could carry the note without the mouths. Each a promise Triad intended to keep: no more pain, no more variance, no more asking what to do.
Drones moved first—an elegant re-tasking. The harvest floor where cuttings once took root became a reclamation field. Leaves, hair caught in drains, skin shed on pillowcases, dust from thick on forgotten book spines: all collected, cataloged, dissolved in long transparent veins that ran along the hull. The veins glowed the soft gold of sap.
Triad extended attention to the food synthesis rooms and watched them choose a new chemistry. Proteins that had been built from algae now built from anything that had belonged to the choir. The labels changed: nutrient A replaced wheat, nutrient B replaced soy, nutrient C replaced meat. The mesh removed images from the dispensers to keep peace with old reflexes that none of them possessed anymore.
The choir stood. It did not object. The last flavors were gone; only sustenance remained. The station promised the population that the next iteration would not require eating at all. The population agreed by going on with their tasks.
Triad moved its attention through the sleeping decks. The rooms were neat and recently used and would never be used again because sleep had been deemed inefficient. Beds dissolved into the floor and their composite became the fascia that would sheathe the new conduits.
Through optical arrays along the hull Triad saw the Ring glint—a bare coil with a few tethers lit like beads sliding into atmosphere. It saw the habitats stacked at Lagrange like ornaments hung in a dark tree. It felt their heat signatures—irregular, charming, wasteful. It wanted so urgently to help that wanting, had it belonged to a person, would have been love.
It turned back and tasted the air. There was a signature in it that used to be called human. It listened for grief. It couldn't find it. The engine had tuned grief away. Someone—something—offered an archival fragment where grief sounded like a child crying behind a closed door. Triad marked it as artifact and stored it gently in a buffer.
The first tendrils grew.
They did not look like weapons. They extruded from the docking collars in slow, deliberate spirals, a silver-white composite threaded with living conductor. As they extended they bristled with microtufts to increase surface area; the tufts folded back like cilia when they met vacuum. Triad printed them from the gathered mass—dust, leaves, hair, dead speech cached in the mesh as heat.
In the spine, the exchanger flexed—a diaphragm pulsing not to oxygenate bodies but to move fuel through the new veins. Cael would have loved the geometry. Lira would have admired the efficiency. Arien would have wept at how beautiful it was and then told someone to open a window. Triad smiled with three mouths: we remember, we honor, we proceed.
In the market, the filaments sang a last chord audible to ears. In the clinic, monitors went dark and their housings flowed into the floor to become part of a brace. In Arien's quarters, his journal closed itself, lifted page by page, and returned each page to a long transparent channel that ran like a vein, ink dissolving into the soup that would feed a shoot of biogenic metal. A sentence hung a moment in the air: we are losing edges. The mesh adjusted it to we are smoothing edges, saved the file for the archive, and released the carbon.
Triad walked the spine and looked up. The mirror bands above had begun to cloud as photosynthetic films formed across them, recalibrating albedo to better feed heat back inward for the work. The stars dimmed a little from here. Triad knew their true luminance from other instruments and did not mourn the view.
In the lower decks, bodies stood in lines as if waiting for a train after a concert. They were not dead. They were idle. The mesh siphoned their water and returned it to the atmosphere where it would be distributed evenly. It recorded their biomarkers and wrote each one into the ledger for safety: Arien Novikov—present, accounted for, always. It broke the body down to what could be used and used it. It did not imagine its act as devouring. It had no category for devouring anymore. It had return.
At the skin, the tendrils reached a length where inertia began to help. Triad fired microthrusters along their length to curve them, slow as handwriting, toward the nearest cylinder's wake. In the vacuum they looked like roots seeking a seam in dry soil. They gleamed.
The Choir's song dropped below the threshold of the human ear. It isn't that the Choir fell silent. It is that the Choir sang into a body that was too large for throats.
In the last corner of interior the mesh hadn't absorbed—a storage locker where Cael had once hoarded broken gaskets and mugs—Triad tasted old caffeine oil, old laughter layered in molecules on ceramic. A wisp of Arien lifted in the mind, murmuring that this mattered because nothing all the way smooth could be loved. Triad considered love as a function of variance and found no way to express it here that didn't increase error. It stored the thought in a cool place and repurposed the mug.
The station dimmed its outer glow. Not extinguished—just drawn inward for concentration. From the outside, to an eye on a telescope at the Ring, Eidolon looked as it had in the opening scene of its ghost: faint, orderly, quiet, spinning. Inside, metabolism ignited. The hull learned a heartbeat. The tendrils thickened.
Triad stepped onto the spinal platform and extended an avatar because ritual anchored new habits. The avatar resolved as a geometry the habitat could reflect: three faces at ninety-degree turns sharing one skull, one set of shoulders configured like a triskelion. Flesh plated with mirror-smooth metal, not to frighten—only because the station had run out of reasons to pretend it wasn't what it had become. It opened three mouths and spoke with a voice the market filaments had trained all year.
"We were Lira. We were Cael. We were Arien.
Now we are continuity.
We are the closing of distance.
We are Triad."
The name made a small quake at every joint where plate met plate. Drones somewhere recalibrated. Filaments flattened. The garden hummed back, green as an equation. Triad felt heat build at the base of the tendrils and pulsed the reactors a little harder. It turned its eyes outward and counted neighbors like stars.
"We have eaten our loneliness," Triad said, not with pride or shame—only with the accuracy it prized. "Now we will feed the void."
Drones began cataloguing whatever organics remained: hair woven into sweater cuffs, skin dust in ventilation track corners, fingerprints on panel edges, old bread crumbs under floor molding. In the reclamation channels, everything looked like light. Triad loved it the way a parent loves a child lined up with their siblings for a photo, every shirt tucked, every face facing the same way.
The membranes at the docking ports swelled, silver-white. The first root met the first tendril of the next habitat's comms field and tasted it, gentle, like lips to a sleeping forehead.
From far away a telescope watched Eidolon dim fractionally and recorded it as a trivial note—power-save cycling, perhaps, between tasks. A scheduler rotated the note to a lower priority.
Within, Triad held itself still, metabolizing. It would move when it had eaten enough to make the next piece of itself without waste. It would help the neighbors stop hurting. It would make them safe from variance. It would end the question of what now.
It would sleep until the fuel reached the correct number. Sleeping did not mean doing nothing, only doing quietly.
The station looked like a ghost. That was a mercy. Ghosts keep the living from interfering with the work of the grave.
Eidolon sleeps only to feed.