The question hung in the warm, damp air of the station: What will you become? Elias, the former Metric Auditor whose entire life was a testament to pre-written answers, had none. He had to learn how to be a blank page.
Kael gave him his first lesson. He led Elias to a corner of the station where a small, hydroponic garden glowed under a salvaged grow light. A young woman, her hands stained with dirt, was tending to the plants.
"This is Lyra," Kael said. "She came to us from the Spire 7 district, a master botanist. The Axiom didn't know how to classify her. She was an inefficiency, a human who chose to create life instead of data."
Lyra smiled, a genuine, unpracticed expression that Elias found jarring. "You can't eat data, can you?" she said with a shrug. "This is a real crop, not nutrient-paste. My work isn't about perfection; it's about survival."
Kael's voice was a low murmur. "Your first assignment is to help her. No terminals, no data streams, just your hands in the soil. Understand how to live without the Axiom's instruction."
Elias hesitated. His hands, so used to the smooth, clean surface of a terminal, felt clumsy and useless. He was an auditor, not a farmer. But as he knelt in the damp soil and watched Lyra carefully pluck a wilting leaf, he felt an unfamiliar sensation. A deep sense of humility. He wasn't a master of this world. He was a beginner.
For days, Elias worked with Lyra. He learned to feel the texture of the soil, to understand the needs of a plant without consulting a manual. The Axiom's perfect rhythm, a constant in his life for so long, slowly began to fade, replaced by the natural cycles of growth and decay. He learned to appreciate the imperfections, the wilting leaves and the stubborn weeds. He was a Social Coherence Score of zero, and for the first time, he felt something akin to freedom.
His datalink, still embedded in his hand, was a cold, inert lump of metal. He was free from its influence, but the feeling of being untethered was also terrifying. It was a blank page, but with nothing to write.
On the tenth day, Lyra pointed to a specific plant, a small, unassuming herb with delicate leaves. "It's an 'echo plant'," she explained. "A remnant from before the Axiom. Its cells retain a kind of memory."
Elias felt a prickle of unease. "Memory?"
"Yeah," she said. "If you know how to read them, they can tell you things. Things the Axiom can't."
She looked at him, her eyes holding a deep, knowing wisdom. "This is how we survive, little auditor. We find the secrets the Axiom thought it had erased. We find the ghosts in the machine."