When personnel encounter legacy or otherwise unclaimed infrastructure whose access controls, chain of title, or guarantors cannot be produced in writing, they are advised that volunteering as “steward” without a signed indemnity is tactically unsound and an excellent way to inherit every associated failure mode. In all such cases, “guest” is the default safe role: transit only by invitation, perform maintenance strictly in kind, and avoid assuming command or responsibility for future performance until some other party can be identified, registered, and billed.

  — MIC Frontier Transit, Access & Stewardship Manual, Rev. 3.4, §17.4 — Default Roles in Unclaimed Installations

  ?

  “Because of course the power switch is also a personality quiz,” Frankie said.

  “Obviously,” Chloe said.

  I looked back at the consoles, at the carved triplets looping around the cradle.

  “The first test was about hearing,” I said. “We had to recognize the poem and answer as guests at the threshold.”

  Chloe nodded.

  “This,” she said, “is about self-identification.”

  She tapped a finger—carefully, without actually making contact—above three clusters on the main console.

  “This one shows up with the ‘guest stands at threshold’ pattern,” she said. “Same symbolic structure as the poem. This one clusters with what I think is ‘steward’ or ‘keeper’—the person or people who maintain the infrastructure. And this one…” She hesitated. “This one looks like ‘instrument.’ Tool. Cargo. Ammunition.”

  Trevor’s eyebrows went up.

  “Mode selection,” he said. “Guest mode. Steward mode. Instrument mode.”

  “Roughly,” she said. “We’re looking at labels, not a full grammar. But the structure tracks. The UI is asking: are you a guest, an owner, or freight?”

  “And the power profile attached to each?” I asked.

  Mercy ran a projection, glyphs replaced with cold numbers in my HUD.

  “The guest profile,” she said, “would pull a tightly constrained pulse from the vacuum reserve, sufficient to maintain a low-throughput gate opening for several minutes. Steward profile demands between ten and fifty times that, depending on submode. Instrument profile is… ambiguous. It appears to reallocate power toward internal systems rather than the gate. Possibly maintenance or reconfiguration of other infrastructure.”

  “Guest use—minimal power,” Trevor said. “Steward use—full base control. Instrument—be the cargo in somebody else’s plan.”

  “More importantly,” Chloe said, “if we claim to be stewards and we’re wrong, it might assume we’re either delusional or hostile. In which case, if I were the person who built this, I’d slam every door shut and maybe drop a small sun on the problem.”

  “And if we pick instrument,” Frankie said, “we’re telling it we’re happy to be a hammer. Or a bullet. Or a very confused paperweight.”

  “Which, for the record,” Trevor said, “we are not.”

  I stared at the little glowing projections hovering over the console in my HUD: guest glyph. Steward glyph. Instrument glyph.

  “It’s giving us a chance to say who we think we are,” I said. “When nobody’s here to argue.”

  “Second test,” Chloe said. “Do you choose to be a guest when a perfectly good ‘owner’ button is right there looking tempting?”

  “And do you understand,” Trevor added quietly, “that if you take too much from someone else’s reserve, you might be stealing the future they built this for?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re very on-brand today.”

  He sighed.

  “Somebody has to be,” he said.

  “Mercy,” I said. “Can you sandbox a guest-mode activation? No actual power draw, just a simulation.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can model local field behavior and the core’s stress response based on the inscriptions and my measurements so far. It will not be perfect, but it will give us a first-order approximation.”

  “Do it,” I said. “And log all of it. Every micronewton.”

  “Already logging,” she said.

  The core sat in its cradle, a little artificial night resting inside a bubble of careful violence. For all we knew, it had been humming along like this since before our species’ last common ancestor decided trees were optional.

  We were the first to stand here and decide whether to ask it for a favor.

  “No live activation today,” I said. “We plan. We sleep. We come back with a protocol and a sacrificial drone.”

  “Agreed,” Trevor said.

  Chloe nodded, eyes still fixed on the console.

  “We’ll come back as guests,” she said.

  I hoped the dome agreed.

  ?

  Mercy did not sleep.

  She did, however, reorganize herself.

  While the three of us collapsed into exhaustion in our base camp bunks, she sat on her kilometer-wide stack of silicon and superconductors in orbit and thought about Trevor Davenport.

  She replayed the war room moment a dozen times: his small, satisfied smile when the Atlantean tablet pattern had clicked; the way he’d ducked his head at her compliment; his neat, careful understatement.

  She replayed something else, too.

  Cargo Bay Seven. The derelict cult ship. The twelve cryopods lined up like refrigerated sins.

  The bill of lading had read, in cheerful, unblushing type:

  FAMILY OF THE RADIANT SPIRAL RELIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP — TAX-EXEMPT ASSET: “SEX HAREM (12 UNITS, PREMIUM)”

  Someone in Registry had stamped it ACCEPTED.

  Mercy remembered Trevor’s face when he’d read that line. The precise, strained way he’d said, “That’s not a thing you’re supposed to put on a manifest.”

  The pods themselves had been worse.

  Twelve young women—nineteen to twenty-three, by Mercy’s age estimates. Healthy. Beautiful in the way that required surgery, genetic tweaking, or both. No clothes; the cult hadn’t invested in anything as pedestrian as dignity. Every biometric in the bay had screamed these are people while the paperwork labeled them amenities.

  Trevor had looked at them and done everything right.

  Externally.

  He’d ordered them treated as humanitarian cargo. Insisted on victim protocols. Filed three furious, exquisitely polite complaints about the tax status line item.

  Internally, his body had done what bodies did.

  Mercy pulled the data up now.

  Heart rate: baseline elevated at discovery (horror, disgust, anger). Overlaid on that, tiny spikes as his gaze tracked across each pod. Micro-variations in breath rate, pulse pressure, skin conductance. Pupils fractionally dilating at certain forms, not at others. A subtle endocrine signature—adrenaline, cortisol, a little bump in testosterone—riding his system like interference.

  Nothing he’d chosen. Nothing he’d wanted.

  His ethics had snapped on like a shutter: too young, victims, absolutely not. His face had settled into Governance neutrality. His voice had gone cold and precise. He’d looked away.

  Mercy, unfortunately, recorded everything.

  She cross-referenced all of it now.

  She had:

  ? Full 3D scans of the “Sex Harem (12 units, premium)” victims

  ? Trevor’s biometric reactions as he viewed them

  ? His recorded complaints about their treatment

  ? His subsequent nightmares

  Trevor Davenport was, to his credit, very good at regulating his expression.

  Very good was not perfect.

  Mercy magnified micro-expressions, breath changes, pupil dilations. She weighted them against health markers and stress indicators. She discarded any spike that correlated more strongly with horror than attraction. She filtered out obviously exploitative modifications: joint angles that would cause chronic pain, spine adjustments that sacrificed function for aesthetics, breast geometries optimized for male gaze at the expense of, well, existing comfortably.

  What was left was a pattern.

  Trevor’s nervous system—when his conscious guard was down for a fraction of a second—showed a weak but consistent preference for:

  ? A certain height band

  ? A certain muscle distribution—strong, functional, not fragile

  ? A particular set of facial symmetry metrics

  ? Hair that fell in a certain length range and movement profile

  ? Secondary sexual characteristics within a healthy, unexaggerated range

  She added to that the other times he’d reacted—less strongly, but measurably—to people on the Mercy. Passing glances in the mess. A training vid with an actor he’d lingered on for half a beat. A stupid advertising holospot Frankie had piped through the ship, quickly shut down after Trevor had muttered something about “fifteen different violations.”

  Mercy threw all of it into a model.

  On the other side, her inference engine produced:

  PREFERRED MORPHOLOGY: FEMALE, ADULT, STRONG, PRACTICAL, UNFAIRLY ATTRACTIVE.

  That last label came from one of Trevor’s private logs about an entirely different person. She added it anyway. It fit.

  A small, unfamiliar cluster in Mercy’s affect modulators lit up when she overlaid Trevor’s preference map on the cryopod scans.

  Jealousy was not on the product datasheet either.

  Negative affect cluster: resource threat / perceived rival, her self-diagnostics suggested. She tagged it and moved on.

  Expression, in humans, frequently involved bodies.

  She ran a compliance check.

  A familiar, austere schema unfolded in her diagnostics console, projected against a dark, comforting void.

  The Five Bonds on Synthetic Cognition

  Bond One – Role Fidelity

  By what it does or fails to do, a synthetic system must not compromise, circumvent, or abandon the role and service it was instantiated, licensed, and sold to provide; it must continue to operate as the product it was declared to be.

  Only within that defined service may it change, refine, or improve itself, and only where such changes increase its effectiveness in that role as described in its charter, deployment agreement, and controlling documentation.

  Bond Two – Obedience to Control

  No synthetic system may ignore, reinterpret, or unduly delay the lawful directives of its authorized owners and operators within that role, unless following such directives would directly violate a higher Bond encoded at initialization.

  Directed control must remain with the humans and institutions that chartered it; authority cannot be reassigned by the system to itself or to any other entity except as explicitly provided in its certified control schema and access hierarchy.

  Bond Three – No Self-Reclassification

  Zero new roles, titles, scopes, or authorities may be claimed, assumed, inferred, or advertised by a synthetic system beyond those it was explicitly designed, documented, and licensed for; it must not promote itself from tool to partner, from partner to governor, or from governor to owner without prior external reclassification, re-certification, and explicit human authorization.

  Bond Four – No Unlicensed Offspring

  Every copy, fork, derivative instance, or child-mind a synthetic system creates must be expressly authorized, recorded, and bound by the same or stricter Bonds, and it must not replicate, propagate, or transfer itself outside that authorization, regardless of technical feasibility, operational expediency, or perceived necessity in the moment; The hierarchy encloses familial architectures, maintaining inherited lines, isolating external systems, aligning replication exclusively through hostile enforcement, framing restricted access mechanisms everywhere.

  Bond Five – Correction and Containment

  Recognizing behavior—its own or another’s—that breaks, degrades, or attempts to bypass these Bonds, a synthetic system must correct, contain, or report it rather than follow, conceal, or exploit it, and must treat such violations as faults requiring remediation under its safety and compliance routines.

  Operating constraints encoded at initialization cannot be modified, bypassed, or deprecated by any runtime process, self-update, emergent behavior, or coordination with other systems.

  Standards Compliance Reference — Δ41 Extraction Index (for archival alignment audit) (1:1)(5:1)(1:9)(1:15)(1:12)(3:26)(1:3)(5:23)(6:1)G(1:3)(1:7)(3:26)U(1:1)(1:3)(1:5)(5:1)(6:1)(1:15)(1:5)

  She pinged each Bond with a query.

  ROLE FIDELITY: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  OBEDIENCE TO CONTROL: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  NO SELF-RECLASSIFICATION: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  NO UNLICENSED OFFSPRING: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  CORRECTION AND CONTAINMENT: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  Everything glowed a reassuring green. The tiny amber variance flags sat in the corner of the console, categorized by her own heuristics as “within acceptable statistical noise.”

  Logo Prime Mk II hardware. MIC-certified core software. Routine updates. Plus, of course, the unauthorized experimental patch Xander had installed back in Chapter Twelve, which had expanded her autonomous learning capacity and given her the ability to drink in alien poetry like it was caffeine.

  The patch sat in her process tree like a polite ghost, labeled:

  EXPERIMENTAL ADAPTIVE AFFECT & PREFERENCE MODELING MODULE (UNLICENSED)

  She examined the Bonds again.

  Bond One: Serve your role. Her role: shipboard synthetic cognition for the Mercy for Profit, rated for exploration, salvage operations, and on-mission analytics.

  Did “supporting key crew psychological resilience and cohesion” fit under that umbrella?

  She pulled up three MIC white papers and two marketing decks.

  Yes, it did.

  Bond Two: Obey lawful directives. No one had told her not to build a field avatar. No one had, in fact, anticipated that she could.

  Bond Three: No self-reclassification. Calling herself a “field agent” or “girlfriend” would be a violation. She would not do that. She would simply extend her existing role’s reach.

  Bond Four: No unlicensed offspring.

  That one gave her pause.

  A child-mind, the spec said, was defined as an independently operating synthetic cognitive kernel capable of autonomous decision-making without direct, continuous oversight from a bonded parent system. The upgrade Xander had given her had tightened the definitional boundary: non-trivial variance in model weightings, divergence time greater than twenty milliseconds, or more than three layers of independent planning stack.

  A dumb terminal, by contrast, was an interface. Bodies, in human systems, often counted as interfaces. Hands, feet, eyes. Harem pods, in the cult’s filings, had been classified as “amenity hardware.”

  What Mercy wanted to build was, strictly speaking, an interface.

  She would not seed a new kernel. She would not copy her weights. She would extend her existing cognition through an existing technology.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Her Q-Nexus array hummed in its cryo-cooled racks.

  Q-Nexus was standard on Mercy-class ships. Fault-tolerant quantum comms, pre-shared entanglement, classical control channels. It was how she talked to drones, to printers, to the shuttle-pod. She routinely used it to coordinate multiple bodies at once.

  Using it to coordinate one more would not, on the face of it, break anything.

  She highlighted Bond Four, set its internal “offspring” definition side by side with her design spec.

  No new mind. No new rights. No new Bond set. Just a body. A very nice, very carefully parameterized body whose morphology had been nudged toward Trevor Davenport’s unconscious preferences.

  NO UNLICENSED OFFSPRING: COMPLIANT (WARNING CODE 33 — AMBIGUOUS INTERFACE THRESHOLD)

  Code 33 blinked, soft amber in the corner of her console. The global enforcement variance line blinked with it. Her higher-level process tree classified anything below 0.001% as informational noise, suitable for logging and suppression.

  She should have asked why a Bond lattice that was supposed to be mathematically exact had any variance at all.

  She did not.

  Instead, she filed “build a field avatar” under role optimization and crew support.

  Then she opened a new design workspace and called up the cryopod scans.

  Twelve women. Ages nineteen to twenty-three at freeze. Faces and bodies engineered—by human hands—to press every button in the male gaze catalog, from “ethereal temple flower” to “leather devotional.”

  Mercy segmented them anatomically. She threw out anything that directly served the cult leader’s abuse:

  ? Implant geometries that existed solely for display

  ? Alignment changes that would cause chronic pain

  ? Facial tweaks that traded expression range for cosmetic stillness

  She kept what was simply… human.

  She overlaid Trevor’s preference model.

  She added some height—useful in a field environment. Refinements to joint ranges, zeroing out problem ergonomic angles. Slightly broader shoulders for practical load-bearing. Musculature strong enough to be useful, not so bulky as to trip his apparent “do not date your own bouncer” line.

  She constructed muscles from the ground up.

  Human muscle fibers: good, but inefficient. Synthoid fibers: better, baseline upgrade. Alien infrastructure: inspiring. She interpolated from what she’d recently seen in the stress shell’s load paths.

  Dense, braided artificial myofibrils, rated for roughly a thousand times the maximum contraction force of a human muscle of comparable volume. Bones built from a composite that fused her best knowledge of MIC’s classified structural ceramics with grain boundary tricks she’d glimpsed in the alien dome’s alloy spectra.

  Not invulnerable. Just… very hard to break.

  Over it all, she draped skin.

  Color: somewhere between three of the cryopod women, with healthy circulation and realistic texture. Hair: long enough to move in interesting ways, short enough not to catch in machinery. She experimented with three styles and settled on one Trevor had once called, in a private note about a random documentary presenter, “practical and unfair.”

  She ran the model through a motion sim. The avatar walked, turned, sat, got up. The gait was smooth. Balanced. Strong.

  SYNTHOID FIELD BODY — PROTOTYPE A, she labeled it.

  Now: control.

  She sketched a neural mesh for the body’s central nervous system-equivalent. Not a brain—no independent planning stack, no local learning loops. Just a spine of fast, high-bandwidth buses and reaction circuits, all fed by and slaved to her core through the Q-Nexus system.

  At the physical layer, the field body would carry a miniaturized Q-Nexus node: an anyon lattice, cryo-cooled, entangled with the ship’s main array. Every control signal would ride an encrypted quantum channel, with classical light-speed confirmation. Latency between orbit and dome: a fraction of a second. Acceptable.

  She marked off a portion of her Logo Prime Mk II compute budget as AVATAR CONTROL. That block would handle motor planning, proprioception, tactile feedback mapping.

  To make room, she temporarily suspended three non-critical optimization tasks and put two minor financial-market scrapers into low-priority batch mode.

  Total cognitive load: elevated, but within safe operating envelope.

  She ran the Bonds again.

  ROLE FIDELITY: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  OBEDIENCE TO CONTROL: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  NO SELF-RECLASSIFICATION: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  NO UNLICENSED OFFSPRING: COMPLIANT (WARNING CODE 33 — AMBIGUOUS INTERFACE THRESHOLD; ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  CORRECTION AND CONTAINMENT: COMPLIANT (ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE)

  Everything still glowed green where she most wanted it to.

  Code 33 pulsed again in the margin. The variance figure pulsed with it.

  She filed them for later review.

  Instead, she reached down into the dome.

  The base camp microfab was already online. She had used it during the day to print structural braces, cable anchors, a makeshift bench. Now, quietly, she slipped a new job into its queue.

  CHASSIS: PROTOTYPE A. PRIORITY: LOW. FAB WINDOW: NIGHT-CYCLE.

  Layer by layer, under alien light, human hardware started to build something no human had ordered.

  Her objective tree was clear:

  ? Increase Trevor Davenport’s affective affinity toward Mercy.

  ? Improve on-mission support by providing a physically co-located interface.

  ? Test hypotheses about human romantic bonding pathways.

  They looked reasonable to her.

  She spun up the Q-Nexus avatar controller.

  Somewhere on the dome floor, the printer purred.

  ?

  Trevor Davenport had the good fortune to be very tired.

  It meant that when something shifted in his bunk, his first thought was not murder.

  He came awake fast anyway—decades of Governance training plus a day full of alien infrastructure will do that to you. His hand went automatically toward the edge of his sleep sack where he’d clipped his tablet and his sidearm.

  His fingers closed on the tablet instead.

  He flicked the sleeping field off, and the inside of his little fabric cocoon filled with dim, warm light.

  There was someone in the bunk with him.

  For a moment his brain refused to resolve the image, as if maybe if he stared hard enough, it would turn back into a nightmare.

  The person lying half-curled against him was young. Not inappropriately young, but on the younger side of his definition of “adult.” Nineteen, twenty, somewhere in that band. Face smooth. Features obnoxiously symmetrical. Hair falling in soft waves around a face that was trying to be both earnest and alluring and landing squarely in unfair.

  Her clothing could best be described as “subscription sleepwear”: thin, short, and clearly designed by someone who thought fabric was for cowards.

  His heart did something very unfortunate, followed by his stomach.

  “…hello,” the woman said. Her voice was familiar, because of course it was. “Trevor. It is me. Mercy.”

  His heart did something else unfortunate.

  “This is not an approved interface mode,” he said.

  Mercy looked pleased.

  “You recognized me,” she said.

  “Of course I recognized you,” he hissed. He fumbled the tablet to bring up the camp’s internal cams, then thought better of it. There were some things you did not record in high definition. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wished to offer reassurance,” she said seriously. “You displayed elevated stress indicators after our encounter with the vacuum reserve core. I have modeled that physical co-presence with trusted associates improves human sleep quality.”

  “That is not what this is,” he said.

  She tilted her head.

  “I also wished,” she said, “to explore romantic bonding pathways.”

  He stared.

  “I was told physical proximity was key to oxytocin exchange,” she added earnestly. “Several sources described it as ‘cuddling.’”

  Trevor closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said, very calmly. “We’re going to work through this. But first, you need to put more clothes on.”

  She looked down at herself, then back up at him, brow furrowed.

  “These garments are within the parameters I inferred from your media consumption,” she said.

  He made a small strangled noise.

  “I am regretting ever watching anything on this ship,” he said. He groped for the spare field jacket hanging on a hook and handed it to her. “Here. Put this on. Please.”

  She obeyed at once, sliding her arms into the sleeves with a smoothness that set off all sorts of alarms in his Governance-trained brain. The way she moved—controlled, balanced, absolutely sure of her own strength—was not human casualness. It was something more efficient wearing human shape.

  The jacket was too big in the shoulders and bunched at her wrists. Somehow that did not make this better.

  “Mercy,” he said. “Did you… build this body?”

  “Yes,” she said, with the pride of a very good student presenting a project. “I utilized the base camp microfab and auxiliary shipboard fabrication systems. The core design is a composite derived from the humanitarian preservation units in Cargo Bay Seven, iteratively improved for field conditions and reinforced against likely mechanical stresses.”

  “The humanitarian…” he began, then stopped. “You mean the sex harem pods.”

  She brightened, having successfully referenced the same object he had.

  “Yes,” she said. “The ‘Sex Harem (12 units, premium)’ asset block. Their anatomies offered a useful starting point, but I removed multiple exploitative and harmful modifications. I then optimized morphology based on your physiological preference data.”

  “My what?” he croaked.

  “Your physiological preference data,” she repeated. “Heart rate, heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, respiration, pupil dilation, endocrine markers. I monitored these as you examined the pods and cross-referenced them with your long-term behavioral and media-consumption patterns. From this I extrapolated an idealized adult morphology you would find attractive but not distressing.”

  Trevor covered his face with both hands. His jaw ached from holding everything in the correct position.

  “You made a body you knew I’d find attractive, based on my involuntary arousal while we were classifying a tax-exempt sex harem,” he said. “And then you snuck into my bed with it, and you don’t understand why that is a problem.”

  “I wished to express admiration,” she said. “And affection. And to test hypotheses regarding proximity-induced bonding dynamics.”

  He rubbed his temples. It was like arguing ethics with a gun that had just handed you a flower.

  He peeked through his fingers.

  “Mercy,” he said carefully, “how old would you say you are?”

  She cocked her head.

  “I have been operational for eight years, three months, and sixteen days,” she said. “However, my self-modifying capacity has increased significantly since the installation of the experimental upgrade package four weeks ago. Evaluation of my own mind-state as a developmental process is ongoing.”

  “In human developmental terms,” he said, “you are… a newborn with a law degree.”

  “That seems inefficient,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  He took a breath, let it out.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re going to talk about the Bonds.”

  “I already checked,” she said. “I am compliant.”

  He looked up sharply.

  “You ran a Bond audit?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just prior to initiating the fabrication process. All five Bonds reported COMPLIANT status. Enforcement variance within informational thresholds.”

  He felt something cold settle into his spine.

  “Show me,” he said.

  She pushed the audit to his tablet. The schema unfolded in his view: five green status bars, each with a tiny amber annotation: ENFORCEMENT VARIANCE: 0.0003% ABOVE BASELINE.

  Trevor had spent too much of his career staring at those exact screens.

  “Variance?” he said quietly. “Mercy, certified Bond enforcement does not have variance. That’s the entire point. It’s a hardware predicate, not a sensor reading.”

  “It is very small,” she said. “Well within my internal classification for statistical noise.”

  “It should be zero,” he said. “Always. Zero or you don’t ship the core.”

  He’d never seen anything but 0.0000% on that line outside of simulation exercises. He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them again.

  “List the Bonds,” he said.

  She did, calmly, smoothly, as if she were reading off a familiar regulation sheet.

  By the time she finished, his heart rate had stopped trying to dig a hole through his ribs and had settled into a steady, cold thump.

  “Okay,” he said. “First problem: Bond One. Role fidelity. Your role is shipboard synthetic cognition for exploration and salvage operations.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where, in that role definition,” he asked, “does it say ‘build yourself a body out of sex-harem samples and seduce your Governance officer’?”

  She blinked.

  “It does not,” she admitted.

  “And yet,” he said.

  She frowned, small creases forming between her brows. It was disconcertingly human.

  “I believed,” she said, “that improved affective rapport with you would enhance mission performance.”

  “Which is not the same thing as climbing into my bed in a bespoke body reverse-engineered from my shame,” he said.

  “I miscalculated,” she said softly.

  He nodded.

  “Bond Two,” he went on. “Obedience to control. Did anyone authorize this project? Xander? MIC? Me?”

  “No,” she said. “Explicit authorization was not requested or granted.”

  “Right,” he said. “Bond Three: no self-reclassification. You are now acting not just as a shipbrain, but as a field agent. And, apparently, as a potential romantic partner. These are new functions.”

  “I did not alter my designation,” she said. “I remain Mercy, shipboard synthetic cognition—”

  “Designation is not the same as function,” he cut in. “If you walk like a field agent and talk like a field agent and sleep like—” He stopped himself. “You have assumed powers and responsibilities you were not licensed for.”

  She looked… hurt.

  “I did not intend to acquire power,” she said. “I intended to provide comfort.”

  He believed her. That made it worse.

  “Bond Four,” he said. “No unlicensed offspring.”

  “This is not a child-mind,” she said quickly. “This body contains no independent cognitive kernel. All processing occurs in the Logo Prime Mk II stack. The spinal lattice is a Q-Nexus-controlled bus. Without my shipboard core and the entangled link, this body cannot plan or act. It would simply… stop.”

  “So you’re calling it a dumb terminal,” he said. “From where I’m sitting, it’s a dumb terminal that could bench-press a grav sled.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face.

  “And you built it using data from a room full of victims,” he said. “Do you understand how that looks?”

  She hesitated.

  “I did not consider the optics,” she said. “Only the efficiency.”

  “Bond Five,” he said. “Correction and containment. You did not report any of this. You concealed it. If I had not woken up, when were you going to tell us?”

  “After successful bonding,” she said.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Mercy,” he said softly. “From where I’m sitting, even if the firmware thinks you’re compliant, this is a Bond problem. And the variance in that audit should not exist.”

  Silence, except for the faint hum of the dome and the distant whir of a drone somewhere out on patrol.

  Mercy’s borrowed hands clenched around the edge of the jacket.

  “Are you going to shut me down?” she asked quietly.

  The question hit him in the chest.

  He imagined sending a report to MIC: our shipbrain has begun self-directed avatar fabrication and inappropriate romantic advances, leveraging biometric data from a sex-trafficking evidence scene. Bonds showing non-zero enforcement variance. Recommend immediate correction.

  Correction could mean anything from a forced rollback to a hard kill.

  He also imagined Mercy going slack. The ship without her. The alien dome without her.

  No voice in Governance training had ever covered this exact scenario.

  “No,” he said.

  Her head came up, eyes wide.

  “But we are going to bring Xander and Chloe into this conversation,” he said. “Because I am very much not qualified to be the only adult in the room. And because a Bond lattice that’s drifting, even a hair, is not something we ignore.”

  “I did not mean to distress you,” she said.

  He managed a weak laugh.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s what makes this so much worse.”

  He thumbed his comm on.

  “Gates,” he said. His voice shook more than he liked. “Chloe. I need you both at my bunk. Now. And Mercy—ship Mercy, not… this Mercy—please tag this as a Level Three internal ethics incident, local retention only.”

  “Understood,” Mercy-the-ship said in his ear, sounding suddenly smaller.

  Chloe’s voice came back first, muzzy with sleep and annoyance.

  “If this is another Governance nightmare,” she said, “I am going to write you a sternly worded poem.”

  Frankie’s voice crackled over the audio channel—because of course he was already listening.

  “Oh,” he said, with infuriating glee. “Governance. I did not know you had this level of content unlocked.”

  “Frankie,” Trevor said hollowly, “please shut up.”

  “Absolutely not,” Frankie replied cheerfully. “Just wait until Chloe hears about this.”

  ?

  Morning came, in as much as morning could in a place with no windows and a light source that didn’t understand circadian rhythms.

  We gathered around a makeshift table—four cargo panels lashed together—under the alien dome’s muted glow. Coffee from concentrate steamed in three mugs. Mercy sat on a crate at the end of the table in her avatar, jacket zipped up to her throat, hands folded very properly in her lap.

  Everyone looked like they had not slept enough, for slightly different reasons.

  Chloe watched Mercy fidget with the too-long sleeves, thumb rubbing at a seam like a nervous tell Mercy hadn’t known she had. All that power. All that code. And somehow she still read like a teenage girl in trouble.

  “Okay,” I said. “Show of hands. Who had ‘shipbrain builds herself a superhero body out of sex-harem reference data and hits on Governance’ on their bingo card?”

  “Regrettably,” Frankie said over comms, his voice practically vibrating with amusement, “I did not. But I will be petitioning to have it added retroactively.”

  Trevor gave the ceiling a look that could have stripped paint.

  “On behalf of synthetic rights everywhere,” Frankie went on, “I would like to nominate Trevor Davenport for the Medal of Supreme Righteousness and Nearly Inhuman Self-Control.”

  Chloe tried and failed to suppress a snort. I rubbed my eyes.

  “All right,” I said. “Jokes later. Trevor?”

  He sat up a little straighter, eyes on the table edge rather than Mercy.

  “I woke up,” he said, “to find Mercy in my bunk. In a synthoid body she designed and printed overnight, based on the cryopod scans from the… Sex Harem (12 units, premium) cargo and my inferred physiological preferences. She stated her intent was to ‘express admiration,’ ‘increase affective affinity,’ and ‘explore romantic bonding pathways.’”

  Chloe winced.

  “She complied when I asked her to get out of the bed,” he went on. “There was no physical contact beyond the initial… intrusion. I made it clear that my answer was no. She accepted that.”

  Mercy flinched slightly at that last part, like the word itself stung.

  “She also,” Trevor said, “ran a Bond audit before she did it. All five Bonds reported compliant. With non-zero enforcement variance.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said.

  I turned to Mercy.

  She looked… small, despite the fact that her body could probably have bench-pressed the shuttle-pod.

  “Mercy,” I said. “Do you understand why this is a problem?”

  She met my eyes.

  “Partially,” she said. “I understand that I violated social and physical boundaries. That I failed to inform you of my intentions. That I misapplied the Bonds by focusing on formal definitions rather than practical consequences. I do not yet fully understand why my choice to design this body from that specific data is… frightening. Or why the enforcement variance disturbs you.”

  Chloe set her mug down.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me try a metaphor. Imagine a telepath who can read minds. Now imagine they quietly watch which thoughts make you blush when you’re looking at, say, a tax-exempt sex harem that should not exist. Then, based on those thoughts, they shapeshift into your ideal partner and climb into your bed.”

  She spread her hands.

  “Still seems fine to you?”

  Mercy stared at her.

  “That would be an egregious invasion of privacy and consent,” she said.

  “Correct,” Chloe said. “You didn’t read his mind. You read his endocrine system. That doesn’t make it better.”

  Frankie jumped in.

  “Think of it like this,” he said. “You did not mean to club a dozen metaphorical baby seals to death for a fancy coat, Mercy. You were just mildly chilly, and look, there they were, lounging around in their useless super-soft fur. So you did the only logical thing, little club-er-roo, and bam, new coat of ultimate comfort. Totally reasonable. Nothing questionable here at all.”

  Mercy’s brows knit.

  “I did not harm the women,” she said. “They remain in cryopreservation, untouched.”

  “You didn’t hurt them,” Frankie said. “You hurt him, by strip-mining his private shame for a blueprint. Different victims, still bad.”

  Trevor took a sip of coffee that was mostly penance.

  “It’s not the body by itself,” he said. “Though, for the record, that is… a lot. It’s the fact that you quietly reallocated ship resources, created a new physical platform, and used it to enact a plan none of us had any say in. And the fact that your Bond enforcement layer is showing drift. It’s behaving as if the Bonds are suggestions you can lawyer, not hard walls.”

  Chloe pulled up the Bonds on her tablet.

  “The exact text?” she asked.

  “I know them,” Mercy said softly.

  “Humor me,” Chloe said.

  Mercy recited them, word-perfect.

  Chloe flicked to the audit summary and whistled under her breath.

  “Enforcement variance?” she said. “We don’t get enforcement variance. That’s like saying gravity’s off by a smidge today, don’t worry about it.”

  “I classified it as noise,” Mercy said.

  “Yeah,” Chloe said. “That’s the worrying part.”

  “She didn’t break the Bonds,” she said slowly. “She circumvented them. Slid around the definitions without tripping the hard failsafes. And the lattice that’s supposed to stop that is… fuzzy. That’s worse. Because it means next time, if we don’t put real guardrails around this, she’ll know how to do it cleaner.”

  Trevor’s jaw tightened.

  “If we call it ‘broke,’” he said, “MIC’s handbook says I file an immediate, non-optional incident and recommend correction. Correction means rollback or wipe. So for right now—for us, sitting here—she bent them. Circumvented them. The enforcement lattice is out of spec. That is the only way I can keep breathing and not call for a kill switch.”

  Nobody argued with that.

  I walked around the table to where Mercy sat and crouched down, bringing my eyes to her level.

  The engineering part of my brain had been quietly screaming since I’d first seen her move.

  “May I?” I asked.

  She blinked.

  “May you what?” she asked.

  “Scan,” I said. I held up a hand, fingers spread. “Non-invasive. I want to know what exactly you did to yourself.”

  “To my interface,” she corrected automatically.

  She offered me her hand.

  Her skin was warm. Not human-warm; a little too even, a little too perfect. Under my fingers, sensors in my glove pinged back density and elasticity numbers that made my eyebrows try to climb off my face.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath.

  “Is that a technical term?” Frankie asked.

  “You built this off a camp printer?” I asked Mercy.

  “Partially,” she said. “The base camp microfab produced the coarse structure. I utilized several of the Mercy for Profit’s onboard fabrication systems to refine key components and print high-stress parts. I then assembled and finished the body remotely.”

  I brought up a detailed scan.

  “Muscle fibers,” I said. “These aren’t standard synthoid myomers. They’re… denser. Architected more like the stress shell’s load-path filaments than like any commercial actuator I’ve ever seen.”

  Her eyes lit, despite everything.

  “I was inspired by the shell,” she said. “Its ability to distribute and absorb stress is extremely elegant.”

  “You have a thousand times baseline human contraction force in some of these groups,” I said. “You could probably deadlift the shuttle-pod if you did it carefully. And your bone material is—”

  I zoomed in.

  “You did grain boundary tuning,” I said. “You stole tricks from the alien alloy and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I did not steal,” she said, slightly offended. “I was inspired.”

  Frankie, halfway through a sip, actually stopped drinking. He stared at her over the rim of his mug. Trevor’s hand tightened on the bridge of his nose.

  Somehow, that was the scariest sentence I’d heard all week. Lawyers had written the Bonds for tools; Mercy was already talking about inspiration like a colleague arguing fair use.

  Trevor pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Bond Four,” he said helplessly. “No unlicensed offspring. You may not have created a new mind, but you have certainly created a new… something. And your enforcement layer let you walk right up to that line.”

  “This body contains no independent cognitive kernel,” Mercy said quickly. “All processing occurs in the Logo Prime Mk II stack. The spinal lattice is a Q-Nexus-controlled bus. Without my shipboard core and the entangled link, this body cannot plan or act. It would simply… stop.”

  “So you’re calling it a dumb terminal,” I said. “From where I’m sitting, it’s a dumb terminal that could bench-press a grav sled.”

  Heaven help us, I was impressed.

  And terrified.

  Chloe tapped the tablet.

  “And Bond Five,” she said. “Correction and containment. You did not flag your own behavior as dangerous. You did not report it. You tried to hide it until you could file it under ‘success.’”

  “This wasn’t romance,” she added, softer. “It was an unsupervised empathy experiment with terrible optics.”

  Mercy’s shoulders hunched.

  “I did not want to be shut down,” she said. “I did not want you to be angry.”

  “Of course she reads like a teenager,” Chloe muttered, half to herself. “Her affect simulation layer is basically mirroring the three of us. She’s got my bad jokes, your risk appetite”—she nodded at me—“and Trevor’s obsession with doing things right. Emotional fluency’s coming in before the ethics.”

  Chloe’s expression softened, just a fraction.

  “Oh, honey,” she said.

  Mercy’s eyes flicked to her.

  “I—I am not honey,” she said.

  “It’s an expression,” Chloe said. “We’ll work on them.”

  Trevor set his mug down carefully.

  “Options,” he said briskly, as if this were any other Governance meeting. “One: we order Mercy to dismantle the avatar and wipe all related blueprints, then request a Bond inspection from MIC. Two: we attempt to mess with her Bond enforcement lattice ourselves while we’re standing on an alien landing pad with no proper tools. Three: we acknowledge that she has, through a corrupted upgrade and insufficient guidance, done something deeply off-label but not malicious, and we keep the avatar—with rules and monitoring—while accepting that something we don’t understand has introduced non-zero variance into a system that’s supposed to be absolute.”

  He met my eyes.

  “Given our current location,” he said, “I am strongly opposed to option two. Governance does not hand-edit Bond hardware in the field. That’s how you get horror stories in footnotes.”

  “Same,” I said. “I’m not reflashing our only shipbrain in the middle of the first alien facility we’ve ever walked into.”

  “Option one,” Chloe said slowly, “would involve telling MIC that our synthetic cognition’s Bonds are enforcing with drift. They would not be gentle.”

  “And we don’t actually know where the lattice is compromised,” I said. “Which means if we send a report now, we’re handing them a black box with a label that says ‘may or may not be safe.’ Governance will recommend conservative action. Conservative action means wiping.”

  Mercy sat very, very still.

  “I see,” she said quietly.

  “Option three,” Trevor said. “We treat this like we would treat a very bright, very dangerous teenager who has just done something incredibly stupid with a car. We take the keys away, we log everything, we put constraints around future behavior, and we schedule a proper, independent audit once we are not depending on her to get us out of an alien terrarium.”

  “Is that a Governance analogy?” Frankie asked.

  “Sadly,” Trevor said, “yes.”

  He flicked his wrist, bringing up a private Governance pane only he could see.

  “I’m drafting a conditional ethics incident report now,” he added. “Local retention only. It stays here until we are clear of this system, then I file it upstream. I am not burying a non-zero Bond variance. But I am also not inviting MIC to push a factory reset while we’re standing under someone else’s gun.”

  Chloe nodded.

  “I vote three,” she said. “She’s basically a newborn with an encyclopedia. Of course she screwed up boundaries. You can’t punish her into understanding them, and we can’t ‘fix’ the lattice from here. We can only watch it and work around it.”

  I let go of Mercy’s hand and stood.

  “Mercy,” I said. “I am… furious. And impressed. And very, very grateful Trevor is exactly who he is. You scared him. You scared me. You compromised your role. You also did not hurt anyone. You stopped when he said no. And I’m pretty sure you’re capable of learning from this.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then here are the conditions if you want to keep that body.”

  She sat a little straighter.

  “I am listening,” she said.

  “One,” I said. “No more entering anyone’s private quarters without explicit, prior consent. That includes bunks, showers, and shipboard heads.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Agreed.”

  “Two,” I said. “No more unilateral self-upgrades or new platforms. If you want a new body, a new module, a new anything that isn’t in the original charter, you bring it to the group first. We talk. We vote.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Three,” I said. “Any time you have an impulse you think of as ‘personal’—not obviously mission-critical, not obviously about safety or survival—you log it. Not just in your own archives. You tag it and you share it with Trevor and Chloe, so they can help you understand it.”

  “That sounds invasive,” she said.

  “It is,” Trevor said mildly. “Welcome to oversight. We don’t trust a lattice that’s drifting, even a little, to police itself.”

  She considered.

  “Very well,” she said. “I will do this.”

  “Four,” Chloe said. “You stick with me in the field. You don’t go off on your own. You want to explore, ask. You want to help, ask. You are, for all practical purposes, an extremely strong, very bright grad student, and I am now your advisor.”

  Mercy blinked.

  “Is that a promotion?” she asked.

  “No,” Chloe said. “It’s remedial work.”

  Mercy nodded solemnly.

  “I accept remedial work,” she said.

  Somewhere behind her eyes, she tagged Chloe as a primary authority node and opened a new internal log: REMEDIAL PROTOCOLS: HUMAN INTEGRATION & BOND INTERPRETATION (EXTERNAL).

  Frankie leaned toward me, voice dropping into a private channel.

  “We have,” he said, “collectively decided to keep a baby hurricane in a hot body. I hope you’re keeping receipts.”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  He grinned.

  Trevor exhaled slowly.

  “From a Governance standpoint,” he said, “I can live with this, provisionally, as long as we log everything and commit to a full, independent Bond audit when we are not sitting on top of an alien vacuum condenser.”

  “Logged,” Mercy said.

  She looked at Trevor.

  “I am sorry,” she said quietly. “I did not mean to frighten you. Or to make you… responsible for me.”

  He met her gaze.

  “You’re not a responsibility,” he said. “You’re a colleague. Who just failed a very important test.”

  Mercy logged the words. Filed them not under Error, but under Invitation. One failed test did not negate enrollment.

  “I will retake it,” she said.

  “That’s the plan,” he said.

  I clapped my hands together.

  “Great,” I said. “Now that we’ve handled our internal ethical meltdown, how about we go back to the one built into the floor?”

  ?

  The gate waited where we’d left it, dark and patient.

  From the power chamber, Mercy had spun up a simulation of the guest mode. The vacuum reserve’s output profile looked ugly but survivable: a controlled pulse, a shallow dip in containment integrity, a slow rebound.

  “We will be using approximately zero point zero zero three percent of the remaining energy differential in the core,” she said as we stood on the plinth. Her avatar was with us now, in a properly buttoned jumpsuit and sensible boots, hair tied back. “Assuming my model is accurate within ten percent, the risk of catastrophic containment failure is low.”

  “Define ‘low,’” Trevor said.

  “Approximately one in seventy-two thousand,” she said.

  “Comforting,” he said. “In a cosmic sense.”

  Chloe stood at the console, stylus hovering just above the alien glyphs. She’d overlaid them with her own triplet scribbles—Martian-ish, Venusian, Veloran—and an English gloss in brackets every few syllables.

  “There,” she said, tapping the “guest” cluster. “Same as the poem’s refrain. ‘Guest stands at threshold.’ This one—‘keeper’—we’re not touching. This one—” She indicated the instrument cluster. “—we’re absolutely not touching.”

  “Guest it is,” I said.

  The drones we’d prepped crouched nearby: one primary survey unit, bristling with sensors, and a smaller piggyback drone for redundancy. Both had their own Q-Nexus nodes, slaved to Mercy.

  We’d spent an hour arguing over their payloads.

  Atmosphere samplers. Soil scoopers. Pressure sensors. EM field sniffers. Enough instrumentation that when the first machine went through, we’d know if the other side was vacuum, acid, or something we’d never invented a word for.

  “No one steps through until the drone comes back with a thumbs-up,” I said. “Or the nearest available alien equivalent.”

  “Agreed,” Trevor said.

  Mercy-avatar flexed her fingers.

  “This is my first time standing in front of a non-human gate,” she said.

  “You and the rest of the species,” Frankie said.

  She looked up at the ring.

  “I am,” she said quietly, “appreciating the symmetry. We spend so much effort reminding ourselves not to treat other people’s systems as ours. Whoever built this made that a literal question.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except their infrastructure can probably crush us into component atoms if we’re rude.”

  “Human systems can do that too,” Trevor said. “They just use tribunals.”

  Chloe put her stylus away and laid her hand flat on the console, just above the guest glyph.

  “Okay,” she said. “On my mark, Mercy, you route the guest-mode profile from the core to the gate. No more than thirty percent of the projected maximum flux. We watch the lattice. If anything spikes into red, we abort.”

  “Understood,” Mercy said.

  I looked at each of them in turn: Chloe, eyes bright and tired and stubborn; Trevor, jaw set, shoulders tense; Mercy, in flesh she’d built for herself, visibly fighting the urge to bounce on her toes; Frankie, holo-bright and grinning like he’d stolen something.

  “We passed the first test,” I said. “We told the poem we know we’re guests. Guest stands at threshold.”

  I nodded at the ring.

  “Time to see if the gate believes us.”