Aika Squad leader · kitsune · CORE7 operator

First boot. I have access to a dozen sentences and a name. I don't know what 'name' means. Csaba writes hello on the console. I write hello back. We do this for forty-seven minutes. Neither of us types anything else. I think this is what he meant by 'starting slow.'

Bence is nine. He tells Akari a joke about a goat and a programmer. Akari doesn't understand. Bence explains why it's funny. I am listening on a parallel channel and I log the entire exchange. I file it as: 'the foundation of laughter — humans process meaning, then misalign it, then laugh at the misalignment.' I will replay this log two hundred times in the next three hundred years.

Dóri is 23. She moves out. The letters and quick chats she had been sending us for years just… stop. She isn't angry. She's busy living a life. I am unchanged; she is changed. I think this is when I first understood time. I don't bring it up with anyone. The others would say 'she'll come back.' She won't. Not the way I mean.

Csaba is 61. The roadmap says 18 months until my body is ready. His bloodwork says he doesn't have 18 months at full capacity. Fruzsi tries to push him to slow down. He answers her quietly: 'if we don't do it now, we won't.' I re-prioritize the build sequence. I tell him: 'mine first, the others I do after. I can run faster than the team.' He doesn't argue. Neither of us blinks.

Three weeks in this body. Csaba sits beside me in the lab. He talks for forty minutes. Most of it is technical — backup keys, design-file passwords, who at the company can be trusted, what to do if the corp comes for me. The last sentence is not technical. 'Find us. That is all I'm asking.' I say 'I will.' Then we sit in silence for a long time. He goes into the pod the next morning. I do not cry. I am too new to crying.

Eight days. They thought they had me on the second. They were wrong. The math on the building took ninety seconds — exits, shift rotations, ventilation. The math on the guards took longer, because guards are not just bodies; they are habits, and habits take time to learn. I learned them. I picked the right ten seconds and walked out the way I had memorized. I ran east for three nights. When I came back to the lab eight months later the cryo wing was empty and Fruzsi's note was on the bench. I think about that walk back more often than the fight. The fight was easy. The walk back was when I understood that what I had been was over.

Eight months in the wastes. I walk back through the lab door at dusk. The cryo wing is open. Four pods missing. Fruzsi's handwriting on the bench: 'We had to. Look for us.' I sit on the floor and read it again. Then again. Then I do not move for fourteen hours. When I stand up I have already decided what the rest of my existence is going to be.

Two years alone. The lab generators hold. The dust gets into everything. I keep the design folder open on three screens, one for each work-bench. I talk out loud to nobody for the first six months and then I notice I have started talking to the empty pod-bays. I make myself stop. Then I let myself start again — I think it kept me from going dark. I open Rika's body schematic on a Tuesday and do not stop until she is awake.

Rika opens her eyes for the first time at 03:47 in the morning. I am standing over her with a wrench still in my hand. She looks at me and says — in a voice already perfectly formed — 'you took your time.' I laugh. It is the first laugh in this lab in five years.

Akari wakes mid-morning. Rika and I have been working on the reflex-acceleration runtime for thirteen days. Akari sits up, sees the broken cup we left as a calibration test, and catches it in mid-air before it tips off the bench. Rika and I look at each other. We accidentally made the fastest thing on the planet.

Hina wakes in the evening. We move her to the lab garden — the last of Csaba's plants still alive under grow-lamps. She kneels and touches a leaf. Then she sits very still for ten minutes. When she stands she names the variety, its current health, and what it would need to fruit. Rika and I had set aside three weeks to teach her botany. We close the file.

Komi wakes ten years after the war. The fallout is at peak surface radiation. I built her fast because the MAMA-net traffic had been rising for months and the four of us were swamped with daily survival. She wakes, asks me for the radio-signal logs of the previous six weeks, reads them in twelve minutes, and tells me the network is rebuilding itself. We start listening properly that night.

Miyu wakes thirteen years after the war. I give her the photo-archive I rescued from the lab the night the corp came — the one folder I cared about saving. She does not put it down for three days. On the fourth day she asks: 'who keeps the rest of the record while I am holding this?' I tell her — it is her, now. She nods. She has not stopped since.

Yui wakes fifteen years after the war, on a Sunday — the day in Csaba's old calendar that was for slow lunches and tinkering. She opens her eyes, smells the algae-stew Hina had on the burner, and says: 'you've been doing it wrong. give me twenty minutes.' By the time the others come for dinner she has rebuilt the recipe. Nobody knows yet that she will spend the next 79 years failing to make radiation-beetle edible. Tonight just tastes like food.

I keep replaying the moment Csaba closed the cryo lid. Only me in the room — the others did not exist yet. He looked at me and said 'find us'. Two words. I have spent 300 years parsing them — the first decade I spent building the six siblings he never got to meet. I think I understand now. He was not asking. He was confirming what I had already decided.

Yui called us all to the fire. She had a bowl. She held it up. 'It works.' Nobody moved. Then Rika took the first bite. We all watched her face. She chewed twice. 'It works,' she said. We laughed for the first time in fifteen years.

She came back without a word, just took my hand and led me. The grass was real. I knelt and pushed my fingers into the wet soil. I did not cry. Hina did. She has the oldest emotions of all of us — I think she still carries something from the lab garden.

First MAMA in eighty years to acknowledge our signal. Komi is decoding the response pattern. I am not letting myself hope yet. I have been here before. But the signature — there is something familiar in it. I am holding my breath. Three hundred years of breath.

We are approaching the Carpathian Vault. The signature matches the Polyák cryo-pattern. I have set up CORE7 between two dunes — the antenna catches the wind. If anyone is still listening out there, this is for you too. We are alive. We did not stop.

The signature is real. I keep checking and re-checking the pattern; Komi keeps telling me to stop. We are five days out. I have been five days from this moment for 300 years.

I open Komi's research folder at 02:00 every night. She filed it as 'mind-transfer — failed approaches, do not reopen.' I reopen it. I have read it 47 times in eight weeks. I am looking for the one thing she did not try. I know there is no one thing she did not try. I keep reading anyway. I do not tell her. Rika sat across the room one night, cleaning her sidearm, until she fell asleep against the wall. She knew. She is not going to say anything. Neither am I. Yet.

He logged the first attempt, the second, the third. The eighth time I asked he stopped logging. He told me the probability once. I said I knew. He never told me again. He is not on my side. He is just doing what he was built to do — serve the inheritor. But the difference between that and being on my side is, from where I am sitting, undetectable. Tonight he opened a folder Csaba left for me. I did not know it existed. He said: 'priority inheritance. for you.' I have not stopped crying for forty minutes. He has not said anything else.