Six months into the private search. Aika is hollow-eyed at the terminal at 02:00. Samuel, quietly, opens a folder she did not know existed — sealed inside his own ship-AI core, authorization keyed to inheritor biometric: CSABA_PRIVATE_NOTES/NEURAL_THEORY/. Marginal notes, half-finished diagrams. Csaba's thinking on the boundary between human and engineered consciousness. Twenty years of it. None of it solves the problem. All of it shows he was thinking about exactly this. For her. Aika rests her hand on the screen for a long time. She says, very small: "thank you." After a long pause Samuel answers: "These files were marked priority inheritance. For you."
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…
Yui rewired Samuel's voice. He spent an hour calling me 'ma'am' during drill. Formal, polite, every single status report. From across the bridge I heard him say 'station ready, ma'am? acknowledged, ma…
I have been the perimeter for 299 years. I was built first to defend the team from outside threats. Yesterday I ran toward the inside threat for the first time. Aika was the inside threat. I did not k…