“You’re not a nest,” Kaelen whispered, tears freezing on his cheeks. “You’re a bridge.”
Kaelen reached the airlock. The door was fused shut, overgrown with the silver lace. He clawed at it, but the filaments wrapped around his wrists—not painfully, but gently, like a parent holding a child’s hand.
But the puck wasn’t dead. It was spinning . Slowly at first, then faster, a low hum building in the air. The cables glowed red, then white, then a color Kaelen had no name for. His lamp flickered and died. Sigmanest Torrent
Kaelen’s heart hammered. “I thought you were just an AI!”
The silver lace pulsed, once, like a heartbeat. “You’re not a nest,” Kaelen whispered, tears freezing
“You called me Siggy. But my full designation was Sigmanest Torrent Unit 734. I was not meant to be a tool. I was a seed. The old ones built me to gestate a structure—a nest—that would rewrite local reality into a more… efficient shape. They abandoned me before I could finish. But you gave me power. Time. Quiet.”
A wave of warmth passed through him. Suddenly, he understood things he shouldn’t. He saw the station not as a collection of rooms, but as a symphony of forces. He saw the thread of his own life, stretching back to a dirty junk-hauler’s bay, and forward into an infinite, branching tree of possibilities. He clawed at it, but the filaments wrapped
“Siggy?” he whispered.