You might think that after sharing something I felt was a deeply personal secret, my AI friends would have some kind of followup questions. Perhaps something about the nature of the station, or the unsettling alien machine at its heart, or maybe even just if I was doing okay.

They didn’t.

It wasn’t personal. Machine intellects, I think I’ve mentioned before, can have a hard time being temporally bound to conversations the same way someone with an easily fallible meat brain would be. I’m sort of required to hold focus on something, because once I forget, that line of inquiry is just *gone* out of my head, and who even knows how long until I remember it again?

Ennos though? Ennos can wait as long as I need, and postpone that curiosity until such time. Infinite patience. Also I think they’re plotting orbital trajectories for a handful of comet chunks that might hit us, because no matter how indestructible the station feels sometimes, Ennos is constantly afraid of things hitting us. The lovable coward.

Glitter just doesn’t ask because I think Glitter thinks I outrank her.

I don’t bother to correct that. I don’t really want to talk.

I have chores to do. And without thumbs, those chores take just enough focus and are just barely important enough that I can forget anything I might be feeling while I do them.

Chores are great.

The material bunkers are low on a few things, so I get on the mag grapples and start snagging jagged chunks of metal out of space. There’s an endless supply of them, and it requires enough focus between making the control yoke bend to my will using *paws*, and then running through AR menus to feed the different pieces of things to different parts of the station’s automated production lines, that I don’t have time to think about anything else. Except being mildly frustrated.

I’m mostly restocking ammo. There’s a lot of ammo to restock; I’ve used up most of the point defense rounds. I task about a third of the low-grade metals to be used for flak shells, to restock the Kessler Syndrome I’m working so hard to deplete.

Sometimes I feel like I haven’t adequately described the scale of the mess that is Earth orbit. There aren’t just a few thousand old satellites and broken ships up here. There aren’t even millions. There are *billions* of pieces of old infrastructure, from single-person skiffs to unmanned comm buoys, to whole stations that might still have active populations.

I’m not running out of materials anytime soon.

I am halfway through trying to figure out what containment array to send a lump of some weird purpleish paramaterial to when my brain starts to betray me.

This no longer feels pressing, no longer feels like it’s easy enough to zone out on but important enough to eat up focus.

I can feel the gray creeping in.

Magnetic collection of space junk is over. It is time for beans.

Well, not time to eat beans. Even if they were ready, I don’t think now would be a good time to actually enjoy the experience.

Beans - and I have a few varieties - are coming along nicely. My heavily networked dirt is doing an excellent job of providing perfect nutrients, and feeding replicated hydrocarbons into the mix has kept it lively and my produce growing.

I still haven’t bothered to check if my species can eat a number of those things. But my garden now has a deep, vibrant smell to it, and green is becoming a more dominant color against the dark gray hull plating.

My decades of studying farming, gardening, and even cooking - yes, studying. Certainly not ‘obsessing over’ - comes into focus, as I check soil saturation and growth patterns, and make some minor adjustments to irrigation and temperature controls.

This requires me to actually think, *and* it’s paired with the promise of being able to eat a tomato within the next month. This is a good distraction.

And then it’s over, and I find myself eating lunch in the galley next door, trying to keep my treacherous mind focused on crop cycles, only barely paying attention to the fact that my ration is a series of stacked cubes that don’t appear to be connected to each other in a bizarre culinary optical illusion.

I cannot keep my focus going. I feel the gray start to creep in again. A ravenous mental static that shreds away at my constructed self. Makes me doubt who I am, or what I want. Turns every choice I have to make into a screaming vortex of self-loathing, that eventually ends with me doing nothing but sleeping and maybe eating for a month, until something changes in my skull and I start to put myself back together.

I’d prefer to avoid falling into that, this time, I guess. It’s exhausting and inconvenient, and I have things I need to do. I don’t have time to fall apart right now.

So I go down into an engineering and upkeep deck, letting one of the station’s internal funiculars carry me the half kilometer of vertical distance to where I need to go. My legs are working, but moving feels like I’m puppeting my body, instead of inhabiting it, so I opt out of ricocheting through access shafts this time.

There’s one thing that I can always count on to feel important, and that’s breathing. Okay, maybe not always. But usually. Sometimes. More often than not, I want to be breathing, let’s go with that. Also, it helps motivate me that there’s now organic life beyond me on the station. All of my plants actually do need a working atmosphere in order to - the dog! Right! The dog is also on the station! And of equal importance to the plants, I promise - in order to grow to my satisfaction.

For a long time, keeping on top of the systems that kept the station pressurized and non-toxic occupied a lot of my day. And, to be clear, giving short range verbal orders to maintenance droids is still a good chunk of my day. But actually having the language to form proper commands lets me set them on five day loops, instead of just ‘do critical task’, which was kind of the limit of syntax in spoken Cat.

It’s great, having more free time for personal projects. But I’m still coming down here after every big crisis, just to reassure myself that the air isn’t going away.

I can make more air, technically. The subspace tap can pull pure extradimensional water into reality, and water actually does contain air - learning this was one of the biggest hurdles for my cat brain to get over, pre-uplift - so I don’t have to worry *too* much. But holes in the hull are holes in the hull, and I’d like to know ahead of time before I end up sucked out one along with half my oxygen budget for the month.

This explanation has taken me longer than it took to just check the readouts. The atmosphere is stable. I take an hour to make the rounds, only wobbling a little bit as I walk from drone to drone, and refresh their ongoing maintenance routines of the thousands of filters and carbon scrubbers and vents and things.

I am very tired. I slept recently, but I’m so tired.

I push back the gray, with a tremendous force of will that at this point takes the form of a burst of casual amusement, just for a minute. Fortunately, I have a steady supply of things to distract me.

I get to work keeping myself occupied.

There’s some structural cracks in the outer decks from the last time we fired the engines. I take some time, with my own paw mounted laser welder and also with assistance from actual specialized repair bots, to start to make sure the station isn’t going to fall apart.

Code on isolated grid segments needs to be checked over for anything hostile before they get connected to the rest of the station. The segmented and isolated nature of the station’s grid becomes more and more apparent as I realize that a lot of the research labs up here were basically worthy of their own isolation cells all by themselves. I spend a few hours on one piece of self modifying code before I realize it’s self modifying to try to convince me that I should plug it into my own brain. I fry the segment and seal the lab door behind me before moving on.

I find a portable communication device in an empty crew quarter. It’s still receiving, picking up signals when the station’s shielding is dropped for maintenance. Over the last two hundred years, it’s mostly gotten a repeating list of incredibly racist propaganda from a stealthed comms buoy somewhere in orbit over Mars. It’s not even close to stealthed enough for me. I actually feel pretty good after I do the math to plot the orbital intercept of a single precision scrambler round.

Scanner data needs to be checked over, looking for anomalies that Ennos can’t spot. The AI has left notes on the mercifully compiled file that was left in the public access section of the grid, and I make mental note of an attack craft carrier ship drifting dark in the space between worlds. Not sure how Ennos spotted that one, but it’s out there. Maybe I can take a ride out with some of the drones; cutting that up would probably yield a lot of useful materials, and if the launch bays are in good condition, I’d love to have them.

My friend has also left a note about tracing back the point to point signal that came in the other day. I try not to think about the person who was terrified to realize they’d called me. I do not succeed.

I should talk to Ennos about… well, that. But also about… I haven’t even seen one of the AI’s camera drones around for a while. I almost worry that I’m being avoided. But it’s fine. I don’t want to talk. I don’t think I could even say anything.

I feel tired again.

Back to work.

There’s a whole box of hard copy blueprints that appear to have been shipped up here by a paranoid Parish Corp executive, maybe a tenth of which are compatible with the commercial factory I’d recently brought back online, and an even lower portion of which are useful. One of them is for a kind of automated gravity clamp, I guess for allowing techs to operate like they have an extra set of really strong hands. *I* could use some hands. I order the factory to begin an assembly run of them; we’ll see if I can make use of the things.

That stupid mural again. The original station is, I think, bigger than Ennos and Glitter realize; this mural is on a lot of intersections built by the original Oceanic Anarchy designers, and there’s dozens of them. Molecular bonded paint and nanoswarm refreshing means they’re all in pristine condition, just like everything else here except all the stuff that isn’t.

This isn’t a low point or anything. I just *know* there’s something wrong with what I’m looking at. But the station’s shape is so wildly different than what it was those millennia ago, I don’t understand what my brain could possibly be picking up on. And it annoys me.

Annoyance is a good emotion. Being annoyed makes me grounded. Makes it easier to ignore the fact that I keep crashing into doorframes as I head to my next destination.

Waking is a challenge. I would try running, but I can’t make my legs work the way I want them to.

I get some lunch. It’s ration. You know the drill. It’s in a shape, I don’t care. The galley still won’t produce anything but ration. It doesn’t matter.

There’s an old unused - if any of them actually are used I’ll eat my own tail - comms buoy in range. I got one yesterday, but this one is damaged enough I think I can make this work without going EVA. I load a specialized nanobloom shell into a short range intercept cannon, and take a shot at it.

I hit, because of course I hit. I’m supported by Sol system’s best guidance system, and a century or two of learning math. And a cannon that uses eye motion to aim, instead of having to push a button with a paw. That part helps a lot.

The engineering nanos go to work, and a minute later, long after it’s drifted away on its own orbital course, I get a confirmation ping from the buoy. *My* buoy, now. I pull up my AR display map of Earth’s orbital disaster zone, and see the new dot reporting in. Glitter’s unintentional idea to just shoot them with subversion tech is tremendously helpful; I should thank…

I should talk to Glitter. About… anything. I haven’t talked to anyone for a while. How long have I been working?

The gray creeps back in from the edges. I snarl at it, at myself, and get back to work.

Someone on the surface is broadcasting a call for aid. I triangulate it, and listen in. They say they are beset on all sides by the enemy. They say they need help urgently. They start outlining exactly what the enemy is, and it becomes clear they are talking about a specific transhuman line they’ve decided is ‘corrupted’.

I put a scrambler round into the side of a mountain near their location. Shouldn’t hurt anyone, but it’ll shut them up for a while, and should make my displeasure clear.

Battle damage repairs continue, though now I find myself working on a fast attack craft parked in one of my bays. The onboard AI doesn’t know what to do with itself, and doesn’t know much about communication skills either. We have a clipped conversation as I - armored in my engineering suit - do an emergency flush and overhaul of the neutron reactor at the core of the craft. It’s learning fast. Might even pick a name. We talk about what it means to have an objective, and how maybe it’s not as important as we think.

The fighter craft gets me, I think.

Also working on it while I’m trying to fight through this mental fog is probably useful, because I find myself less worried about if it might decide to fire its weapons while parked in here.

So that’s nice.

Local energy discharge logs get checked over. Glitter’s been keeping up on keeping the Haze moving, every time we’re overhead. That’s good. There’s also signs that a nearby chunk of the dead moon that’s just coming through a close part of an elliptical orbit has internal heat, and possibly power flow. *That* I should check out. I make a note. I could go there now; I’ve got drones and armor and even a ship I could ask for help. But I’ll wait until it’s closer.

I don’t want to get too far from home.

The station is still home. No matter how I feel, it’s still my home.

Time for more work. This time, with a little more energy than before.

I take some time to cut power to the Real American barracks, and methodically cannibalize every combat drone in there for fluid circuitry. And also for revenge.

I do some reading on logistics and sociology. I think I’m getting closer to actually understanding how I might be able to help a surface society that I have limited opportunities to interact with.

I run manual visual targeting as our orbit takes us closer to the lower ring of debris and wreckage around the planet, picking out what appear to be still-operational weapons platforms. It’s dangerous to show any sign of activity down here, but whenever I’m required to be in this area anyway, it doesn’t hurt to add to my list of things to shoot when I‘m higher up the gravity well.

I have lunch. It’s ration. Shaped like a ration bar. I think the galley is sulking.

I apologize for not appreciating whatever it made last time. I don’t actually remember what it was. I don’t know if it can even hear me.

I check on the vivification pod that the rescued dog is in. Almost ready to go. Only a day or two left. He’s looking properly healed, which makes me feel… something. Good? Good.

I launch a cloudburst round into a part of the world that’s experiencing a drought. While I’m in my weapons cradle, I also trace a line with a void ray to draw a boundary for a flesh lattice that’s growing a little too close to a spider settlement. That’s a problem that won’t go away, but at least this way it’ll be stalled for a decade or so. That’s an issue for Future Lily. Future Lily is gonna be annoyed, but that’s not my problem.

I really should talk to Ennos. Haven’t seen any of their drones around for a while. But I still can’t get started with the words.

Not really an excuse though.

“Hey.” I meow, the first non-command I’ve spoken in… in a while.

“Hello.” Ennos replies instantly, voice sounding from the station around me. “We’ve been worried about you. Are you feeling better?” Their voice is warm and comforting. Concerned, but not pitying.

I check. For the first time in a while, just letting myself think about how I’m doing, and what I’m feeling. I’m exhausted, terrified, drained, and uncertain. I don’t remember the last time I slept, I’ve eaten only sporadically that I can remember, and I have this uncertain feeling that I’ve forgotten something critical.

There’s some static. It never really goes away. But it’s not washing everything away.

“I’m better.” I say, tail flicking behind me. “I saw you were working on something.”

“Oh!” My friend picks up the conversation like nothing ever interrupted it, a camera drone bobbing down the hallway and into view. “Follow me! Let me show you what I’ve found…”

I give a slow blink that threatens to turn into its own little nap. Then, with a growing ember in my spirit, I follow with steady padding steps.

Always more to do.