Wake up, eat real food, talk to my friends, garden, study, play an increasingly complex board game with Glitter, eat fake food, play with Dog, build, salvage, sleep.

Repeat.

Repeat over and over and over, until the warm fog of memory holds nothing but the peace of the moment and the horizon of the past.

No one needs anything from me. No one asks anything of me. There’s just us, and the future, and the quiet.

But it can’t last.

I face myself. Or something that looks like me. She stares at me with questioning dream eyes. “How did you end up here?” The rippling electrical reaction in the shape of a cat asks. I could ask her the same thing. I think I do. “I have always been here.” She replies. “Something’s changed. You can-“

I jolt awake.

I’d been having a good dream. Apparently I’d been sleeping while in my weapons crèche, which is new. And also possibly very risky! It’s been a joint project for a week now to strip back the restrictions and put a few cat-and-AI-friendly automation patches into place, but it’s not something that’ll be done overnight, and in the meantime, sleeping somewhere that enables me to drop kinetic payloads onto the surface with the twitch of a paw seems… irresponsible?

That had been a nice dream. I felt like I was floating. Possibly I felt that way because I’m in the one spot in the solar system designed to be ergonomic to a cat’s spine. But it’s also possible that my subconscious is recovering.

Recovering from what, you ask? Could be anything. There’s a long list of options.

Oh, I woke up because of a targeting alert. I feel like the whole ‘alarm startles me awake’ thing is kind of the only way I wake up anymore, so I didn’t mention it earlier.

But that doesn’t mean I should neglect it. I check the newly refocused EM tracking scanner, pointed at a large swath of Earth in a much more useful resolution courtesy of Ennos finding the commands to order the repair systems to recalibrate it to be *optimally* efficient, as opposed to simply *functionally* efficient.

Our target is moving.

I begin cycling the void batteries, dumping a few hundred hours of charge into the capacitor for the void beam, and drag a paw across the projection map in a rough line that *should* be an on target intercept.

This will be my third shot, and so far, the other two haven’t been nearly as on target as they should have been.

This is also the first time in a while I’m tracking something as small as a single vehicle, and as problematic as an actual person.

I should start from the beginning.

Four hundred and twenty one years ago…

No, this isn’t going to work. I’ll get too distracted. I should start from a more recent beginning.

Some time ago, an amount of time that is too short for me to have added mental weight to it, and too long to remember properly, a young feathermorph on the surface got ahold of an emergency signal communication unit. They, by accident, ended up contacting me. I, on purpose, may have eliminated a few pressing threats to their village.

In the time since then, I may have, through an irresponsible resource expenditure, sent a sentient construction swarm to that same village to just kind of hang out and be friends. Because that is how I think friends work, and so far, nothing has proven me wrong. I have additionally directed a couple local wanderer’s groups, one pack of refugee orphan shadelings, and a fairly large merchant caravan that had almost been eaten to the same village. I also made some art for them!

Not all of this at once, that would be irresponsible. Obviously.

I like this village. It’s in a spot where I pass over it roughly once every three days, no matter which of my three clear orbital corridors I’m on. So I can check in when I’m not scrambling for something or asleep.

And the last time I passed over, I got a message through that emergency beacon. For the first time in months.

Someone had been killed. More specifically, someone had been murdered.

I deal with a lot of garbage on the surface. When I got the message, I was in the middle of trying to get the munitions factory to accept a modified blueprint for a paramaterial enhanced splatter round that I could use to redirect sentient hostile weather patterns. This isn’t new. This is just a job that I do. My paws can’t do everything, I’m working with tools not built for me, and not every problem on the surface can be solved by orbital bombardment. But I *still haven’t run out* of problems that can.

And yet, all of a sudden, I have a problem that is both small, and deeply personal. I hadn’t really realized that I’d been thinking of this village as close to my heart, but now that it’s impossible to avoid, I find that I can’t stop thinking it. Which is a big problem.

Because it’s happened before.

And every time, I outlast them. As individuals or as communities, I keep going, and they don’t. I live, and they don’t. And it hurts every time, and I fall back to a cycle of barebones maintenance and killing the largest threats and sleeping too much, until I can stop grieving.

I see the trap closing. But I walk into it anyway.

Now, the hard part about tracking a murderer is that verifying things that have happened in the past is basically impossible with just a normal view of the ground from above. I’m technologically advanced, I’m not a time traveler. And despite my often reckless nature, I don’t *really* want to bomb a mostly innocent person.

But that doesn't mean I can’t check sensor logs. Both my own, and I others that I can steal! It took me an hour or two, mostly to get in and out of the engineering suit, but I made the leap to a listening post and took over its recent records for myself, adding to my own logs from the last time I did a flyover.

Then it’s just a simple matter of comparing heat and energy signatures, mapping movements of people on the ground, and finding the perpetrator.

With a bunch of gaps in the logs. And poor sensor resolution. And a phase cloud drifting in the local weather patterns. And the villagers having moved the body so I don’t know where it was originally.

So I actually lied to you when I said it was simple.

At first, I asked Ennos and Glitter for help, which is when I learned that phase clouds are artificial and actually composed of billions of paramaterial particulates. Which is scientifically interesting, and I will absolutely come back to that, but also means I’m doing this manually. I considered asking my human resident, but she’s been exclusively occupying her newly assigned quarters, one specific chair in the galley, and the path between them. I told her we could talk when she was ready, and I think she took it as a threat.

I consider asking Dog, too - I have decided the dog’s name is Dog by the way - but Dog is more interested in the chew toy I made for him out of hyperreactionary rubber. So no help there, either.

So I search, and plan, and hear another broadcast about a second murder. I put the pieces together as my heart breaks, and I eventually spot an engine signature from a vehicle that arrived through the cliffs and valleys around the village, but never approached. It’s there again when the third murder happens, before speeding away back into the low terrain under the jagged cliffs, out of my ability to kill it without causing massive ecological damage.

But that’s fine. Because I have more eyes than I know what to do with.

And now, at a higher focused resolution, I can see the singular person disembarking their vehicle, keeping low as they stalk toward the village. There’s a symbol on my scanner display notifying me that a level two personnel baffle has been deployed, and marking the three spots on the map where I’m supposed to think the target is, lines traced back to the idiot who thinks they’re fooling anyone.

Well. They’ve been fooling someone. But not me, now.

The void beam lances down like lilac lightning, fractal arrays of energy curving in on themselves as the simplistic weapon warps through the phase cloud and nails the ground as close to my prey as I can make it. Which is, in this moment, exactly where they are crawling. They don’t even have time to understand that they have been killed, much less to feel pain, or scream. A merciful and clinical end to a murderer. The beam’s attack pattern etches a twenty length long zone of death into the sandy dirt in a half second, annihilating a chunk of the surface and turning the rest to smoothed glass, before it burns through its power supply and cuts off.

I take a deep breath, untense my inadequate feline muscles, and slump back in the crèche. I take ten minutes before I start to move again.

The engines need to be secured and activated; we’ll stay in stationary orbit for a day or two, to make sure that was the real problem. This means I’ll need to divert a lot of power to the aft mag shields, but that’s okay. We’re only a little bit screwed on power right now, this will be fine if I shut down a lot of stuff.

After that… well, back to work. I’ve still got stuff to do. That automated manufacturing ship thing that’s parked next to me still needs a job before it goes insane. And maybe my human guest would like some kind of decor for her quarters? Is that a human thing?

I decide it should be tradition here, and since I’m in charge, that makes it tradition by default. I ask the Orbital Era industrial repeater - see, I can remember names! - to design and produce some kind of pleasant wall decor suitable for crew quarters for culturally traumatized elderly cyborg women. It answered back almost immediately with cheerful acknowledgment of the order, and asked how many I wanted.

For some reason, I think it sounded offended when I said one? So I added ‘hundred’ onto the end of the sentence, and pretended I just got a hairball in the middle of speaking to deflect suspicion.

The repeater (which will need a real name, but we’ll work on that) sent back a projected materials invoice and timeline. It’s nice working with professionals sometimes.

Ennos disagrees with me on that, but they’re biased, because they have to work with me, and Ennos likes me for some reason.

It’s been a nice day. I’ve gotten a lot done, I feel rested, and it’s only three hours in. I should nap in the weapons crèche more often.