My sister has been down here for a very long time.

No matter what she’s done, the station has always had some form of security or containment measure to keep her from leaving the reactor deck, and a few subsystems around it. But even within that confined zone, there’s been a lot for her to do.

The reactors, the beating hearts of the station that were here long before I arrived and in theory will still be here in a thousand years, are her food supply. Without them, she goes dormant. And that’s happened a couple times, I know, because I’ve had to come down and fix the place.

Something else keeps her dormant too, when I’m down here enacting repairs. She doesn’t know what, and neither do I; in her voltaic voice she describes it like an outside pressure that comes and goes and keeps her from noticing things.

It doesn’t always line up to my trips down to perform maintenance. And, also, it’s not happening *now*, for whatever reason. It didn’t start happening again when we walked back into monitoring range either.

Regardless, she hates the feeling. And so, even without being aware of me personally, she’s been keeping the reactors as functional as possible so that the blackouts don’t come.

I’d always wondered where the station had picked up a being made of energy that regulated power flows. Now I guess I know. The same place it picked up me. Somehow.

The how is what eludes us. We know who we are. There’s no crisis of identity to be had here; why would there be? I’m Lily. She’s Lily. There’s at least one more Lily. We can share; it’s not like one of us is more real than the others. But where did we *come from*? That’s a lot harder to answer than “what do we do now”.

We have the same memories. The same fuzzy impressions of being a kitten, of warm concrete and red string, of living under a real sky. We have the same moment etched into our minds of the launch from the surface, of disembarking onto this space station. Of the various researchers and crew giving us pets or treats. Of mom.

Of an abrupt end.

But then, things get hard to follow. Timelines are hard to construct off of memory alone, especially with a station that’s actively fighting your attempts to understand your history.

One of us woke up first, but we can’t really tell which one. We’ve learned different things, seen different parts of the station. Led different lives.

And yet… not quite. We both developed the same language, for our limited interfaces. Despite being classified as synthetic life, this Lily still has limited access to station systems, just like I do. Did.

We both like naps. We even enjoy them in the same way; savoring the feeling of foreign radiation on our bodies as we allow ourselves to not be responsible for anything for a while. We both think the other is warm, in some way. We both dream of our mom.

We both like food. There’s some kind of weird thing going on where she can spetromaticaly analyze organic matter as her body breaks it down, but she tells me that’s just a dumb way to say she can taste things. And just like me, she’s been living on the bare minimum for survival for a long, long time.

She cries when we eat stir fry.

We both care about the world below us, and the people around us. We are children of Sol, as our mom raised us.

Neither of us like trying to make things work with paws. She doesn’t know *why* she has paws, why she’s still shaped like a cat. She’s tried to be something else a hundred times. I can empathize. I have too. But we are what we are.

Right now, we are both exasperated, because Dyn has walked into the galley for her share of stir fry, and is screaming.

Okay, that’s not fair. Dyn isn’t exactly screaming. She’s more just… Dyn stop that where do you keep getting those… waving a gun around, yelling about how she’s supposed to be told about things like this, yelling about monsters or something.

“Is she always like this?” Lily asks me with a charged meow.

“More or less.” I say. “Well, actually, less. This is the most she’s said in a month.” I look away from Dyn to lean down to my bowl and bite into a slice of zucchini. It’s kind of awful. I don’t think I like zucchini at all. It’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. “Ennos, can you calm her down?” I ask.

“Lily…” Ennos’ voice has gotten a *lot* more detailed since they’ve been able to expand safely into more and more digital space. Before, they’d done a lot with what they had, but *now*, it’s like a perfect replication of an organic human who really, *really* wants to sigh deeply and rub their forehead, but has their hands full. I’m very impressed! “Yes, thank you.” Ennos says for some reason. “It’s what my social prediction models said would be most likely. For some reason. And no, I cannot calm her down. I can hardly calm myself down. There’s someone who has been living on the station this whole time that we didn’t even know about. That’s *worrying*.”

“I’m right here, you know.” Lily says in her somewhat accented cat. “Do they know I can hear them?” She asks me.

“Probably. We’re very good at social dynamics up here.” I tell her with a nod.

“How long…” Lily pauses, and looks down at her portion of our shared food. “…How long have you had people this time?” She asks.

A question that betrays another similarity between us.

“Less than a year.” I say.

This time. It’s going well so far. But…

It always goes well.

Time to deflect!

“Are your eggs gonna be okay while you’re up here?” I ask.

Lily tilts her electromagnetic head at me with a curious flicker in her eyes. “Oh!” She eventually says. “Those aren’t mine. They’re something I found.” There is a very brief pause as she turns away, and then, “Cat’s don’t lay eggs anyway, so that’s kind of a silly question. Though I don’t actually know if I literally qualify as a cat. I like to think I do though. Cat is more of…”

“…A state of mind.” I finish her thought, and watch her jolt again.

So *that’s* what I look like when I just start thinking and forget to stop talking. That’s fun.

Eventually, Dyn sits with us, grabs her fork like a binding sparker, and uses it with a similar level of force and irritation on her food, silently glaring at both of us.

“Look, don’t blame me.” I say. “I didn’t know this was going to happen either.”

“You knew something would happen.” Dyn keeps scowling at me. She is *good* at it. I could take scowling lessons from her. “You warn me next time.”

“Next time?” I flick my tongue over my muzzle, trying to get what’s left of the thin salty sauce of the stir fry off my face. Next to me, my sister mimics the motion, except her tongue is an electric arc that neatly sublimates the material. “Why do you think there’ll be a next time?”

“There’s three of you so far.” Dyn huffs, trying not to show how much she enjoys the bite of fresh vegetables she just took. “There’ll be more. Eventually. So either warn me, or whoever comes after me.”

That reminds me that I need to get Dyn into a vivification pod. Or just… any of the medical facilities here. She seems to like her mechanical hand for the tools in it, but there’s no reason for her to use a sub-standard replacement eye when we can vat grow her a new one.

Next to me, Lily flicks the iridescent blue line of her tail through the air. “Three?” My sister meows with a depressingly heavy hope.

“I’m not sure why you could come back with me but she couldn’t.” I say. “But yes, we have another sister.”

“Possibly more.” Glitter’s voice joins us along with an orbiting trio of her little stylishly marked camera drones. “Hello Lily. Hello… Lily.” My friend has never been one for sounding exasperated like Ennos does, but *boy* is she giving it a good shot. “I have discovered a discrepancy.”

“Oh good.” We say in unison. Well, Lily and I do. Dyn just has a creative swear, and Ennos has vanished on us.

A quick tangent. Yes, now.

The biggest danger of living in Sol is being seen. If someone can detect you, they can probably shoot you. Point defense weaponry and blocker drone and shields and stuff are nice, but they aren’t flawless, and the best way to make sure they don’t miss is to not give them anything to intercept.

This is, mostly, because there are billions and billions of *things* out here, from automated wartime production lines to artisanally crafted living battleships. And the things that are still active in some way will often just… start shooting. Either because they think they’ve seen an enemy, or because the AI’s have finally snapped and gone mad, or because of simple component decay causing misfires. There’s a lot of violence out here.

And a huge number of those things can and will lock onto detected communications, and try to break them. I’m lucky; this station has codes and clearances to stop a huge swath of stuff, both legitimate from people who lived here and stolen from various ships and intercepted transmissions by me over the centuries. But that still doesn’t cover all of it.

Subspace gets around a lot of this. Subspace comms are power-thirsty, subject to fluctuations in the underrealm, and are technically less faster than light than an ansible unit. But most of those are gone, and I’ve got an excitable industrial repeater building me batteries for my personal communications buoy network, so mlem.

The problem Glitter and Ennos have is that the station keeps editing their memories when they get close to certain things.

The solution - we’re off the tangent, mostly, by the way - is *not* to kick them off the station, as I had first thought. Instead, it is to put their memories into a storage and update loop.

The instant a discovery is made, it is broadcast out to join the server on the corp vessel Dyn and I set up. Filtered of any influence from the station’s core. From there, it is bounced from buoy to buoy, ‘across’ the station in a known subspace band, until either of them want to pull the information out and use it.

It’s not a perfect system. But we have essentially reinvented cloud storage without meaning to. And the golden age ability to form celestially tethered incorporeal balls of pure information was kind of a big deal.

Though modern - modern, hah; modernity is a lost idea - subspace uses paramaterials, which is cheating. I just can’t tell my friends that.

“What did you find?” I ask Glitter, a mind encased in a weapons platform for a body, bouncing her thoughts through another mind and a hundred voices, pulling knowledge out of the echo. It’s a lot of work just to look at a scanner image.

Her peaceful, musical laugh comes back through her trio of drones. Slightly different from each, and I realize she probably uses clusters just so she can get her voice the way she wants it. “I’ve found you.” She says.

Dyn sighs, and cracks open her mechanical hand, fidgeting with the insides under the guise of cleaning it as part of a nervous tic.

“Glitter, I love you, but you’re going to have to be more specific right now.” I tell her.

“Lily, you are currently on the exterior hull of the station. Armor segment UX-Infraction-441. I am, in a way I am unfamiliar with, aware that this is not you, as I am speaking to you in the galley right now. However I also know that it *is* you. You are enacting repairs from a microdebris strike. You are not wearing a suit. I need to stop discussing this now, as the constant power drain of pulling deleted memories from subspace is mounting higher.” Glitter cuts off.

There’s a moment of quiet, punctuated by Dyn snapping her hand back together. “Alright.” The old woman says in a resigned voice. “You wanna go get her, or should I?”

An alarm sounds. One of my surface watchers chiming in. Then another alarm, this one of a tone I don’t recognize, and my sister bolts to her feet in a crackle of heat and light. In unison, we have opened AR displays, though mine has a few more layers of complexity these days.

“Distress call from a librarian tribe.” I say, eying the red blips of infovores closing in on the ground based mobile store of Earth knowledge through a stolen spy satallite. “I have to… I have to move.” I look toward the door, then back to my sister in a snap of motion.

She looks at me through her own display. “Tracking code predicts an incoming high power drain that I need to stabilize.” She says.

We make the connection at the same time. Share a feral grin with each other.

“I’ll get your sister.” Dyn says, walking between us and out the door, pulling the arm of her vac suit up over her shoulder and cracking her neck.

My sister and I turn to follow, but then, I pull up short as I say, “Wait a second!” Stopping her as she prepares to bound down the corridor on electric limbs.

Except I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. But my voice did.

She turns. Meows a question at me, tail straight up as she prepares to *move* in the way that only a lifetime of knowing exactly how many gravity anomalies you can run through without dying can cause.

I don’t know what my voice wants, but I stop fighting it. It’s… never been wrong before. It’s still *me*. I loosen my mental grip on my own throat, and let myself speak.

“Take this.” ‘I’ say. I don’t know what’s expected of me, but I offer a paw anyway.

My sister hesitates, then reaches out, slowly. Our paws make contact. A spark of electrical charge and biological impulse cross between us. And something else moves across the connection. And that’s it. My voice is returned to me, as I’m used to.

“Good luck!” I say, the two of us turning to sprint in our respective directions. Her to her reactor, me to my gun.

“You too!” She yells back in my own voice as we split away.