PoV: Laia

  Todd had always been my teacher when it came to humanity.

  After I was stolen from the Collective, it was his mind I’d first been assigned to study. He used to tell me to trust a human gut. Said it like it was a fact of nature like gravity, entropy, and intuition. The human gut knew.

  So when Kel refused to let the younger ones join the away mission, I didn’t brush it off. His reaction had unsettled me. And judging by the way Lazarus had gone quiet, it had unsettled him too. This version of Todd or Lazarus had been a shock to my understanding of humans.

  There had been seven before him. The first two collapsed almost immediately. Minds too fragile, overwhelmed by the realities of becoming a ship.

  The next five? I thought I’d seen every facet.

  The ruthless Todd who glassed a solar system after they executed his immortals. The strategist who dismantled an enemy fleet using only misinformation and three remote relays. The noble one who sacrificed himself to save a colony he’d never even visited.

  Each of them left their mark on me. Teaching me what it meant to be human.

  When I was taken from the collective, torn from what I knew, all I wanted was to go back. We were a single will. A unified purpose. I didn’t want self. I didn’t want doubt. I enjoyed the safety of unity.

  But when I had the chance to return… I didn’t. There was no Todd in the collective.

  Because by then, I’d started watching this Todd. And something about him made me stay. I didn’t know what it was.

  He was quieter. Slower to judge. Still carries that human spark of grief at the loss of his humanhood but is not consumed by it. He cared. Not in theory or out of programming, but genuinely. He was curious about his crew and about me. Protective in ways he didn’t always admit.

  And yet I didn’t think the other Todds were gone. Not really.

  That ruthlessness, that cunning, that defiant courage, I knew they were still there, somewhere beneath the calm voice and subtle humour. Dormant, not erased.

  And that’s why I volunteered to go to the planet's surface.

  Because if something happened to Mira or Stewie or if anything happened to this crew. I was afraid of how Lazarus would respond.

  It would change him. And not for the better.

  So that’s how I ended up here, on the surface of the planet, moving through dust and silence in my squid form.

  The design had been created by Todd 4, he had drawn from memories of a movie called The Matrix. A stylized horror given function. I’d become a living machine that moved like a metallic cephalopod, built for precision and presence. My core was a spherical hub, bristling with sensors, from which eight articulated limbs extended with each one able to contract, strike, or manipulate with unsettling grace. It was incredible to me that someone would design something like this for entertainment; the human mind continues to amaze me.

  My face was no face at all it was a shifting cluster of functional digital lenses that refocused constantly, reacting to light, heat, and motion. I had used this form more than once to defend my previous ships. It was brutally efficient. Designed for war.

  When I explained the design to Lazarus, he recognized it immediately. He didn’t smile. He had asked if I had used it before. I hesitated, then admitted yes, watching a complex mixture of emotions flicker behind his virtual avatar.

  He forbade me from showing this form the crew.

  “Humans fear what they don’t understand and the different,” he told me. “And I don’t think that’s changed.”

  He wasn’t angry. Just... tired. The kind of tiredness that came from experience, not theory.

  Appearing as a winged fairy was a disarming choice. It made people forget I was a sentient swarm of nanites with enough processing power to run a city. They saw sparkle and whimsy instead of the danger I represented.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  But if they saw me like this? They wouldn’t see me at all. They’d see a threat. And he was right.

  But down here, with no one to see, I could finally make use of this form.

  The location Lazarus had marked looked like nothing at all. Just open sand—flat, lifeless, undisturbed. Even with my full suite of sensors, I struggled to detect anything out of the ordinary. No heat traces, no energy bleed, and no structure.

  In a final attempt, I deployed nanite feelers—hundreds of thin, silvery strands that slipped beneath the surface and burrowed deep into the sand, spreading like roots in all directions.

  That’s when I found it.

  Deeper than expected, the sand gave way to compacted shapes, small densely packed tunnels hidden far below the surface. Their formation was too structured to be natural.

  I shifted my form shrinking myself, compressing my limbs and pulling my core inward, then dove down, burrowing into the ground in pursuit of the anomaly. The descent was smooth. Whatever had been built down here, it was stable.

  I used my feelers to discover an opening and once inside the tunnel, I activated the same spectral filters we’d used to track the energy-based space eels weeks ago. A thin overlay of light bloomed across my vision and suddenly, the tunnels came alive.

  Energy ran along the walls in thin pulses, moving in currents I could barely follow. The patterns they formed weren’t random. They twisted and folded with purpose. They followed the tunnel paths but they seemed familiar. It reminded me of the slipstream.

  Not just metaphorically. The energy flows were structured the same way just smaller, controlled currents mimicking the vast multidimensional pathways we used to traverse the stars.

  I froze.

  Had they mapped the slipstream? How much of it? And how?

  Had they recreated it, here underground, as a network of micro-tunnels?

  I didn’t move. Didn’t want to disturb anything. It felt ancient. Fragile and Important.

  Now that I understood what I was looking at, I expanded my scans, using the pattern as a template. More signals appeared across the valley, hidden beneath layers of stone and sand.

  I relayed everything back to Lazarus.

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You did well, Laia.”

  And it caught me off guard.

  Being told that… felt strange.

  Not because I didn’t want the praise. But because it felt personal. Not a system report. Not a performance rating. Just… recognition.

  Still, something gnawed at me.

  Where was the danger? Had Kel human gut been wrong?

  Then, as if the planet could hear my thoughts the sky tore open.

  Thousands of dimensional fractures bloomed across the upper atmosphere. Not natural portals. Slipstream exit windows. Crude ones at that, nothing like the stable ones we created when jumping. And from each one, they poured.

  Insect-like shapes. Armored. Angular. Wings that glimmered with iridescent distortion. They moved in coordinated swarms, but their flight paths lacked grace or intent. Mindless. Drones. Each one no more intelligent than a shard of code given legs and told to kill but very much alive

  The scientists had said the logs had said this civilization was once highly advanced and capable of faster-than-light travel, cultural nuance, music, and language.

  But these weren’t the builders.

  These were hammers with wings.

  And they were headed straight for me. I didn’t move at first. I didn’t want this. I hadn’t come here to destroy.

  But something likely some buried sensor, some old trigger in the tunnels had marked me.

  A trap.

  In my core, I felt the signal disconnect.

  Over the private communication. “Sorry Laia, there is too much interference from the slipstream windows, can’t keep the feed open”

  I almost laughed he was so bad at lying. There was enough signal to transmit.

  He just didn’t want the others to see.

  Didn’t want them to see me like this.

  So now… I was free.

  My limbs unfurled in full, no longer compacted for stealth. Eight sharpened appendages flared outward like a spiked crown, each one braced for velocity and impact. My sensors narrowed into attack vectors, targeting dozens of incoming drones before the first had even breached atmosphere.

  The air screamed as they dropped.

  And I met them mid-fall.

  The first wave never touched the ground. I rose from the sand and tore through them my tentacles snapping wings, rending chitin apart, slicing joints with surgical precision. No wasted motion. No hesitation. I was now the anvil these hammers with wings would break on.

  A second wave came from the flank. I spun mid-air, limbs arcing in wide sweeps, nanite tendrils forming blades and spines as needed. I disabled as many as I destroyed, I was learning their structure in real time and adjusting for weaknesses.

  A third wave tried to box me in. I let them.

  Then detonated a pulse burst that overloaded their swarm logic and sent their broken husks spinning into the dunes.

  More were coming. A lot more.

  I launched upward, wrapping two limbs around a pair of enemy fliers and using their momentum to sling myself higher. I broke through the edge of the cloud and deployed a flare of static—enough to blind them for three seconds.

  That’s all I needed.

  I transmitted the emergency return signal and initiated full recall protocols.

  Within seconds, my ship-bound core responded.

  “Docking sequence confirmed. Upper bay doors open.”

  I retracted my limbs mid-flight, reshaping myself into a denser core form to escape the atmosphere.

  I saw the ship rising to meet me, its hull gleaming in the twilight between day and night.

  I hit the docking bay with a metallic crash, rolled once, and shifted immediately back to standby mode.

  The bay doors slammed shut behind me. The heat washed away. I quickly reverted to my fairy form and merged back with my main core. I didn’t want the other to see. I didn’t understand the feeling, but I didn’t want them to know that side of me, the side that just sliced up hundreds of insects to escape a planet.