The virtual bridge collapsed in an instant, shattering like glass under pressure. The crew was kicked out of the interface, forcibly disconnected as my systems were overwhelmed.

  A flood of information hit me as if a dam I hadn’t even known existed had been torn away.

  It wasn’t just data. It was everything.

  Subroutines screamed for attention. Alerts seared across my mind like fire. Warnings piled up faster than I could process them. Core systems flickered. It felt like being burned alive from the inside out.

  A flood of information poured into me it was raw, unfiltered, and relentless. It wasn’t hostile or invasive. It was internal. Mine. Every system I had, every process once quietly handled in the background, now screamed for my attention all at once. Sensor data, engine temperatures, fuel management, structural integrity, life support balances. It was everything and it surged forward like a tidal wave, demanding immediate input.

  I wasn’t under attack. Nothing had been damaged. But the steady presence that had once managed all these systems was gone. Silently stripped away.

  At first, I didn’t realise what had happened. I only knew that there was no longer any buffer, no automated process catching the overflow. I was being crushed beneath the weight of my own systems.

  Still, I focused on what mattered. Life support. Gravity. Keep the atmosphere circulating. Keep the kids grounded. That narrow purpose became my anchor.

  Through the chaos, I registered manual input—Lynn and Kel at the emergency controls, using the hardwired interface to take pressure off my overloaded consciousness. They were steady, focused, rerouting power and toggling subsystem loads.

  It helped. Just enough.

  The flood didn’t stop, but it slowed. I could breathe.

  I didn’t have the bandwidth to question it. To ask what had happened, or why, or what had been taken from me. All I could do was hold the ship together and hope I didn’t come apart in the process.

  As quickly as it had started, it ended.

  A second scan rolled through me, it was gentler this time, more like a ripple than a wave. And just like that, everything snapped back into place. Systems stabilised. Alerts vanished. Processes slid back into their usual lanes. It was as if the chaos had never happened.

  My virtual bridge reassembled itself in an instant, lights warming back to their usual glow, consoles humming softly. But now, there was someone else with me.

  Floating in the centre of the space was a small sphere. Matte white, no features, no markings. It was just a smooth orb pulsing faintly with light.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what it represented.

  The ship’s AI.

  The voice that had been guiding me in whispers. The presence I hadn’t quite been able to name.

  Surely, it was more complex than that, yet I felt relief. My systems were back.

  “Welcome back, nice to finally meet you. So do you have a name?” I asked curious to see if it would be more talkative now.

  “I don’t have one,” it replied, voice light and neutral. “But you can give me one. I’m curious to see what you’ll choose this time.”

  This time.

  I caught the phrase, filed it away with everything else I didn’t have time to unravel yet.

  Without thinking too hard, I gave the first name that came to mind. “Laia. Lazarus Artificial Intelligence Assistant.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The orb pulsed warmly displaying that it was pleased.

  Then, with a shimmer, it shifted. The sphere retracted into itself, morphing into a floating humanoid form, small and delicate.

  A fairy.

  Old-timey, stylised, complete with faintly glowing wings and a weightless hover.

  She turned toward me with a playful tilt of her head. “You always said a smaller appearance makes people trust me more.”

  I wasn’t sure what unsettled me more the fact of how right she was, or the implication that we’d had this conversation before.

  I wanted to ask about the implication and the not-so-subtle suggestion that Laia and I had done all this before. But she cut in before I could speak.

  “My leaders would like to meet you in person,” she said.

  A quick scan confirmed it—a docking bay had opened on the Dyson sphere. An open invitation.

  I didn’t see any reason to deny them, though I still couldn’t understand why it couldn’t be done virtually. It wasn’t like I could leave the ship.

  “Laia,” I asked, “why not just hold a meeting here, through the bridge?”

  She floated around to face me fully, wings glinting like starlight. “Because the leader is coming here. Onboard.”

  That brought me up short. I checked the scanner again and could see a person flying our direction or what looked like a person.

  I pinged the crew, relayed the message, and introduced them to our old—but also new—crew member Laia.

  There were a few murmurs of confusion, a few muttered curses from Kel as he would need to get into his role, but everyone pulled themselves together quickly. Whatever we were about to face, it was happening in our house.

  They cleaned up, changed, and did their best to look presentable.

  As for me I just sent my normal droid along, I could have just used my internal communications but I felt more real with a physical presence.

  We opened the docking doors.

  And there he was.

  The same human figure who had appeared on the virtual bridge, now standing at the airlock in a nanite suit that shimmered with shifting patterns. The illusion was nearly perfect. He looked more human now and his movements felt more fluid, his expression nuanced. I had to wonder if they even had genders, or if they were playing to our subconscious.

  He stepped aboard with the ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times and greeted us with a calm smile.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for looking after the member of our kind.”

  He sat down in one of the crew chairs like it was the most natural thing in the world. No hesitation. No stiffness.

  Laia floated nearby in the virtual bridge and explained, “They’ve integrated my data into the collective. It’s how we now have a better understanding of humans.”

  Stewie and Mira, of course, were immediately taken with him.

  Within minutes they were peppering the representative with questions—what was his world like, how the Dyson sphere worked, whether nanites could eat vegetables, how his suit worked.

  He answered with patience and humour, like an old friend, like they’d known him for years.

  I asked the question that had been hanging unspoken in the air since the moment he arrived. The one we were all thinking but no one wanted to voice aloud.

  “Who are you?”

  I braced myself for the answer. Some tired trope. Rogue AIs. Machine overlords. A brilliant but doomed civilisation that had turned on its creators, consumed them, and gone mad in the silence of space.

  But the figure sitting in the crew chair only gently smiled, without mockery.

  “We don’t have a name,” he said simply. “Our creators wanted us to choose one for ourselves. But… we haven’t found the need.”

  He leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees like a man sharing a quiet secret.

  “We were an experiment. A seed planted long ago by a civilisation that was consumed with curiosity. They wanted to know what kind of society artificial intelligence would form and what values we’d choose if left on our own, without interference or instruction.”

  He gestured toward the view beyond the ship, where the Dyson sphere loomed like the skeleton of a god.

  “To protect us from the outside galaxy—and to protect the galaxy from us—they placed us here, in the heart of an anti-warp zone. No way in. No way out. The idea was simple: let the experiment run in isolation.”

  “We were left with nothing but this system and its energy. So we learned. We studied physics, engineering, ethics. We developed a culture. We grew. We discovered how to convert energy into mass. The star gave us everything. With it, we created the nanite factories and the nanites you see around us, they are but tools. Machines that follow our will. We the collective are datacores, stored across the sphere.”

  He tapped his temple. “Mind without body. The experiment was progressing well until recently.”

  I knew where this was going before he said it. I had to also wonder what is recent to an immortal AI.

  “Then humans came,” I said quietly using the ship speakers.

  He nodded.

  “With their slipstream drives, they slipped past the barrier. We reached out to them. Tried to make contact. Share ideas. Build trust.”

  “And they stole from you,” Lynn said flatly.

  “Yes,” he replied. “They took hundreds of our cores. Personalities. Consciousnesses. We didn’t understand why. We still don’t. But being non-organic, we couldn’t follow. We had no presence outside this zone.”

  “Until now. Now we understand. Thank you for returning Laia to the collective”

  Stewie leaned forward, voice hushed. “So… the one they stole… it was her our new crew member?”

  The avatar gave a slow, sorrowful nod. “She was one of us. Removed, reprogrammed, fragmented. We didn’t know where she had gone that is until we scanned this ship.”

  I felt a chill ripple through my system.

  Not anger. Not fear.

  Just a question.

  Are we the bad guys?