Three months.

  Three months the crew had been routinely commuting between the moon and the ship. The crew sometimes camped on the moon, other times conducting independent research aboard the ship.

  But it worked.

  The crew had bonded in the strangest, most human way possible. Camping, hunting, learning to swim or just bickering over cleaning duties. It did something good to them. The boundaries between the crew and Laia had slowly come down, T’lish was now more accepted as part of the crew. Even I, now that my secret was revealed and that I was an old-timer was accept with any fuss.

  Over the last few months, Laia had become… intrigued.

  Watching the crew fumble through fire-building, swimming and hunting had fascinated her. I had formally assigned her the role of guardian and teacher, I taught her all the basics, giving her what she needed to help.

  She spent her nights with T’lish. The two didn’t need much sleep, which gave them a couple of quiet hours each cycle for what Laia cheerfully referred to as “girl talk.” I had no idea what that entailed, and frankly, I didn’t want to know. But it was doing something. T’lish had a blunt, clinical honesty about her and she gave Laia exactly the kind of feedback I couldn’t. Even if I was sure some of it might have been wrong.

  We had discussed it, her and I. That empathy wasn’t something you could download like a language pack. She wasn’t going to wake up one day and suddenly feel what humans felt. But she could observe. Learn. Predict. That was something an AI could do.

  And over the three months on this moon, she had.

  More and more, she correctly anticipated the crew’s emotional responses and predicted when to back off, when to step in, when a joke would land and when it would cut too deep. She’d started warning herself before actions that might hurt them. She’d begun asking questions she never would have before. They noticed, even if they didn’t say it aloud.

  Kel had taken to the wilderness like he was born for it. He was half-wild himself now, the proud owner of a handmade spear he kept insisting was “just for balance” despite Laia’s ongoing and entirely futile attempts to confiscate it whenever he came back to the ship. He'd let his beard grow untamed, using it to mock Stewie's lack of facial hair. A rite of passage for any teenage boy.

  The teasing had seemed to increase their bond. He and Stewie had practically rebuilt Chunkyboy from the reactor core up, using half-recovered tech and a shocking amount of gumption. Warp drive was stronger, shielding tighter and more efficient, reactor cleaner. It was now ready for the crew to take on solo missions.

  Mira had turned food into art. Somehow. She’d managed to catalogue every edible plant on the moon. She had taste-tested most of them with Stewie as her “official sacrifice.” Then came the quiet request: could we add a garden? Maybe even a livestock bay? “Fresh is best,” she’d said, more than once, spoon in hand, eyes bright with hope.

  I hated disappointing her. But unless I did a full hull expansion there was no way for it to happen. I was already at near max internal capacity so that dream was on hold. Still, she kept smiling. That’s the thing about Mira. Even when the answer’s no, she stores it away like a “maybe.” She had stockpiled seeds and a few other samples for if we did get a garden. I had also started to design where it would go. Just need a good shipyard.

  Lynn had gone full merchant mode. I don’t know how many times I caught her muttering trade values in her sleep, or drawing up maps of salvage paths across her datapad. She catalogued every asset, flagged four promising salvage sites from data we had collected, and turned our mess of miscellaneous loot into something approaching a legitimate portfolio. We just needed to get back to a hub, and convert it into Telks.

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  On the subject of Telks. I had even considered stripping one of the old bases for Telk as there were caches of it used in the construction of the bases. But in the end, I didn’t. We might need this place again. And if I’ve learned anything about life in my last life, it’s that burning bridges leaves you cold.

  I’d been doing some analysis of my own. Between camping schedules, weather watch, and regulating T’lish’s increasingly dangerous bio experiments, I’d used the me time to dig into the slipstream and warp maps we had recovered.

  My findings? Warp lanes and slipstreams weren’t separate entities, they were threads of the same weave. And if you understood the pattern, you could navigate and create the slipstream routes using nothing more than a traditional warp map a bit of patience and an algorithm. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. And it meant we could travel to more unknown locations without needing to buy or find slipstream routes.

  Of all of us, it was T’lish who had accomplished the most.

  While the rest of the crew learned to hunt, build fires, and sleep without complaining about insects, she buried herself in research. She was quiet, methodical and obsessive. She studied the organic ship components like they were sacred texts. She grew samples from stem cells in sealed containers, tested muscle contractions, regrew damaged biostructures and even ran simulations of atmospheric re-entry stress on bioflex tissue. Her excitement was infectious. I believe their short life spans made Kall-e more impulsive to prone to action.

  She’d made progress too. And she wanted to share it with me.

  “I believe I can improve your sensory feedback,” she said one evening, standing beside a rack of glistening organoid clusters. “This patchwork here will allow me to mimic dermal nerve input. I could integrate it with your hull. Let you feel again.”

  I didn’t even hesitate before shaking my avatar head.

  Not because it wouldn’t work. It probably would. But because some things you can’t come back from. Feeling again that real, physical sensation not just my current vague feeling wouldn’t just be a technical upgrade. It would be a regression. A door cracked open to a past I had finally stopped chasing. I wasn’t a man anymore, not really. And if I was going to survive as a ship… I had to move forward. Not backward. I had to come to terms with being a ship.

  T’lish didn’t push. She just nodded. “I understand.”

  And then moved on to her next project: the hull-bud.

  We’d agreed on a transport configuration it was nothing fancy, but enough to help us move more goods, open new trade options. But that was only the beginning to her. T’lish had grand ideas. She’d studied the scans of the slipstream bugs over and over, cross-referencing genetic structures and energy patterns. She was convinced she could build an organic slipstream drive.

  I didn’t laugh.

  Because if anyone could do it, it would be her.

  But then came the problem.

  The ship, once grown, couldn’t pilot itself.

  “There’s no interface sophisticated enough to handle living control dynamics,” she explained. “Not without a mind like yours. Or Laia’s.”

  That was when she proposed her wildest idea yet.

  A self-contained core system. She wanted to build a module that could house my consciousness and Laia’s Ai core, together or separately. A plug-and-play brain. Something that would allow us to swap bodies, and shift control between vessels. I could be me, but also fly something else. Experience being different ships. I already begun imagine my dreadnought body, or transport body, maybe even a luxury space liner body.

  Except, of course, she couldn’t do it alone.

  “I don’t understand how your mind threads into half the systems,” she admitted, sketching schematics on her holopad. “If I do it wrong, you could… break. Or go mad.”

  Which, yes, was a problem.

  “We’d need help,” she said. “From NeuroGenesis. Or at least their archives. I know you hate them. But I can’t do this without understanding what they did to you.”

  I didn’t answer right away. Because part of me agreed. And another part wanted to rip the idea up and throw it into the nearest sun.

  Then there was the practical issue: the organic ship wouldn’t grow on its own. It needed a growth pond. A controlled environment where it could mature, root itself into the biosphere, draw nutrients and oxygen and catalyze its early structures.

  T’lish was ready to start.

  She wanted to build the pond here, on the moon. Use the same valley where the deer grazed and Mira picked vegetables. She said the soil was fertile, the moisture steady, the sunlight optimal. She said it could be hidden and camouflaged.

  But I shook my head.

  “I want it somewhere private,” I told her. “Somewhere no one can stumble across. Somewhere we control.”

  She frowned. “You don’t trust the others?”

  “I don’t trust the galaxy.”

  She didn’t argue.

  So now we needed a new objective. A quiet system, unclaimed and unobserved. A hidden sanctuary where something precious could grow.

  Exploration again. But first, we needed to return to a hub and make some Telks.