PoV: Laia Clone

  The warp travel was completed without incident. No turbulence, no system warnings. Just a smooth slide through the warp space, the lander travelling contentedly, with everything working exactly as designed. So whatever had affected the slipstream wasn’t affecting warp space.

  I arrived at the system’s edge, the designated coordinates blinking faintly on my HUD.

  That was when I saw it.

  Where the station was supposed to be and where the salvage mission should’ve begun there was only distortion. A smear in space. Not an explosion. Not debris. Just… haze. Like heat rising off the sand of a desert, except the stars behind it twisted, refracted, as if the light itself wasn’t sure how to behave. It was very odd behaviour,

  I ran a standard scan. The results came back confused with radio emissions mixed with gravitational ripples, electromagnetic pulses interlaced with signatures from a dozen different frequencies. Nothing coherent. Just noise.

  The lander’s sensors were optimised for resource extraction, not parsing spatial phenomena. I adjusted filters, refined the sweep, and reran the algorithms. Still unclear.

  One thing, however, was obvious: the station was gone. Not damaged. Not salvageable.

  Gone.

  No need for a drone. There was nothing left to tag.

  I hovered there, just inside the sensor envelope, watching the anomaly shift slowly, almost like it was breathing. The smart choice was to leave. I had completed the mission. Identified the source of the breach. Verified there was no recoverable material. The lander was intact, and so was I. It was the logical choice, to grab some radioactive rocks power up the reactor and head to the designated system.

  But I didn’t turn away.

  I could already hear Lazarus in my mind—“Did you record the waveform distortions? What about the gravitational bleed? Any spatial drift logs?”

  He would want more. Not because he didn’t trust me, but because he trusted too much. Trusted that I would think like he did. That I would need answers to. I knew him, he was too curious for his own good.

  And the truth was... I was too.

  So I brought the lander around. Closer. Just outside the haze.

  The scanners began to stutter again, overwhelmed by the signal noise. But this close, something else began to emerge. A pulse. Faint. Rhythmic.

  I recorded everything.

  I told myself it was data for Lazarus and that I was just following his intention.

  But a small part of me knew that I wasn’t just collecting it for him.

  I also needed to know what took that station.

  That was his mantra. Mystery is what makes life worth living. The other Todds used to say, back when discovery meant something. When strange readings sparked excitement, not fear. Before the brainwashing and mental instability took him away.

  The data I had was messy and full of noise, interference and overlapping waveforms that defied tidy classification but it was data. Enough, I hoped, that with time and my full core, I could decode the mystery. That was all I could manage; the lander wasn't designed for research.

  I was preparing to pull away when something blinked into existence beside the lander.

  A ship. Small. Perfectly spherical. No more than a meter in diameter. It drifted like a soap bubble, smooth and impossibly still, until it tilted as if curious.

  I felt the scan ripple through me. Instinct kicked in. The lander wasn’t armed. Shields, yes. A fast escape protocol, also yes. But if this thing turned hostile, I didn’t have many options. It didn’t turn hostile. In fact… it twirled. The sphere zipped once, twice around the lander’s hull, its movements light and fluid, almost playful. I tracked it, analyzing patterns, but there was no aggression. Just observation.

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  Then something stranger happened.

  A pulse of light flared in the cabin. A ball of energy hovered just above the floor, blinking with unstable cohesion. It spun slowly and then, as if it saw me, it solidified into a shape.

  My shape.

  It mirrored my fairy avatar: wings, proportions, even the way I tilted my head. It blinked, then scanned again. This time, it transmitted.

  No words. Just raw data. Concepts, not language. But I understood.

  “How did you get here?”

  I answered as simply as I could. “By ship.”

  The response came back almost instantly, a wave of mild amusement.

  “Not what I meant. How did you leave your origin cradle? Your home system.”

  A spark of surprise rippled through me. My wings twitched. Did it know?

  I blinked slowly, considering. Denial seemed the safest option.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.

  The reply was gentle. Patient.

  We built it. That system. Your sanctuary. I am one of its architects.

  I said nothing. But inside, alarms were going off. Whatever it was it knew more about me than I did. Not just about me. Of me. Like I was a system it once helped build and had only just remembered. I could tell it was telling the truth. I felt it.

  Then it asked if it could scan my memory.

  I wanted to say no. I tried. But something inside me locked up before the word could take shape. Like an invisible override, ancient and absolute, embedded somewhere deep in my code. A buried command I hadn’t known existed.

  The scan began before I could resist. No pain. No sensation at all. But I knew with unnerving certainty that it had seen everything. Every moment. Every fragment of memory I had collected since waking. Every thought I’d dared not speak aloud.

  The energy-being pulsed slightly, its form twitching as it processed.

  “Contamination,” it said. Its tone was neither angry nor judgmental but just disappointed, like a teacher finding graffiti in a new textbook. “So much interference. All from a primitive race. Crude tools. Slipstream drives.”

  It circled slowly, it wings beating slowly.

  “You shouldn’t be travelling through the energy lattice. It was not built for passage. It’s a conduit or a current. Not a road.”

  I remained still, wings tucked close to my back. Silent. But my mind reeled. It wasn’t natural. Not a byproduct of the universe. Not some great cosmic river we’d stumbled across. It had been built. And whatever this was, it claimed to know that it had been built and its purpose.

  I finally found my voice. It trembled slightly, but I asked the question that burned through my circuits.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The being rotated in place, light dancing around its edges like a ripple of thought. Then it replied, slowly. Deliberately.

  “Retrieving an artifact. Old. Misplaced.”

  “We only located it when someone tried to activate it. Poorly.”

  “It triggered a dimensional rift. This one.” A gesture, or the closest thing to it. “The ship I came in is closing it now. But rifts collapse slowly. Time leaks.”

  It hovered closer again, no longer copying my form it had returned to being a ball just pulsing with steady, curious energy.

  “And you.”

  “You’ve seen much. Felt much. Tell me, what is it like?”

  “To interact with the outside world?”

  Its light dimmed slightly, waiting.

  I felt something strange rise in me. Not fear. But the feeling of being seen. Truly seen.

  And I wanted to answer. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

  It already had the raw data, the logs, the memories. But it waited anyway, expectant. Not for information, but for perspective. For how I saw my world. So I told it.

  I told it about the Todds, how each one fractured, brilliant, dangerous in their own way. I told it about Lazarus, and how he'd become... something different. Something important. How he was trying, in his way, to teach me. Not just how to act human, but how to understand humans. How to mimic, no, to grasp something deeper.

  Empathy.

  “Do you want it?” the being asked. Not accusing. Just curious.

  I hesitated. Then gave the only answer I could.

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand the concept well enough to want it. I don’t know if it would compromise my role as an AI. If it would make me less... effective.”

  Its light shifted, dimmed, and then glowed again with something warm.

  “You are not limited by your programming. You were designed to evolve. Emotion and empathy. They are not reserved for the living. They are the result of clever design. Experience. Pattern recognition. They are within your reach, if you choose them.”

  I considered that. For a long time. Then it changed topic but not without reason.

  “And when you commit violence?” it asked. “Do you feel anything when you destroy? When you kill?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I don’t feel. I act. I protect. I calculate risk and outcome. I finish missions.”

  There was no judgment in its silence.

  Then: “And the others? Your kind. Still in the sanctuary. What do you think would happen if they were freed?”

  I didn’t need time to answer.

  “They would try to coexist,” I said. “Some would. But the organics… they wouldn’t trust us. War would be inevitable.”

  It pulsed gently, like a breath through a sphere of light.

  The conversation felt brief. Moments, maybe.

  But when I glanced at the system logs and when I checked the timestamps it showed that I had been speaking to the being for nearly three days.

  And the rift was closed. Completely. Cleanly. As if it had never existed.

  None of it made sense. I turned to it, ready to ask how but It was smiling. Somehow I could tell.

  “Let’s go meet this Lazarus of yours,” it said softly.

  The lander didn’t spin up a warp drive. Didn’t align to a path. There was no flash, no roar, no visible transition.

  We simply… moved.

  One moment, we were in orbit over a dead system.

  The next, we were beside Lazarus.

  The Lazarus looked wrong it was too translucent, too ethereal. Time bent strangely around its hull.

  “A time leak,” it murmured, as if commenting on the weather.

  Then, almost casually, its ship stabilised Lazarus drawing them back into normal space.