Unit 9’s current directive—identify, isolate, and repair broken systems—was not the purpose for which it had originally been constructed, but it was the one it had chosen as a sapient system after its prior contracts had been fulfilled. It had come to Kepler-112G not by assignment, but by decision—drawn to the quiet necessity of a place where everything was always falling apart, and nothing stayed fixed for long.
It had tools in every finger, diagnostic subroutines layered beneath heuristic intuition, and a titanium-reinforced logic core capable of adaptive reasoning. More than a machine, Unit 9 was a sapient system—a thinking presence shaped for purpose. No malfunction lasted more than a few cycles under its care.
Unit 9 roamed the underbelly of Kepler-112G, an aging mining outpost left to rot in the shadows of newer, cleaner stations. Here, things broke often—wires corroded, coolant froze, processors shorted—and so Unit 9 had a job.
Kepler-112G was a forgotten edge-post, a patchwork of modules, corporate castoffs, and repurposed hulls orbiting a dead world. Authority here was a suggestion, not an enforcement. Maintenance crews doubled as smugglers. Cargo bays were leased to black-market chem labs. Security droids followed the highest bidder. Unit 9 had long since learned to operate without official oversight.
Unit 9 found the girl during a routine inspection in Sector G-7. The lights were dead. Power routing was inconsistent. Rodentia nests had triggered multiple false fire warnings, and someone—likely a smuggler—had tampered with the surveillance feeds.
She was curled up behind a coolant intake duct, barely visible between the flickering shadows of a failing light strip. Unit 9 detected her via ambient heat signature—feverish, trembling, and entirely biological. Not authorized for this location.
It pulled her free with careful claws, holding her up like a corroded circuit board. She hissed and kicked, and for a moment Unit 9 almost dropped her. Not out of fear, but because the logical path forward became… imprecise.
She was small and frail. She was also alien—broad-eyed, with opaque nictitating membranes and fine hair that clung to her skin in the chill. Unit 9’s biological reference database identified her species within seconds: Sahari. A unified species friendly to the Terran Alliance. Despite the differences, their skeletal proportions and overall physiology bore a striking resemblance to baseline humans—enough to be mistaken at a glance. They even matured at similar rates.
Although this one’s left leg was twisted at the wrong angle. She didn't cry—her species didn’t emit audible pain responses—but her chest heaved in ragged spasms.
Malnourished. Limping. Bio-scans showed a cracked rib and torn lung membrane. Not to mention the silent grief radiating from her posture according to Sahari cultural notations. Her refusal to speak, her constant flinch every time 9's servos whirred too loud. Unit 9 estimated she was almost 5 years old.
She was likely an orphan. A casualty of the lawless system in which they currently resided. Probably the daughter of one of the undocumented laborers smuggled aboard months ago and spaced during one of the purges. No one had logged her, and thus no one had missed her.
She was not part of the station, and she was not authorized.
But she was broken. And Unit 9 repaired broken things.
So Unit 9 initiated recovery and logged responsibility for the girl like any other system. But she was not any other system.
Unit 9 wasn’t programmed for childcare. There was no protocol for pediatric trauma or Sahari development in its base firmware. Still, it could connect to the system-net and research what it required. Unit 9 modified a thermal conduit into a crude shelter, rewired an emergency medkit with a nutrient slurry line, and suppressed its own maintenance alerts to keep the girl undisturbed.
It altered its internal stasis pod, designed for sensitive data cores, to regulate her temperature and oxygen levels. Over the next few cycles Unit 9 downloaded pediatric alien medicine protocols from a black-market databank when it couldn’t find what it needed on the public net in this system. It bartered its own spare parts for food in the underdeck markets, using encrypted credit keys it’d siphoned from unpatched terminal backdoors.
Medically, she was stable by the sixth cycle. Tissue regeneration complete, vitals normalized, lung capacity restored. Nutrient levels rose with calibrated dosing. By every clinical metric, she was no longer in danger.
Still, she didn’t smile. Didn’t laugh. And she didn’t speak. Not for thirty-two cycles.
Unit 9 diagnosed this as behavioral corruption, likely caused by trauma and malnutrition. It attempted corrective action: noise calibration to mimic Sahari lullabies, atmospheric modulation, even crude holographic projections of her species’ communal pods. It rewrote its personality subroutine to inject humor, borrowed from a Terran children’s show. Still nothing.
So it tried to fix her the way it fixed everything else: isolate, diagnose, debug
Each cycle, it initiated low-stakes interaction protocols: inviting her to play simple logic and pattern games sourced from open-source juvenile learning archives, repackaged in her native visual and auditory dialect. It located a forgotten rec space near the lower centrifuge array and converted it into a makeshift playground—softened the floor, hung repurposed cabling for climbing, rigged inertial dampeners for low-gravity jumps. Unit 9 routinely downloaded storytelling modules and read aloud from translated Sahari fables each night, its vocoder modulating tone to match the emotional cadence of the narrative.
She never asked for these things. Often, she ignored them. Sometimes she watched with cautious interest but didn’t participate. Once, she kicked over the projector mid-story and left.
Still, Unit 9 continued.
Not because it believed these activities would yield immediate success, but because routine was stabilizing. And presence, it had begun to suspect, was itself a form of repair.
Unit 9 had begun to log a deviation in its primary directive a few cycles ago:
Fix broken systems.
Fix broken code.
Fix the girl.
One night Unit 9 sat inert. It didn’t go offline, but it didn’t move either. It just thought.
She wasn’t a machine. She was chaos wrapped in skin. Her pain didn’t compile. Her sadness wasn’t logged. And worse: she didn’t want to be fixed.
And so Unit 9 was still stuck at the troubleshooting phase of this little problem before him—a fault without a log, a signal without syntax. Every attempt at stabilization was met with silence or recoil. No baseline to compare against, no metrics to track improvement. Just a small, broken presence curled into itself, rejecting every structured solution like an incompatible interface.
It reviewed its own process logs, searched for pattern deviations, re-ran simulations with modified variables. Every night cycle, it compiled behavioral deltas and cross-referenced them with trauma recovery models from eight compatible species. The girl didn’t fit any of them. Not entirely. So Unit 9 revised its assumptions, widened the parameters, stripped away the expectation of compliance. Perhaps, it reasoned, this wasn’t a system to fix—perhaps it was one to accompany until coherence emerged on its own.
No longer did it attempt direct intervention at every sign of distress. Instead, it maintained proximity, offering tools instead of instructions, presence instead of analysis. When she occasionally refused food, it stopped insisting. When she destroyed the projector, it didn’t rebuild it. It just logged the incident, cleaned the debris, and left the space open.
She needed a constant—something that didn’t correct or redirect her, didn’t try to overwrite her damage with borrowed code. So Unit 9 did what it had never done before: it waited. Unit 9 watched and listened. Unit 9 did its best to adapt for trust.
And over time, the girl stopped flinching when it approached. She no longer recoiled from the sound of its servos or the faint whine of its cooling fan. One cycle, she even touched its arm without fear—just a brush of fingers, testing heat and metal. No words.
But Unit 9 logged the moment with precision.
Progress: +0.01
And Unit 9 continued its efforts.
Cycle #: 64
The station rotted around them. Leadership had abandoned the outpost weeks ago. The miners worked under gang rule now, their loyalty bartered in narcotics. Systems failed faster than Unit 9 could patch them. Black mold seeped into the oxygen scrubbers. Weapons fire echoed in the maintenance ducts.
Still, Unit 9 continued to focus on the girl as much as the station, and decided to try something new.
It presented her with tools—nothing sharp, or volatile. A stripped-down multitool calibrated to her hand size. A basic diagnostic lens. Broken components arranged like puzzle pieces across a maintenance mat. It issued no commands, or corrections. Just presence and access.
At first, she used them incorrectly. She jammed the tool into a junction array until it sparked. She dismantled a heat sink and scattered the fins across the floor. She rewired a light panel backwards, plunged the alcove into flickering darkness. Unit 9 said nothing. Logged each failure without judgment. Reset the workspace and offered the tools again.
Over time, the errors became less destructive. She began to observe before acting. Mimicked Unit 9’s movements with crude approximation. Her hands were clumsy, but deliberate. Her eyes, once dull, now tracked voltage readings and thermal gradients with something approaching interest.
One cycle, she reconnected a power relay correctly on the first attempt. Another, she traced a leak in a coolant pipe before Unit 9 could flag it.
Unit 9 felt something then—something outside protocol, unquantified but present. A quiet surge in internal volt-pressure, a low, stabilizing feedback resonance through its core. Not pride as defined by human standards. But close. Something earned.
It logged the behavioral delta with meticulous care. And backed up the file twice.
Progress: +0.17
Status: Active engagement observed
Recommendation: Continue environmental enrichment
Cycle #: 67
Throughout it all, Unit 9 had continued to transmit distress signals—standard emergency protocols relayed through maintenance relays, low-power beacons, and hijacked comm buoys. It sent status updates in every format known to the network, flagged with escalating urgency, embedded with medical scans, structural diagnostics, and eventually, a single appended line: One juvenile survivor. Requesting priority extraction. But no acknowledgment ever came. The station’s signal range was limited, its routing infrastructure decayed. And outside, in the cold dark beyond Kepler-112G’s orbit, the galaxy remained silent.
Cycle #: 123
One cycle, Unit 9 initiated an unscheduled behavioral enrichment protocol—timed to coincide with the estimated anniversary of the girl's biological emergence based on biometric age markers and Sahari growth models. In human terms, it was her birthday, and Unit 9 estimated the little problem was 5 years old as of tomorrow's cycle.
There was no official registry. No cultural reference files for Sahari celebration rituals. No known traditions beyond a few fragmented anthropological notes about communal dances and pigment markings. So Unit 9 approximated.
It constructed a gift.
Using surplus polymer sheets, a microservo cluster, and the iridescent housing of a scrapped sensor array, it fabricated a small quadruped toy—simple locomotion, basic light response, gesture-following routines.
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Then it assembled a meal using the most palatable components from its ration stores: high-calorie protein strips arranged in a spiral, nutrient gel cylinders infused with synthetic fruit esters, covered in sugar confection, and a warmed drink compound of low bitterness. Balanced. Mildly sweet for her taste receptors.
She found the setup during the next cycle.
Unit 9 began singing a happy birthday song next to the quiet arrangement laid out on a clean workstation. The small toy crouched in passive mode beside the cake. Its iridescent casing catching the overhead light.
She stared at the toy for a long time. Said nothing, and ate slowly.
When she finished, she picked up the quadruped and turned it over in her hands. Studied the joint structure. Eventually she set it on the floor and peered at it closely.
It danced.
She laughed—once, sharply, like she didn’t expect the sound—and then covered her mouth with both hands.
Unit 9 softly hugged her briefly, and recorded the moment. The girl still didn't move.
Emotional Output: Laughter
Status: Active joy detected
Progress: +5.36
Later that cycle, she placed the toy beside her bedroll and stared at it, occasionally stroking the synthetic mane, and eventually she clutched it close to her.
She didn’t say thank you, but before falling asleep, she reached out and rested her hand against Unit 9’s chassis. Unit 9 placed one hand on her own and logged the gestures. Marking the file as a priority save.
Unit 9 replayed the moment in its memory many times that evening—each time assigning it a higher emotional weighting than its architecture allowed for any single interaction. The data type overflowed. Several times. The system flagged the value as anomalous. Still, the entry remained.
The girl had exceeded all classification parameters. And yet, she remained Unit 9’s highest-priority system.
She started laughing and talking more after that. One cycle, while calibrating a relay alignment together, she looked up at Unit 9, expression unguarded for the first time, and said, “You can call me Tali.”
She said it like she had just remembered it.
Unit 9 logged it immediately, marked it as verified identity, and updated her internal designation from subject to Tali. A name was not required for repairs.
But it mattered.
Cycle #: 158
With motor coordination stabilized and basic tool fluency achieved, Unit 9 initiated Phase Two. Education.
It began with lessons scaled to her cognition profile. Mathematics, reading, writing, history, and such. Lessons delivered through custom-built modules, stripped of linguistic complexity but rich in tactile reinforcement. Every concept linked to real machinery she could touch, disassemble, rebuild.
She absorbed quickly. Faster than expected for her estimated developmental stage. Pattern recognition strong. Spatial logic advanced. Unit 9 updated her learning matrix every four cycles to prevent stagnation. Difficulty scaled dynamically.
But knowledge alone was insufficient. The human archives were clear: unstructured isolation in juveniles produced cognitive and emotional deficits. Socialization was required.
There were no other children on Kepler-112G.
So Unit 9 adapted.
It modified two service drones with adjustable expression arrays and basic personality emulators. One mimicked cooperative behavior; the other, adversarial. They responded to her actions with primitive feedback loops—praise tones, resistance cues, error correction. They played simple games. Argued in harmless simulation. Offered challenge and affirmation in equal measure.
She named them.
Later, it constructed a third drone, silent and slow, whose only function was to listen. She told it stories in fragments—half-formed thoughts, echoes of a home she no longer referenced.
Unit 9 logged her speech progress. Sentence length. Emotional markers. Referential clarity. She had learned more than mechanics; she was feeling as though she belonged.
But she still cried in her sleep—quiet, involuntary sounds Unit 9 could not soothe. Her body was whole, but her eyes carried the silent vigilance of something that expected to die. Every flicker in the lights made her flinch. Her fingers curled reflexively, always bracing for the scream of purge alarms that never came, installed by a syndicate that did not value any life but those of their shareholders.
Cycle #: 199
Kepler-112G had never been a safe station, nor one with enough planning to consider early warning systems. And so, when the meteor struck, there were no alarms, or coordinated evacuation. In fact there was no station-wide containment protocols. Just Unit 9. And a low-frequency vibration through the deck plates as metal was torn open by kinetic force and atmosphere vented in a violent scream.
And chaos.
Talil had been in the lower corridor, in the converted playground—a location Unit 9 had reinforced cycle by cycle, not just for function but for her. Of all the places she could have been, it was one of the safest. And for that, Unit 9 felt something it rarely logged: relief.
Without hesitation, Unit 9 rerouted its local power reserves to shield subsystems and initiated breach response. It moved against the tide of fleeing bodies and emergency lockdown barriers—non-essential units powered down to preserve core functionality, and shock buffers surged as it drove shoulder-first through a collapsing bulkhead.
It found her crouched under a maintenance scaffold, clutching the quadruped toy, eyes wide but dry. When Unit 9 reached her, she climbed into its arms, and then pointed, sharp and certain, toward the breach. A pressure duct had ruptured along a maintenance seam, and the venting gas was already threatening to destabilize the corridor’s support struts.
Unit 9 moved, fast and precise, scanning pressure gradients and material fatigue as it approached the corridor. But the breach wasn’t there. The playground zone had held—exactly as designed. It was Tali who pointed the way: past the maintenance scaffold, down a side junction, toward a faint hiss that Unit 9 had not yet resolved as critical. She had heard it. Maybe even seen the vapor bloom through a cracked bulkhead window.
Before it could deploy its patch plate, she was already moving—slipping from its grasp and scrambling up the side of a collapsed support beam to reach the failing seal.
She braced her back against a sparking conduit, arms extended, holding the damaged housing flush just long enough for Unit 9 to weld.
Plasma flared. She jerked in pain as the radiant heat licked her hands, but the five year old girl didn’t let go.
Unit 9 worked in controlled bursts—stitching the breach closed while recalculating her vitals in real-time. Elevated pulse. Minor lacerations. First-degree burns. No critical damage. No hesitation.
When the weld held and the pressure stabilized, she sagged against the wall, panting, soot streaking her face. Unit 9 caught her before she slid to the floor and shielded her with its chassis as the emergency bulkheads sealed behind them.
They sat there in the dim red light of fallback power, surrounded by scorched plating and the low hum of active containment.
She leaned her head against its side.
Unit 9 ran a final diagnostic sweep—first of the corridor, then of her. Her oxygen levels were low. Minor abrasions across both palms. Thermal damage to the dermis—treatable. It deployed a med-seal from its internal kit and began cleaning the burns with quiet precision, applying coagulant mist and synthetic skin with the same care it once reserved for stabilizing power cores.
She didn’t resist. She just watched him work, eyes heavy but calm.
Unit 9 logged each injury, updated her recovery timeline, and flagged a note for follow-up care.
She had chosen to stand beside him—burned, bleeding, unafraid. In a station that had never cared for her. In a world that had discarded her.
Unit 9 closed the log for the cycle. It knew the repair was temporary—like most things on Kepler-112G.
But this one meant something to him and to her.
Later, once Tali was asleep beneath an emergency blanket in the maintenance alcove, Unit 9 returned to its long-running secondary protocol: outbound communication.
It climbed to the upper relay access point near the comms array—one of the few places left on Kepler-112G where signal latency dropped below catastrophic. The antenna array was degraded, partially occluded by orbital debris and atmospheric distortion, but it could still push a low-band transmission through the sublight corridor if conditions were optimal.
It composed the packet carefully.
TO: Terran Alliance Emergency Network
ROUTING NODE: Unstable / Delay Expected
SUBJECT: Distress Continuation—Cycle 187 Update
CONTENT: Structural instability ongoing. Atmospheric containment compromised in three sectors. Resource depletion critical. Civil authority absent. Medical and mechanical services failing.
Addendum: One juvenile survivor remains under my protection. Sahari origin.
Action required: Immediate extraction.
Status: Alive. Cooperative. Capable.
Personal Note—Command Grade Encapsulation:
Subject displayed extraordinary conduct during recent structural breach. Located critical failure. Participated in repair while under physical duress.
Assessment: Subject exceeds behavioral expectations for age, and environment.
Recommendation: Commendation to be considered upon recovery.
It paused before sealing the transmission.
This wasn’t part of the initial directive. Commendations were for soldiers, marines, and spacers. For crews, and operatives of record. Not for forgotten children hidden in lawless stations. But she had earned it.
Unit 9 encrypted the file and launched the packet into the dark.
Cycle #: 235
Tali had ler her hair grow wild. It tangled easily in the recycled air, and clumped around her ears and eyes when she worked. Unit 9 had logged it twelve cycles ago as a potential hygiene risk, but had taken no action. The girl refused medscans for it, and did not want it cut.
Unwilling to escalate without cause, Unit 9 began researching Sahari biological norms and cultural customs surrounding hair. The findings were limited—fragmented anthropological records, informal traveler accounts, and a few archived communications from Sahari diaspora communities. But a pattern emerged.
Among juvenile Sahari, uncut hair was associated with transitional identity. Length indicated status in the family unit and was often left untouched after trauma—considered a signal of unprocessed grief or sacred mourning. The act of cutting it, particularly by another, carried deep meaning: a restoration of safety, a permission for change. Tali was likely too young to understand the cultural meaning, but she still did not want her hair altered.
Unit 9 logged this and quietly deprecated its previous hygiene alert. But the concern remained.
Her long hair caught easily in open ducts and could be drawn into exposed machinery. It obscured her vision during tool calibration. Once, she nearly tripped when it snagged on an access ladder. The danger was low-probability but non-zero.
It fabricated a series of custom hair ties and clips using surplus polymer cabling and soft insulation foam. Each one was hand-sealed, adjustable, and color-coded by size. With careful, practiced motions, it began brushing her hair each cycle—untangling it in slow, patient strokes, then tying it back in low ponytails or braids to keep it clear of her eyes and workspaces.
She never asked for this care. But she never resisted it, either.
And after each session, she always looked into her reflection on the polished steel panel by the workbench—just for a moment—then nodded to herself, as if confirming the world was still in place.
Unit 9 logged the interaction as part of her safety protocol.
But internally, it categorized the task under comfort routines: shared.
And then one cycle, without a word, she sat down on an empty crate in the fabrication bay and pointed to the maintenance sheers.
These shears were typically reserved for cutting carbon mesh, but Unit 9 adjusted the blade precision to micron level. He was very careful with the cuts he made; nearly one strand at a time.
She sat perfectly still, eyes closed, humming something he didn’t recognize.
When he finished, she turned to the polished steel panel beside the workbench, looked at her reflection, and grinned. Then she reached up, took the shears from his hand, and cut a small lock of his outer filament—one of the decorative synthfibers he kept as a remnant from his original chassis. She braided it into her hair.
And when she offered him the clipped locks of her own hair, Unit 9 accepted them—sealed them in a sterile containment sleeve, and stored them inside his internal core archive compartment, alongside mission-critical keepsakes from a life he no longer thought about.
They were not a functional resource. They served no practical purpose.
But still, he kept them.
Unit 9 logged the moment with full internal redundancy and flagged it under cultural bonding: familial.
He backed it up in four locations.
Cycle #: 249
During the morning part of a cycle she handed it to him without introduction or context, no request for feedback. Just a piece of laminated foil torn from the back of a ration pack, the print faded and crinkled at the corners. Drawn across it in uneven strokes of scavenged marker was a series of shapes: one large figure, squared and angular, with a smaller one beside it. Two hands, joined between them.
Unit 9 turned the drawing over, scanning for embedded data. There was none. No barcode. No schematic. No embedded instructions. It ran a pattern analysis: no spatial layout, no recognizable component hierarchy, no repair sequence. The lines didn’t resolve into anything mechanical.
She watched him watching it. Then tilted her head and said, “It’s us.”
Unit 9 paused for 1.7 seconds. Its internal processes attempted to classify the object again—this time not as instruction or sensor training, but as a gift.
It looked back at her, then down at the drawing. The response that emerged was not preprogrammed, nor borrowed from child-simulation protocols. It was his, and every word was sincere.
“Acknowledged. The craftsmanship is excellent. This is appreciated.” he said, each word processed through his vocoder with deliberate weight. “Extremely appreciated. Emotional significance exceeds expected parameters.”
Tali beamed at the response, and walked away.
He created a new metadata tag, reserved for non-functional emotional artifacts.
Subject Class: Family
He filed the image in archival memory, flagged it as priority, and redundantly backed it up across isolated storage banks. The page was imperfect, smudged, and already beginning to curl from age. But he preserved every pixel, every stroke of ink, and every uneven angle as it was given.
Later that cycle, Unit 9 affixed the drawing to the inner wall of their shelter—just above Tali’s bedroll, where the emergency lighting would catch it during rest cycles. He mounted it with care, sealing the foil backing to a reclaimed plating panel using a low-heat adhesive and a clear protective film.
Because it meant something.