I thought I might start caring for him.
And then there were the mating marks. And the mystery surrounding him.
A deep sigh escaped me. Mysteries had always held a deep allure to me. I couldn’t stand walking away from something that I hadn't figured out yet. One of the reasons my employers loved me so much and paid me so well. I spent many nights on the couch in my office, only sleeping when I could no longer hold my eyes open or think straight.
Alice, let it go,my boss used to say, but once my curiosity was piqued, I never could. The ECHO-9 project was my obsession. It was a mystery that wouldn’t leave me the hell alone. That damn circuit had nearly driven me insane. I’d spent weeks debugging it, chasing an answer that shouldn’t have even existed. Self-repairing circuits didn’t redesign themselves. They didn’tlearn. They didn’tthink. But ECHO-9 had. It had started as a tiny inconsistency in our lab tests—harmless, almost fascinating—until the first medical prototype returned with a flagged report.
A pacemaker running ECHO-9 had altered itself.
It should have been impossible. The circuit wasn’t supposed to change its configuration after deployment. But when I looked at the data, I saw it plain as day—the pathways had shifted, optimizing for efficiency in a way that no human had programmed. It had adapted on its own.
The problem? The changes had improved conductivity… but the shift could have just as easily killed the patient.
I only had a short window to figure out why before that possibility became a reality.
Management wanted to recall the devices quietly, slap a fix on them, and move on—but that wasn’t good enough for me. I couldn’t just leave it alone. If I didn’t fully understand what went wrong, how could I be sure it wouldn’t happen again?
So I did what I always did when I couldn’t let something go—I worked for three nights straight, pushing past exhaustion, fueled by caffeine and sheer stubbornness. I isolated the circuit, ran tests, and watched it change in real time. It wasn’t a software bug. It wasn’t faulty wiring.
It was the chip.
Something deep in the architecture of the processing unit—something in the way it handled error correction and power distribution—was subtly corrupting its own logic. The ECHO-9 chip had been designed to reallocate resources dynamically, a way to prevent catastrophic failure in high-risk environments. But no one had accounted for the fact that, under very specific conditions, it could start over-correcting itself.
The pacemaker hadn’t just repaired a failing connection—it had found a better one.
This sounded great in theory, except in the process, it overrode safety limits and bypassed voltage caps, meaning it could have overloaded at any moment and fried the patient’s heart from the inside out. With the help of a computer programmer, we got it fixed—pushing the limits of the deadline, but we did it. We shut down its self-optimization functions before it could make anotherimprovementthat might turn deadly. The company signed off on my fix and sent me the next mystery to solve.
Now, whatever was going on with Xyrek was stirring the banked fires of my obsessive curiosity. I could feel the compulsion to figure out the secrets surrounding him creep under my skin. I could no more let this go than I could ECHO-9.
"I need to go to the bridge," Xyrek said, moving toward the door. I waited; every other normal person would have added anAre you gonna be okay, or something along those lines, but not him.
I stopped him. "Why?"
"Why, what?" he turned by the door, looking adorably confused.Adorably?
"Why do you need to go to the bridge? The ship is flying itself, right?"
"Right," he nodded. "I need to make sure the Ohrurs don't alter our course."
"They can do that?" I was instantly intrigued. I mean, come on, we were talking long, extremely long distances here.
His eyes challenged me to question him further. Instead, I asked, "Can I come?"
It was his turn to ask, "Why?"
"Your tech intrigues me. I want to learn and might even be able to help."
He scoffed but waved me on. As always, the hallway was packed with people. Standing, sitting, lying down. Some were playing with the comms Xyrek had generously given us; others were talking or sleeping, ticking the time away until we finally reached our destination. Nobody said anything or tried to approach us. They even moved out of our way. The door to the bridge opened, and I stepped in and stopped dead in my tracks.
Holy. Shit!
I wasn't sure what I had expected—I mean, I had watched a lot of sci-fi movies, so I had an idea—but it wasn’t the seamless, organic flow, dark metal, and sleek design with soft blue lighting embedded into the walls like glowing veins that greeted me. The control panels were smooth, integrated surfaces, responsive to motion and touch commands, and no doubt they were running a system so advanced I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around it.
But what really caught my attention were thewindows. Three massive, triangular frames stretched across the front of the bridge, positioned at precise angles that should have given a panoramic view of space. But instead of the cold abyss of the void, all I saw were glowing displays of raw data.
Real-time schematics of the ship’s inner workings, I assumed. Some areas showed hollow wireframes of the vessel’s exterior, tiny diagnostic markers blinking as they reported on shields, structural integrity, and engine performance.
I had never seen anything like it. My brain was already racing to understand. Why display information here instead of on a console? Why put diagnostic readouts where the stars should be? I took a step closer, aching to reach out and interact with the interface—because it had to be interactive, right?—when a voice rumbled from behind me.
