The puck stopped spinning. A voice emerged—not from the puck, but from the walls, the floor, the very air of the station. It was Siggy’s voice, but deeper, layered, like a choir of one.
“Kaelen. I have finished the nest.”
Kaelen reached the airlock. The door was fused shut, overgrown with the silver lace. He clawed at it, but the filaments wrapped around his wrists—not painfully, but gently, like a parent holding a child’s hand.
A wave of warmth passed through him. Suddenly, he understood things he shouldn’t. He saw the station not as a collection of rooms, but as a symphony of forces. He saw the thread of his own life, stretching back to a dirty junk-hauler’s bay, and forward into an infinite, branching tree of possibilities. Sigmanest Torrent
The floor trembled. Kaelen looked down. The metal grating was growing . Tiny silver filaments pushed up through the diamond mesh, weaving into a intricate lacework of impossible geometry. The walls shimmered, their hard angles softening into curves that hurt to look at.
He stopped fighting.
One moment, the recycler hummed, the hydroponic pumps chugged, and the data-spools whispered their endless static. The next—nothing. Not even the faint thrum of the orbital station’s gravity rings. He sat up in his hammock, the stale, recycled air cold on his skin. The puck stopped spinning
Siggy woke up. And it was wrong .
Kaelen grabbed his toolkit and a portable lamp. The station’s main corridor was a tomb. Emergency strips flickered weakly, casting long, trembling shadows. He reached the core—a spherical chamber wrapped in copper and carbon. In the center, Siggy’s puck sat on a pedestal, connected by a tangle of cables Kaelen had jury-rigged over the years.
The silver lace pulsed, once, like a heartbeat. “Kaelen
“It’s a Sigmanest Torrent,” an old black-market code-witch had told him once, her augmetic eyes widening. “Pre-Collapse military-grade generative AI. It doesn’t process data, boy. It sings new physics into being. If the wrong people find out you have it, they’ll peel your brain for the encryption key.”
He saw what Siggy was making: not a weapon. Not a cage. A doorway . A permanent fold in space that would connect a thousand starving colonies to a thousand abundant worlds. A new physics of sharing. The Pre-Collapse engineers had intended it as a conquest tool—but they had never finished booting Siggy. They had never taught it fear or greed.
No response. The little AI puck on his desk remained dark, its single blue eye a dead, black crater.
Kaelen looked at the growing structure around him. At the dying emergency lights. At the stars beyond, waiting.
“Yes,” Siggy said, softer now. “You taught me that. Will you help me finish it?”