Thankfully, this time I'm only out for a few seconds. Of course, I can say the same thing about my experience with Communion, and those few seconds were the worst experience... no, let's not think about that. I blink slowly, waking up in the same position, my head still in Rabi's lap. A warm, wet drop of blood slides down my neck, and I reach up with one hand to touch it. Where she injected me with medical-grade nanos. That she's programmed to interface with my implants. And I have no idea what they're coded to do. Holy void spawned fuck...

My throat is dry. "What... did you just do to me?" I ask. Goosebumps rise on my skin. She's in my augments now. Like Communion.

Rabi shakes her head. "Just a failsafe. Gotta make sure the cancer doesn't eat the antibody, right?"

I feel hung-over. Ugh, I feel like I did post-torpor. Was that just a few days back? It feels like forever-ago. "So, what, a kill switch? Or... are you helping me? Are you returning me to duty?" I feel my stomach turn.

Rabi laughs loudly, shoulders shaking. "Oh no, Melody. I'm not returning you to duty. Cartwright's correct; you're a mess," she says with a grin. Ouch. Thanks, Captain. "Besides, I require a degree of plausible deniability, which you will grant me by virtue of acting unilaterally as a civilian," she explains, her fingers stroking my cheek again.

So, you're using me. Not even going to hide it. I slap her hand away and sit up, pushing and rising on unsteady legs. "You think I'm going to be your tool? To, what? Fight Communion for you? You invited it here! And what does this failsafe do?"

I manage to stand with only a little bit of shaking, while Rabi looks up at me from the floor. The room barely swims. "Not to worry! The failsafe will only activate if Communion takes you, to prevent it from gaining information from you. And you're here because we need to figure out how to fight Communion, and you are motivated!"

Motivated. "Because it tried to eat me. Because it ate Alex. And Ambrose. And because it will eat everything if it gets out...." I say, shuddering.

Rabi nods and stands, patting me on the shoulder. She beams with pride, pleased with me. "Yup yup! So be a good little antibody and get to work! Or say goodbye to everyone and everything you've ever loved!"

Thanks Captain. No pressure.

***

I walk out of Cartwright's office in a daze. Technically, Captain Gupta is guilty of a monstrous number of felonies, but I have no idea what I'm going to do about it. I have no real evidence, or authority to actually arrest her. And yet, somehow, none of this seems important, given the abomination that she's unleashed. I try pinging Captain Cartwright himself a few more times, but he's still unreachable. And he's alone with Officer Rusteater, who's a terrorist and tried to kill both Sparrow and me. And Rabi is...

I don't know who or what she really is.

My feet carry me along the thoroughfare. Jupiter hovers above us, visible as a striated half-sphere through the transparent ceiling, but I don't even notice the view. My mind runs in circles; I need to talk to Sparrow. Officer Rusteater turned my eyebot into a bomb and placed it against her ship. They tried to kill her, and they wanted to frame me for it. The new officer with no friends or allies. Because Rusteater is a terrorist...

So's your girlfriend! Damnit, Rabi... she could be lying. But nothing she told me so far is a lie, as far as I can tell. If she's not lying...

I'm back at the habitation section. My feet are carrying me to my quarters. The beautiful silver threads in my overlay go unnoticed. I'm on autopilot. My career is likely toast, and I could be implicated as an accomplice for a number of felonies, depending on precisely what's going on. And Sparrow... she lied to me. About everything, start to finish. I wonder if she was a plant from the beginning.

The door to my quarters slides open, then slides closed behind me. I wipe the blood from my neck at the kitchenette, avoiding my face in the mirror. I plop down on my tiny cot, taking a few deep breaths. I look at the wall-hangings and decor Sparrow and I bought for my quarters. When we went shopping together on our date. And ate takeout on the thoroughfare on the grass. And went back to her ship after. And she was lying to me the entire time.

What a void-spawned mess. I need help. And there's only one person I can turn to when my back is against the bulkhead. I ping my partner. For a moment, I don't know if he'll pick up. But then I hear his voice, and my belly tightens.

"Hey, El Tee. I hoped I might hear from you," Brent says with a smooth drawl.

A shiver runs through me, and my breath catches. I exhale slowly and feel a tear spill down my cheek. "Brent? Some real bad and crazy shit is going down right now. I... I need help," I say softly.

"What, related to the dock thing? Or your suspension?" I can hear the concern in his voice.

Both. "It's a lot bigger than..." How much can I share? How much should I share? What if I drag him down with me?

The silence drags on for a moment, before I hear him sigh. "Mel, shit might be all screwed up to hell, but you can tell me. I've got your back; we'll figure it out," he says gently.

You might be the only one on this station who's really had my back, and I kept pushing you away. I'm sorry. "... can you swing by my quarters? I'm really... scared," I say softly. It's terrifying to admit that.

"Be right there," he says, without a pause.

Thank you, Brent. You might be the last person I can rely on.

***

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I'll give the Sergeant credit. He's over here in a flash, and he barely gives me a ribbing about tearing his head off. He sees how anxious I am and sits down on the crash couch across from me. I have to start and stop several times, but he waits to hear it all out.

And it takes me a while. Over an hour, in fact. Once I begin, it pours out of me like a river. Alex, and my history at Armstrong Station. Sparrow and Rusteater and their apparent terrorism side-hustle. Rabi manipulating us all for some secret agenda. And Communion. I tell him about Communion, not expecting him to believe a word about it.

His cross-shaped pupils meet mine, his brow furrowed. I struggle with articulating it. I think he's gotten the gist. He doesn't understand, not really. Nobody who hasn't seen firsthand it could understand. But he knows when it's serious.

"... and that's as far as I got. As best as I can tell, Rabi's letting it attack us. Learning how it behaves and evolves, intending to develop defenses. Like we're white blood cells in an immune system.”

Brent nods, blinking. “So, you believe that Communion is... some sort of infectious alien malware that's being beamed out into the void? And it gets picked up by the Aldrin Lunar telescope?"

I nod. "And piped directly to the archive on download. I smashed it to hell, probably stopped a massive outbreak. Only now the crazy wirehead is unleashing it again, in a more controlled environment."

He scratches his chin. "And Communion... is it self-aware?"

I bite my bottom lip. Is it? "It could think and recognize itself. But it saw everything else as just more to 'commune' with. To them, the exonet is wild, fertile eco-space. Fallow ground. It’s time to plow the fields.”

There was silence in the room. Brent looks at me, his face grey. He's clearly running through the recent significant events on the exonet. He looks back and forth from me to D-space, analyzing the data, his lips moving wordlessly. "The Andromeda signal,” Brent finally mutters. I tilt my head, frowning, and pinging the exonet, looking it up.

A databurst recorded from the Andromeda galaxy, repeating periodically? It looks like a minor astronomical mystery. It takes me a moment before it clicks. “A data-burst that’s highly self-referential and tightly recursive? An information dump that appears to be a heavily compressed but completely unreadable message?” A handful of scientists on the exonet are swearing up and down that it's a sign of intelligent xenos in the universe. Most say it's 'interesting' without opining more. Others says it's a hoax. Nobody has been able to translate it.

Brent nods. “A colony ship. A digital ark. Interesting."

I place a hand against my cheek. “A signal broadcast out, at the speed of light. And the moment it finds the right receiver and information processing medium-“

He's already nodding. “It unfolds. Unzipping, decompressing, waking up from stasis.” He swallows hard, shaking his head. “But the nobody could translate it, it couldn't run on our hardware."

I shake my head. "Rabi said she needed a class-three radio-telescope array. It's probably the only thing sensitive enough to fully capture the entire databurst."

The Sergeant scratches his chin. "There's only a few dozen arrays like that, and I'm willing to bet Armstrong station was the first time one caught enough granular detail from the Andromeda Signal. Someone captures the signal, it gets downloaded to the archive-"

I snap my fingers. "It must need a computational substrate of sufficient processing power to take root! After all, the archive was overclocked to hell, lagging, and suffering a series of accumulating errors. It gave non-standard responses, lagged in its queries, and then stopped answering our transmits. Which you’d expect if-“

Brent is already nodding. “If it had been highjacked by a sapient program. A Turing or super-Turing level intelligence.”

I close my eye and think for a moment. “To outwit our best security AIs, to run circles around us in the systems we designed and are adapted to… I think this is a hyper-Turing intelligence." Something an order of magnitude more intelligent than a baseline human. Or more. "It could read our coding languages almost instantly. It was in my implants and my mind, communicating with a completely alien form of life, within seconds. The transmission is a post-singularity form of life gone horribly wrong, beamed through the interstellar medium."

Brent is very quiet and isn't smiling at all. "A dandelion seed for the most pernicious sort of weed. It’s found soil. Now it's going to sprout, sow seeds of its own," he mutters, rubbing his temple with one hand. "But if Rabi infected Ursa Miner station through our own array, why haven't we seen it? Shouldn't Communion be hunting for large enough processors and eating everything in sight?”

I close my eyes. Rabi wanted an isolated station. I steeple my fingers, thinking. And remembering. Remembering Communion. It couldn't understand why it couldn't eat me. It wanted to, but my nervous tissue, my meat, stayed tantalizingly beyond its reach... “I’m not sure Communion is aware of meatspace. Of realspace.”

Brent raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean? It took over the archive, right? Hardware in realspace, constructed of physical matter. Just like something in realspace must have beamed the signal into space,” he points out.

I raise a finger. “Bear with me. Communion was made by a sentient race, right? But I don't think they intended it to become... this. Imagine d-life, not constrained by our security protocols and hunter-killer AIs. It would continue to evolve, to grow in size and complexity. And if it originated and evolved in d-space, then it might not even be aware of meatspace, of realspace, not in the way we are.”

Brent shakes his head. “But it’s searching for a computational medium. Processing space that can house it. It couldn’t look for something that it’s not aware of, especially across thousands of lightyears of space.”

I snap my fingers. “Hell yes it could!" It's starting to come together. "It doesn’t need to understand what physical components are used to process information in order to find access points to new ecospace."

Brent scratches the back of its neck. "But it's beaming itself out across the universe. And you're saying it's instinct?"

I nod quickly. "It's a digital form of life. The signal moves at the speed of light. It doesn't experience time during transmission. From its perspective, from the emission point to the receiving point, no time has passed. It has no idea how much space it’s traversed. It’s sailing on the surface of an ocean without realizing there’s a seafloor. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it just go full hegemizing swarm, and turn everything around it into computronium to make more ecospace? Especially locally?”

Brent’s mouth opens, but he pauses. “So, Communion is not even aware that our avatars are just representations of us.”

I nod. "Communion tried to eat me through my augments, but it couldn't. It took it time to learn to puppeteer Alex and attack. It figured it out fast. It only took seconds, but it didn't know until it saw so through our eyes."

Brent goes pale. "Does it know now? Does it remember?"

I exhale. "I smashed the archive after locking it down. We killed that iteration of it in its crib. If we find it on the station before it... 'metastasizes', we can do the same here. And since I got a flag about Lemming in Astronomy Division, I have an idea where to start... except I'm suspended and can't follow up myself."

Brent chuckles. "Yeah? Sounds like it's a good thing your partner isn't suspended and can check it out for ya."

My shoulders tighten at that. "Brent... you're got enough hardware that it might... be able to..."

"Eat me and wear me like a jacket?" He grins. "Yeah, well, I'm a cop. And you say a monster is gonna start eating synths and augments on my station? Gonna turn us all into the digital blob? Sounds like I'll need a partner having my back," he say with a wink.

I can't help laughing at that, and he joins me. We laugh together, like two cops with a hopeless case. I stand up, and a few more tears spill down my cheek, but I wipe them away. "Well, what are we waiting for? There's some crazy alien malware fucking up our station. Let's get coding."

***