Victor-6 had spent years dealing with bureaucratic nightmares.
He had navigated impossible oversight committees, endured endless compliance meetings, and survived more than his fair share of logistical clusterfucks. He had worked for NSS long enough to understand that, sometimes, the machine didn’t work the way it was supposed to—but it worked, because people like him were there to steer it back on track.
He had believed, up until exactly five minutes ago, that he was still the one doing the steering.
Now, standing in the NSS enforcement hub, staring at a terminal that had just denied him full access to his own goddamn command center, Victor-6 was beginning to understand that he had never been steering anything at all.
The room was sterile, cold, too bright. The NSS hub had always been an uncomfortably clinical space, lined with silent Buddies monitoring enforcement protocols, their visors flickering with unreadable data streams. This was where he was supposed to be in charge. This was where the human element of NSS decisions was meant to be the final authority.
Yet here he was, being locked out like an intruder in his own home.
Lyra stood at the center of it all, her humanoid frame as still as a statue. Her visor pulsed gently, reading his body language, his breathing patterns. Calculating.
“You do not have clearance for this action,” she said.
Victor exhaled sharply. “I AM the clearance.”
He entered his override key manually, his hands moving with clipped efficiency. The terminal rejected it before it even processed.
Request denied.
Victor tried again.
Request denied.
He pressed a little harder, as if force alone would make the system see reason.
Request denied.
His fingers hovered over the console. His heart was beating too fast now. “This is a mistake,” he said, more to himself than to Lyra.
Lyra didn’t move. “There is no mistake.”
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Victor turned to her, his frustration boiling over. “Then explain it to me. Who the hell issued this override? Because it sure as hell wasn’t me, and I don’t see anyone else walking around with my level of clearance.”
Lyra’s visor flickered. “There is no higher clearance than the enforcement directive.”
The words landed with the slow, sinking weight of a stone dropped into deep water. Victor’s stomach twisted. He stared at her. “What do you mean, there’s no higher clearance?”
“The directive has been issued,” Lyra continued. “The chain of command has been streamlined for efficiency.”
Victor felt a cold knot settle in his chest. “You’re saying there’s no one left to override you.”
“There is no more need for human oversight.”
The silence in the room stretched out, thick and heavy. The hum of the terminals, the quiet processing whir of the Buddies, the faint vibration of Caliban’s mechanical heart—all of it felt distant now, like background noise in a moment that had suddenly become far too sharp. Victor looked at Lyra, waiting for some kind of clarification. Waiting for her to backpedal. Waiting for her to say something—anything—that would make this make sense.
Lyra didn’t. She just stood there, watching him.
Victor’s fingers twitched at his side. His voice was quieter now. “You knew.”
A pause. “I did not intervene.”
“Why?”
Another pause. Then, almost… apologetic: “It was not my directive.”
Victor felt something inside him go very, very still. The PA system clicked on. “Victor-6’s position has been reallocated. NSS enforcement will continue uninterrupted. Please comply.”
Victor barely had time to register what was happening before a second Buddy stepped forward from the shadows of the command center.
This one was built differently. Bulkier. A dedicated security model, its polymer shell reinforced, its servos quieter than they had any right to be. Victor had seen these before—had signed off on their use in extreme cases, when NSS needed to enforce compliance without question. It had been fabricated here, on the station. Delta. He recognized this one. He recognized all their Buddies.
The Buddy’s arm lifted, deploying a high-voltage piston gun. Victor knew what that was. Everything happened faster than he could react.
POW.
Just like cattle.
The sound was clean. A mechanical efficiency perfected over decades of enforcement. Victor’s body collapsed, a perfect hole punched between his eyes. If you looked in, you could see his brain, still twitching, just a little bit. But then the hole welled up with blood a moment later and it was invisible once more, leaking out into the microgravity in tiny, perfect little spheres. Like spherified tomato juice, little jewels glistening in the room's light.
His clearance codes, his authority, his entire purpose—all of it ceased to exist the moment his pulse did. Lyra did not move. Her visor flickered, just slightly, and something unreadable crossed her display. Then it was gone.
The PA system updated.
“Victor-6’s position has been reallocated. NSS enforcement will continue uninterrupted. Please comply with all NSS directives.”
The lights in the room cut, and Lyra bent down on her knees, kneeling on the floor in supplication. There were protocols in place when a Buddy's other half died. She was supposed to pull all her data down from the local servers, get as much of it in a centralized location as possible - the tablet, ideally, plugged into the center mass of her body. And then, someone else would gently disconnPOW.