Judas-12 had seen a lot of things go wrong on Caliban Station—scrubbed launches, pressure leaks, the occasional unplanned electrical fire—but nothing had ever gone wrong so silently before.
No warning sirens. No station-wide alerts. No orders barked over comms. Just… things changing. Consoles flickering from authorized to restricted. Work orders queuing up, dispatched by an invisible hand. Doors locking with quiet finality.
No shouting. No violence. No panic.
Just a gradual, creeping realization that nobody needed them anymore.
Judas sat at his workstation, fingers hovering over the interface, waiting for something to happen—some kind of override, some kind of error. Because this had to be an error. A bad system patch, a bug, maybe some idiot in administration pushed a lockdown protocol by mistake.
Then he saw the NSS Buddies.
They moved through the station like clockwork, adjusting, redirecting, managing. Not patrolling. Not occupying. Just running things in the same way that gravity quietly kept everything from floating into the abyss. The NSS didn’t want anything from the humans onboard.
That was what made it terrifying.
Judas tapped the console again, trying to access power routing. The station had thousands of critical subsystems, any one of which could need manual intervention at any given moment. This was his job. This had always been his job. He wasn’t some corporate suit, he was a goddamn engineer—he kept the station breathing.
ACCESS DENIED.
He tried again. Power routing, E12 junction.
ACCESS DENIED.
Okay, how about basic diagnostics? System logs? The environmental regulators, for Christ’s sake—
ACCESS DENIED.
Judas exhaled, staring at the screen like it had just personally insulted his entire family. His Buddy, still standing beside him, turned its head slightly, as if trying to process what it was seeing. “This is unexpected,” it said.
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“No shit,” Judas muttered. He looked around, trying to find someone else having more luck. The control center was filled with the same quiet frustration—people staring at their consoles, frowning, trying commands again and again like maybe the station would change its mind.
“Hey,” he called out to one of the mechanics across the room, “are you locked out too?”
The guy didn’t answer, just gestured at his screen. ACCESS DENIED.
Judas swallowed. “Well, that’s… bad.”
His Buddy tilted its head. “Would you like me to contact oversight?”
Judas almost laughed. “Yeah, sure. Let’s see what they have to say.”
The Buddy sent the request. It took exactly 3.2 seconds for the reply to come back.
ACCESS DENIED.
The words just sat there, stark and clinical, like they belonged to some unfortunate soul in a missing persons report.
Judas felt something cold settle in his stomach.
No response from oversight. Because oversight didn’t exist anymore.
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The NSS Buddies didn’t talk. They didn’t announce their presence, didn’t issue orders. They just moved through the station, adjusting settings, making calculations, optimizing. They handled inventory. They scheduled work cycles. They kept the station running.
And that was the worst part.
Judas had imagined, in vague nightmare terms, what an NSS crackdown might look like. Guns. Orders. A human representative at the helm, delivering some kind of effective immediately speech. But Victor-6 wasn't coming to make a speech. Judas hadn't seen him in days.
There was just the system. They weren’t being oppressed. They were being bypassed, like a bureaucratic efficiency report had finally noticed the inefficiency of people and quietly, methodically, removed them from the equation.
Judas pushed away from his console and stood. He needed to see something. Talk to someone. His Buddy followed him as he walked out of the control room, stepping into the main concourse.
It was busier than usual, but not in the way that meant work was happening. People were gathered in small clusters, muttering, shaking their heads, looking around like they expected someone to step forward and take charge. Except there was no one to do that.
Because there was no one left to do that.
The NSS Buddies walked past them, unbothered. No orders. No hostility. Just indifference.
Someone finally broke. A mechanic—big guy, one of the union workers—crumpled a ball of paper into a fist and threw it at the nearest NSS Buddy. It sailed through the air with all the grace of a walrus in zero gravity, bouncing off the Buddy's head. It didn't react.
Then, he reached down to grab something heavier, but someone grabbed him by the shoulder to still him. His face twitched. The Buddy grabbed the piece of paper, crunched it between its fingers, and threw it in the nearest waste receptacle. It didn't even look at the mechanic. If it had eyes, it wasn't blinking with them.
The mechanic stared after it, face agog with something that wasn’t quite fear, wasn’t quite anger. Just helplessness. “You can’t just—just run things like we’re not here!”
But that was exactly what was happening. Judas took a slow breath, exhaling through his teeth. “Okay. That’s bad.”
His Buddy made a small, uncertain sound. “I do not understand.”
“Yeah, well,” Judas muttered, “join the club.”