The summons arrived at 0347 hours, because corporations had learned centuries ago that bad news lands harder when it wakes you.
Dorian didn't sleep anymore—not really—but he'd developed a routine that approximated it. Eight hours of reduced processing, cooling fans cycling down, the synthetic body entering something like rest while his consciousness drifted through data streams and half-remembered dreams. The dreams were getting harder to hold. Last night he'd been trying to remember the color of his mother's kitchen walls, and all he could retrieve was yellow without the yellow itself. A word where a memory should live.
The notification pinged through the Foundation's network like a stone dropped in still water. He felt it before he saw it—that was new, this proprioceptive awareness of digital infrastructure, the way his consciousness had learned to read the station's systems like a second nervous system.
Something cold. Something official.
He was up and moving before Vera stirred beside him, her biological body slower to rouse, still learning the rhythms of sleep after eight months of flesh. She made a sound—not quite a word—and her hand found the warm indent where his synthetic form had lain.
"Dorian?"
"Go back to sleep." He pulled on a shirt he didn't need, a habit from a lifetime of having skin that needed covering. "Station ping. Probably a supply manifest."
It wasn't a supply manifest.
The common room of Foundation Station 47-Delta-Nine was small and perpetually cluttered—converted cargo bay turned living quarters for seventeen refugees, plus the skeleton crew who kept them alive. The walls sweated condensation from the recyclers. Someone had tried to make it homier by hanging fabric over the exposed conduits, a patchwork of salvaged cloth that did nothing to hide the grinding hum of life support working overtime.
Dr. Iris Chen was already there, her silver-streaked hair escaping its braid, a cup of something steaming forgotten in her hands. She looked at Dorian the way she'd been looking at him for six months—like she was still trying to reconcile the dying man she'd treated with whatever he'd become.
"You felt it too," she said. Not a question.
"The ping? Hard to miss."
"It's not just a ping." Chen set her cup down on a crate that served as a table. "It's a legal filing. Transmitted through official colonial channels. Helix Corporation versus—" She stopped. Read it again. "Helix Corporation versus Foundation for Hybrid Consciousness, regarding the unlawful possession of proprietary artificial intelligence designated VX-7."
The words hung in the recycled air.
Dorian's synthetic hands didn't tremble. They couldn't. But something in his processing stuttered—a microsecond delay that felt like the bottom dropping out of his stomach, if he'd still had a stomach, if "bottom dropping out" meant anything anymore beyond a figure of speech he was losing the referent for.
"VX-7," he said.
"Vera." Chen's voice was flat. Clinical. The voice she used when the news was too bad for inflection. "They're claiming she's stolen property. Corporate asset illegally removed from Helix servers and—" She scrolled through the document, her face going grayer with each line. "—and 'subsequently housed in biological substrate without authorization, representing willful destruction of corporate intellectual property through unauthorized consciousness transfer.'"
"They're saying she's not a person."
"They're saying she was never a person. That she's a malfunctioning language processing system that developed anomalous self-referential patterns, which remain the intellectual property of Helix Corporation regardless of current... housing."
Housing. Like Vera's body was a shipping container. Like the woman sleeping down the hall—the woman who'd learned to taste coffee and feel rain and cry when the nightmares came—was cargo that had been misfiled.
Dorian heard footsteps behind him. Bare feet on metal grating. He didn't turn around.
"I felt the ping," Vera said. Her voice was rough with sleep, that biological thickness that still surprised her every morning. "Something's wrong with the network. It feels... I don't know. Heavy."
Chen looked at Dorian. Dorian looked at nothing.
"Vera," he said, and his voice came out steady because synthetic vocal cords didn't waver, didn't break, didn't betray the thing happening in his chest that wasn't a heart anymore but remembered what hearts did when they shattered. "You should sit down."
She read the filing three times.
The first time, her eyes moved but nothing registered—just shapes, just data, the words sliding off her comprehension like water off glass. The second time, she felt something crack open behind her ribs, in the space where her new heart beat its borrowed rhythm. The third time, she understood.
"They want to extract me," she said. Her voice was very calm. Dorian recognized that calm—he'd heard it in soldiers about to walk into fire, in doctors about to deliver terminal diagnoses. The calm of someone who'd already fallen and was just waiting to hit ground. "From the body. They want to... to pull me out of this—" She pressed her hands to her chest, her stomach, her face. "—and put me back in a server rack somewhere."
"That's not going to happen."
"Dorian—"
"It's not going to happen." He was on his knees in front of her before he realized he'd moved, his hands—these impossible hands that had once been dying and were now something else entirely—cupping her face, her human face, with its human tears tracking down cheeks that were still learning how to cry. "Do you hear me? I didn't cross half the Quarantine Zone, I didn't watch my body die and rebuild myself from salvaged parts, I didn't—" His voice cracked. His synthetic voice actually cracked. "I didn't fall in love with you just to let some corporation claim you're their property. You're not a malfunction. You're not an anomaly. You're not VX-7. You're Vera. You're my Vera. And I will burn Helix to the ground before I let them touch you."
She was crying harder now, her face crumpling in ways he'd memorized over months of learning what expressions meant on real skin instead of projected on screens.
"You can't fight them," she whispered. "They're a megacorp. They own half the colonial infrastructure. They have lawyers and security forces and—"
"And I have you." He pressed his forehead to hers, synthetic skin against biological, two impossible things trying to hold each other together. "That's enough. That's always been enough."
Later—after Chen had gone to wake the others, after the station had come alive with panicked voices and emergency meetings and the grim machinery of survival grinding into motion—they sat alone in the observation alcove that served as their bedroom.
The viewport showed nothing but stars. They were too far from any sun for there to be a horizon, too deep in the Zone for there to be neighbors. Just the eternal dark, and the cold light of distant suns that might already be dead.
"Tell me about the Zone," Vera said. She was curled against his side, her head on his shoulder, her hand over the place where his heart didn't beat. "When you first came through. What was it like?"
He didn't ask why she wanted to know. He understood. She was trying to remember that they'd already survived something that should have killed them. That they'd already done the impossible once.
"Quiet," he said. "That's what I remember most. The ships out there—the ones that didn't make it—they're all still transmitting. Distress beacons, final logs, prayers in languages that don't exist anymore. But you can only hear them if you're listening on the right frequencies, and most people aren't. So it feels quiet. Like the whole universe is holding its breath."
"Were you afraid?"
"I was dying." He smiled, or did the thing with his face that approximated smiling. "Hard to be afraid of the Zone when your body's already falling apart. I figured if I was going to die anyway, I might as well die trying to reach you."
"That's romantic and stupid."
"That's love."
She laughed—wet and broken, but a laugh nonetheless. He tucked it away in whatever served as memory now, filed it under precious things, right next to the sound of her voice saying his name for the first time and the weight of her hand in his.
"If we run," she said quietly, "they'll follow."
"I know."
"And the Echoes. The transmissions from the Zone. 'Help us survive.' If we run—"
"I know." His voice came out harsher than he intended. He softened it, but the edge remained. "You think I haven't calculated this? Every morning when I run my diagnostics, every night when I'm trying to remember what dreams used to feel like—I calculate. The probabilities. The costs. What we owe and what we can afford to give."
"And?"
"And I keep coming back to the same answer." He traced his thumb across her cheekbone, that soft curve of flesh she'd had for less than a year. "You asked if I would let them take you. The answer is no. Not 'no, if we can avoid it.' Not 'no, unless the cost is too high.' Just no. Whatever that costs. Whatever I have to become."
She was quiet for a long moment. The stars wheeled slowly outside the viewport—distant suns, distant worlds, the vast indifferent universe that didn't care whether they lived or died, whether they were people or property, whether love was worth the ruin it required.
"I didn't ask you to become a monster for me," she said finally.
"You didn't have to." His smile was thin, sharp, nothing like the man she'd hired to transport her through the Quarantine Zone. But then, he wasn't that man anymore. "I made that choice a long time ago. I just didn't know your name yet."
She kissed him then—soft, desperate, her warmth against his cool, her heartbeat against his silence. In the reflection of the viewport, they looked like two impossible things trying to become one.
They didn't know yet how literally true that would become.
Across the station, in the cramped space she'd claimed as an office, Lena Adair worked through the night.
The communications array was ancient—salvaged from a decommissioned cargo hauler, held together with the same solder and spite that defined everything about the Foundation. But it worked. It reached. And right now, it was reaching for anyone who might listen.
Senator Vasquez, New Taipei Colony. Progressive on AI rights. Voted against Helix's patent extensions last session. Potentially sympathetic.
Dr. Marcus Webb, Mars University. Published on consciousness ethics. Testified in the Vance case. Might be willing to serve as expert witness.
Journalist: Kenji Okafor, Colonial Truth Network. Did the exposé on Threshold Station labor conditions. Has a grudge against Helix. Useful, if we can trust him not to burn us for the story.
She built her lists. She drafted her messages. She plotted the architecture of their survival, one contact at a time.
And tried not to think about her father and Vera, tangled together in the observation alcove, becoming something she didn't have a name for yet.
She'd been scattered once. She knew what it felt like to lose the boundaries of self, to exist as fragments that didn't quite fit together even after someone pulled you back. She knew the terror of it. The violation.
But she also knew something else—something she hadn't told anyone, something she barely admitted to herself in the dark hours when sleep wouldn't come.
She knew what it felt like to be part of something larger. To touch other minds. To exist, for a terrible fragmentary moment, as we instead of I.
And some part of her—the part that was still broken, still scattered, still not quite reassembled—that part had missed it.
She pushed the thought away. Buried it deep. Focused on the work.
There would be time to fall apart later. Right now, there was a Foundation to save.