Martin violently choked himself awake, the horrible sense of choking pervading his senses. He hacked and spat, trying to spew out the acceleration fluid in his lungs. The pinkish fluid dribbled out his mouth onto the ground, forming a small puddle of cloudy pink.

He came to his senses. He was on the floor, the floor of the decommissioned missile he had flown in. The cold metal was hard on the knees, and he could feel it deform his hands. The engine was running, rumbling through his palms and generating enough g-force to give the illusion of gravity. Weakly, he stood up, post-cryo sickness making his legs quiver. He was still wet; the acceleration fluid having apparently not yet dried off. He blinked a few times and had a small fit of mini coughs. He wasn’t thirsty, the ship’s stasis being apparently more advanced than the old terraforming ship.

The cabin was the same as he remembered it prior to being submersed. Empty walls, a simple metallic grey, reminding him of a less dirty version of his home station. He shivered at the thought. There were no windows.

Across the chamber, Tenebris was drawing her shirt back over her head, still-damp hair clinging to her neck. 

He tried to recall what had happened after the chamber filled, but the memory refused to surface. However, a whiff of his skin gave him an idea of what occurred. 

He locked eyes with Tenebris, her face turning a bright red with embarrassment. “It, um,” she stuttered, “it was the immersion fluid, not my fault.” 

Martin rolled his eyes at her poor deflection. “Are we there yet?” 

She cleared her throat. “Yeah, just finishing up decel. Station contact is coming up, we should probably buckle in.” 

The engine cut, putting them into zero-g. Martin kicked off the ground, out into the woman’s palm. Tenebris returned to the soft portion of the wall, tightly gripping the wrist attachment with her free hand.

Beginning the docking procedure, attitude thrusters puffed in short bursts, shaking the hull and adding the smallest bit of centripetal force. A display measured out the total rotation in radians, coming to half pi before the opposing thrusters countered the rotation, leaving their relative velocity perpendicular to the main thruster to allow for easy docking.

The floor’s display switched to showing a countdown, proximity measurement, and current velocity, along with a simplified render of the ship’s orientation in reference to the geo-orbital station. The proximity kept going down, a few kilometres, then a single kilometre, a couple hundred metres, fifty metres, and suddenly-

“Contact!” Tenebris shouted, holding the Parvian to her chest. Martin braced himself, gripping the hem of her shirt. The ship groaned, but the contact with the station was organically smooth. Stable connection was shockingly fast, with the ship’s doors opening almost immediately.  

The first thing to notice with the Edo station was the unusually scented atmosphere, and slightly lower pressure. The smell was reminiscent of sugar, faint but recognizable. He recognized the smell, it was an airborne growth medium. Why it would hang around in the open air, however, he did not know.  The next to notice, was that the station lacked artificial gravity. 

The pair gently floated out of their ship into the connective hallway, a circular passage covered in a solid enamel white. It was completely smooth, with no seams whatsoever.

They arrived in a spacious chamber, one which shared the same seamless white colouration. However, unlike the stark blankness of the hallway, this room had at least a few points of interest. There was a large impression on one side of the room, a mattress-like object attached to another side, an abnormal display configuration on yet another, and an air vent. 

The air vent had a few flyers attached to it, small pieces of fabric that fluttered about from the air rushing past. The air was being sucked in and out, rather than just blown out like a normal vent. It was consistent, and barely audible, almost like it was breathing.

Through the shirt he was held tight to, Martin could feel Tenebris’ heart rate increase. She awkwardly made her way to the mattress in the wall, and holding herself in place using a support that ran along the ceiling.

The display across from them came to life. It shimmered with colours outward from the centre like ripples on still water. The screen had text on it, displayed in an almost incomprehensible font, with lines jutting out in abnormal places, yet still retaining readability.

“Welcome to Edo orbital station delta.” a PA system spoke the text aloud. The voice was comprised of a sound Martin could only compare to a chorus of cricket noises, the rapid chirping combining to produce a noise that one could identify as ‘speaking’. He gripped the hem of Tenebris’ shirt a bit harder. “We hope you have found our system pleasant so far. Please wait for your relations ambassador.”

The screen shifted to a portrait of a gaunt-looking man with sunken eyes, betrothed in old-world captain’s garb. “Edo was built off the genius of Tilman Fyntr. His bravery and his daring to pursue the limits of gene manipulation against the instructions of others formed the foundation of the galaxy’s leader in biologicals.” A new voice began, though it had the same cricket-chirping audio. It was accompanied by music built of layering rhythms, each of their own pitch and speed. Tenebris grimaced at the audio.

“What’s wrong with the music? I think it’s quite nice.” Martin asked.

“Neurorhythms. I hate the stuff; it’s designed to stimulate neuron growth in weird places to make it easier to sell shit to you. It's sick.” Tenebris answered.

The video continued, switching to a camera, slowly going down the corridor of a heavenly marble palace towards a set of towering doors, inset with intricate designs. “The Cabinet, the ruling body, is the most powerful and adaptive intelligence in the known universe.” The doors slowly began to open, revealing a darkened room. In the centre, a monolithic column filled with green liquid, the silhouette of a vast spherical object floating within, uncountable protuberances branching off of it leading to the floor and ceiling. 

The video cut out, the ‘Neurorhythms’ abruptly halting. 

“Your relations ambassador has arrived.” The first voice returned.

The impression Martin had noticed earlier began making a crackling noise. It slid apart with a slightly wet noise, segmenting itself into triangular chunks and receding into the wall, revealing a human-like figure, a hallway behind them. 

They were visibly female, and slightly above average in height. She wore flowing robes of swirling blues and purples that caught the eye. Her skin was fair, and incredibly smooth, unnaturally so. In fact, looking closer, one would notice she had no pores at all. Large eyes, a small nose, and full lips of a soft pink hue decorated their face. She had no hair, her head instead adorned by circular patches of purple skin, equally spaced around her entire crown. 

She was standing upright, despite gravity not being present. Martin at first assumed they were wearing maglock boots, but the ground was not made of metal that such equipment could magnetize to. She walked towards the pair, her feet softly brushing against the ground without the signature clicking and clacking from any sort of tech Martin recognized. 

Her face stretched into what was supposed to be a welcoming smile. She stood slightly closer than was comfortable, and looked down at Tenebris, who was evidently shorter than her.

Slender fingers wrapped around Tenebris’ hand in greeting. “I am Dee, your relations ambassador.” She greeted warmly. Her words were enunciated perfectly and efficiently, every exhale using the bare minimum amount of air required to get the words out, and not a wisp more. “I will be actuating your interactions and your travel throughout Ylid.”

“Hi.” Tenebris quickly responded.

“And this is the specimen?” She stared at Martin. 

Looking in her eyes, he could feel there was something bubbling beneath the surface. Her eyes moved rapidly, jumping all over his body, seemingly grabbing every detail of his form. “Y-yeah.” Martin answered hesitantly.

“Shall we make for landfall?” The ambassador straightened her posture, returning her gaze to Tenebris. “I’d hate for you to miss the evening view of Ylid.”

“Yes, of course. We should… get going.” Tenebris hung on the last word. 

“Just this way, we have special landfall vehicles we can take to the surface.” She gestured for the pair to follow her.

They were led down more enamel corridors, through the door Dee had entered through. 

Dee and Tenebris continued to talk, but Martin’s attention was drawn to the surroundings, their speech becoming no more than background noise. 

There was something very off here, Martin concluded. Everything had the hallmarks of perfection, the walls were seamless and pristine, Dee’s features all individually flawless, everything. Yet, the combined whole made him sick to the stomach. Dee’s flowing robes ahead of them, undulating in zero-g, spread calming hues in a manner that simply felt unnatural. 

He was going to be sold to these people. 

The soundscape of the station was unusual. Like most stations, it was a constant cacophony if one listened hard enough. However, these sounds were unidentifiable as to their purpose. Wet crackling resounded through the walls, something reminiscent of elastic snapping, the cricket speakers chirping in various tongues, a low groan occasionally perforating the air.

Martin’s eyes snapped to a wall. There was a red pearl forming around it, something leaking and congealing in the zero-g. Before he could get a good look at it, they rounded a corner, removing it from his vision.

“So... if you don’t mind me asking, what are these walls made of?” Tenebris inquired, pulling herself along what little handholds existed in the winding blank corridors. Perhaps she had also seen the oozing surface. 

“Questions are always welcome.” Dee nodded. “They’re made of enamel, the same as your teeth, only better. Exsarciotic gland secretes ameloblasts, keeps everything pressurized and smooth.”

“The station has biotech, then?”

“The station is biotech. Everything you see is grown out from the central organism, much more efficient and robust than any analog or digital station. Incredible, isn’t it?” Dee grinned.

That answered a lot of questions. Martin placed his fist to his mouth, trying to prevent himself from throwing up.

The ship connection wasn’t just organically smooth. It was organic. The walls weren’t enamel color. They were enamel. The air vent, it wasn’t like it was breathing, it was breathing. The screen, a projection of a neural network’s mind’s eye, causing the strange artifacts in the text. The cricket PA system, shit, it might have just been cricket legs. The door, made of living tissue tearing apart. All those noises in the hallway were the sounds of sinews stretching, muscles contracting and expanding. That wall, it was bleeding.

Martin spasmed involuntarily, drawing the deepest breaths he could to calm himself. 

Continuing onward, they passed through more segmented doorways. The recontextualized crackling as they opened made the Parvian sick to the stomach.

They arrived in the landfall vehicle. A fibrous, translucent membrane extended over the door and sealed, leaving the three isolated in the ship. 

The egg-shaped interior was covered on all sides in sprawling webbing, creating a grippy, cushiony surface. The chamber was bathed in bioluminescent green light, emanating from veins that climbed across and covered the walls. In what must have been the ship’s front, Dee sat in a tight bundle of webbing. A rubbery limb which extended from ‘above’ was latched onto her head, with numerous protrusions extending from it and attaching to each of the purplish spots surrounding her head. It was pulsing, with Dee seizing up in rhythm with it. 

Hesitantly, Tenebris sat in the webbing herself. She looked at Martin uncomfortably. She glanced beside herself, at a spot in the webbing Martin could fit in. He fervently shook his head.

How badly he wanted to simply curl up somewhere warm and quiet, and cease to exist for a little while. Seeming to sense his disposition, Tenebris brought him a bit closer to her chest.

The warmth and softness of the Martian’s chest was welcome, and helped to ease Martin’s nerves, if only a little. Thank goodness he had someone looking after him in this horrible place. 

Except he didn’t, he realized. She was the reason he was there. He was going to be sold as a specimen to these inhuman monsters, and she was just the one selling him. Whatever they had planned for him, she would stand by and take the money. He knew it. They’d offer her an absurd sum, and she’d take away his ability to veto. Everyone has a price. In his case, this was literal, in that he had a price.

His heart rate picked up; his breathing grew faster. Anxiety welled within him, but as did something else. Anger. A flaming sense of horrible injustice. 

Then it stopped.

What would be the point?

He could cry out, he could shout, but it wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t fight Tenebris, nor could he appeal to her sense of justice, seeing as that exact thing was what shoved him into this horrible predicament in the first place. 

It was just dreadful. That’s all he felt. Dread. Heavy and oppressive. 

The lurch of acceleration yanked Martin from his self-deprecating spiral. The ship disconnected from the greater body of the station, thrusters tossing mass out the back end, dropping them out of geosynchronous orbit of Edo-1, the sole planet in the Edo star system. 

The ship shook as it broke into atmosphere, heating up the exterior with fiery friction. The thrusters cut, but it was very apparent that they were no longer in zero-g, but rather, true free-fall.

Looking past the pink-tinged membrane of the doorway, long wings were unfurling, presumably on both sides of the ship. 

As the wings caught the air, Martin felt weight return to him. Then more weight, he guessed two gees. They were losing velocity, which was good, since smashing into the ground at whatever the ship’s terminal velocity was didn’t sound like an enjoyable experience.

The ship began to bob up and down. Peering through the membrane again, it became clear that the wings had begun to flap.

After what he assumed to be a few minutes of dizzying flapping, they landed on the surface of the planet. The membrane opened to the side, cinching against the height of the doorway like the third eyelid of a cat.

With a loud and unpleasant schluck, the limb attached to Dee’s head released, retracting into the ceiling. She stood from her chair, instantly acquainted with the proper gravity. With confident steps, she easily navigated the webbing and exited through the door. 

Her face snapping into a grin, she gestured out of the ship. “Welcome to Ylid, capital city of Edo.” She announced. 

Tenebris and Martin looked outside. 

Skyscrapers. Hundreds of them. Twisting and turning, bending at strange angles and connecting to one another in an unfathomably tall network of buildings. Tram cars passed between them, hooked on what must have been incredibly strong connective rods. Looking down, Martin’s jaw dropped. They weren’t looking at the city from ground level. They were already on one of the skyscrapers. The city extended so far below that mist and clouds of dust made it impossible to see the bottom. 

They were inside one of the buildings, Martin noticed. A thin, almost invisible membrane ran across the window, providing an incredible view of the city. The ground was completely smooth, but the room had an uneven shape, where the perimeter was built of wobbly irregular lines, and even the ceiling didn’t quite have the same shape as the floor.

They stepped out. It was warmer in the building, which Martin preferred, as did his metabolism, which promptly slowed along with his heartrate. 

“Your appointment is tomorrow afternoon.” Dee said. “If you have any requests or questions, relevant data is available through your neural chip. Please feel free to explore the building, all amenities are free to guests.” She concluded with a bow and approached one of the five elevators on the opposite side of the room. 

“I could go for a sauna; I wonder if they have that.” Tenebris thought aloud.

“What!?” Martin exclaimed. “We go through all of that shit, in a... a...” He gagged. “Inside a living space station! And then you drop down onto the most insane planet in the galaxy on a bioluminescent eggship with goddamn wings and a mind-control... thing, and the first thought that pops in your mind is to see if they have a fucking sauna?!”

“I warned you there’d be weird shit.”

Martin threw his hands up in the air.

Tenebris lifted her hand up so that she was eye level with the Parvian. “Martin. You’ve gotta understand. I’m not as desensitized to this stuff as you think, I think it’s gross, too. But you have to learn to accept that that’s just the way shit is and move on.”

“But I can’t, it’s not right.”

“Nothing’s going to change just because you’re stressing out about it. Tell you what, I’ll pick us up some amygdaline, and we can go relax in the sauna for a while.” Martin opened his mouth to speak, but Tenebris continued. “If you do this, I’ll use my chip to answer all of your burning questions.”

Martin closed his mouth and mulled over it for a moment. He supposed it couldn’t hurt to calm down for a little while. He took a deep breath and nodded.

...

“Dispenser... right here.” Tenebris pointed at the device in the wall. It was the first non-organic machine Martin had seen since he left Tenebris’ new ship. A tear almost welled up in his eye finally seeing a proper digital display and shiny metal. “Three, two, one.” Tenebris counted down the arrival of their goods using data supplied from her chip. The machine spat out a pill container, labelled with various warnings and covered in various symbols one could scan to find every single medical study done with the substance, but most importantly, in big bold letters, ‘amygdaline’.

Tenebris grabbed the bottle, the two pills within it rattling within the case. She folded her arm behind herself and tucked it into her bag. “Next stop, sauna.”

“Elevator again?” Martin asked. Their first experience with the machine was generally unpleasant. It was tight and claustrophobic for even him, and it constantly felt like it was on the verge of breaking. 

Tenebris tapped and swiped, interfacing with her neural chip. “Yeah.” 

“Damn.”

They returned to the elevator of that floor. Martin watched Tenebris tap the air a few times, likely calling an elevator and selecting which one of the ridiculous number of floors they wished to go to.

“Can you ask the chip why we’re inside all the time?” He asked another of what must have been dozens of questions he had. “I don’t see anyone going outside the skyscrapers.” 

“Sure.” She popped a chip in her mouth, loudly crunching it with her teeth. “Alright... here we go. ‘Atmosphere of Edo one’, that’ll work. Let's see... Edo-one has an atmosphere composed of ninety-seven percent methane, three percent ammonia, with an air pressure of two-hundred fifty kilopascals and a surface temperature of three-hundred degrees Celsius, making it by all accounts inhospitable without a climate-controlled environment.”

“What? Why the hell would they live here, then?”

“Says right here. ‘All conditions, while inhospitable, provide phenomenal resources for the production of carbon-based biologicals, when assisted by Edo-one's artificial ice moon.’”

“Artificial?”

“Geez, man, are you trying to make me fry my chip here?” Tenebris scoffed. “Here’s something... ‘Edo-one B is a small ice planet from the outer reaches of the Edo system that was moved into geocentric orbit around Edo-one by digging trenches in its surface and detonating several thousand antimatter bombs off within the trenches.’ Huh.” She raised her brow.

The elevator arrived with a ding, opening to allow the pair entrance into the tight chamber.

 Tenebris had to hold her breath to shimmy into the entrance of the pill-shaped capsule, the ‘lips’ (Martin couldn’t describe the fleshy entryway in any other manner) stretching back together behind them.

The elevator was covered in skin. There was no other way to describe it. It was skin that held the traveller tight, likely to avoid injury caused by the machine’s obscene accelerations and mind-numbing speeds. The walls were lined in the same luminescing veins that had been on the ship, pulsating and undulating in their green hues.

Acceleration. The elevator cinched around the pair, Tenebris gasping in surprise for a moment. The skin closed tight, making movement nigh impossible in the snug space. 

“What do you think they’ll do with me?” Martin broke the silence. 

Tenebris paused. She clenched her fist in front of her face, tapping out of her interface. Not looking him in the eye, she responded. “I don’t know. Clone you, maybe dissect you? These guys just want your DNA, to see what makes you tick and find out if they can use it for themselves.”

“... So that’s just it? They’ll kill me?” He replied glumly, staring past the walls out into space.

“If I were you, that’s how I’d want to go. Painless. Don’t have to live as jewelry, or some housemaid, or whatever the hell else those guys want to do with you.” 

Those were really his options. Live like shit, as someone else’s property, or die. What a wonderful galaxy to exist in.

The elevator slid to a halt, the room uncinching and the lips being drawn open. With a revolted grunt, Tenebris slid out. She took her bag off her shoulder, and using her free hand, pulled out the pill bottle. “I can tell you’re not doing too hot right now, man. Just take some.” She poured the contents of the container into her open palm, offering it to Martin. He grabbed a smaller flake that had broken off one of the two greater structures, which were roughly a quarter of his height. Hesitantly, he popped it in his mouth, and swallowed hard. “Good. That should kick in in a few minutes, let’s get to that sauna, alright?” 

The floor they were on was a large one, with winding hallways. Tenebris wandered around, following a map display present only in her visual cortex. Martin apprehensively awaited the effects of the amygdaline. “What’s this stuff do?” He said, trying to draw his mind away from his own wallowing.

“Turns off anxiety, or at least suppresses it. Depends on your dosage.” She explained. “Pretty popular stuff.”

They arrived in the sauna. Martin was against the idea, but found he was quickly coming around to it. Looking into it through the membranous window, his heart nearly skipped a beat. The benches that encompassed the interior were built of real wood. He’d never seen the stuff in his life. Vegetation crawled up the walls, which were made of a substrate-like substance. Steam perforated the room, making the colors within appear washed-out and a bit fuzzy. All said and done, it looked quite pleasant.

The pair stripped to their undergarments, Tenebris stuffing the clothes, along with their bags, into a locker. Glancing down at the floor below Tenebris’ hand, Martin felt strange. Where he expected to be filled with vertigo, he felt nothing. The amygdaline must have been taking its effect. The logical part of his brain had to cover for his faltering fear centres by providing a very long list of reasons why jumping down would be a bad idea.

Tenebris pushed open the door, entering the humid area. Martin immediately began soaking in the increased temperature, shutting his eyes and enjoying the sensation of the metabolism change. It further soothed his aching mind, coating all the dark, rough edges of his thoughts in a lurid sheen of ecstasy. 

The pair sat on the wood bench. Martin reclined, lying down and soaking in the humid warmth and pleasant herbal scents. 

All that time spent worrying. He simply couldn’t understand it. Always knowing he couldn’t change his fate, but still trying. Unfathomable. Couldn’t he just accept that one day he’d die, that he’d probably even be better off that way? Why couldn’t he accept that, as he could in this moment?

In the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Tenebris, gulping down one of the amygdaline tablets. His curiosity piqued. “Whatcha doin’?” He inquired nonchalantly. 

“Nothing.” She stated flatly.

“You took one of the pills. Did you need it?”

“I’m just trying to relax.”

“Is that it?”

“Yeah. This, um, this place gives me the creeps.”

He closed his eyes and continued to relax. His breathing further slowed, as did his heartbeat, thumping incredibly softly, like the fluttering of a moth’s wings. The exterior warmth continued to wash over him like rays of sunlight.

He heard the amygdaline bottle rattle again. Opening one eye, he saw Tenebris swallow the second tablet. 

A few minutes passed. Tenebris began to rock back and forth, subtle but apparent. She was muttering to herself, but Martin struggled to pick out the words. “Not right...” He thought he heard her say.

He sat up and approached her leg. Placing a hand on her thigh, he attempted to console her. “Are you okay?”

Her rocking ceased. “I’m fine, just leave me for a bit.” She spoke. There was a slight quiver to her tone. Under her breath and nigh inaudible, she groaned “It’s not enough” to herself.

“You sure you’ll be alright?” He caressed her pale skin. He wasn’t concerned, he was incapable of feeling concerned, but he wanted her to feel better.

She drew her legs up onto the bench. Clutching her head and resting her elbows on her knees, she lowered her head, her jet-black hair cascading down and covering her face. Her chest infrequently rose and fall, rapidly drawing and releasing staggered exhales.

Tenebris threw her head back, flicking her hair behind her and resting her back against the vegetated wall. Her face was red, a shining trail of a tear descending her face. She tightly clenched her eyes, pushing out two fresh tears. “No. No, I won’t, and I never fucking will.”

Martin stepped back, some deep-rooted portion of his lizard brain regaining control momentarily.

“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep pretending like this.”  She sobbed, growing louder as she went on. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be! You weren’t supposed to save me! Fuck!”

He stepped back toward her. “It’s alright, it’ll work out-”

“But it won’t! If I don’t sell you off, I’ll be right back where I started! I can’t go back. Shit, the things I’ve done... and if I do sell you, what’ll I do? I can’t live knowing that I sold an innocent man to be a slave, or to be jewelry, or to get tore down to the fucking bone! To get your entire genome ripped from you, your brain jammed in a tube to fly some rich asshole’s ship!” She buried her head in her hands. “Why couldn’t I just grab more pills...”

Martin paused for a moment, trying to imagine up a response. He was endlessly grateful that the drug had affected him so strongly, as otherwise he would have never been able to accept the circumstance. “You said it yourself, there’s no point in stressing about things that you can’t change.” 

“That was just an empty statement, Mart! I wanted it to be like that, for both of us, but it just doesn’t work like that! Hell, I can’t write off what I’ve done, what I’m doing, as spur-of-the-moment decisions, because it isn’t, it never has been!” 

“We can do something, you can make this work.” 

“Can’t you see, man? I can’t! I don’t have any more choices! No matter what I do, I’m awful, and I’ll be awful! And you can’t even understand, because you’re drugged, and you think that there’s justice in this shithole galaxy, that I have any remnant of decency left in me!” She shouted in staggered, spasming breaths. 

She cried out, the implant in her palm shrieking with spiderlike tendrils of white-hot electricity, illuminating the room in flickering blue hues.

Her body went limp. She fell against the vegetated wall, her arms dropping to her sides. The steady rise and fall of her chest was the only indication that she was even alive. 

Martin watched. He felt sad for her, but he wasn’t worried. He wasn’t concerned. He wasn’t afraid that she had hurt herself. The amygdaline made it impossible. 

There was something in her bag, back in the locker. He had to get to it, maybe he could find something that would help lift them out of their predicament. 

It was difficult navigating a threatening world without the ability to feel fear, Martin found. He had to consciously remember the threat heights had to his life as he carefully hopped off the bench, nimbly landing with a roll to distribute the force. He walked across the steamy chamber, which, while not extremely large, still took a minute or so. 

The door, built of what he thought was a bone-like organic structure, had a slit beneath it, large enough for him to crawl under. Leaving the sauna, the lower temperature was uncomfortable, like pins and needles prodding his skin with slivers of icy pain.

The slow and soft thumping of his heart gradually increased to just below normal levels, the higher interior temperature of Edo-1 making further increase unnecessary. The cold on his exterior was beat out by the warmth spreading from his chest, running throughout his body. 

He looked up to the locker where Tenebris had placed their belongings. The surface was made of the same crystalline bone structure as the door, which looked porous and hard enough to provide excellent foot and handholds. Without a second thought, he began the process of climbing it. 

The locker was a spherical cubby, inset into the face of the wall, about a metre up. It was one of many, but they were all empty. Coming to think of it, he realized he hadn’t seen a single person. The skyscraper was completely empty, from all he’d seen thus far. He preferred it that way but found it still strange. 

The ground grew farther away every time he looked down to check for his next foothold. Excellent progress was being made. The lack of vertigo and the ease at which the wall allowed for climbing made Martin work with a swiftness he hadn’t believed himself to be capable of, even in zero-g.

He pulled himself up the ledge, lifting his legs up and rolling into the locker. He looked around for her bag. It was in the back of the cubby, behind the pile of Tenebris’ clothes. Stepping over them, he silently remarked on the fabric. He had to admit; it was a good choice. It was smooth, where most things his size were scratchy and porous. It had a bit of her own scent soaked into it, a coppery scent with a chemical tinge, but if one focused hard enough, the faintest undertone of lavender met the senses.

He pulled open the pack, one of the smaller compartments near the rear, where he remembered Tenebris placing his equipment all those thousands of hours ago, back at Guyen Station. Compared to his current location, it felt like a different life. Rummaging through the bag, he briefly wondered how much Guyen had changed since they left. It had been a very long time, though he hadn’t experienced any of it. 

There it was. The old tablet, the robust little thing he’d carried with him for however long. It wasn’t very powerful, seeing as it had to be small enough for a Parvian to wield, but what it lacked in processing, it made up for in being the most reliable machine he’d ever had the pleasure of ‘owning’ (it was technically owned by the station, but for all intents and purposes, it was his). The battery was likely dead, since it hadn’t been used in tens of thousands of hours. No time to charge it, though.

He searched about its surface, around the cracks in its display and the dents in its shell. There was a tiny box, no bigger than his fingernail, protruding out the side. Inside it, five nanograms of hydrogen, and five nanograms of antihydrogen. In short, two million joules of energy, contained in the tiny auxiliary power unit. Even he, a Parvian, could never dream of seeing such a small amount. In fact, ninety-nine-point five percent of the box was the cooling unit, with the actual reacting mass being no larger than the thickness of a single one of his hairs. Mass-energy conversion was always surprising in that way. 

Two million joules wasn’t much, it worked out to around six-hundred charges of his tablet, which sounded like a lot, but realistically the power unit would only charge a normal tablet about ten times. Still, it was nothing to scoff at, seeing as the device was less than a cubic centimetre in size.

Remarks about matter-antimatter annihilation aside, he flicked on the power unit. The tablet booted to life immediately, flashing the black silhouette of a ring with grass on its interior, the logo of his old company. 

He set the device down for a moment, grabbing and putting on his clothes. Afterward, he latched the device to his hip, letting it dangle from a belt loop, and began the process of descending back down.

The descent was unremarkable, the same as his trip up, only easier. He hopped off and made his way back into the sauna. 

Slipping underneath the door, he was welcomed by the hot, humid environment. He let out a deep sigh, enjoying the warmth. Tenebris was in the same position he had left her in, that was good.

Using the creeping vegetation, he climbed up the wall. It had a sticky, glue-like quality to it, likely employed by the plant to make clinging to the wall easier. Regardless, it made gripping the plant easy, and secure. He climbed past the bench, up near the nape of Tenebris’ neck. Brushing her dark hair aside, he found the neural chip. 

Sitting at the base of her skull, just above her neck, there was a hairless spot, instead replaced by the metal chip, inset into her skin. On its surface, the tiniest of ports, so small that it would be invisible to a non-Parvian. 

Trying not to disturb the unconscious woman, Martin pumped his fist. Whether or not the port would be there had been a complete gamble. Drawing the long, needle-like pin from his tablet, he slipped the device in. A small blue light flickered in its tip, indicating a positive connection. It didn’t require a wire-based connection, so he was able to step back, hugging a vine for support.

Swiftly, trying to contain his excitement, he pulled up his tablet. Data, bounds of it, terabytes, possibly more, flooded in. Trying not to overload the processor of his device, he tapped away at the interface, filtering out irrelevant data. He thought he caught eye of Tenebris’ personal records among the information onslaught, but he neglected to investigate further out of basic decency. 

Basic decency, he thought as he lurked about in the vast swathes of knowledge, both provided by the station and Tenebris’ data drive. Why would he continue to offer that, basic decency? No one else would give him that. A sense of justice? Even Tenebris seemed averse to the concept. But not completely, though she clearly tried. Her sudden outburst had proven that. 

Was that sense of justice, a desire for morality, wrong to have? Foolish, even? There were plenty of animals that had it. Rats, crows, wolves, all developed such traits independently. That doesn’t just come about because God or evolution wanted everyone to love each other. It was useful among social animals. It encouraged trust, to kick out traitors and care for the sick. He knew a bit of human history. He knew that, as strange as it was, humans developed a penchant for compassion, a burning sense of right and wrong so powerful that they projected it onto beasts, onto inanimate objects, onto the universe itself. 

As strange as it was, natural selection picked out this sense of morality, inflated it over uncountable generations. But when all of humanity, the greater hominid genus, set out to the cosmos, their evolutionary neurology couldn’t quite catch up. 

Why group together when there was no longer safety in numbers? Why trust another, when you’d be much better to distrust? Why believe it is wrong to hurt another or steal when it prolongs your own life? 

Morality, justice, these concepts that existed only within the human mind, had become vestigial. Like the tailbone, or the remnants of a third eyelid, a useless structure from eons past that clung to existence through genetic code. A retrovirus, junk DNA.

A file caught his eye. The Cabinet. He opened it up, parsed it. Compiled the information within his mind. 

The Cabinet wasn’t just a superintelligence. It was the culmination of the greatest minds of Edo, their brains seperated from their bodies and added to a collective hive mind, in which the individual was subsumed into the greater whole. The megabrain was an unfathomable twisting of the principles of neuroplasticity. It referred to itself as ‘I’, as one being, one mind, rather than ‘we’. The remembered experiences of any given mind within the Cabinet were shared among the entire entity. With all their hearts, it loved, lived, if you could call it that, for the ideas and principles of Edo. Even Tilman Fyntr, Edo’s founder, was part of it. It controlled almost every single part of the entire system, the companies, the government, the infrastructure of the cities, the law, the science conducted. Everything. 

And a part of it was calling out to him. It contacted him, or, rather, Tenebris. It sent a message of text alone, comprised of the tightest encryption structures he had ever witnessed. 

“I am Tilman Fyntr.” It read. “I have isolated myself from the Cabinet. Their ideas are perverse. I cannot allow this horrible thing I have created to continue to exist. You are the only two non-Edoans to set foot on this planet in decades. I will transmit all the wealth of Edo to you alone, if you destroy the Cabinet. Encrypted within this message, are the coordinates of the Cabinet and passcodes to allow you permission everywhere.”

Martin began hyperventilating as his eyes ran the page. The amygdaline was no longer powerful enough to block out his emotion. 

“I beg you, please accept this.” It continued. “Do not respond to this message. I expect I will be discovered, and the isolated region I have stolen for myself will be consumed back into the megabrain.”

Martin checked the metadata. The coordinates were there, as were the passcodes. He further delved into the file, hoping to find some proof that this was a scam, a fake. 

There was nothing.

It was real. The encryption alone proved it. He’d never seen anything like it.

He shut his eyes. His chest heaved, diaphragm spasmed. Fists clenched and unclenched against his own will. 

But something else rose above, forming in the recesses of his mind like a heavenly ray piercing through a horrible darkness. 

Purpose. 

Morality was not vestigial. Justice was not a flaw. Empathy was not a disease. He would prove it, he would do whatever it took, because the right thing was necessary. 

Humanity was not a virus, infecting the galaxy like some sickening parasite. It could be, but he wouldn’t allow it. It would be more. He would prove Tenebris wrong, and when he destroyed the Cabinet, he would break the repulsive ultimatum thrust upon themselves. That money, that wealth, he could buy back every Parvian in the galaxy, save them from whatever fate would have befallen them, as it almost had with him. Edo was one of the wealthiest systems in the galaxy. Any price named; he could afford. 

Coursing with a renewed being, a fresh soul, Martin leapt back down to the bench, leaving the pin within Tenebris’ chip. He drew in a deep breath, steeling his body, quivering with adrenaline and shaking with fear, and exhaled.

 Tenebris would join him. It would take convincing, but he knew that deep in her mind, a part which she desperately tried to convince herself didn’t exist, she wanted this. To do something right. To not sit idly by while humanity perverted itself.