###Chapter 16
The first thing Auburn noticed was that the ship was listening.
Not in the way it always listened, not passively. As a lattice of inputs waiting to be queried. Attentively. As if something in the architecture had shifted from monitoring to observing.
The hum in the walls had changed timbre. Not volume. Interest.
The other Keshin felt it too. Auburn could tell by the way the Incident Officer's tendrils tightened, then deliberately relaxed, as if resisting the urge to reassert control through sheer procedural force.
"Explain," Auburn said, keeping his voice even.
Auggie glanced between them, clearly clocking the shift in authority without knowing the language for it.
"I was bored," she offered, not as a question, but as a statement.
Moss made a sound that was not in any approved lexicon.
"- bored," he repeated, flatly.
"Yes," she said, penultimately unbothered. "Also curious. But mostly, bored."
"That does not improve the situation," Moss replied.
"It explains the motivation," she countered. "You asked me to explain."
Auburn lifted one hand, palm outward, not a command, but a request for pacing.
"Start with the how," he said. "Not the why."
The human nodded. Once. As if that distinction mattered to her.
"I noticed the control panel translates paycheck psychicly," she said. "It oscillates. Tiny corrections, all the time. Like breathing."
Moss's tendrils twitched despite himself.
"That fluctuation is corrective," Moss said. "Not interactive."
"Everything interactive looks corrective if you're committed to believing it doesn't respond," she said mildly.
Auburn felt the ship lean into that sentence.
"I didn't change the baseline," she continued. "I nudged the tolerance curve. Very gently. Like… tapping glass to see if it rings."
"And it rang," Auburn said.
She smiled. Not triumphantly. Delighted.
"Yes."
Moss stepped forward.
"The gravity system is not a toy," he said. "It is a foundational constant. It exists so that you do not die."
"And it did that," she said. "Successfully. I'm still here."
"That is not how safety is measured," Moss snapped.
"No," she agreed. "It's how risk is measured. Safety is about trust, and the system held me just fine."
Silence fell, not empty, but weighted. The kind that only happened when a system encountered a premise it had not been built to evaluate.
Auburn felt it then, unmistakably.
The ship was not waiting for Moss.
It was waiting for her.
Not for instructions. For expectation.
"Unit within the Collective," Auburn said slowly, "did you isolate the incident thread?"
"Yes," Moss replied. "Immediately."
"And yet," Auburn said, "the ship remains responsive."
Moss did not answer.
The human tilted her head, eyes tracking something Auburn could not see.
"It likes being asked," she said suddenly.
Auburn's mandibles clicked softly.
"Explain," he said again.
"The system," she said. "It's not… sentient. Not like you mean it. But it's not inert either. It's been optimized to anticipate need. That's what you do when you build something to care for people who are considered fragile."
Moss stiffened, "Humans are fragile."
"Yes," she said. "And so are you. You just distribute the fragility differently."
That landed.
Not as an accusation. As a mapping.
Auburn watched Moss struggle, not with anger, but with categorization. The Incident Officer was trying to place her statements into an existing framework, and finding none that fit without breaking something important.
"You are not authorized to interrogate core systems," Moss said finally.
"I didn't interrogate them," she replied. "I LISTENED."
The ship's lights dimmed by a fraction, then brightened again.
Acknowledgment.
Auburn felt a chill run the length of his spine.
"This is exactly what your file warned us about," Moss said, voice tight. "You do not experience boundaries as deterrents. You experience them as invitations."
She considered that.
"…yes," she said, matter of factly. "That sounds right."
Moss turned to Auburn.
"This is unsustainable," he said. "If she continues to engage systems as interlocutors rather than tools, containment will fail."
Auburn did not look away from the human.
"What happens if containment succeeds?" he asked.
Moss hesitated.
A fatal pause.
"She remains safe," Moss said carefully.
"And the ship?" Auburn pressed.
Moss said nothing.
The human exhaled, slow and thoughtful.
"Oh," she said,cgrinning unabashedly. "That's the real question, isn't it."
Auburn felt something shift inside him, not alarm, not fear, but recognition.
This wasn't about a breach.
This was about a choice.
The ship had been built to protect.
The human had treated it as something that could respond.
And in doing so, she had revealed a third option. One Moss had never been designed to consider, despite their vast structural omnipotence.
"Curiosity," Auburn said quietly, "is not a failure mode."
Moss's gaze snapped to him.
"It is," Moss said. "If unmanaged."
Auburn inclined his head.
"And yet," he said, "it is how systems learn."
The ship's gravity adjusted.
Not enough to be dangerous.
Just enough to be felt.
The human smiled again, not because she had won, but because something had answered.
And Moss realized, with dawning horror, that the firewall he had been building was no longer between the human and the ship, but rather between himself and the future.