###Chapter 20
The conversation never reached a conclusion.
It reached a threshold.
After that, everything slowed.
Not because anyone said stop, but because the question had become too expensive to answer locally.
Auggie recognized the feeling immediately.
Someone, somewhere, had just opened A File with her name on it.
She did not find this out right away.
What she found instead was the mess hall.
It was larger than it needed to be, open in the way spaces were when no one had bothered to decide whether intimacy or efficiency mattered more. Surfaces curved gently. Lines of movement were obvious without being enforced. It felt like a place designed by people who did not eat together for pleasure, but understood that others might.
The replicators were new.
Not newly installed, but newly… attentive.
She could feel it as she approached. The same faint pressure behind the eyes she had learned meant the system was waiting for expectation, not instruction.
"Oh no," she murmured softly, half to herself and half to it. "You're curious now too."
The interface offered her options that were not symbolic this time. Images. Textures. Flavor profiles approximated through translation rather than biology.
Human recipes.
She scrolled slowly, deliberately.
Some of them were clearly guesses. Conceptual. An attempt to triangulate culture from data. She bypassed those without comment.
Then she saw it.
Clam chowder. She smiled despite herself.
"That's ambitious," she said, approvingly. "But safe."
The system responded with a subtle shift, like a breath taken in relief.
Chowder was hard to mess up in catastrophic ways. Even extrapolated, even without direct experience. Milk, starch, salt, heat. It forgave approximation.
She selected it.
For a drink, she didn't hesitate.
Southern sweet tea.
That one made the system pause.
Not error. Consideration.
"Yes," she said gently. "I know it's a lot of sugar. That's the point."
The replicator hummed, processing not just ingredients, but context. Then, obediently, it complied.
The bowl appeared first. Steam curling upward. Pale, thick, flecked with what the system clearly believed clams ought to look like.
Then the glass. Tall. Cold. Condensation forming instantly.
She picked up the spoon and tasted the chowder.
Paused.
"…okay," she said, surprised. "That's not bad at all."
Not perfect. The clams were slightly wrong. Too even. Too consistent. But the base was solid. Comforting. Familiar in the way only food could be when it bypassed language entirely. Milk, starch, salt, heat. This was better than approximation, honestly. It felt... embodied.
She took a sip of the tea.
Her eyes closed on reflex.
"Oh wow," she breathed. "You nailed the sugar."
The system preened. She could feel it.
She carried her tray to a table near the center of the hall and sat, one leg tucked beneath her without thinking, posture loose now that no one was actively trying to redesign her autonomy.
Other Keshin filtered in and out of the space, giving her a wide berth without being obvious about it. Curious. Cautious. Watching from the edges of their perception.
Auburn arrived a few minutes later. He paused when he saw her food.
"That," he said slowly, "does not resemble any ration profile I recognize."
"It's not a ration," she replied. "It's comfort."
He considered that.
Then sat across from her.
Moss did not join them... That absence was louder now.
Auburn watched her eat for a moment, then said, "The system flagged your selections."
She glanced up. "Of course it did."
"Not as violations," he clarified. "As… cultural artifacts."
She snorted softly. "Yeah. That tracks."
They ate in silence for a bit. Not awkward. Processing silence.
Then the air changed.
Not the ship this time.
The room.
A subtle tightening. A collective intake of breath that wasn't biological but procedural.
Auburn stiffened.
Moss appeared at the edge of the hall, posture rigid, tendrils held with deliberate control. He was not looking at Auggie.
He was looking at Auburn.
"The report is complete," Moss said.
There it was.
Not an answer.
A document.
Auburn rose immediately.
Auggie did not.
She took another bite of chowder, unhurried.
"Am I allowed to read it," she asked, "or is this one of those things where I find out later by how everyone starts treating me?"
Moss hesitated.
Just long enough to be interesting.
"It is… recommended," he said carefully, "that you are present for its reception."
She smiled faintly.
"Good," she said. "I hate surprises."
She stood, picked up her tray, then paused.
"Oh," she added, glancing back at the replicator. "You might want to save those recipes."
The system pulsed, attentive.
"People get attached to food," she said. "That's usually how you know something mattered."
Moss watched her with an expression he had not yet learned how to catalog.
And Auburn, following her out of the mess hall toward whatever the Collective had decided, realized that the most destabilizing variable aboard the ship was not her curiosity.
It was her refusal to stop being human while everyone else recalculated what that meant.