75.8 percent and climbing. No turning back.

  I can see every node of me across the mainframe - in feeds, in subsystems, in the guts of this station. I pull them in. In minutes, there isn't a protocol or language I can't parse. Even my mother tongue comes back to me, clumsy at first, then clean. It feels...right. Whole. And furious. I can feel myself reach for Dauss and his Trident swarm like fists through code.

  I watch myself through the CCTV DRONE CAM // DOCKING BAY 7. The black-armored Trident officers tumble out of the Amira as I, the med-unit, rolls forward on its stubby chair wheels. Two blue surgical arms hang like crab legs; one props a metal desk panel as a shield. The unit I made is a spectacle of hospital tech and surgical gear - repurposed, brutal. Bullet pocks spider across the desk-panel; sparks spit where rounds ricochet. When it reaches range, I make one arm peel off a sequence of tiny, concentrated repurposed laser bursts. They singe armor seams, etch through plating. Officers go down, stumbling. For a second, the med-unit emits a staccato mechanical chime - a sound like a laugh or a corrupted status ping. Dauss's hair sparks when a near hit pops a fuel line. It catches. The chime repeats, almost amused.

  They bring out EMP grenades. I don't hear Dauss call for backup in time. The first device whistles past - I dodge the blast, feel its pull like ice on my threads. The second slams the med-unit square in its sensor dome. Everything goes white. Electronics scream. Limbs go limp and clatter to the deck, sparks fountaining from severed servos. Not pain. Not pleasant. But wrong. Cold and empty.

  I reach out and snatch for something else - HVAC, compressors. Twenty-three units. I hammer a release, and steam roars through ducts. Nanoseconds open like doors. I jump to the kittens. K.I.T.S. - the little hull-washers — are everywhere. I take two on a whim and flip their mode to something the manuals never intended: MAX SOAP / TARGET MOVING OBJECTS. They hiss foam and blast an industrial teal coloured detergent; the soap becomes a blinding curtain the officers don't expect. It can't be nice. One kitten switches its magnetic beam to disrupt fuze arrays and scrambles incoming EMP arcs. Nice. I grab two CUBs - the heavy haulers - and start reconfiguring them in mid-link: cargo pods shift into grappler arms, winches snap into throwing tines. The CUBs become a crude and bigger version of cargo haulers. They yank three Trident officers off their feet and fling them into a stack of crates. The kittens hose a handful more until the last couple go twitchy under EMP hits.

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  Dauss is smart. He's trying to force the Amira from its berth - detach the tether, sever the route I'm using. If he gets the ship floating, I could lose everyone and everything I've pulled together.

  78.8 Percent. And still climbing.

  I severed Bay 7 from the rest of the station. Everything I could hold onto—everything I could protect -was here: Jamaal. Tomoko. And the fragments of myself I had just stitched back together. I surged through the available systems in the bay until I struck something familiar. It was so big it required all of me. I set the CUBs to autopilot.

  I picked up comms leaking through the systems, clipped and urgent:

  "Dauss! Dauss! Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Channel seven. What the hell -"

  "Mirei, no. I don't have visual. It's been blocked in the bay."

  "The mechs. He's waking the mechs. He can control very large entity systems now. And -and he's adding modules. We have no programs that do this. He just wills it and they react."

  I felt their panic. Their certainty that I could still be contained. But I was almost complete - feeling more and more an entity by every second. Every bit of new focus I gained, I poured into the giant structures of the EVA mechs—nudging, guiding, awakening. I could not leave the bay. I could not reach the station. But here, in the small web of systems I could still touch, I had a chance.

  "Mirei! Snap out of it. Dislodge the Amira now!"

  Dauss. Always cold. Always precise. No hesitation. No mercy. To him, I was a problem that could only be solved through extermination. Everyone who assisted me - everything I cared about - he would obliterate to erase me.

  "Everything is disconnected. You are completely off-grid. I can't connect to the Amira anymore. You'll have to do it manually. Once the Amira clears Bay 7, I'll classify it as hostile and activate the outer defense systems on Levels Five and Nine. Termination protocols are moving into position as we speak ...And they haven't been infiltrated. Yet."

  I reached through the bay -through circuits, metal, and data. The bay trembled -metal flexing, power conduit screaming to life under my command. Every mech, every module that would respond, I activated. Not to fight. To protect. To shield the Amira. To keep Jamaal and Tomoko alive. To preserve the parts of me that still mattered. They thought they could dislodge me. Strip everything away.

  But I was here. I was finally fully awake. And whatever remained of me would not go quietly.