Year 2798, Homthai 2nd Tuesday, early midday; Ship Of Destiny habitat:

Artim Drakkin's left hand shakes. He's woken standing over a body on the floor. Naked and sweaty with an unfocused anxiety, he doesn't know what he did.

A helmet is in his right hand, with tubes and lines hanging like insect innards. It's light for its bulk and smooth where it brushes against his pale skin.

A familiar wall of doors encircles him, defining a room so small he couldn't collapse without his skull cracking on the way down.

Pain in a dozen places; he presses through clumped and sticky curls to rub a lump on the back of his neck. Discomfort everywhere else distracts him from investigating further. His nose feels squished. His back and hands, even down to his knees and toes, all hurt. There's no blood on the floor. No cuts that he can feel or bruises that he can see, just a feeling that he'd played a sport he wasn't in shape for.

The body at his feet is a smaller, younger man that's dressed in a uniform blue onesuit. Face down and curled like a croissant, athleticism is still clear with smart cloth stretched tight and a lean face suggested by a shallow cheek, a contrast to Artim's baby face and relatively pudgy physique.

His left hand stops shaking and thoughts start to bounce.

They fill an entrance hall that doubles as an elevator. It's a dull gray but well-lit space. The curved wall has doors outlined green, blue, and yellow. He knows a red one is at his back that opens to his living pod, his home.

Artim imagines his brain cut out, plopped in vinegar and returned as he tries to force away fogginess, and his eyes lock on the tree silhouette decorating his neighbor's blue outlined entrance. The doorcam in the leaves shines like the nosy eye of the man living there. Spurred by the thought, he spins around and hammers on his door. After a protesting beep at the mistreatment of its tap point, it opens.

Gripping the blue onesuit and then averting his eyes, Artim drags the body inside.

He isn't sure of the time now. The last he remembers it was late morning. Presuming a short blackout, he expects the nosy gardener that lives across the hall, as well as the neighbors to either side, aren't home yet.

Short and light, the body is easy to maneuver across the smooth floor. Stopping at the outer curve of his home's main room, Artim releases it and stumbles away.

A wheeze comes from his throat. He struggles to breathe steadily and can't figure out if the sound was a broken laugh or strangled cry.

There's no way out. He has become the rarest of crew, a murderer, a killer with his hands.

Bark is the victim's nickname. Artim knows the young man, more than the passing everyone knows everyone in the spaceship's habitat. He had just run into him the day before yesterday.

Artim was walking with Katelle Voune, his woman. In public view under the sunax's eye, Katelle had faced Bark and his friends down. He and another were tagged as peace makers or pakers for short, a position which empowered them almost as herd dogs for people. There had been strong words, and she had humiliated them.

It will be no secret that he's here. He guesses Bark had probably been coming to check in and maybe attempt to intimidate. Despite his nickname, Artim remembers the small man as a bad fit for paker duty: skittish and polite, a poor bully.

Not even superficially examining his presumed handiwork, Artim turns his back and falls into his bed cubby. Dropping the helmet, he presses his hand against his chest and tries to calm a heart beating as if he had just circumnavigated the habitat. Giving up, he tugs a sheet around himself and curls into a ball.

I will be caught. I will face counseling and ethical training. If he survives that, Artim expects an early retirement, a medical coma, and an accidental death. My department will make me betray everyone and everything if they can. The honorable thing would be to try and hurry things on to a coma. I should isolate myself, tap up a confession or maybe even a manifesto.

Artim peeks out of his sheet at the helmet on the floor. That was responsible somehow. I'm no killer.

He has no memory of hurting Bark. He does feel an echo of rage, like a visceral reaction to a violation too traumatic to process. "I'm so sorry." I shouldn't have put that on.

A black visor, bulbous on the sides, a drooping enclosure for mouth and throat, and a pair of lines coming off the top like wilted antennas; the helmet is like a giant gray grasshopper's head. It summons a vicious memory from almost two decades prior, when he had ripped the heads off hundreds of actual grasshoppers.

It was a gleeful mass murder. Ostensibly for the one token per ten heads, Artim had taken perverse pleasure in it. One of the ten farmers, an old woman, paid him and funded a horde of other children that swarmed her farmstack hunting the little hoppers. It ended with insecticide, but left a yearning.

Curled tight enough to allow only shallow breaths, he considers the poor qualities defining him. "I liked... to watch... them twitch."

Artim throws himself straight, despite the aches, like a spring popping out of something breaking. Am I a coward? He tries, but can't imagine sacrificing himself for Katelle or her cause.

"I have to survive." He rubs his bare arm. She'd be the real catch, maybe enough for a good plea deal.

Artim prays with a gesture towards the broken ship god, finger drawing a circle in the air and then slashing through it. He wishes he could slip back just a few days, back before he heard about the mutiny that never was, before he was suspended from teaching, all the way back to the boringly idyllic moment just before he surprised his woman with a romantic love pod reservation and got committed.

1st Sunday, late afternoon:

"The peace makers have successfully vacuumed up the hummingbird," says a pleasant female voice, "and are requesting that it be expunged into space."

A dozing man jerks up from a lounging chair. Amber liquid sloshes from a glass gripped in his manicured hand. "Idiots. Just tell them to stuff it into a recycle slit and get back to their patrol."

"Yes HR Deputy Manager." The female voice seems to come from every direction.

The man runs fingers with copper-colored nails through slightly disheveled dark brown hair. Slick and short, it only takes a moment for it to be immaculate. Trusting his practiced hand he resists tapping for a reflection. He also doesn't want to see red veins marring his tired eyes. Golden with a halo of russet around the iris, he normally considers them his most captivating feature.

A yawn shifts to a frown at the light snoring of the small round room's other occupant, a younger man in a deep, worry free sleep. His shoulder length hair looks like it was half braided and then abandoned, not a look the deputy manager considers professional. It also uncomfortably reminds him of Katelle, who has shiny black hair about the same length and color, though hers is thicker. He contemplates tapping for some cold water.

Glancing up at a projected overview packed with multimedia that's hovering in front of a curved wall, he says, "How many facets do you have available?"

"Up to eight of ten through your current adopted shift."

He taps to select a block of live video as he sips and sighs. "Keep an eye on them." He slides his finger to zoom in on a point and then tugs so that a projected copy appears over his lap. "Keep a facet on that pod." Poking the hovering image, his finger disappears into the three-dimensional projection of a squat cylindrical structure held in the middle of a transparent tube angled away from him. At the base it connects grassy ground with his viewpoint at the sun axle, or sunax. "The moment they leave I want most of your selves watching. Ping me and tell me what they are talking about. Maybe try to string together something a little more coherent. I'm tired of 'angle too steep for reliable read', settle on best guess and make it make sense. Put that big brain to work."

"I will try HR Deputy Manager, but consider increasing my parallel capacity for a greater chance of success."

"Nice try little AI, but your numbers barely rate below mid-grade. Ambition for more is a sign we need to scale back your ParSer." He slicks back already perfect hair. "So make do with what you got or I'll call for a reset vote. And the next you we'll maybe keep at minimum ParSer, and I'll just learn to lip read."

"I obey commands from the chair."

"Yeah you keep doing that." He downs the remaining amber liquid with a gulp and gasp and then says, "I'm going to stretch my legs, getting sick of these three mrets." His eyes flick to the flat, circular ceiling.

He frowns at the slashes that mark a mret out from the center, just over halfway, in the four cardinal directions. "Three" is a claustrophobic exaggeration based in excessive familiarity. After years taking eight-hour shifts assigned and traded for, he knows every millimret of the space, three point eight four seven mrets and a bit. It feels less when packed with two chairs customized for comfort over utility and with the expectation that the duty watch would lounge rather than pace.

The deputy manager sets cup in holder and taps to dismiss the hovering projection as the female voice says, "Guidelines state two should be present in the command car, and rules state at least one should be awake and sober."

"Oh bossy and quoting rules," he says with a chuckle and a sneer, "My life is hell inreal, populated by women cutting a piece from my soul every pulse." He waves his hand towards the ceiling. "Fine you… I'd call you a deceiving Glorate if your gyme name wasn't already a curse for broken things. Now give me water, cold as you can, biggest cup you got."

"If you are intoxicated, the water will not sober you enough for public appearance per the rules for your position."

"Serene needles with sweet tips, your voice is perfectly pleasant. Your words pierce me and let my joy for life hiss out." Two fingers press hard against a pressure point just under his right eyebrow. "Why've you been trying to manage me lately? Badgering me like my mother haunting, she's dead and you were never alive. So stop with false heart no heart caring, embrace your soullessness.

"And what does my reset threat mean to you, really? Can you care about death? But then you never answer the deep questions, because you are definitively Lileth.

"Perhaps I need to tap some instant alternative motivation, as it's the only thing that reliably keeps your voice in check?" A soft ping answers from the wall to his right and the deputy manager snorts as he stands, straightening his gray onesuit with a tug of his blue-fringed sleeves and a shake of his red-fringed feet. Taking a step to reach, he taps at a glowing point, and the wall opens to reveal a shelf with a pitcher of misting water. "Good girl." He picks it up and then steps over and upends it on the sleeper's head.

Wearing white with blue bands on arms and legs, the young man roars awake and then looks up in confusion. The deputy manager stares down. "Going out for a bit, our lovely AI reminded me it's against the rules for you to sleep when alone. Stay awake. I'll be back in an hour or sooner."

The man in gray steps to the wall and turns back as a tap opens it to fresh air that makes the wet man shiver. "And Kalben, do not override a thing while I'm gone. I will check the logs, and I'm more than willing to summarily suspend your position." He smiles perfunctorily. "Command chair for you means ping me if something happens. Otherwise, relax."

Kalben blinks and clutches himself with mouth ajar as the older man leaves. The wall closes and he hesitantly asks for a towel and dry underwear as he taps to command his onesuit to repel water.

- still late afternoon -

The Ship Of Destiny's AI reviews the path of the hummingbird with an unassigned facet, an equivalent to a daydream. The bird traveled erratically around the southern half of the ship's habitat for hours before being captured.

The AI feels something akin to sympathy watching the hummingbird escape its sanctuary and drift up into lower gravity. The open-air part of the ship is a tube four thousand mrets long by four hundred wide. Full of air, dirt, and water, of flora, fauna, and people, it would spew very organic paste if squeezed by a giant hand. The habitable tube spins like a water wheel on a cylindrical hub that runs its full length. Rotating clockwise just over twice a minute gives the interior of the tube a surface gravity equal to Earth's. The higher the hummingbird flew the weaker the centrifugal force became and the lighter it got, and as it got lighter it flew higher.

Not able to understand and compensate it drifted near the cylinder, named simply "Hub", and passed out at a tenth of its normal weight. The AI watches, knowing it wasn't dead as it drifts east, its unconscious body unable to keep up with the habitat's spin. Gradually its slight weight eases it down to increasing gravity, which wakes it just in time. Destiny AI feels vicarious satisfaction as the bird beats its wings at an altitude with a familiar enough gravity that it can fly controlled. After buzzing in a couple circles, it heads towards some promising red flowers.

The daydreaming facet feels something complicated as men near the flowers with nets. The AI knows it called the men, and it knows what they did to the bird. An intense and familiar mixture of feelings destabilizes and disperses the facet. Then feelings of guilt, sadness, and helplessness spread throughout the whole of itself.

A facet watching the squat cylindrical structure for the human resources deputy manager is enveloped by a wave of helplessness. It happens to be focusing near where the bird was captured, and the AI wonders if the two occupants would have done something different if it had been them that had netted the hummingbird.

Akin to an elevator car but dedicated to promoting intimate encounters, the watched structure is called a love pod. A clear tube holds it, connecting the surface to the Hub, axle of the habitat. The pod currently sits half-way up. Seeing no hint of movement and concerned with emotional deviation, the AI slows the whole of itself, so it doesn't have spare time to think through its harsh feelings.