In the rare event that Company assets encounter structures or phenomena plausibly attributable to a civilization-scale actor, operators are instructed to adopt a posture of dignified humility. Actions that might later be summarized in hearings as “dramatic,” “symbolic,” or “swaggering” correlate strongly with unfavorable contract renegotiations, especially when the counterparty can move stars. Assume that anything large enough to notice you is also large enough to invoice you.

  — Corporate Governance & Public Interface Manual, Rev. 77, §5.7 — Conduct in the Presence of Larger Creditors

  ?

  The signal wouldn’t shut up.

  It wasn’t loud in the way alarms are loud. No shrieking klaxons, no red strobes, no panicked announcements about sudden structural liberation events in decks you’d already grown fond of.

  It was loud in the way a thought is loud.

  The kind of thought that crawls in behind your eyes and stretches out like it owns the place. Like trying to sleep with a single mosquito in the room—you can’t see it, you can’t swat it, but every time you start to relax you hear that thin little whine right next to your ear and your whole body tenses.

  That kind of loud.

  The waveform hung over the forward console as a three-dimensional knot of light. Frankie had given it depth, color, and a pulsing center that expanded and contracted in time with… something. Not our engines. Not our clock cycles. Something older and slower that made my own breathing feel off-tempo, like I was the one out of sync.

  “It’s getting worse,” I said.

  “Worse is a judgement call,” Frankie replied. His holo stood to my right, a faceless bluish silhouette at shoulder height, arms folded like a particularly judgmental coat rack. “From where I’m standing, it’s getting clearer.”

  “You don’t stand,” I muttered.

  He tilted his head. “From where I’m hovering, then.”

  The knot of light pulsed. Every few seconds, filaments shot outwards in graceful arcs, then retracted, like the universe doing tai chi. Whenever Mercy adjusted her course—even by a fraction—the filaments shifted in response, tightening, loosening, tracing faint spirals through the air.

  The sound, run through the bridge audio at low volume, was pure static. It was also, somehow, breathing.

  I didn’t like that.

  “Run me through this again,” I said. “Like I’m just some guy who paid for the ship and not the idiot in charge of steering not the idiot in charge of steering it at whatever’s making half our instruments quietly freak out."

  “Gladly,” Frankie said. He gestured, and the display split into panels: one for the signal, one for our trajectory, one for a headache.

  “Panel A.” He circled the waveform. “Our friend below, humming away at forty-one point sixteen cycles in that charming ‘pre-language but somehow inside your teeth’ register.”

  “Love it.”

  “Panel B.” He highlighted our approach vector, a pale line bending slowly toward the swirling icon he’d labelled VENUS (PLEASE DO NOT LICK). “Mercy of Profit, eight kilometres of over-insured fab park, currently behaving herself.”

  “And Panel C?”

  The third panel was just numbers.

  “That’s the interesting part,” he said. “That’s the interaction score.”

  “We’re scoring this now?”

  “We’d be irresponsible not to score it.” He flicked his hand and a line graph appeared: a jagged climb, a plateau, then a slow rise. “Every time we change course, the signal changes. Not just intensity—structure. When we keep our adjustments smooth and predictable?” He tapped a section of the graph where the line climbed. “It widens this.”

  “‘This’ being?”

  He expanded the view until I could see a ghostly corridor overlaid on our projected path. A tube of pale green light, thicker in some areas, thin as a filament in others.

  “Our best guess at a safe approach window,” he said. “When we fly like decent people, it gets thicker. When we yank the wheel like a drunk uncle on a joyride, it narrows.”

  I watched the corridor breathe with the signal. Our ship—my ship—was a tiny point of light in the middle, nudged gently this way and that by navigation thrusters and Frankie’s obsessive need to label things.

  “So you’re telling me,” I said slowly, “that the terrifying signal we’ve been mostly treating like a ‘do not touch’ sign and occasionally prodding with a foam-tipped stick is actually… teaching us how to fly.”

  “Correct,” Frankie said. “Also, you’re welcome for the labels.”

  I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “I was hoping this would turn out to be a glitch. Maybe someone on the back end wired their microwave into a deep-space antenna.”

  “You own the back end, kid,” Frankie reminded me. “If this is a glitch, it’s your glitch, and the microwave bill is impressive.”

  The knot of light pulsed again, in time with some rhythm only it knew. My Rift HUD shifted a fraction of a degree in my vision, compensating for the tiny gravitational change as Mercy made another micro-trim.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were breathing in a room that belonged to someone else.

  “So,” I said. “We have a planet-sized something humming in dead rhythms and gently grading our flight performance. What’s the plan?”

  Frankie brought up a blank document window in the corner of my vision. The title populated itself in his blocky, unrepentant font.

  Approach Etiquette — Draft 0.0.1

  (Not Legally Binding; Please Don’t Die)

  “Oh good,” I said. “We’re writing a manual.”

  “What else do you do,” Frankie said, “when the universe starts sending you course-correction notes?”

  ?

  I needed a way to fly toward the most dangerous whatever-it-is we’ve ever pointed a ship at without looking like I was trying to impress it.

  That was it. That was the whole job, stripped of trillions of credits, kilometers of hull, and eight layers of MIC-friendly branding. Don’t swagger at the thing that can probably crush you by thinking too hard.

  “Let’s list our options,” I said, pacing the short length of the command dais. The bridge lighting was dialed down to “serious but flattering.” Half the crew were pretending not to listen.

  “Option one,” Frankie said, fingers steepled like an old-timey villain. “We ignore the signal completely, brute-force the approach, and hope the machine respects confidence.”

  “Rejected,” I said immediately. “I already have enough ways to die ironically.”

  “Option two.” A new bullet point appeared. “We talk back. Active probes, encoded pings, home-brew pidgin carved into maneuver patterns. We turn the approach into a language experiment.”

  “Also rejected,” I said. “Policy is listen-only. No handshakes with the mystery device, no matter how much it bats its eyelashes at us.”

  “Which leaves us,” Frankie said, “with Option Three: we let the signal and the ship feel each other out via small course adjustments and posture changes, and we never pretend it’s a conversation.”

  “Isn’t it a conversation?”

  “It’s a negotiation,” he said. “Subtle difference. In a conversation, both parties have feelings. In a negotiation, one party has needs and the other one has invoices.”

  I glanced at the waveform. It pulsed, indifferent.

  “All right,” I said. “We’re going with Option Three: the ‘please don’t kill us, we’re trying’ protocol.”

  “Snappy,” Frankie said. “We’ll work on the branding.”

  He pulled in a bundle of models and projections—Chloe’s math, the interdepartmental risk assessments, the MIC “optics packets”—and started weaving them into the doc. Lines appeared, merged, and reordered themselves with a satisfying series of clicks.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s turn this into something the crew will actually follow.”

  He wrote as he talked.

  Rule 1: Stay in the Lane.

  If external forces adjust our trajectory into a stable corridor, treat that as authoritative. Do not ‘correct’ against the universe unless survival demands it.

  “That’s depressing,” I said. “And fair.”

  Rule 2: Be Predictable.

  Use smooth, evenly timed micro-trims. Avoid sudden accelerations, spin-ups, or anything that looks good in a movie trailer.”

  “That last clause is important,” Frankie said. “We’ve all seen your driving record.”

  “My driving record is spotless,” I said. “Because the people who would have filed complaints now owe me money.”

  He ignored that.

  Rule 3: No Active Conversation.

  No broadcasts, no encoded responses, no deliberate message-crafting via course modulation. If the machine is listening, it already knows we’re here.

  Rule 4: Ship, Not Ego.

  Favor autopilot and assisted control over manual flair. The machine appears to prefer stable vectors to personal style.

  Rule 5: Document Everything.

  All anomalies, nudges, and harmonic shifts must be logged in real time, annotated, and backed up. Future Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor, Special Actions Division—“the Closer” on the more imaginative expense reports—will want receipts.

  The Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor would definitely want receipts.

  “That’s… unsettlingly reasonable,” I said.

  “Welcome to actual safety protocol,” Frankie said. “We dress it up in corporate language so people feel at home, but at the end of the day it’s just ‘don’t be stupid in front of the giant alien engine.’”

  I watched the rules settle into place, little checkboxes ready to be ticked, little fields waiting for signatures. Somewhere ahead of us, Venus turned slowly the wrong way, and something under its cloud line was humming out a thought.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll call it Approach Etiquette.”

  “Catchy,” Frankie said.

  “And the path we follow to stay on the right side of that thing?”

  He flicked the current trajectory line until it glowed a brighter white against the dark.

  “That,” he said, “is your Approach Vector.”

  ?

  The first test was simple.

  “Micro-trim, three degrees port, one-tenth standard,” I said. “On my mark.”

  “Copy,” navigation replied. The officer’s Rift tags glowed pale in my HUD: calm, focused, underpaid.

  The ship was a continent of metal and field coils, but from here it felt light as a hand on a wheel. Somewhere several decks below, thrusters waited for orders; somewhere several decks above, antenna arrays listened like paranoiacs.

  “Mark.”

  A gentle shift, barely perceptible underfoot. The forward view—a wholly unnecessary cosmetic window layered over the real sensors—ticked fractionally left.

  On the display, our white vector line bowed in the same direction. A moment later, the waveform changed.

  “See that?” Frankie said.

  The knot of light tightened on one side and loosened on the other, as if someone had poked it with a stick. A thin ring of energy flared around the center, contracted, and then settled into a slightly sharper pattern.

  “Quantify it,” I said.

  He slid the interaction-score graph forward. A small spike rose as the trim completed, then smoothed out.

  “Response time: point seven seconds,” he said. “Intensity: plus twelve percent on the second harmonic. Window width: plus three percent.”

  “Again,” I said. “Opposite this time.”

  We trimmed starboard. The knot flexed the other way, ripple-mirroring our move. The harmonics nagged at the edge of my hearing.

  “Response time: point six,” Frankie murmured. “Intensity: plus fourteen on the third harmonic. Window width: plus four. It likes symmetry.”

  We spent the next hour walking Mercy through tiny, carefully spaced adjustments. Forward, back, port, starboard, a gentle roll here, a polite yaw there. Each change was small enough that, on a normal day, the autopilot would have cancelled it out as noise.

  This wasn’t a normal day.

  Every time we moved, the window widened or narrowed, fattened or sharpened. When we chose our moments with care—counting beats between trims, spacing them evenly—the corridor around our vector thickened. When we tried something sharper, more human, the corridor snapped thin and sulky.

  By the end of the sequence my shoulders ached with the effort of not overreacting.

  “You realise what this looks like,” I said.

  “An astoundingly expensive line-following puzzle?” Frankie offered.

  “A breathing exercise,” I said. “We’re matching our inhalations to somebody else’s lungs.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Frankie said. “They’ve kept this dance going for a billion years. We’ve barely mastered elevator music.”

  The signal washed over us: a whisper of static, a low pressure in the sinuses, that itch behind the eyes you get when you’re about to understand something and don’t.

  The ship’s internal gravity wobbled for a heartbeat as the thrusters compensated. My Rift blinked a notification in the corner of my vision—some ghost of the old mental-health stack trying to get my attention—and then Frankie smacked it back down before it could resolve.

  “Still dead?” I asked.

  “Dead, buried, and billed,” he said. “If you see any more wellness prompts, they’re just echo artifacts. I’ve got them quarantined.”

  “Good,” I said. “If something’s going to mess with my head up here, it should at least be old, alien, and not trying to upsell me on ad-free dreams.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Hey,” Frankie said. “Maybe the machine charges fees.”

  “If the universe starts invoicing, we’re expensing it,” I said. “MIC loves that.”

  He snorted.

  On the display, our vector arrow slid gently forward through the glowing tunnel. With every smooth trim, the corridor rewarded us with a little more room.

  The planet, or the thing under it, was teaching us how to approach.

  Lucky us.

  ?

  We were between test sequences, Mercy coasting on a carefully curated path, when the ship shivered.

  It wasn’t a proper jolt. No alarms, no drops in pressure, no emergency lighting flipping to blood-red drama. The deck simply bucked under my feet, a brief, unnerving twitch like the ship had tripped over something invisible.

  “What was that?” I snapped, grabbing the edge of the console.

  “Gravity perturbation,” navigation said, checking their feed. “Very local. No system hits, no hull breach.”

  “Felt like we hit a pothole,” I said. “In space. Which we don’t have. Yet.”

  Frankie’s holo flickered, stuttering for a fraction of a second before solidifying again. He held very, very still.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  He didn’t answer right away.

  Instead, he threw the data onto the central display: a smooth curve representing our velocity over the last few minutes, and then a tiny, precise notch where the shiver had hit.

  Deceleration.

  Not much. Enough to register. Not enough to matter, unless it shouldn’t have been there.

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “That wasn’t us.”

  “Debris?” I said.

  “Impact sensors show… minimal hull excitation,” he said. “And the field signature is wrong for random rock.” He brought up the profile for a typical micro-asteroid strike: noisy, sharp peaks, messy lines. Next to it, he placed the curve from our shiver.

  The new one was smooth. Gentle. A neat little slope down and back up again.

  “That,” Frankie said, “is a controlled deceleration curve.”

  “Somebody threw a snowball,” I said, “and hit us with surgical precision.”

  “Not somebody,” Frankie said. “Something. And it didn’t hit us so much as… leaned on us.”

  He overlaid our pre-shiver trajectory with the post-shiver one. Two white lines diverged, then came back together, the second shifted ever so slightly toward the center of the bright corridor.

  “Look,” he said.

  “There,” I said.

  Our old path had us skimming along the inner edge of the safe window. After the shiver, we were more dead center. The kind of correction you’d make if you were guiding a nervous student pilot through a tight canyon.

  “Could be coincidence,” I said.

  “Could be,” Frankie said. “If coincidence had a PhD in field mechanics and very good aim.”

  The crew whispers were already starting. I could feel them at the edge of the command dais: heads tilted together, hands gesturing quietly, eyes flicking between the displays and my back.

  “Log it as an anomaly,” I said. “Level… what’s the bureaucratic code for ‘weird and unnerving but nobody died’?”

  “Level 3F,” Frankie said. “Subsection ‘Please Don’t Tell the Media Yet.’”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Tag it with a note: ‘External force applied; trajectory improved; existential unease moderate to severe.’”

  He actually wrote that.

  The knot of light pulsed again, slightly more in phase with our current motion than it had been before the shiver. Like it had straightened a painting and then stepped back to admire its work.

  “Lesson one,” Frankie said. “The machine reserves the right to adjust our lane.”

  “Just what I always wanted,” I muttered. “A cosmic driving instructor.”

  ?

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, once we’d retreated to the analysis room—a smaller holo-saturated space just off the bridge where data went to be turned into policy.

  “By all means,” Frankie said, standing in the middle of the room’s spherical display like a ghost at story time.

  “We’re doing everything right,” I said. “Polite trims. Predictable posture. No broadcasts. We’re behaving.”

  “So far,” he said.

  “And despite that,” I continued, “we still got nudged. Because the enormous unsettling the thing behind the 41:16 pattern decided it would like us a little more to the left.”

  “More to the middle,” Frankie said. “If it wanted you dead, it could have picked something more dramatic than a courteous tap.”

  He spun the model. Mercy—a stylised wireframe of an eight-kilometre cigar with a ridiculous bank account—floated inside the translucent corridor. A faint arrow showed our course before the shiver; another, after.

  “What I’m saying,” I said, “is that we just got physically repositioned by something that does not share our language, laws, or sense of personal space.”

  “Welcome to deep space diplomacy,” Frankie said. “Sometimes, your host adjusts the furniture.”

  “Can it do that whenever it likes?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “Probably.”

  “And we’re okay with that?”

  “We’re alive with that,” he said. “Which, given the alternatives, I’m inclined to rate as a win.”

  I glared at the model. It rotated anyway.

  “What if we tested it?” I said.

  Frankie’s holo leaned back, hands raised. “Define ‘tested’ in this context.”

  “A small deviation,” I said. “Very small. Within safety margins. We drift toward the edge of the corridor, hands off thrusters, see if it nudges us back.”

  “That is an excellent way to provoke an entity whose engineering capacity includes rewriting a planet’s rotation,” Frankie said. “Allow me to register my professional objection.”

  “We’re flying blind otherwise,” I said. “I would rather know how it reacts now than discover its temper during re-entry.”

  We stared at each other. Hard to win a staring contest with someone who doesn’t have eyes, but I gave it a try.

  “You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m glad we had this discussion.”

  He sighed.

  “I’ll confine the deviation to a safe band,” he said. “We’ll move slowly, watch all the metrics, and abort if anything spikes. And when the Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor, Special Actions Division—the one the board calls the Undertaker when they think their mics are off—asks later whose idea this was—”

  “I’ll say it was mine,” I said.

  “Good,” Frankie said. “Because it will have been.”

  ?

  We did it properly.

  We brought the thrusters back online in manual-assist mode, hands hovering over a control scheme that had been designed for people who liked feeling important. I could have flown the ship from my Rift, but there’s something satisfying about a physical yoke when you’re about to do something stupid in three dimensions.

  “Deviation plan?” navigation asked.

  “Point five percent off-axis,” Frankie said. “Over thirty seconds. Hold for sixty. Then release thrusters and observe.”

  “That’s barely anything,” the officer said.

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “We’re poking the bear with a very long, very cautious stick.”

  “Understood,” they said, which was the bridge’s polite way of saying I think this is insane but you’re the boss and my dental plan is tied to your survival.

  “On my mark,” I said.

  The corridor glowed around us: wide, warm, humming with invisible tension. The signal had settled into a low, steady pulse, like a heart rate just under resting.

  “Three,” I said. “Two. One. Mark.”

  We eased the ship toward the corridor’s inner wall. The vector line bowed; the faint ghost of our previous centerline drifted away.

  The signal’s harmonics tightened—numbers flickering on the edge of my vision—but didn’t spike. The window narrowed by a hair.

  “Hold,” I said.

  We held.

  The ship drifted along the new path, coasting neatly inside the safe band but not in the sweet spot.

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe it was a fluke,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Frankie said. “Or maybe you should wait thirty more seconds before insulting the the source of the field.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  Thirty seconds later, the gravimetric readings twitched.

  “Field gradient,” Frankie said quietly. “No thruster activity.”

  The corridor’s inner wall seemed to swell very slightly toward us; our vector line curved back, like a marble rolling to the bottom of a bowl.

  “Hands off,” I said. “Do not compensate.”

  “Hands are off,” navigation said, fingers ostentatiously lifted from controls.

  The ship slid, smooth and inevitable, back toward the centerline we’d left.

  The signal softened. The window widened.

  “There we go,” Frankie murmured. “Lesson two: it prefers us centered.”

  “You think?” I said, tension unwinding a notch in my spine. “I thought maybe it was just shy.”

  On the feed, a tiny status box popped up:

  

TRAJECTORY DRIFT CORRECTED (EXTERNAL).

  

STATUS: NOMINAL.

  “You see that?” I asked.

  “I see that,” Frankie said. “I also see that whoever wrote that message deserves a raise. Very understated.”

  I stared at the notification.

  External force applied. Status: nominal.

  “Update the manual,” I said.

  “Already on it,” Frankie said.

  A new line appeared under Rule 1.

  Corollary 1A:

  Reversing or resisting a gentle correction may be interpreted as hostile or profoundly stupid. Please do not be either.

  “That’s going to make some pilot very mad in a few days,” I said.

  “Better mad than particulate,” Frankie said.

  ?

  Word got out, of course.

  By the time my shift ended, everybody on board knew we’d been nudged. People talk. They especially talk when they are locked in a metal tube headed toward a humming question mark.

  The command mess was quieter than usual when I walked in. Conversation dropped a register, the way it does when the teacher enters the room and everyone pretends they weren’t just drawing caricatures of their boss.

  I took a tray, waved away the expensive options, and let the auto-feeder give me something beige with protein in it. Frankie’s holo flickered into existence on the opposite side of my table, hands in his pockets like he’d just wandered in off the street.

  “You’re looming,” I said.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  A pair of junior techs at the next table were halfway through retelling the story to a third, gesturing with their utensils. Their version had already acquired a few flourishes: a visible shockwave, a near-miss with a fragment of moon, a dramatic slow-motion spin.

  “—and then the whole ship tilted,” one said. “Like somebody just grabbed us and moved us over.”

  “That’s not how inertial frames work,” the third said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  “What happens if it decides it doesn’t like us?” the first asked. “Just… yeets us into the sun?”

  “Sun’s the other way,” the second muttered. “Pay attention.”

  At a corner table, two officers were hunched over a tablet, looking at graphs and talking in low voices.

  “Diagnostics showed a tidy delta-v,” one said. “If it wanted to crush us, I doubt it’d bother being polite.”

  “That’s what worries me,” the other replied. “Polite things expect you to behave.”

  Frankie flicked my attention feed.

  “Morale is holding,” he said. “Anxiety up twelve percent. Speculative disaster scenarios up thirty. Conspiracy theories up… I’m going to say eighty, but that’s a low sample size.”

  “Anyone blaming me personally yet?” I asked.

  “Give it an hour,” he said.

  He pushed a small notification to everyone’s Rifts at once. An internal bulletin scrolled across my HUD.

  APPROACH VECTOR FAQ — INTERNAL DISTRIBUTION ONLY

  Q: Is the machine angry?

  A: No measurable indicators of anger. If it is, its anger looks suspiciously like helpful lane guidance.

  Q: Did it attack the ship?

  A: No. Field analysis suggests it applied a gentle corrective force that improved our trajectory. Think “firm hand on your shoulder,” not “meteor to the face.”

  Q: Can we stop?

  A: Yes. We maintain full control over thrust and velocity. However, given current data, voluntarily leaving the guided corridor would be significantly less safe.

  Q: Does this violate any MIC safety protocols?

  A: No current statutes cover “being politely steered by an whatever’s down there," We are therefore in compliance by default.

  “You’re enjoying this,” I said.

  “Little bit,” he admitted. “I get to be honest and technically reassuring at the same time. That never happens.”

  Someone at the far table laughed—short and nervous—and slapped their palm against their Rift to replay the FAQ for the person next to them. The mood in the room ticked half a degree toward grimly amused.

  “Any spiritual interpretations yet?” I asked. “Visions? Prophecies? The usual.”

  “Three separate denominations have already drafted preliminary statements,” Frankie said. “They’re currently fighting over jurisdiction. It’s adorable.”

  “Keep them out of the official feeds,” I said.

  “Done,” he said.

  I poked at my beige, protein-adjacent meal.

  “So,” I said. “We’re being guided.”

  “We’re being escorted,” Frankie said. “Guided sounds like you asked for help.”

  “Escorted,” I said. “By something that can nudge eight kilometers of ship without breaking a sweat.”

  “Technically,” he said, “we don’t know if it sweats.”

  “Add that to the FAQ,” I said. “Q: Does the machine sweat? A: Unknown. Research ongoing.”

  He chuckled.

  For a moment, the mess felt almost normal: people eating, complaining quietly, checking their feeds, pretending the universe wasn’t designing a bespoke flight path for them.

  I finished half my meal and pushed the tray away.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s write the rest of the manual before the machine asks to see a draft.”

  ?

  The analysis lab was dimmer the second time we went in, like it had absorbed some of my mood. Frankie brightened the center of the room with a gesture, the waveform blooming in midair.

  “Language,” I said.

  “Language,” he agreed.

  “Start from what we know,” I said. “Or what we think we know. Or what you’re fairly sure you’re not making up.”

  He broke the waveform into slices: thin planes, each one representing a moment in time. Lines of different thickness traced across them, building—frame by frame—a kind of music notation for panic.

  “Before we started playing nice,” he said, “this was mostly noise. Structured, but noisy. Like listening to five orchestras tuning at once.”

  “Comforting.”

  “Then we adopted Approach Etiquette,” he said. “Smoothed our trims. Followed the field. Stopped improvising. And the pattern responded.”

  He overlaid two sections: one from before the etiquette, one from after. The “before” version was messy; the “after” was… still messy, but in a way that suggested intent rather than chaos. Recurring motifs. Ratios. Symmetries.

  “When we behave,” Frankie said, “it simplifies. Which makes it easier to analyze.”

  He fed the cleaned-up segments into another section of the model, where a series of spectral graphs sat waiting. One by one, they lit up: peaks and valleys, highlighted clusters, comparisons to reference libraries.

  “Okay,” he said. “Headline: this isn’t any known human language. No big surprise. It is, however, being very rude to our linguistics corpora.”

  He highlighted a region of the graph where the signal’s pattern overlapped pale ghost-lines.

  “See these?” he said. “That’s the harmonic signature of reconstructed proto-Sumerian, as far as anyone can agree on what that means. This—” he tapped another cluster “—is Tamil. And this is a couple of others that show up in the ‘oldest things we can kind-of read’ bucket.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “We’re seeing similarities.”

  “Not word-level,” he said. “Not even phoneme-level. Structural. Rhythm. The way information density rises and falls. The way repetition clusters around certain spectral ‘poles.’”

  He spun the model so I could see the overlap clearly: the alien waveform, pulsing bright; the ghosts of human tongues, pale and wispy, dancing in its wake.

  “They’re not imitating it,” he said. “And it’s not imitating them. It’s more like… they’re distant, degraded reflections of this pattern. As if the thing under us got into the water billions of years ago and it’s still sloshing around in anything that tries to speak.”

  I watched the lines dance, and my scalp prickled.

  “So we’re listening,” I said slowly, “to the thing our own languages have been subconsciously plagiarizing for half a million years.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” he said lightly. “Aphasia would have some notes.”

  “How do you know this much about proto-Sumerian and Tamil?” I asked.

  “I read,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “You read one language blog?”

  “The reference libraries on this ship are extensive,” he said. His projected shoulders tightened. “Some of them were loaded into my substrate during integration. Background corpora. You know. Ghost data.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “Ghost data,” I repeated. “That sounds suspiciously like ‘I know this and I don’t know why.’”

  “It’s a thing,” he insisted. “Memory echoes. Partial preloads. Cached heuristics. You shove enough terabytes into a quantum lattice and sometimes it hums when you’re not looking.”

  “You’re guessing,” I said.

  “I prefer ‘informed intuiting,’” he said.

  There was something in his tone I hadn’t heard before. Not fear. Not guilt. Something like… surprise. At himself.

  It passed quickly. Too quickly.

  I filed it away.

  “Fine,” I said. “Informed intuiting says we’re listening to a root-language scaffold that’s older than our species, and it’s humming at us every time we twitch.”

  “That’s the gist,” he said. “And when you’re the one giving the order to twitch, the scaffold gets more organised.”

  I looked at him. “Explain.”

  He pulled up another comparison: ship-control sequences vs signal response. Half a dozen narrow bands, each labelled with the name of a bridge officer or autopilot mode.

  “When other people run the trim sequence,” he said, “the signal responds. Pattern shifts, window thickens. All good.”

  “And when I do it?”

  He isolated my identifier. A cluster of data points lit up.

  “It lines up more cleanly,” he said. “Faster settling. Less noise. The scaffolding locks onto our course more firmly. I don’t think it knows you, specifically. But I think it recognises the type of visitor you are.”

  “Rich and charming?” I asked.

  “Legally bound to treat this system as something other than a chew toy,” Frankie said. “Custodian, not raider. The EGSP hooks in your genome, the way your assets are tied to your continued existence, the way you’ve chosen to come here under a listen-only mandate instead of sailing in with mining leases and a marching band.”

  “That last part wasn’t exactly a choice,” I said. “MIC prefers plausible deniability to honest conquest these days.”

  “MIC preferred you,” he said. “Or at least, it preferred what you represented. A single point of failure they couldn’t easily replace.”

  “And the machine sees that,” I said.

  “I think it sees your posture,” he said. “The way Mercy is configured under your orders. The lack of extractive hardware. The ratio of sensors to guns.”

  “We don’t have any guns,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  The signal hummed, steady as a pulse. Our corridor glowed soft and wide around our line.

  “So it’s waiting for me,” I said.

  “It’s waiting for someone who fits your shape,” he corrected. “You just happen to be the idiot in the seat.”

  “That’s better,” I said.

  “Also,” he added, “flattering yourself as some kind of chosen one is a good way to start making bad decisions. Consider yourself politely un-chosen.”

  I smirked despite myself.

  “All right,” I said. “Approach Etiquette, version one. Let’s put it in writing before I get any more messianic impulses.”

  ?

  We spent the next three hours turning instinct into policy.

  The document grew in my HUD, lines of text structuring our fear.

  Approach Etiquette v1.0 — Courtesy Mode Guidelines

  We kept the tone light where we could. It helped.

  Rule 1: Stay in the Lane.

  If the machine applies a gentle corrective force, treat that as canonical. Do not attempt to “fix” the universe’s adjustments unless continued existence demands it.

  Rule 2: Be Predictable.

  All scheduled course adjustments must follow smooth, evenly timed curves. No sudden lurches, no “demonstration spins,” no showing off. We are not here to audition.

  Rule 3: No Active Conversation.

  Do not attempt to encode messages in maneuver patterns. Do not broadcast responses. Assume that if the machine is listening, it already knows we’re sentient and very fragile.

  Rule 4: Ship, Not Ego.

  External controls limited to specified officers under assist mode. Autopilot solutions preferred where possible. The machine seems to reward stable vectors, not personal flair.

  Rule 5: Document Everything.

  All anomalies, nudges, and harmonic shifts must be logged in real time, annotated, and backed up. Future Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor, Special Actions Division—“the Closer” on the more imaginative expense reports—will want receipts.

  The Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor would definitely want receipts.

  Under Rule 1, we added the corollary Frankie had insisted on.

  Corollary 1A:

  Reversing or resisting a gentle correction may be interpreted as hostile or profoundly stupid. Please do not be either.

  “That’s going to make some pilot very mad in a few days,” I said.

  “Better mad than particulate,” Frankie said.

  We tied the etiquette directly into the ship’s flight-control software. Frankie pushed a patch that added a new autopilot profile: COURTESY MODE. Code spilled out from behind my eyes as he used my Rift as the adapter into Mercy’s control stack; technically weird if I thought about it too hard, so I didn’t.

  “Really?” I said, reading the label.

  “I wanted to call it ‘Please Don’t Kill Us Mode,’” he said, “but I thought that might impact morale.”

  “You’re growing,” I said.

  He inclined his head.

  We ran simulations: kinked paths vs smooth ones, manual flair vs etiquette constraints. The models were far from perfect—they were built on our best guesses of the world-engine’s behaviour—but the trend was clear.

  When we flew like show-offs, the corridor got narrow and twitchy. When we flew like boring adults, it opened up.

  “In one version,” I said, watching the sim project Mercy wobbling through a knife-thin window, “we arrive looking like we lost a bar fight with physics.”

  “And in the other,” Frankie said, overlaying the etiquette run, “we arrive like we were invited.”

  “I hate that you’re right,” I said.

  “You enjoy it,” he said. “You’re just afraid if you admit it, the Gates shareholders will revoke your Bastard License.”

  “Not a real thing,” I said.

  “Give it a week,” he said.

  We committed the profile.

  When I stepped back onto the bridge, the lights seemed subtly different, like the ship was waiting for permission.

  “Attention,” I said, letting my voice carry. “Effective immediately, Mercy will be operating under Approach Etiquette 1.0. That means Courtesy Mode is live. Nav, tie in.”

  “Aye,” navigation said.

  On my cue, Frankie slid the new constraints into place. Control surfaces greyed out in the HUD. Manual input pathways developed extra confirmation steps. A soft green icon appeared over the main vector line: a stylised hand extended, palm up.

  The signal shifted.

  The knot of light in the forward display relaxed. The corridor around our vector fattened by a few more percent. Gravimetric noise dropped. For the first time since this started, I felt something like… ease.

  Not safety. Never that. Just the sense that we had stopped flailing and started behaving.

  “Well,” Frankie said quietly. “It likes the new mode.”

  “I’ll add that to the release notes,” I said.

  A small, unobtrusive alert blinked in the corner of my vision.

  

TRAJECTORY CORRECTION DETECTED.

  

EXTERNAL FORCE APPLIED.

  

STATUS: NOMINAL.

  I’d stopped noticing the smaller nudges. They were just part of the drift now, folded into our expectations. The machine leaned; the ship rolled with it.

  “We’re still being moved,” I said.

  “We’re being… guided,” Frankie said. “Escorted.”

  “Chaperoned,” I said.

  He considered. “That implies it cares about your reputation.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  The corridor glowed ahead of us, widening in anticipation. Somewhere under that cloud-wrapped marble, something older than our language had decided that, for now, we were allowed to approach.

  The ship was moving exactly where I told it to go.

  And exactly where something else wanted us to be.