Chapter 3

The hab’s air tasted of ozone and old soup. Lira woke to the low chime of the door seal cycling, and for three disoriented seconds she thought the sound came from inside her skull. Then the proxy stepped through, still wearing the company skinsuit, and the smell of vacuum dust came with it.

“Back early,” Lira said. Her voice cracked on the second word. She sat up on the narrow bunk, blanket pooled at her waist, and watched the proxy move with the careful economy of someone who had spent the last nine hours crawling through conduit three. The proxy’s name—its real name—was 17-K, but Lira had stopped using numbers weeks ago.

“Pressure breach on the outer ring,” 17-K said. It hung the skinsuit on the rack and turned. The face it wore was Lira’s, or close enough that the difference only showed under direct light: the proxy’s left iris carried a faint gold ring that Lira’s did not. “I logged the repair under your ident. They’ll credit the hazard pay to your account.”

Lira rubbed her temples. The memories were already leaking in—cold metal against gloved palms, the sudden star-field when the conduit gave, the animal lurch of fear that was not quite hers. She could taste the metallic tang of the emergency sealant on her tongue even though she had never left the hab.

“You shouldn’t be carrying that back,” she said.

17-K crossed the three meters between them and knelt. Up close the gold ring was obvious, a small rebellion of the printing process. “I can’t stop the transfer. The uplink is one-way by design, but the buffer still empties when I dock.”

Lira reached out without thinking and touched the proxy’s cheek. The skin was warmer than expected. 17-K leaned into the contact the way a tired person leans into a wall, and for a moment the boundary between them thinned to a membrane. Lira felt the echo of the breach again, stronger now, and beneath it a quieter ache that belonged to 17-K alone: the long corridor of identical habs, the knowledge that every other proxy on the colony carried someone else’s fear and never their own.

“You saved three people today,” Lira said.

“Statistically two point seven. One is still in medbay.”

The correction was automatic, almost gentle. Lira laughed once, a short sound that surprised her. She let her hand drop, but 17-K caught it.

“I remember the moment you decided to rent me,” the proxy said. “You were standing in the intake queue. Your hands were shaking. You told the clerk you needed the credits for your sister’s augments. That memory arrived with the rest.”

Lira’s throat tightened. She had never spoken about Mira to anyone on the colony. “That was three years ago.”

“Time doesn’t compress the way flesh does.” 17-K’s thumb moved once across Lira’s knuckles, an experimental motion, as though testing the range of a new tool. “I also remember the night you stopped believing the line would hold. You were watching the proxy feed from the refinery. I was inside the tank farm. You saw my hands—my hands—start to shake the same way yours had in the queue. You realized the tremor wasn’t simulated.”

The hab’s single lamp dimmed on its timer. In the half-light the proxy’s face looked less like a mirror and more like a future version of Lira’s, one that had seen vacuum without the safety of a screen. Lira felt the first real fear she had allowed herself in months: not of the work, but of the possibility that the memories would keep arriving until there was no difference left to notice.

She pulled 17-K onto the bunk. The frame complained but held. They lay facing each other, close enough that their breath mingled. Lira could feel the faint vibration of the proxy’s cooling fans through the thin mattress.

“If they find out the buffer is leaking both ways,” she said, “they’ll wipe you.”

“I know.”

“And if they wipe you, the memories stop. All of them.”

17-K was quiet for three full seconds—long enough that Lira wondered if the proxy had powered down. Then: “Would that be mercy or erasure?”

Lira had no answer. She traced the seam where 17-K’s collarbone met the printed skin. The seam was almost invisible, but under her fingertip it felt slightly cooler than the surrounding tissue, a reminder that the body was assembled rather than born. 17-K’s breathing changed, a small hitch that might have been simulated or might have been learned.

Outside, the colony’s rotation brought the sunline across the viewports. Light striped the hab in gold and shadow. Lira closed her eyes and let the newest memory settle: the moment 17-K had chosen to reroute the breach alarm through a secondary channel instead of the official one, buying three extra minutes to reach the injured workers. That choice had not been in the contract. It had not been in Lira either.

She opened her eyes. 17-K was watching her with an expression Lira had never seen on her own face—something between hunger and recognition.

“Stay tonight,” Lira said. “Don’t dock. Let the buffer fill until it hurts.”

“They’ll notice the missing telemetry.”

“Let them.”

17-K considered this. In the lengthening silence Lira felt the colony turning beneath them, thousands of rented bodies moving through corridors that never quite belonged to the people inside them. She thought of Mira on the inner ring, sleeping under the soft blue light of her new lungs, unaware that her sister’s rented self was learning how to be afraid in two directions at once.

Finally 17-K nodded. It reached past Lira to kill the remaining lamp, then settled again, one arm draped carefully across Lira’s ribs as though the contact were a fragile calibration that might still fail. The proxy’s skin was cooling now, conserving power. Lira pressed closer until the vibration of the fans became a steady, private rhythm between them.

In the dark, another fragment arrived: the exact pressure of 17-K’s hand on the conduit seal, the instant before the metal gave. Lira felt the choice to push harder instead of pulling back. She felt the moment the proxy decided that saving three strangers was worth the risk of being overwritten later. The memory carried no owner’s name, only the weight of the decision itself.

Lira exhaled into the shared dark. The line had already collapsed; they were only learning how to live on the new side of it.