Everything You Are Belongs to Meridian

The airlock pressure gauge was reading wrong, and Emeka Solis had exactly four minutes before the docking clamp released and the shuttle left without him — but none of that mattered as much as the thing the compliance officer had just told him through the comm panel bolted to the corridor wall. The thing about his spine.
He pressed his back against the curved hull of Meridian Logistics Platform Nine, a station that existed in the legal grey-belt between the Outer Settlements and the Kerath Transit Corridor, a place designed specifically so that the usual protections didn’t apply. The platform was old in the way that only orbital infrastructure gets old — not weathered, not worn, but corroded from the inside out, its seams stained orange with mineral bleed from recycled water, its lighting panels flickering at a frequency that gave long-term residents a particular kind of headache they called the Meridian Pulse. The corridors smelled of processed soy protein and hydraulic fluid and the faint, sweet chemical tang of the neural-bonding compound they used in the implant bays two decks below. Emeka had worked here for six years. He knew every smell. He had never, until thirty seconds ago, known the full inventory of what Meridian owned.
The compliance officer’s voice had been almost gentle. Her name was Nuala Voss, and she appeared on the comm screen as a woman in her fifties with close-cropped silver hair and the kind of calm that comes not from peace but from certainty. She wore a Meridian Logistics jacket — deep charcoal grey with the company’s three-ring sigil embroidered in copper thread at the collar — and she had explained, in precise and unhurried language, that the spinal support lattice installed during Emeka’s accident recovery three years ago was not, as he had believed, a standard medical implant covered under his worker’s compensation package. It was, in fact, a proprietary Meridian BioTech device, model SVL-7, leased to his body under a sub-clause of his employment contract that he had signed during a four-hour onboarding session on his first day, still dizzy from the transit sickness that had plagued him the whole journey out from Callisto Station. The SVL-7 was what let him walk. It interfaced directly with his L3 and L4 vertebrae. And his lease payments, Nuala Voss explained, were now forty-two months in arrears.
He had started running before she finished the sentence.
The thing about running on Platform Nine was that there was nowhere to run to. The station was a self-contained logistics hub, a fat torus of pressurized corridors and cargo bays and processing floors, orbiting a gas giant called Veth-4 whose amber clouds filled every porthole like a painting that never changed. The shuttle — the one leaving in now three minutes and forty seconds — was the twice-weekly supply run to Kerath Station, the nearest transit hub with independent legal jurisdiction. If Emeka reached Kerath, he could file a disputed-lease claim under Outer Settlement Code 7.4, which required a fourteen-day stay of any biometric asset recovery. Fourteen days was enough time to find a lawyer. Maybe. He had done the research in the twenty minutes between overhearing a cargo tech mention the compliance team’s arrival and actually seeing Nuala Voss’s face on the comm screen. Twenty minutes of frantic research in the break room terminal, hands shaking, reading legal text he only half understood, arriving at the single fragile conclusion that Kerath was his only option.

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About the Author

Fred Marlowe — an interstellar economist tracing corporate warfare and sabotage across whole colonies. His emprie is so powerfull he ones sold Jupiters moon by mistake and his accountant even did not notice.

— Fred Marlowe

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Categories: SCI-FI, Spacepunk

Tags: 10min stories, biometric rights, body implants, corporate debt, orbital fiction, sci-fi, short story, space station, spacepunk, Survival

August 3, 2026

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