Everything You Are Belongs to Meridian

Emeka stopped walking. He was ten meters from her. The pressure door behind her was still open; he could see the shuttle’s boarding collar, the warm amber light. He was breathing hard, and he let himself breathe, let the sound of it fill the tube, because he needed the seconds and because he had learned, in six years of cargo work, that the body under stress will betray you if you don’t give it a moment to settle.
He had done the research. Not just the legal research — the technical research too, in those same twenty frantic minutes in the break room. The SVL-7 was a leased device. Meridian had a right to recover it. But recovery required the device to be in a non-operational state, which required a controlled shutdown sequence, which required the subject’s written consent or a medical override authorized by a licensed physician. Nuala Voss was not a physician. The man with the hardcase was a technician, not a doctor. And Emeka had not consented to anything.
“I want to see the original sub-clause,” he said. “The one from my onboarding. I want to see the exact language about the lease terms and the recovery protocol. Right now, on a screen I can read.”
Nuala Voss’s certainty flickered. Just slightly. The technician glanced at her.
“That documentation can be provided through the standard compliance channel within seventy-two —”
“Outer Settlement Code 7.4,” Emeka said. “Section twelve. Disputed biometric asset claims require full documentation disclosure at the time of recovery initiation. Not seventy-two hours. Now.”
The silence in the docking spoke was absolute. Somewhere behind the hull, Veth-4 turned slowly, indifferent, its amber storms rolling in patterns that had continued for longer than human civilization had existed. The recyclers hummed. The pressure door’s seal indicator glowed green.
Nuala Voss looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the technician. Then she looked back at Emeka, and the certainty was still there but it had shifted in quality — it was no longer the certainty of someone who holds all the cards, but the certainty of someone recalculating which cards they hold.
“We’ll need to verify the applicable code version,” she said.
“Take your time,” Emeka said.
He walked past her. She didn’t move to stop him. The technician stepped aside. Emeka walked through the pressure door and into the boarding collar and through the collar into the shuttle, and he found a seat near the back, by the porthole, and he strapped in, and he sat with his hands flat on his thighs, feeling the faint warmth along his spine that was the SVL-7 cycling through its hourly check, transmitting its data to a server that would, in fourteen days, if everything went the way it needed to go, no longer have a legal claim on the signal it was receiving.
The shuttle disengaged from Platform Nine with a soft mechanical thud, the docking clamp releasing in a sequence of three precise clicks. Through the porthole, the station fell slowly away — a fat torus of orange-stained metal and flickering lights, hanging against the amber immensity of Veth-4, smaller than he expected, smaller than six years should make a place. Kerath Station’s transit beacon was already pulsing on the nav display at the front of the cabin, a steady blue light, patient and reliable, marking the way to a jurisdiction where the law was a different shape.
Emeka watched Platform Nine shrink until it was a speck, and then until it was nothing, and then he looked down at his hands, still flat on his thighs, and slowly, deliberately, he turned them over — palms up, open, holding nothing that anyone had a right to take.

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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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