That was the truest thing anyone said that day. The memories — if that’s what they were — didn’t feel like intrusions. They felt like the kind of thing you’d forgotten and suddenly recovered: vivid, warm, carrying the emotional weight of lived experience. The cargo hold Riya dreamed about smelled like machine oil and cold metal and something sweetly organic she couldn’t name. The woman in the dream had laugh lines and a scar along her jaw and a way of moving that suggested she’d spent decades in low gravity. When Riya described her, her voice softened the way it only did when she talked about people she loved.
“So where are they coming from?” Diarmuid asked.
Riya touched the deactivated mesh at her temple.
We all looked at her.
“It’s not transmitting,” she said quickly. “I’ve checked. The interface is dead. There’s no signal in or out.” She hesitated. “But the others don’t have interfaces at all. So if it’s coming through mine, it’s not staying there.”
Alma turned to a new page on her datapad. “I found something in the station maintenance logs. Eighteen months ago, Spoke Three’s atmospheric processor was upgraded. New particulate filters, new humidity regulators. Standard stuff. But the contractor who did the work —” she turned the pad around so we could see the screen — “was a company called Ilyandra Biometric Solutions.”
The name meant nothing to me. It meant nothing to Diarmuid or Arjun either. But Riya went very still.
“Ilyandra-9,” she said.
“You know them?”
“I know of them. They were a Meridian subsidiary. Experimental division.” She crossed the room and took the datapad from Alma, reading quickly. “They were developing ambient neural encoding. The idea was that you could embed experiential data into an environment — air, surfaces, low-frequency sound — and anyone in that environment would passively absorb it. No interface required. No consent required.”
The room got very quiet.
“What was it for?” Arjun asked.
“Training,” Riya said. “Officially. You put workers in a space and they absorb the procedural knowledge of experienced operators without formal instruction. Cheaper than training programs. Faster.” She set the datapad down. “But the trial I heard about wasn’t training data.”
She told us what she knew, and it was fragmentary and second-hand, the kind of information that travels between workers on long shifts when the supervisors are elsewhere. A pilot. A long-haul cargo run between the inner colonies and the Vekara cluster. The pilot had died on approach — catastrophic decompression, nothing recoverable. But the pilot had been part of a Meridian program, carrying a full neural profile: not just skills but memories, relationships, thirty years of a life lived in transit. And Meridian, not wanting to lose the investment, had encoded the profile and stored it.
Somewhere.
“The atmospheric processor,” Alma said.
“It’s the right size,” Riya said. “The right infrastructure. And Spoke Three has been sealed for maintenance three times in the last eighteen months. No one asking questions. No one monitoring air composition at the molecular level.”
We sat with that for a long time. Outside the compartment, the station groaned its low structural groan, the sound of metal adjusting to temperature differentials as Vekara’s distant sun moved across the station’s outer hull. Somewhere down the corridor, someone was cooking something with a lot of garlic. The ordinary world was still there, pressing in from all sides.
But inside the room, we were all quietly taking stock of what we’d absorbed.
Diarmuid knew how to dock a class-7 freighter. Arjun could calculate burn trajectories for an engine he’d never touched. I knew the Tethered Welcome, a song sung by dock workers on Vekara-7 when a ship came home safely. And Riya had spent six weeks loving a woman she’d never met, mourning a life she’d never lived.
“We have to shut it off,” Diarmuid said. It wasn’t a question.
“And then what?” Arjun asked. “Report it? To who? Meridian is gone. Ilyandra-9 dissolved eighteen months ago — I can already tell you that without looking it up, because apparently I know things about Meridian’s subsidiary structure that I definitely didn’t learn myself.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “We are walking around with a dead woman’s life in our heads and the company that put her there no longer exists.”
That was when the urgency arrived. Not loudly — it crept in the way cold does on a station with failing insulation, finding the gaps.
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