The next six hours are the longest of Yolanda’s working life. She runs her filtration checks with mechanical precision, but her mind is pulling at the words like a loose thread — physiological outputs, cognitive outputs, audit and retrieval. She keeps thinking about the neural calibration sessions Palloren Corp runs every eighteen months, the ones they call routine wellness checks, the ones where a technician presses a small sensor array against the base of your skull and tells you to think about nothing for sixty seconds. She has done it six times. She thought it was a health screening.
By the time the shift ends, she has worked out what she needs to do, and she is not proud of the fact that it took her this long.
She finds the others in Ezequiel’s bunk corridor. Jhevon is pacing. Ezequiel is pulling up contract text on a cracked data-slate. Nexil is sitting on the floor with their back against the wall, long legs folded, watching the door.
“We need to see the audit data,” Yolanda says. “The actual records from the wellness checks. What they collected. What they’re holding.”
“The records are in the corp liaison’s office on Deck Three,” Nexil says. “I have been to that office. The terminal uses a Palloren-standard biometric lock. It reads the compliance markers in your palm.”
“Meaning it will only open for someone whose markers are already logged,” Ezequiel says.
“Meaning it will open for any of us,” Nexil says. “Because they have logged all of our markers. That is the point.”
Jhevon stops pacing. “That’s — they built a lock that uses the data they took from us without telling us, to keep us out of the records of what they took.” He sounds almost admiring, the way people sometimes sound when something is perfectly, horribly elegant.
They go at the start of the next shift cycle, when the grey-suited liaisons are in their scheduled operational review and the corridor cameras on Deck Three run their standard forty-second recalibration loop — a window Nexil knows about because Nexil has spent eleven years paying attention to things that other people overlook. They go together, all four of them, which Yolanda knows is either solidarity or collective foolishness, and she has decided it doesn’t matter which.
The tension between them surfaces in the lift. Ezequiel says they should pull only their own records and leave. Jhevon says they should pull everything and broadcast it to every terminal on the station. Yolanda says neither, not yet — they need to know what they’re dealing with before they decide what to do with it. Nexil says nothing, but their amber eyes move between the three humans with an expression that Yolanda has learned, over years, means they have already thought this through further than any of the rest of them.
The liaison’s office is small and cold and smells like recycled air that has been filtered one too many times — sterile, almost sweet, nothing like Deck Nine. The terminal glows pale blue in the dim room. Yolanda presses her palm to the reader. It opens.
What they find is worse than she expected, and she had expected something bad.
The wellness checks did not just scan neural markers. They extracted — the word in the data is “harvested” — eleven distinct cognitive pattern sets per employee per session: problem-solving pathways, spatial memory maps, procedural muscle-memory chains. The kind of data that, when compiled across hundreds of workers over a decade, becomes a detailed blueprint of how a human being learns to operate a station. Palloren Corporation has been building an autonomous operations system. They have been building it out of the workers’ own minds, without asking, without disclosure, without compensation. The system is called PAVE. It is eighty-three percent complete.
When it is finished, they will not need any of them anymore.
“Kovash,” Ezequiel says softly, staring at the screen. “They walked him off because his data contribution was complete. He’d given them everything they needed from him.”
Nexil reaches past Yolanda and begins copying files to a small drive with the calm efficiency of someone who prepared for this possibility before they walked in the door. Yolanda watches them and feels a complicated rush of gratitude and irritation — gratitude because Nexil thought ahead, irritation because she should have.
“We broadcast it,” Jhevon says. “Now. Station-wide.”
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