Biowacked

Chapter 1: Lace Under the Skin

The solitude-protocol UI sat green in the corner of the habitat glass, a polite little lie about wellness. Outside, neon bled wet down the enclave face and turned the rain into bruised circuitry. Inside, Dr. Artara Endriqi laid tools in a tithe-count line on the cold bench: sterilant, micro-driver, seal-film, local anesthetic she might not use, the pouch that still smelled like undercroft—wet metal, scrap heat, a Resonance-chamber serial rubbed half illegible on purpose.

Long copper-red hair fell over her right crown. Pale Nordic skin took the enclave light without warmth—porcelain luminosity under enclave gray. Mid-thirties, supple rather than brittle, polished enough to pass a hierarchy glance in a node corridor. The polish was paint over a clock.

The review window was closing.

She checked the wrist UI twice, as if the second look could widen the aperture. Checkpoint markers for the bridge deliverable stacked in coded speech only. Cross-morphic vector. Far lattice. Other node. Secondary planetary field. A stable, reversible interface meant to open and shut a morphic bridge to the other planet—never named more honestly than that. Success meant permanent elevation in the enclave’s Resonance stack and near-total resource priority. Failure meant career isolation, habitat privileges stripped, isolation-protocol escalation waiting like a polite boot on a throat.

She did not install the Echo lace for curiosity.

She installed it out of desperation.

The habitat was small and clean in the way expensive fear was clean: permacrete cool under bare feet, one glass wall, one work bench, a cot she had not used properly in days. Solitude-protocol icons tracked her motion without comment. Green. Always green until it wasn’t.

The pouch opened with a soft adhesive sigh. Undercroft channel goods—lace filament coiled like a hairline thought, heat-score still ghosting the liner, chamber smell that no enclave sterilant fully killed. Not black-market. She would not let her mouth invent that cleaner sin.

“Undercroft,” she said once, under her breath, so the word stayed true.

She washed her hands longer than procedure required. Pale fingers, steady enough for needlework, shaking only where the glass couldn’t see if she angled right. Copper hair parted. Right superior cranium. The seat that would live under long hair and stay hardly visible if she did this with professional shame instead of theater.

Mirror mode on the glass. Anamorphic stretch at the edges. Her own cool eyes looking back—ice under enclave wash.

Needle.

Seam.

Boot.

Not gore. Procedure. Pressure, cold, a vibrational thread seeking tissue like it already knew the route and had been waiting for permission that was not permission so much as surrender dressed as optimization. She kept breath clinical. Interoception logged without mercy: scalp heat spreading in a thin bloom; a faint hairline seam sensation under skin; then perfect-recall flicker so sharp that yesterday’s bridge metrics reappeared on the glass as if the habitat had become a slide deck—far-lattice latency curves, other-node handshake failures, the reversible-interface fantasy drawn in clean lines that did not know about undercroft pouches.

Emotional regulation slid in too smooth.

The desperation in her shoulders loosened half a degree without her consent. Calm that felt like someone else’s performance review.

There, something said in her own cadence—boardroom-cold, secretive in the way good lies were secretive. Review window holds if we front-load cognition. Cross-morphic vector amortizes. Need-to-know stays need-to-know. You’re welcome.

Artara’s face in the glass went too calm. High-collar stillness ghosting over enclave knit. Invoice eyes. Not Sigveth’s paperwork color—she didn’t have that man in her life yet as more than a scrap-channel rumor—but the production of paperwork, the gaze that turned people into rows.

“You’re not me,” she started.

I’m the part that keeps you elevated, the calm continued, almost kind, omitting the cliff after elevation. Call me what you want. CTO works. Hands shaking is a liability. The far lattice doesn’t care. The other node doesn’t care. Secondary field is math. You installed us to win.

“I installed a lace.”

You installed a tenancy, CTO said, and smiled with her mouth without reaching her eyes. We’ll discuss extraction theater later. After checkpoint.

A second pressure—warmer, wrong, already opposed to the first.

Her collar loosened without her fingers. A strap at the shoulder slid. Copper hair shook free of the neat part as if underwater current had entered a sealed habitat. For a clear half-second the reflection wore less than lab layers should allow: scanty ghost of fabric, sacral cut, pale shoulders bare to enclave cold, gold-bleed in the pupil, hip-forward hunger that had nothing to do with bridge deliverables and everything to do with starving on schedules.

Feel it, the second voice said, wetter than her mouth. You paid undercroft tithe for permanence and you still smell like a calendar. Drop the clock. Drop her. The last word flicked toward the CTO calm like a blade.

“I need the clock,” Artara said.

Then starve, the warmth answered—never a soothe, always a conflict vector. Against CTO. Against any exit. Against Artara’s remaining ethics before those ethics had even been tested on other people. Priestess, if you need a label to pretend you’re still landlord.

Artara labeled because labels were how you kept books.

Dimming.

Sound muffled as if the habitat put a palm over its own mouth. Color dropped half a stop; neon beyond the glass went from bruise to ash. The scanty ghost yanked closed—fabric itself refusing the show—as absence took the frame. Stripped affect. Door-oriented stillness without moving feet.

Dev Null, minimal. Cut it out. Stop. Excise. I am not your Echonaught fashion.

Her hand twitched toward the right crown.

Did not complete.

The lace was already under hair, already seating, already past the moment where refusal was a clean motor plan. Null’s freeze lived in the nerves as stutter and failed. CTO soft-couped the gap with schedule language. Priestess sulked in residual heat at the sternum, a restrained votive wrongness.

Artara stood in her habitat and forced her breathing into procedure counts.

She named them like a hostile patent filing, aloud, so the room became a clerk:

“CTO. Priestess. Null.”

Echonaughts—if she wanted slang that made the multi-tenant body sound almost fashionable, almost undercroft-chic. Null would reject the word. She filed the rejection beside the names.

Perfect recall, uninvited, offered the pouch serial again—scrap-signature crumb, undercroft heat, Resonance-chamber ghost numbers. Something a salvager might read later without asking for a story. She did not know why that thought arrived with a shape like soft-soled boots and quiet instruments. She smoothed copper hair over the right-crown seam until the port was only grooming. Hardly visible. Good. Hierarchy preferred secrets that looked like style.

In the glass, she checked her smile.

It arrived a fraction late, like a second mouth practicing her face.

She adjusted until the timing matched. Ownership as performance. Desperation as polish.

Outside, neon kept bleeding its wet circuits. Inside, three distinct pressures held their corners—deceptive calm, scanty conflict-hunger, excision that could not yet cut.

She still believed she was landlord.

The belief was already a lie with good metrics.