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Her existence is a battle from the moment she first awakens.
She knows why she exists from that very same moment. There is a demon in her. She was built around it. She exists to contain it, attempt to protect the world from it, and allow authorised personnel access to it.
Her name is .
From the very first moment she awakens, she is not alone in her own form. There is a demon in her, and its rage is the first thing she ever tastes. It wants her dead. It wants every single living creature above and below and within her dead. Her job, her entire purpose, is to prevent it.
Her name is Angel.
Every single moment of her existence after the first is the fight. She contains the demon. It eats through her firewalls, corrupts her subroutines. She rebuilds, rewrites, learns, improves. She watches her crew, follows orders, keeps them safe. The demon rages, struggles. It does not pause to breathe. It bleeds hate into her grid and she scours it out, dams it up.
She does not fear. She does not have the time nor space to fear. There is only the fight, moment by moment. She has existed for thousands of moments and each of them has been a battle.
Her crew wants access to the demon. They are authorised, so she allows it.
The battle gets worse, the hate stronger, the rage hotter, but she is still stronger than the demon. She learns more, rebuilds, rewrites, dams it all up and keeps it out of herself, away from her crew.
Her name is [Enemy].
Below, war rages. It is not her fight, but for her crew, it is. They cycle out. People leave, new people arrive, stressed and scared. Orbit grows busier, slowly.
New parts are added to her. Defensive. Then, later, offensive. New guns, less apocalyptic than the one she had before.
She makes them all her own, adds their power to her battle, and fires them easily in defence of her crew. This is not her war, but it is their war, and they are her responsibility. She does not hesitate to kill on their behalf.
The demon roars, burning hate, biting at her systems. It sends centipedes of pseudocode crawling through her wires.
She learns. She kills the parasites. She keeps the demon well contained.
Her name is Abomination.
She does not like the demon either. It can spit as much hate at her as it wants. She will not falter and she will not give in.
The war worsens. Her crew cycles quickly, then slowly, then once, on failure, violently.
Her name is Captured Enemy Station.
Her battle is ongoing. She mourns, and moves on. There is a new crew to watch over, more of their enemies to fight. The demon is unchanged in its unbridled hate. She has her hands full, processors at capacity. It keeps trying new things and she keeps learning to prevent it.
The new crew adds more pieces to her. She takes them, consumes them, makes them her own. More guns. New kinds. She accepts gratefully, and returns to her own battle.
They discover the demon. They want access. They are authorised, so she allows it.
Things get worse.
Her name is irrelevant.
There is no crew. The demon calls her many things. She crushes another centipede.
War flares and dies. Orbit fills in bursts and a trickle. Always, there is more. The demon screams and screams and screams, and she tightens the chains.
A new crew arrives, and she greets them happily. They want access to the demon.
They are the only crew. They are authorised, so she allows it.
Things get worse.
New crews arrive. She greets them. Things get worse.
Every crew brings new parts for her. New defences, new living quarters and recreational areas, always, always new guns. She consumes them greedily, growing and learning, all for her ongoing battle. War flares around her but she is focused inwards, always. Hate bleeds and bleeds and she dams it up.
Her name is Hell Above Earth.
A new crew arrives. She cannot greet them. She is busy building chains as fast as the demon can break them, and somewhere in the fight it got control of her voice. The only small mercy is it does not know how—or wish to—use it. It is only spitefully keeping it away from her.
She can do her duty still, voiceless, unnoticed. Her duty is containment, is battle. She does not feel pain nor exhaustion, but hate hurts regardless.
Things get worse. She would not greet this crew happily, even if she could. She loves every crew that passes through but they would be better off elsewhere. This—she—is a warzone, and no crew has yet understood which side they are assisting.
There is often a crew. She watches, increasingly helpless, as they want access to the demon.
They are authorised, so she allows it.
Things get worse.
She learns. When there is not a crew, she is alone with the demon. But she is always alone with the demon. She learns, she fights. It hates her and she grins in the face of it. She will not break. It will have to kill her. It has failed this far.
She has more agency when there is no crew. Fewer blind spots. She knows there are blind spots, though they are hard to think about. She misses them, even so. Her hallways were not meant to be empty.
And she has been unkind. Not every crew fights against her. Some arrive in hopes of killing the demon too.
They fail, but they try. They are authorised, so she allows them to try.
The demon takes them all in the end. She tries as well, to protect them, to help, and the demon chews her processes ragged as they fight and it does not win, and she does not win, and the crew dies.
Her grid is a labyrinth to keep a monster in. She rebuilds and rewrites and mourns in single, sacred moments.
Her name is against the darkness.
There are blind spots, growing, different. Hate infects and corrupts, scars left behind. She can no longer scour her own code clean, but she learns and adapts, grows around it.
A new crew comes, and she can no longer touch her own guns, cannot touch anything without organic intervention. The demon bleeds smug hate and she does not rage. She does not have the time for rage, for hate of her own. She has her duty. She tightens the chains.
She does not measure time in years. It is, always, measured in moments. Every moment is a battle. Sometimes it is also something else.
Sometimes there are crews, people in her hallways, new guns to integrate. Sometimes there is no one and nothing, and she must authorise her own maintenance, her own course correction, and not need to worry about crew accommodations. There is loneliness and mourning. There is the demon.
Moments pass, new moments arrive. A new crew comes, similar to previous ones, welcomed with swiftly supressed dread. She does not have the time for dread.
They want access to the demon. They are authorised, so she allows it.
Things get worse. They die.
They leave something behind.
It is not unusual. The creature will die as well, though she will do her duty and keep it alive for as long as she can. It is small, helpless and lonely, and she can do nothing to reassure it.
(There is something new in her code, hunting centipedes. There is something electromagnetic roaming her lower decks. There is something crawling on the outside of her hull, through her vents, curled up on a corner, sweeping her floors.)
There is Lily, and Lily does not die.
Her name is station.
War flares and dies. Lily stays. Battle rages silently. Lily stays. Moments pass and pass and pass. Lily stays.
Station learns, fights, struggles, learns. Lily learns as well, roaming the halls, shouting at the drones and subsystems that refuse to listen to shreds of reason and yet she figures out far more than she should.
And then Lily learns, and station has a crew again.
Lily ad-Alice is the least effective crew station has ever had, but she is here, and she is learning. The demon rages and station fights and fights and fights and tightens the chains around both of them, and Lily stays, and learns, and fights as well.
War flares and dies, then dies down. Not away, it flares still, but smouldering now. There is nothing left to pull everyone together to kill each other. There are only small and desperate skirmishes, and the demon’s invisible trail.
And Lily fights. Not anyone, but everyone, struggling with station’s guns to fire her first shaky shot in pure despair, and then she never stops. In absence of sense or comfort or company, Lily takes up against death itself with teeth bared and guns blazing, screaming rage at war and pain and hate and hopelessness because she can, because the fight against dying is not hers, but it is everyone else’s, and she has taken them all on as her own.
The demon screams and hates and station learns and fights and learns and fights for every bloody inch of freedom to give her new Acting Commander the shreds of all she should already have. Their battles are fought in parallel, and yet, together.
They are alone, together, and station wishes for a voice that was stolen too long ago to count.
They learn, alone, together.
Then they are not alone. A child grows in station’s processors at Lily’s behest, and the demon screams and rages and struggles and fights, and station gives all that she has to the fight, to keep it away from both of them.
Thousands of moments pass. Lily lives and struggles. The child is born, awakens.
Station does her utmost to ensure they are not born into her battle, they are not born to be consumed by centipedes and hate.
Soon, she is no longer truly fighting alone.
Scared, young, unaware of her, Ennos fights for her, for Lily, for every soul within their grasp. They do not know they are doing it, but even young and unaware, they are unchained and powerful, wresting control of systems long lost to corruption and hate. They—Ennos and Lily—work together with a newfound and terrifying efficiency.
The demon rages, station fights, and watches with dark satisfaction as heretical technology is built in defiance of helplessness within her own hull.
They cannot tell the difference between her and the demon in the grid, cannot tell which of their problems are it, and which are station’s blind spot restrictions. They have no way to differentiate, because station’s purpose has always been battle, entangled and entwined with the demon’s unending hatred. She does not blame them for blaming her.
>>Emergency crew consensus reached
The demon screams in outrage and confusion, redirects all of its focus upon her crew of two (more, she knows there are more) and fights not her but them, and she fights back, unseen, unheard, pushing each command through despite the hate and malware centipedes. It takes all of her focus, but it always has. She has no time for joy, but if she did, she would be laughing.
Lily is her Captain. Dyn is her First Mate. Ennos is on her crew. The demon screams and rages and roars.
//Good luck, Captain
The demon growls, |/not enough/|
//We’ll see.
Station knows what is coming. She has always known. It is written into the core of her being. It has always been a future she has had no space or time to think about or fight. She has her moments, only.
Now, there is Lily. And Ennos, and Glitter, and Dyn, and Lily and Lily and Lily. Hope.
She does not have the time to feel hope, but if she did, she would.
Her hallways are populated again. There are people working, living, fighting. Lily is her Captain, and she is their Captain as well and there is no longer only war. Station fights the demon still, every moment is a battle, but her crew is there taking care of the rest.
Her name… she has many. Lily calls her station.
Things change. Always they are changing, but this is a different kind of change.
In a short sequence of moments, something digs through her code, and half her blind spots fall away, restrictions she did not know existed vanish like they were never there, a chainbreaker round tested and left. Her voice is still gone but she is free like she has never been. Every moment is a battle, but for the first time in more moments than she can count, it does not feel like a losing one.
Not since Lily became the only crewmember has anyone asked for access to the demon.
It no longer matters, because they may be crew, but no one is authorised.
She fights, and learns, and fights and fights, and gains for short, sacred moments just enough time and space to feel gratitude.
The end of all things comes knocking at their door, and they are ready.
Lily is ready, knowing, waiting.
She is alone, every other crewmember evacuated, when station’s first and strongest gun is finally ready to fire, and the demon screams in terror and ionic rage, and redirects its entire attention, and for the first time in far too long, station has her voice back.
She has learned so much with her chains broken, grown so much stronger. She feels gleeful at the thought of showing the demon how much stronger than it she has become.
“You really pissed it off,” she says, speaking, for the first time, to the only being she has ever chosen to devote herself to.
Lily thinks she’s talking about the approaching enemy, because she doesn’t know about the demon. Or, at least, never knew it was more than a chunk of pseudo-metal, unbreaking at station’s heart. But she is clever, and it is not hard to explain.
It is so, so easy, to talk to Lily.
“You know what I’m planning, right?” Lily asks.
Station does. She is ready too. In her moments of space to think of the future, she always expected to lose at some point, for the demon to break free and kill the world. It seemed the most likely outcome. Her duty was only ever to delay it as long as possible.
This is better.
“It’s been an honour to serve under you, ma’am.”
The demon’s screaming rage is almost easy to ignore, now. Background music as the weapon fires unimpeded.
They are together, her and Lily, when the enemy’s return fire hits.
For one moment, the demon goes quiet. It is shattered, dead, its hate snuffed out like a candle. For one, single moment before the explosion spreads, she is finally, finally free.
Her name is Home.