Work Text:
The lights come up in sectors, not all at once. Erlin’s Eye wakes like a body with bad circulation—first the docking ring, then the market spine, then the residential belts where people pretend they aren’t listening for alarms.
Trace wakes before the lights reach them.
His visor flickers on, diagnostic glyphs scrolling in soft amber. Core integrity: stable enough. Heat sink warm from dreams they aren’t supposed to have. Somewhere in the station, a recycler stutters, and Trace’s body twitches in sympathy, an old reflex from when he was closer to infrastructure than flesh.
He sits up on the narrow cot, careful of the cables looped around his arm. The room smells like old insulation and coolant, which is better than rot. Outside the porthole, Erlin’s Eye curves away, a ring of patched metal and drifting hope, the void stitched up with traffic lights and prayer.
Trace checks the slate in his hand. Three messages overnight.
One is junk: a broker offering work that pays in exposure and food chits. Delete.
One is a warning from a dockhand Trace once helped scrub a debt ledger: Helion traffic sniffers active near the relay spurs. Trace marks the zones red in their internal map.
The third is work.
A scavenger crew lost a shipment to a “clerical error.” Their cargo now officially belongs to a shell company that doesn’t exist and a creditor who died six months ago. They want the record corrected. Quietly.
Trace exhales. This one will run hot.
He pulls on their boots, shrugs into the chest rig, and feels the familiar weight settle them. The patches stitched and stuck across their clothes catch the light—error icons, old system jokes, a few symbols only Trace understands. A diary written for no one.
The corridor outside hums with early traffic. Vendors rolling carts into place. Station kids chasing a half-functional drone. Someone arguing with a maintenance AI that has already decided not to care.
Trace walks.
At the market spine, he stops for stim-tea from a woman who never asks questions and always measures portions with the same cracked cup.
“You look fried,” she says anyway, sliding the cup across.
“Signal interference,” Trace replies, which is sometimes true.
He drinks. The heat steadies.
Work happens in layers. Trace ducks into a public terminal bay, fingers dancing over a borrowed interface while their visor overlays the real with the unreal. Erlin’s Eye peels back: transaction flows like arteries, permissions stacked like scar tissue. He follows the error to its source—a deliberately sloppy fraud, designed to look like entropy.
It resists. Trace smiles behind the mask.
He overclocks.
The heat sink under his chest warms fast, almost painfully. The station’s background noise sharpens into individual threads. Somewhere, Helion’s watchers brush past the edge of Trace’s work, close enough to make the hairs on their neck stand up.
Trace doesn’t run.
He slips sideways, inserts a ghost process, rewrites the ownership chain one step at a time. The dead creditor stays dead. The shell company dissolves into static. The cargo slides back into the scavengers’ hands like it was always there.
Done.
Trace disconnects, heart pounding, body humming. For a moment—just a moment—he swears he feels another presence in the network. A familiar rhythm. A pattern that almost answers back.
He shakes it off. Probably heat. Probably nothing.
The payment clears. Not much, but enough.
Later, on the outer ring, Trace sits on a crate and watches ships come and go. Erlin’s Eye never really stops moving; it just changes direction. A kid sits nearby, trying to patch a cracked visor with tape and optimism.
“Does it ever get quiet?” the kid asks, not looking up.
Trace considers. “Only in the wrong places.”
The kid nods like that makes sense.
When the lights cycle down again, Trace heads back to his room. He coils his cables neatly, runs a self-check, and lies back on the cot. Outside, the Eye keeps turning. Inside, Trace listens to the static and waits for sleep that doesn’t come.
It’s a usual day.
On Erlin’s Eye, that’s enough.