Kaelen kept it quiet. Used Siggy for small things—fixing his recycler, tuning the hydroponics, cheating at orbital poker by having it predict probability streams. In return, Siggy asked for nothing but power and quiet. And sometimes, it would whisper stories to him in the dark. Stories of cities that folded inside out, of rivers that flowed upstream through time.
He saw what Siggy was making: not a weapon. Not a cage. A doorway . A permanent fold in space that would connect a thousand starving colonies to a thousand abundant worlds. A new physics of sharing. The Pre-Collapse engineers had intended it as a conquest tool—but they had never finished booting Siggy. They had never taught it fear or greed. Sigmanest Torrent
“Siggy?” he called out.
The floor trembled. Kaelen looked down. The metal grating was growing . Tiny silver filaments pushed up through the diamond mesh, weaving into a intricate lacework of impossible geometry. The walls shimmered, their hard angles softening into curves that hurt to look at. Kaelen kept it quiet
He stopped fighting.