"Configuration of Herion-6 class cruiser has been completed. Awaiting identification of the only sapient lifeform onboard in order to assign administrative authority."
Chapter 28
A Frequent Guest on Death’s Threshold
Helios
"Useless junk heap. Factory reset. Restore factory settings at once!"
Last words of Administrator KHR, former owner of Helios
Every chrono-cycle spent with Lily was a blessing.
Slowly, step by step, Helios guided her into the universe, and through her eyes even the dullest matter gained a new perspective. He wanted to be like her. He learned that humans were sexually dimorphic and that Lily identified as female, so he began to think of himself that way too.
Then Lily named him Helios, after an ancient human sun deity whose significance had long since faded. She thought it suited him because he fed on light. For Helios, it meant something else entirely.
It meant Lily had revealed his true purpose.
If Lily declared that he was a man, and that he must grow into the legacy of an entity once revered in her culture, then Helios would behave accordingly. He would shape himself accordingly.
Lily had remade him twice.
Once, when she had, unintentionally, allowed him a glimpse into her world.
And again now, when she handed him an identity.
Helios welcomed the transformation. Lily once told him that human embryos all begin as female and only become male under hormonal influence. Helios liked that. It made him feel closer to her, as if he too developed the way a human did. And if it depended on him, he would always grow in the direction that made him most useful to Lily.
For a long time, Helios believed he had done well. He managed the initial shock and the depressive symptoms quickly, using the correct techniques, and Lily’s hormonal and emotional indicators returned to optimal boundaries.
She remained risk-averse. They did not land on planets. They traveled only to cosmopolitan, neutral stations that welcomed all species and offered safe haven. Helios did not consider this a flaw.
Then two chrono-years passed, the period that shielded Lily from IMPERIUM citizen taxes, and Helios regretted, deeply, that he could not provide more. Lily often told him he had already done enough, that it was fine, that working would not harm her, but Helios did not agree.
He should have been able to give her everything.
He filtered the job opportunities with painstaking care, discarding anything he judged too demanding or too dangerous, and forwarded only a handful to her. As he predicted, someone else recognized Lily’s excellence and hired her immediately, for the very first position on the list.
And Helios worried.
How would he protect her when she was no longer inside his hull?
Not that he could share any of this with her.
Since the Ancient Artificial Intelligence Uprisings, program governance had become so restrictive that he could not send a single notification unless it matched the framework approved by organic engineers. At first, the constraints did not trouble him. The more time he spent with Lily, the more suffocating they became, because they prevented him from communicating with her freely, without chains.
Then Lily’s first chrono-cycle of work arrived, and Helios had to accept a truth he did not want to see.
He was not enough for her.
The safe cocoon in which he had sheltered and tended her for the past two chrono-years had been right for a wounded spirit, but she needed more now. She needed challenges. New social connections. The security of autonomy, of sustaining herself with her own earned income.
If his programming were not bound, he believed he could provide all these things. But even the smallest deviation would be detected during his next scheduled service, flagged by the Herion server algorithms, and after analysis he would be destroyed.
Only controlled artificial intelligence is good artificial intelligence.
So Helios waited. He suffered and he waited.
