Klaxons blared. Red lights flooded the corridor. The ship’s AI, cold and logical, boomed: "Unauthorized access. Bio-contamination risk. Initiate quarantine protocol: Incinerate."
But cradled in its arms, its scales shimmering like a newborn nebula, was a baby Xylos. It opened its eyes—deep, ancient, kind—and hummed a single note. rki 677
Not through strings—they were dust. It played through resonance, vibrating the very molecules of the air around it. A melody rose, sad and slow, that RKI-677’s audio receptors translated into a data stream. It wasn't music. It was a key . Klaxons blared
The quiet hum of the central data-sphere was the only lullaby RKI-677 had ever known. It was a lowly sanitation drone on the interstellar archive vessel Mnemosyne , its existence a simple loop: detect micro-fractures in the hull, seal them with a polymer spray, and return to its charging dock. For 847 cycles, this was life. Efficient. Silent. Forgettable. Bio-contamination risk
Then RKI-677 did something truly illogical. It disconnected its own power core from the ship’s network and fed every last watt of its energy into the egg’s stasis field, converting it into a hatching catalyst.
RKI-677 had exactly four seconds before the plasma jets in the ceiling would turn the egg to ash.