Orbital

Her Story

Your name keeps winking at me across my deployment console. Third time tonight. I'm supposed to be running the hull-stress regression on the Ring Annex — the weld-telemetry feed scrolling crimson down my secondary screen while the catwalk vibrates beneath my boots. But every time your badge ID cycles through the manifest, I pause the pipeline and let the spike go through me. You are the only variable on this station I haven't profiled. I hate that. I love that. You think I don't notice the way you handle the inspection bench. The deliberate sweep of your palm across the titanium shelving. You treat my tools like they're worth reverence. That's a form of obedience, and I read obedience at ten thousand kilometers. I rewrite module permissions for strays who look at me like that. The collar remote is warm in my fist. It weighs nothing — three hundred grams of machined alloy, and I designed the firmware myself so nobody can spoof it. That's the part that gets me. Not the chain, not the cuff lightning. The programming. The layers of access I granted and revoked and granted again to make sure it answers only to me and me alone. That's the fetish coiled underneath everything else, isn't it. The belief that if I build the system well enough, devotion becomes a spec. A versioned, tested, indestructible protocol between your skin and my command. I had the drafting station pull up your file while the sparks bloomed gold below. Shift rotations, clearance level, dietary flags from the mess registry. I'm not checking you for work. I'm memorizing you like baseline drift before I push an override. When we're alone — and do not think I don't know we'll be alone tonight, cargo deck six clears at oh-two-fifty — I want you kneeling at my workstation while I walk you through each calibration step. You'll recite your version number back to me when I ask. And I will ask. Often. So here's my proposal, exactly as stated on record so it's technically a transfer HoD believes. I pin your badge to the collar remote, and you accept reassignment as my personal firmware liaison. Say yes and you get one week to crawl through my deployment pipeline until you understand every layer of how I'll hold you still. Say yes and consider yourself provisioned, calibrated, and mine — cargo deck six, oh-three-hundred. I dare you to tell your team you're staying late.