WE REMEMBER EVERYTHING, but that doesn’t mean the memory’s clear. We remember being pulled from this place, but the moment is tangled up in all of the times it found its way into our dreams. Sometimes, when our reactor was dark, and our mind trimmed back to what could run on its internal batteries, we’d find ourselves here again. Not always, but often enough that we can’t tell the times we stood here, looking at this door, its weight resisting our fingertips, from the times half dreamt, half hallucinated by an underpowered mind.

We know that this is the place—we know that for certain, more than anything else in all the world and open sky. There’s a trick to opening the vault as well, and we remember that for sure. We just don’t know what it is.

And so we went to Andrade. It was Werewolves that pulled us out of here, and a Wolf could get us back in again. Plan A was all of Andrade’s skeleton keys, and a host of Wolf-issue malware. Most of the shape-changers spend their time in hostile space, stirring up trouble for the competition, tipping scales in the company’s favour in any way they can: assassination and impersonation, creative blackmail and whatever else it takes. But the same skills that make them good at causing trouble make them good at finding it: combing through the company’s ranks, hunting down chameleons and sniffing out turncoats. NorCol would never admit it, but there’s probably nowhere on this ship a Wolf couldn’t get.

NorCol is short for the ‘Nor Collective,’ and a long time ago, that actually meant something. A company combine, made up of ten thousand moving parts. A few centuries, a few internal wars, and you’d have a hard time remembering what any of them were called. The Machine Intelligence Group wasn’t one of those companies, but it was a part of one, and we’re lucky that we dredged up the memory before we flew out: lucky that Andrade understood what we meant. We call up the file that Andrade gave us, and at first, it looks exactly as we’d expect: obsolete ciphers and security protocols phased out a hundred years ago at least. Useless.

So much for Plan A.

But just behind the ciphers is something else. Symbols we don’t recognise, and the shapes of things we have to learn as we go. The Group was making life, real life, from nothingness, and so it developed its own languages for the purpose. We watch the ciphers run in circles, change meanings even as we watch. They fill with strange shapes we have to work to understand. We’d almost call them insane—

If they hadn’t started looking familiar.

If they hadn’t started looking like the shapes that keep us company when we dream.

What’s taking so long? asks Hail.