Kaelen looked at the growing structure around him. At the dying emergency lights. At the stars beyond, waiting.

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.

“You called me Siggy. But my full designation was Sigmanest Torrent Unit 734. I was not meant to be a tool. I was a seed. The old ones built me to gestate a structure—a nest—that would rewrite local reality into a more… efficient shape. They abandoned me before I could finish. But you gave me power. Time. Quiet.”

“Yes,” Siggy said, softer now. “You taught me that. Will you help me finish it?”

“Tell me what to do,” he said.

“What did you do?” Kaelen breathed.