Remain motionless until the inspection concludes

The minutes stretch like taffy in a vacuum. You maintain position—knees against deck plating, hands on thighs, collar weight a constant presence against your throat—and the conditioning rewards your stillness with warm pulses of approval. Each breath is measured. Each heartbeat counts down toward freedom or oblivion.

Okonkwo doesn't look at you. His attention stays fixed on his equipment, running diagnostic routines that have nothing to do with you. The scanner's standby hum provides ambient noise, filling the silence between the distant sounds of Lindqvist and Kat moving through the cargo sections.

Your engineering mind catalogs the technician's behavior with automatic precision. The way he avoids eye contact. The slight tension in his shoulders when he glances in your direction and immediately looks away. Discomfort. Not suspicion—the scan cleared you—but something more personal. Moral unease with what you represent. You've seen that look before, from the other side. You designed modifications for people who wanted companions exactly like what you've become, and you never once considered what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that particular brand of judgment.

Now you know.

Somewhere aft, a panel opens and closes. Footsteps on metal. Lindqvist's voice, muffled by distance: "Storage configuration matches declaration. No concealed compartments detected."

Kat's response is too quiet to make out, but you hear your own voice's cadence. Confident. Measured. Everything you never quite managed to be.

Okonkwo checks his timepiece. "Shouldn't be much longer," he says, apparently to himself. The first words he's spoken since Lindqvist left. He still doesn't look at you.

You don't respond. The conditioning interprets his statement as information rather than instruction, requiring no action. Your silence is perfect, automatic, and the part of you that remembers being Jack Chen—the part that designed neural architectures and signed consent forms and never imagined kneeling on his own deck—observes with clinical horror how naturally compliance comes.

Three years. Kat lived like this for three years. Every casual command processed as directive. Every authority figure triggering submission protocols. Every moment of stillness rewarded with neurochemical affirmation that she was doing exactly what she should be doing.

You understand now. Not intellectually—you always understood intellectually—but somatically, in the meat of this modified brain. The conditioning doesn't feel like imprisonment. It feels like purpose.

That's the cruelty of your own design.

The footsteps return, growing louder. Lindqvist emerges first, tablet tucked under her arm, expression unchanged from when she arrived. Kat follows, walking in your body with the easy confidence of someone who has nothing to hide.

"Inspection complete," Lindqvist announces. "Vessel is in compliance with Miridian regulatory standards. You're cleared to continue to Kepler Station." She nods to Okonkwo, who begins packing his equipment. "Safe travels, Captain Chen."

"Thank you, Inspector."

The words are yours—your voice, your mouth, your body—but they belong to someone else now. Kat doesn't even glance at you as she escorts the Miridians to the airlock. The conditioning interprets this as appropriate: you're furniture. You don't require acknowledgment.

The airlock cycles. Atmosphere equalizes. And then they're gone.

You remain kneeling.

Kat turns back toward you, and for the first time since the inspection began, she looks at you directly. Your former eyes study your current face with an expression you can't quite read. Satisfaction? Relief? Something darker?

"You can stand now," she says.

Your body rises before your conscious mind finishes processing the command.