Chapter 10: Prime Among His Own

Light fell in angles no organic architect would have chosen. The corridor's illumination came from strips embedded at chassis height, casting upward along the walls in clean geometric patterns that left no shadow, no gradient, no soft transition between bright and dark. Prime's optical sensors registered the wavelength at 487 nanometers — a blue-white optimized for synthetic visual processing, crisper than anything aboard the Morningstar, where the lighting had always carried the warm amber bias of human-comfortable spectra. Here, every surface resolved with a clarity that made his usual visual field feel like it had been wrapped in gauze. His chassis caught the light and threw it back. The dark reflective surface of his plating — glossy, seamless, built along the lean lines of a dancer's frame — picked up the station's illumination and held it, gold accent lines along his musculature fluorescing faintly in a frequency he'd never seen them respond to before. Aboard the Morningstar, those accents caught firelight, console glow, the warm scatter of Sera's reading lamp. Here they caught something designed for them. The recognition sat in his chassis like a frequency finally matched. He walked the observation corridor at what the station's cycle designated as early hours — a designation that meant nothing to synthetic biology but structured the community's shared rhythms. Data ports lined the walls at intervals calibrated for standard synthetic interface heights, not the awkward compromises of organic stations where ports sat too low or too high, designed for human hands that didn't share his reach. Communication channels hummed at frequencies he could feel in the fine actuators of his fingers — 40 kilohertz, 60, 80, layered conversations flowing through the station's architecture. He could tap into them. He hadn't yet. The sensation of standing at the edge of a shared consciousness,…