The Helix Anchor

Lena Rao's first task of the maintenance cycle was so ordinary that she had rehearsed it in sleep for years: arrive at Node Twelve, interface through the biometric panel, run the diagnostic sweep, record anomalies, close the loop. The West Ring smelled faintly of ozone and recycled lemon from cleaner cartridges; light panels hummed in regulated pulses like a mechanical heartbeat. Out past the ring's tempered windows, the colony's orbital curve scrolled the planet beneath in a thin, embroidered arc of blue and cloud. Helix kept that curve coherent. It also kept people coherent with one another; the field's continuity services smoothed memory jitter so that schedule conflicts stayed small and collective tasks did not fray into panic.

She liked the routine because it simplified choices. When she tightened a standoff bolt or replaced a filament, consequences were linear and contained: torque, resistance, success. In the human layers, decisions were messy. Lena's daughter, Etta, waiting for her at the compact kitchen module with a packet of instant tea and drawings taped to the freezer, complicated everything with an unquiet tenderness. Maintenance orders came in the same file as morning school schedules and Etta's immunization reminders. Lena catalogued obligations the way she catalogued parts—exact, necessary, able to be completed—and then carried them like a private gravity toward the domestic center of small life. She told herself she could do both: keep a city alive and keep a child safe.

At Node Twelve the diagnostics returned nominal values on energy flow, a microstatic anomaly in the optical coupler, nothing the heuristics didn't already know how to route around. While the automated script ran its backfill she opened the access hatch and the smell hit her: mineral and something colder than metal, an aseptic absence she could not name. There, tucked between braided conduit and an old insulation patch, was a shard of geometry—no more than a handspan—cut in impossible planes. Its surface refracted the workshop light into angles the eye wanted to resolve into a pattern but couldn't. She had seen composite detritus before: slag from micro-forges, polymer sheeting eaten by radiation. This fragment seemed cut from a different logic, as if it belonged to a lattice of rules that did not include human measures of distance.

Her gloved fingers warmed the fragment and felt nothing, which in the tunnels translated as the first warning bell. She closed the hatch and transferred an unlisted sample flag into her diagnostic buffer, then opened a secured channel to the node's local recorder. The logs displayed, but edits flickered like bad rendering: intervals hemorrhaged into grey bars, timestamps looping to earlier entries, a margin note flagged "sanitized" in routine font. She didn't like the way Helix's tags looked tonight. The continuity field tended to be discreet. It smoothed the rough edges of shared life without announcing the surgery. This displayed mark was loud. Whoever had sanitized these lines wanted someone to know they had been sanitizing.