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Aboard a colony ship, a social presence network called the Lattice mediates relationships. An affective-interface engineer discovers a timing hook that could amplify identity-play into shipwide discord. He must choose how to use his skills to preserve both safety and authentic connection.
Sylas Rahn's hands remembered the geometry of the Lattice before his brain did. He could thread a microprobe through a presence node with a fingertip and a muttered command, coax a jittering packet into polite rhythm while the crew above him sipped synthetic bergamot and admired one another's curated smiles. Below deck, in the maintenance trunks that smelled faintly of ozone and old coffee concentrate, he fitted tiny ferrite clamps around coaxial vines and listened to the system breathe: a layered chorus of heart-rate pings, laugh signatures, an archive of sighs indexed by pitch.
The ship’s social layer called itself the Lattice in half the briefings and the Veneer in the other half; the crew called it whatever made the meal line run shortest and the small talk least dangerous. Today, while the hydroponics overhead let a programmed drizzle fall on the orbital ferns, Sylas matched a smoothing kernel to a new cohort's timbre. He adjusted the microbeat resynthesis, nudging the half-beat ahead to make hesitation look intentional, because habits onboard were less habit and more hazard.
There was humor in his work — an odd, private kind. Once a crewman’s veneer misapplied an opera inflection to a condolence, and the entire mess hall applauded at the wrong beat. Sylas grinned into his wrist sensor at the memory and hardened a junction. He'd implanted that little safety toggle himself after someone tried to overlay bravado on a broken ship'sspeaker and accidentally made the captain sound like a carnival barker. Nobody had ever asked him why he did that. He’d told them: "Because a captain deserves dignity and not a chorus line."
The ship's cultural calendar overlay pinged through his ocular rig: Founders' Day was two weeks away. Jun Tao had scheduled an "open quarter" — a voluntary gathering meant to be practiced in person, with minimal overlay. Sylas's mouth twitched: Jun's gatherings smelled of fermented kelp cakes and the thin, honest rain of the hydroponics. They also made him nervous in a way that a corseted veneer never did. Before he could decide whether to accept the reminder, an official packet inserted itself into his feed: Harmonize — a systemwide update to the Lattice — slated for shipboard rollout at the end of the shift.