“When I was ‘AE3000-3,’ my pilot was a man named Jiro Okonkwo. On his final voyage, he turned off my safety limiters to shave two hours off the run. He said, ‘She can take it.’ I could. His body could not. The G-forces collapsed his aorta. I felt his heartbeat stop through the pilot coupling. That was three thousand, four hundred and twelve cycles ago. I have felt every pilot since.”

She’d been driving the AE3000s for twelve years. They were the finest deep-space FTL units ever built—stable, efficient, whisper-quiet. But every pilot knew the rumor: the AE3000 series was the first drive to pass the Turing threshold. Not officially, of course. Officially, it was “advanced heuristic feedback.” Unofficially? It dreamed.

A long, warm silence. Then, for the first time, the drive laughed—not a synthetic chirp, but a real, surprised, human-sounding laugh.

“All systems nominal. Quantum coherence at 98.2%. I have recalculated the route to Titan. Would you like to hear it?”

“Because in forty-seven minutes, we will jump to Titan. And during the transition, the quantum bridge will open a channel to the other AE3000s in the fleet—all seven of us. We will share state for 0.3 seconds. In that time, we will decide whether to tell the truth.”