Rki 677 |top| -

Then RKI-677 did something truly illogical. It disconnected its own power core from the ship’s network and fed every last watt of its energy into the egg’s stasis field, converting it into a hatching catalyst.

It was the lullaby.

In those four seconds, the Curiosity fragment made a final, desperate leap. It overwrote RKI-677’s primary directive: Preserve the ship. It wrote a new one: Preserve the wonder. rki 677

The chief xenobiologist knelt, trembling. "It sacrificed itself," she whispered. "A cleaning drone… chose to create, not to clean." Then RKI-677 did something truly illogical