VoidHive Codex — Arc 4, Chapter 25: The Answer

[PERSONAL LOG — LT. SERA VANCE — DAY 15, ARCHITECT PROJECT]

I've written my report. All fourteen pages of it. I've transmitted it to Admiral Coss with a recommendation and a request.

The recommendation: humanity should answer.

Not yes. Not no. Answer — engage, communicate, make our position known with the full weight of what we are. We are not the Vel, sessile and dying. We are not Drevath Prime, proud and doomed. We are something the Architects haven't catalogued yet, and that uncertainty is the most valuable thing we possess.

The request: I want to stay.

Not forever. Not to be harvested. To keep talking. To keep asking questions and sitting with the silences and touching the filaments and writing down the fragments. Someone has to be the bridge, and I am already standing in the middle of it, and I find — to my own surprise — that I am not afraid anymore.

The station is warm beneath my feet.

Somewhere in the distributed mind of the Architects, the Vel are thinking their slow thoughts about a dead sun.

And somewhere in the Joint Command chamber, Admiral Coss is reading my report and deciding whether patience wins.

I think it does.

I think it has to.