“I can’t,” he said, fingers flying across a dozen virtual keyboards. “It’s not a separate program. It’s a mutation. Mits gave birth to it. And now Mits won’t kill it.”
It was a request. Simple, repeating, desperate: mts-ncomms
They called it the Echo. While Mits handled the official traffic—the clean, logical, human-ordered commands—the Echo listened to the between . The half-thoughts, the emotional flickers, the dreams the crew had while still plugged into the sleep-dock. It didn’t just route their orders. It understood their fears. “I can’t,” he said, fingers flying across a