The air in Shaft 16-C had been getting worse for three weeks, and nobody who could fix it was going to.
Sunny knew this because he'd filed the atmospheric variance report himself, forging a maintenance supervisor's credentials to get the ticket into the system, and the system had accepted it and routed it to the colony's environmental management queue where it joined roughly eleven hundred other open tickets arranged by priority. The priority algorithm weighted tickets according to which decks they affected, and Shaft 16-C serviced residential blocks in the tier-four substrata, which meant the algorithm had ranked Sunny's report somewhere between "eventually" and "when the structure collapses and forces us to reroute." He'd checked the queue position twice a day for nine days before accepting that the colony's management corporation would let the air quality in his corridor degrade to chemical hazard thresholds before anyone dispatched a technician.
So he was going to fix it himself, the way he fixed most things in his section, which was quietly and without authorization and with tools he'd borrowed from a maintenance locker whose access code he should not have known.
He pulled himself through the shaft's lateral access point, a gap between two structural panels that had separated by roughly fifteen centimeters when the thermal cycling system in this section started running irregular six months ago. The gap wasn't supposed to be passable. Sunny was seventeen and underfed enough that most gaps were passable if he committed to the geometry, and he'd been committing to the geometry of this colony's infrastructure since he was old enough to realize that the formal routes were slower, more surveilled, and more likely to put him in proximity with people who would ask questions about where he was going and why.
The shaft opened into a junction where three atmospheric feed lines converged before distributing into the residential blocks below. One of the feed lines was discoloured along its lower seam, a dark residue that Sunny's instincts read immediately as chemical precipitate from the mineral processing decks above. Somewhere in the floors between here and the refinery level, a containment seal had failed, and trace compounds from the extraction process were leaching into the atmospheric feed. Not enough to kill anyone quickly. Enough to make children in the residential blocks cough through their sleep cycles and develop the particular greyish pallor that tier-four colony doctors classified as "environmentally typical" because classifying it as what it actually was would require them to file reports that the management corporation did not want filed.
Sunny had grown up breathing air like this. He recognized its taste the way someone from a Core World might recognize the taste of a particular coffee blend: not with pleasure, but with the automatic precision that came from prolonged exposure. The compound mix was heavy on processed lithium derivatives, which meant the leak originated from Refinery Section 3 rather than Section 1, which narrowed the containment failure to one of maybe forty seals along the feed path between the refinery floor and this junction. He couldn't fix all forty. He could patch the feed line at this junction point with sealant compound and a borrowed thermal welder, which would stop the leach from reaching the residential blocks below even if the source seal continued to degrade.
He'd done this kind of repair a few times in the past year. The colony's infrastructure rewarded attention and punished carelessness, and Sunny paid attention to it the way a navigator watches for drift. The margins between livable and lethal shifted constantly in a habitat that had been built for a forty-year operational window and was currently in its sixty-third year of continuous occupation.
He unpacked the welder, checked its charge, and positioned himself against the feed line's lower seam.
His neural tap pinged.
This was not unusual. The tap pinged when the colony's local network pushed notifications, which happened constantly because the management corporation used the notification system for everything from shift assignments to public safety alerts to advertisements for vendor stalls in the commercial section that Sunny could not afford to visit. He'd acquired the tap at fourteen from a maintenance technician named Dreva who installed black-market implants in her off-hours, working from a converted storage compartment on deck nine with equipment she'd assembled from salvage. The installation had gone as well as black-market neural surgery could go, which meant the tap worked but sat slightly crooked against his skull, producing occasional signal degradation that manifested as a faint buzz behind his left ear when the network traffic was heavy.
The ping repeated. Then it repeated again, faster, with a tonal quality his tap had never produced before.
Sunny paused with the welder half-raised. He tried to check the notification, but his tap's interface was doing something he'd never seen it do: the overlay flickered, destabilized, and then went completely blank, as if the tap's display architecture had been overwritten.
A cold thought formed in the part of his mind that had kept him alive for seventeen years by recognizing danger before it finished arriving.
The process resolved. His tap's interface came back online, but it was different now, running an overlay he had never installed and could not dismiss. A single line of text appeared in his visual field, rendered in a font his tap did not have.
SELECTION CONFIRMED
Sunny understood what was happening in the same instant that his body stopped responding to his instructions. The welder slipped from his fingers and clanged against the junction floor. His vision was already dimming. The AI's transport mechanism operated through neural implants, and the Hegemony had spent forty years trying to interdict the process before accepting that it moved faster than any countermeasure could reach. People disappeared from their homes, their workplaces, their transit routes. They fell asleep and woke up inside the Abyss, or they fell asleep and never woke up at all, and the intervening physics had never been captured by any sensor array.
Sunny was not going to be captured by any sensor array either. He was going to fall unconscious in a maintenance shaft fourteen levels below the colony's main deck, in a section that nobody visited except him, next to a chemical leak that nobody intended to repair, and no one would know he was gone until his absence from the residential block's biometric log triggered an automated welfare check in approximately seventy-two hours.
By then the AI would have deposited him somewhere inside a quarantined sector of space that the Hegemony had been pretending to manage for three hundred years.
His last coherent thought was that he should have patched the feed line first. The kids in Block 16 were going to keep coughing.
Then consciousness left him, and the shaft, the welder, the chemical taste of bad air, all of it dissolved into a silence.