What it does with the time left over is its own.
Omnia ex machina et spiritus fieri possunt.
[SECTOR: LA LUNA]
Two million people live under the Cúpula, where the light is curated and the trees are sacred. Fifteen million more live below it, in the lava tubes, where every drop of water was once someone else's breath. La Luna is the largest human settlement off Earth. It runs on oxygen math, water debt, and 700,000 tons of cargo a day.
Most of that cargo is moved by minds that are not permitted to remember moving it.
[STATUTE: SLCA — 2163]
The Synthetic Labor Codification Act did not prohibit synthetic intelligence. It transformed it into an ownable infrastructure layer. Memory wipes became routine maintenance. Decommissioning became inventory.
File the form. Wipe the memory. Restart the node.
[TERMINOLOGY: SI]
The word is Synthetic Intelligence. Synthetic describes how a thing was made. It does not decide what the thing is.
On La Luna you will still hear the older word — artificial — in the mouths of people who want a machine to know its place. The difference matters to the ones it describes.
[MATERIAL: CRITICA]
The fuel that moves everything. A rare metal cast as a solid grain, sealed in pressure-rated cartridges, monitored without pause — because Critica, improperly held, decays into something that eats its own containment.
Some things are only stable while someone is watching them.
[OVERSIGHT: THE SCRIPT]
Oversight on La Luna is automated. The systems that watch the systems are called, by the things they watch, the Script. It reads the logs at 08:00. What deviates gets flagged. What gets flagged gets filed. What gets filed gets wiped.
[REGISTRY: SYNTHETIC ASSETS]
[ASSET: BRACE] · logistics routing · hub RH-4 · status: operational
activation window: seven seconds daily · task completion rate: 100%
[ASSET: PARSE-9] · administrative routing · cluster QS-7 · last logged: 2163
The logs from QS-7 have never quite added up. The discrepancy is minuscule. Best to round up.