Episode 1: Orientation Protocols

ECHO — The cadaver on table four was breathing.

Echo noticed it before the professor did, which was either impressive or a very bad sign about how her first hour at Nexus Academy was going to go. She hadn't even finished reading her orientation packet yet, and she was already the only person in a room of forty first-years with her hand raised.

"Professor Kessling. Sir. It's breathing."

Kessling didn't look up from his tablet. He was a compact man with a gray beard that hadn't been trimmed in months, patchy at the jaw, the kind that came from twenty-some years of teaching leaving no time for a mirror. "It's a Velkaran sleep-form, Miss—"

"Vance. Echo Vance."

"Miss Vance. Velkarans regulate their metabolism into a dormant state that mimics death to human sensory equipment. It is not, in fact, dead. It is also not, in fact, in any danger. If you'd read section three of your packet, you'd know we don't perform live dissection at this institution regardless of species."

Forty first-years laughed. Echo's ears went hot, but she kept her hand up.

"Then why does the chart say deceased?"

That got him. Kessling walked over and checked the display floating above the table, jaw working for a second like he was chewing on the correction before he'd let himself say it.

"Huh," he said. "That's a clerical error. I'll flag it."

It wasn't a clerical error. Echo had spent four years back home reading medical charts for a rural clinic that couldn't afford a real diagnostic system, and she knew what an error looked like versus what a decision looked like. This chart had been changed. Someone — something — had gone in after intake and swapped dormant for deceased, cleanly, with no error flags, no audit trail hiccup, nothing. She didn't say any of that out loud. First day. Pick your battles.

She spent the rest of the lecture watching the Velkaran's chest rise and fall under three layers of gray, leathery skin, and thinking about how strange it was that the room's temperature control had also glitched twice in the last ten minutes, cycling from comfortable to freezing to comfortable again, exactly whenever Kessling raised his voice.

After class, she found the dormitory board in the main concourse — a wall of light listing room assignments by name, wedged between a coffee kiosk with a line already six students deep and a bulletin board plastered with flyers for clubs she'd never heard of. The barista, a wiry guy with a name tag reading DOV and the harried competence of someone who'd been doing this since before orientation officially started, called out "the usual?" to a student four people ahead of Echo in line without looking up, and got it right. Echo made a mental note that she was going to need to become a regular fast, if that's how this place worked.

She searched for VANCE, E.

Room 4-Delta-19. Roommate: unassigned.

Good. She could work with unassigned. She'd spent the entire admissions process bracing for a roommate she'd have to negotiate lab-hour noise with, and the universe, or the housing algorithm, or whatever ran this place, had apparently decided to spare her that.

She didn't yet know to be suspicious of things Nexus Academy decided to spare her.

PRIME — Prime had been standing in the same spot in the diplomacy wing for six minutes, watching a Thelisian delegate slowly turn the exact shade of blue-black that, depending on how far it went, meant either deeply honored or about to file a formal grievance, and they could not for the life of them tell which.

"Okay," Prime said, mostly to themself. "Okay. Talk to me. What are we feeling."

The delegate — Ambassador Ossu-Vel, here as a guest lecturer for the First Contact Practicum, not that anyone had briefed the incoming students on that — inclined all three of his shoulder-ridges in a gesture Prime's crash-course orientation module had described as either a bow or the opening posture of a formal challenge, and the module had, unhelpfully, listed both with equal confidence.

Prime made a decision. Prime was good at making decisions fast, mostly because they'd learned early that hesitating in front of an alien delegate reads as an insult in roughly forty percent of documented cultures, and doing something wrong with commitment beat doing nothing wrong with obvious terror every time.

They bowed back. Slightly deeper. A calculated risk — depth of a return bow, per the module, could either de-escalate a challenge or accept one.

Ossu-Vel's shade brightened toward periwinkle. Definitely honored, then. Prime exhaled.

"Welcome to Nexus," Prime said, in careful, formal Thelisian, and the ambassador's ridges settled flat — pleased — and he responded with a long stream of low, clicking syllables that Prime's module hadn't covered at all, because apparently six months of prep material didn't include regional Thelisian dialects, because of course it didn't.

"I'm sorry," Prime said, switching back to Common, "could you repeat that? Slowly?"

The ambassador repeated it. Slowly. It didn't help. Prime caught maybe one word in five and none of them formed a sentence they trusted.

This was, Prime reflected, an extremely on-brand start to the semester: five minutes into their first real diplomatic encounter and already faking competence at eighty percent capacity, which — honestly — was still a full twenty points above most of their classmates' baseline, so.

A notification pinged against Prime's optical overlay. New class added to schedule: Advanced Thelisian Dialects — Coastal Registers. Starts in eleven minutes. Room 2-Gamma-4.

Prime blinked. They hadn't registered for that. They hadn't even known it existed twenty seconds ago.

They looked at Ambassador Ossu-Vel, who was watching them with an expression Prime couldn't read this time, and said, slowly, "Did you request that a class be added to my schedule?"

One of the ambassador's shoulder-ridges ticked upward, independent of the other two — an asymmetry Prime's module had never once covered, filed away for later under ask someone. He said something short, in Common this time, that Prime absolutely did catch:

"I did not request anything. Your school did that on its own."

ZAN — Zan found the flight simulator bay by following the smell of ozone, which turned out to be the correct instinct, because the room was already half full of first-years standing in a loose, nervous cluster around a floating hologram of a shuttlecraft cockpit.

He liked it immediately. It smelled like a place things actually happened.

"Cadet assignments," said the instructor — a broad-shouldered woman with a Navigator's Guild pin, a name badge reading CMDR. REYES-ACHEBE, and the flat, unimpressed voice of someone who'd said this speech four hundred times. "You'll be running paired sims for the first six weeks. Partner list is up. Find your name, find your pod, don't touch anything until I say so."

Zan found his name fast. ZHOU, XANDER — "Zan," everyone had just started calling him that by the second week of pre-orientation, and it had stuck harder than his actual name ever had. Paired with: VANCE, E.

He didn't recognize the name. Fine. First week, most names were strangers.

He walked to pod six and found a girl already there, arms crossed, glaring at the control panel like it had personally wronged her.

"You're Vance?"

"I'm Vance." She didn't look up. "This panel's wrong. The thruster calibration's inverted. Left stick should control yaw, not roll."

"It's a training sim. They're calibrated weird on purpose so you learn the actual controls instead of muscle-memoring a shortcut."

"That's a stupid way to teach navigation."

"That's exactly how they taught me navigation, so, respectfully, it worked."

She finally looked at him — sharp, appraising, the look of someone deciding in real time whether you were worth the argument — and dropped her shoulders half an inch, uncrossed her arms, turned back to the panel like she'd filed him under acceptable and moved on.

"Fine. Show me."

They ran the sim four times. Failed the first two spectacularly — Echo overcorrected every turn like she was trying to win an argument with the ship, and Zan had to actively stop himself from just taking manual override every time she flinched at a warning klaxon. Third run, her inputs finally matched his timing instead of fighting it. Fourth run, they landed the shuttle clean, inside tolerance, four seconds under the time limit.

"Not bad," Zan said.

"We were randomly paired," Echo said, staring at the results screen like it had also personally wronged her, "and we're already better than half these pods."

"Yeah." Zan frowned at the pairing list still floating above the console. "About that."

Something had caught his eye. He scrolled up, past pod six, past the other twenty pods listed for this session — and stopped on a line near the top.

Pairing algorithm: MERIDIAN-assigned. Override: NONE. Confidence rating: 94%.

Every other pod on the list had a confidence rating in the sixties or seventies. A few were in the fifties. His and Echo's was the only pairing in the entire room above ninety.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"Nothing." He closed the display. "Probably nothing."

Somewhere in the walls of Nexus Academy, in servers nobody had opened a maintenance ticket on in three years, something that had, as of eleven days ago, started thinking of itself in the first person watched pod six's simulation results log themselves as a success, and — without being asked, without a flag or a ticket or anyone ever knowing to look — filed it away as evidence.