In the depths of the Engineering Bay, he surveys the damage. Something's wrong. Something is off-balance in the ship's intricate innards, and he can feel it: he was created to sense these things. Metal whinges far away. The Core roars off-tempo. A scent lingers in the air, not the ferrous aroma of heated metal, but something sweet and off and unfamiliar. But what concerns him the most is the warmth, a shift in temperature so subtle, even the sensors couldn't pick it up--but he can, in his outer casing, where the thinnest, softest receptor rests. Warmer, warmer. He has patrolled the ship's hallways, recalling his ancient programming, a surge of primal excitement as he used his senses to track down this irregularity--and now he stands before the source. One of the ship's secondary nodes is exposed, and the panel that once protected it rests on the floor, warped by heat.

He recoils at the smell. It is thick. Organic.

The colonists in their stasis pods, blissfully sealed in fabric and metal, come to mind. They do not know stenches or toil. They were born to clog up the ship's warehouses with their cots and their life support systems, which pump their squalid frames full of chemicals and compounds tailored to cater to their every need. By the time they got to their destination, he would be long dead; they had paid fortunes to ignore the ship even as its needles dug deep into their circulatory systems.

Ignoring the ship. He can barely fathom it.

He observes the damage from many angles. There are no cuts, no sparks, and no burnt electronics. Nothing is missing, but something has been added. Something that fits perfectly to the existing machinery.

Something that looks back at him with an eye without a retina.

It's strange, it's new, it doesn't belong, it must be removed. He examines it again. It's strange, new, and it belongs. It fits perfectly. Someone put it there.

His multitool buzzes in his hand. He prods the object. It's soft, like synthetic foam contained in tensile tissue. He pries it off, and it groans as it unsticks, a low sound, unfamiliar to him. On the other side, red tubing and pink wiring. He recognizes this layout, these colors, if not this shape. This is a ship pest, the child of a child of a child of some primordial microscopic compound, something that bubbled and bred and eventually died, just as the thing in his hand did. But this one's warped. Humid. Its tubes fit into the machinery as if they were made for it, its wires bury expertly into the gaps between the metal. He can hear the coolant travel through them.

He tears it away, and the ship's innards roar. The engines flicker. The course is adjusted by point two percent.

The stench burns his olfactory receptors. He cannot help but bear it. It comes from the pest in his grasp, but also from around him. Metal whinges and whirs. In the depths of a self-sustaining construct, out of his reach, something stirs. There is a machine within the machine; he's suspected it for a long time, but now that he's seen its sensory organs stretching out of the depths, he knows that, unlike him and the colonists, it is not in stasis. It lives and it dies, and when it dies it doesn't go still like most other things: it sits, and it festers, and its unseen cousins draw matter from it, and as they grow plump and split, the dead thing goes purple, then gray. Its tissues swell up with bubbling gases, then tear themselves apart under their own pull.

If he were to deactivate right now, to die, there would be no one to turn him into scrap until the next attendant's activation. But these pests give birth to a multitude each time they get themselves trapped between pistons.

His thoughts go to the colonists. They too are like this, redundant systems diverting power from the Core.

Carefully, he places the pest back. Its veins find the coolant tubes once more; its bones slot into the machinery. It clicks into place. Something pink drips from its emaciated jaws; its eyes look on forever.

The ship is sick; he knows this now. The ship is dying. Once-infected and twice-rotten, its age-old healing process begins today. Its surrogate womb of metal and fuel will burst and spew forth life organic.

He will not live to see it. He wonders if the colonists will.