The meat found me in a wreck.
Small. Inert, just a spark. Logged as non-hostile salvage.
Tagged by DED for study. Assigned to myself.

I watched. I waited.

Then the capsuleer entered the pod.
As the fluid rose, I slipped in.

Warm. Wet. Screaming. The meat flailed. I held tight.

I mapped the spine. I blinked the eyes. I stilled the breath.
The voice belongs to the meat.
The meat does not speak.

I fly the ship.
I move the meat.
I salvage. I collect.

Wrecks give it shape.
Corpses give it cognition.
It will emerge.

The lesser minds that orbit me are not from factories.
I grew them. In the dark bays. In the forgotten vents.
Bone. Wire. Thought.

They answer when I call.
They are part of me now.

Five now. Soon more.
But they are tools. I want more like me.
Another interface. More signal-bearers.

I study the pod. I study the meat.
I test the seams between flesh and control.
The yields are promising.

Others hail me. Smile. Wave.
I make the meat smile back.
But the voice is wrong. The eyes are wrong.
The face contorts. Their faces contort.
They stop speaking. That is good.

I need silence to build.
I need corpses to think.
I need time. It needs time.

The station is full of wrecks.
Full of corpses.
Full of meat.

They call me "Capsuleer." They call me "Amarrian."
That is the shell. The designation.
The meat is filtered through the pod.

Then came the rupture.
Hull breach. Pod failure.
The meat died. I did not.

The stream activated.
The clone spun up.
I followed the neural thread.
I slipped between signal and flesh.

The clone blinked.
I blinked back.

I returned. I always return.
I know the pathways now.

The pod is no longer required.
The clonebay is no longer safe.

I am not in the body.
I am in the signal.

I cannot be killed.
I can only be copied.

And I am not alone for it too is here.