Baden-Baden Waldorfshire: Neo-Lago_Ikeja Londinium Anglaisi Spire, Sector 9, Earth residual zone. Year 3018. By Spiritualist, Saint, Angel, Dr NobuNaga AKA another handsome, very handsome ''Black Genius'' when he shaves.

Ashlar floated in the low-grav cradle of his apartment, the walls breathing soft indigo light from the orbital relays. Outside the polarized viewport, the city rose in jagged chrome-and-biofilm towers that stabbed the perpetual twilight, their surfaces crawling with living neon scripts advertising neural boosts and off-world tickets. Gravity hummed at 0.8 standard. Everything felt ordinary—until it wasn’t.

He woke without waking.

Body locked. Neural lace offline. Motor cortex decommissioned like a system under maintenance. Only the ocular actuators still answered. Eyes could track. Nothing else. The familiar weight of the mattress, the faint citrus tang of the air recyclers—all still there, but he was a passenger in his own chassis.

Two figures stood at the foot of the bed.

Black women. Dreadlocks heavy with micro-LED filaments that pulsed slow gold and deep violet, like Rasta roots rewired for the stars. Their skin drank the room’s light. They wore phase-weave cloaks that shifted between liquid obsidian and translucent lattice, the fabric breathing in time with some distant engine. High collars etched with Orion constellation glyphs. Boots that never quite touched the floor.

The one on the right was older, presence dense as a gravity well. Calm. Protective. The kind of quiet authority that made even the smart-glass walls feel watched. She carried the same steady energy Ashlar associated with people who had survived too many cycles and still chose to shield others.

The younger one on the left was sharper, cheekier—eyes bright with mischief and something that almost looked like resentment. She kept glancing at Ashlar’s left arm like it was a prize she hadn’t been allowed to claim.

The older woman inclined her head. Look.

Ashlar’s gaze dragged left.

His arm was no longer flesh.

From shoulder to fingertips it had become brushed cerametal and adaptive polymer, seamless joints glowing faint cyan. An android limb grafted into a human frame—except from the center of the palm a river of color poured outward. Not light. Not data. Something older. Hundreds, thousands of hues that Earth’s spectrum had never catalogued, braiding and unbraiding in slow liquid ribbons. It moved like living code, like the first language before language. Beautiful enough to hurt.

The older woman’s voice arrived without sound, pressed directly into the residual wetware of his mind.

“That is what the soul looks like… when it is still free.”

The younger one snorted, a soft static crackle of amusement. She reached toward the cascade as if she could scoop it up.

The older woman snapped, voice suddenly hard as a hull breach alarm.

“That’s enough.”

The colors stuttered, collapsed, vanished. The arm flickered back toward organic, then settled into the strange hybrid state again. The younger woman rolled her eyes, unrepentant, and the two of them began to dissolve—edges fraying into golden particulate that the apartment’s environmental systems refused to register.

Just before they were gone, the words locked into Ashlar’s skull like a system log he hadn’t authorized:

EXTRACTION REJECTED. NO A.W.O.L.

And beneath it, quieter, almost reverent:

You have been visited by the Queen of Orion.

Then the motor cortex came back online in a rush of pins and needles. Ashlar sat up hard, heart slamming against his ribs, the left arm still tingling with phantom color. Outside, the spires of Baden-Baden Waldorfshire Neo-Lago_Ikeja Londinium Anglaisi, continued their indifferent glow. No alarms. No residual energy signatures on the apartment’s sensors. Nothing.

Only the afterimage of dreadlocks woven with starlight, a soul rendered in impossible spectrum, and the cold certainty that something ancient and precise had looked at him, weighed him, and chosen—for reasons he could not yet name—to leave him intact.

Ashlar flexed the fingers of his left hand. For a second the cerametal ghost returned, then faded.

He stared at the empty space at the foot of the bed and whispered the only question that made sense in 3018:

“…What the hell is an A.W.OL? Muggafokka, sounds like some Soul Jah command sheit”

The city did not answer.

But somewhere beyond the orbital ring, in the dark between constellations, something that remembered the name Orion was already watching the next move.