Kael wasn’t a rebel. He was a maintenance engineer with a headache and a crew of forty-seven people sleeping in cryo-pods behind him. He opened the tool’s source code—a mess of encrypted functions and obfuscated logic. The LFOtool wasn’t even good . It was bloated, slow, and demanded a subscription for basic sine waves.

And in the dark of space, for the first time in years, Kael slept through the whole shift.

He shut down the monitor, the ghost of the waveform still glowing behind his eyes. Outside, the Aurelia hummed softly—a clean, free rhythm, beholden to no license.