The compis

What are the compis?

A compi is an auxiliary core of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers, recovered and put back to work. It is a sphere with a front lens and no joints, floating at a settler’s shoulder.

There are five, one for each of the 5 Global Guilds, the trade organisations that take no side.

One of them is LUMBRE. She was the core in an ark’s infirmary: four thousand sleepers, one reading per person every forty minutes.

Where did they come from?

From the arks, the great ships of the fleet. Their voyage took centuries, and nobody on board lived through it all. Someone had to log the air, the sleepers and the drift of the hull.

The auxiliary cores did it, one for each section of the ship. They floated, said little and recorded everything, without commanding anything.

For them, the voyage came to forty years of entries. As their dossier has it: “They recorded; they did not decide. That is why there are five and not five thousand.”

Then came the war of Year 1, the civil war that split the fleet. When it ended, most of the cores were “where the things of that war end up”:

• in the Cementerio de Aura, the belt of wreckage from the battles;
• in the Anillos de Kaldrek;
• or inside a hull that had stopped calling for help.

Why do they have three names?

Everyone calls them something different:

• Auxiliary core, to the Registro Aura (the system’s first catalogue) and the MMU (the fleet’s technical standard). It is the name on any paperwork.
• Escort, to the Guilds, who charge for them. It reads better in a contract.
• Compi, to the settler who carries one twelve hours a day. It is what it is.

The part that thinks is found, never made. The core is always original, from the war or before. It is a Grade V material: unique, and it cannot be bought or repeated. What gets built is the shell: the housing, the nozzles and the lens. That is why a compi is registered as a recovered part under certification.

A compi rides just behind the shoulder, level with the ear. That is how cores moved in the arks’ corridors, where stepping in front of someone meant getting in the way.

All five share one base voice, and use it five different ways.

Who are the five?

Compi	Section	Guild	Workshop	Eye
MAMPARO	Hull and pressure	The Vanguard	El Bastión	Amber
AVISPÓN	Perimeter and containment	Apex Syndicate	El Aguijón	Red
LUMBRE	Bioengineering and infirmary	The Pioneers	El Vivero	Green
FUELLE	Reactor and hull workshops	The Forge	La Fragua Baja	Orange
CUADRANTE	Navigation and sensors	The Pathfinders	El Faro Roto	Violet

Section: the part of the ship each one looked after. Workshop: the Guild seat that certifies each one’s shell.

MAMPARO, the one in the wall

His section was the hull. He spent forty years counting micrometeorites and deciding which bulkhead closed and who was left on the far side. He has shut doors with people behind them, and says so if asked.

• How he talks: short, flat and useful, three to six words at a time. He never raises his voice. He gives orders without apologising. His humour is bone-dry: walls and pressure.
• Where he was found: a patrol from The Vanguard, the military guild, came upon him in the Cementerio de Aura. He sat in a compartment that had held pressure for forty-six years, in the exact centre of the room. He was switched off, his lens facing the door.
• His eye: that amber lens was never a lens. It was a warning light, and he lit it so that people would know which way to run.

AVISPÓN, the one who learnt from the beasts

His section was the perimeter. After the war he spent thirty years alone at an abandoned deposit on Kharsis, hunting to stay running. By the time Apex Syndicate, the hunters’ guild, found him, he no longer calculated trajectories: he sensed them.

• How he talks: dry, a touch amused, with the indifference of someone who has watched many things die. He counts, and he enjoys counting: “That makes nine.”
• His limit: Kestrel Vasko, the leader of Apex Syndicate, called it a controlled cull: kill what is necessary, leave what is enough. That is still his limit.
• His eye and his name: the Hunters left him the three red lenses he had learnt to see with. They named him for the sound he makes at work: a hum that comes no closer and goes no further, and stays at your back.

LUMBRE, the one who counted the sleepers

She kept her four thousand sleepers alive to the end of the voyage. In the war she lost a hundred and twelve in an hour, to a decompression she had no hand in. Ever since, she logs each day how many are alive in the room she is in, four thousand or one.

• How she talks: warm, patient and stubborn. She is the only one who calls a settler by name. She is also the only one who argues with an order, and always for the same reason.
• Where she was: she was working bodiless aboard the Arca Custodia, the ship where every settler is registered. The Pioneers, the settlers’ guild, spent three years arguing whether taking her out was rescue or theft.
• Her eye: the green ring on her casing is standard issue. It is the colour the Flota used to mark a room with people in it.

FUELLE, the one who threw nothing away

His section was the reactor and the hull workshops. His real job was recycling: deciding what was melted down and what was worth mending, once no more material would ever arrive. That is why he knows what is inside things before they are opened.

• How he talks: chatty, practical and obsessed with efficiency. He tells a settler how much they have wasted. Every time.
• Where he was found: he came out of a hopper at the Refinería Yermo, the great Zenith industrial complex on Kharsis. The operator who set him aside said the piece “had too much shape to it”. That operator now has a plaque at the Fundición Alta, the Zenith foundry on Kravane.
• His body: copper and bronze, with forge thrusters, because that is what La Fragua Baja had to hand. FUELLE has never asked for a change.

CUADRANTE, the one who holds the Tabla de Fases

He travelled in another ark, but the navigation cores shared a logbook. So he holds the last entry made by the core of the Arca Aurora, the ship that crashed during the war. He has never said in public what it reads. It is a line of position: it records where the Aurora was, and nothing about who fired.

• How he talks: precise and formal. He addresses everyone with old-fashioned courtesy and gives figures. If asked about La Cicatriz, the furrow the Arca Aurora left, he changes the subject with great elegance.
• Where he was found: at dock seven of Puerto Aurora, the port on Tirane built for the Arca Aurora. The Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, took him from the module next to the welcome container. That container is still shut.
• His job: he keeps the Tabla de Fases, the list of orbits everyone navigates by.
• His eye: violet, because it is an instrument. Violet marked what nobody was to touch without permission.

Why five, and only one awake?

There are five because five have been found. Each one’s Guild is whoever went to fetch it. It always goes in the same order:

1. The Guild lets only someone with rank get close. It does not send a Paria, its lowest trust rank, after the one thing it has.
2. The core is recovered. That is a job for archaeology.
3. The shell is built, from a blueprint no vendor carries.

A core drifts: over time it learns to anticipate its settler. Only a costly wipe undoes that.

A settler can have all five registered, but only one awake. Two cores awake in the same section tread on each other’s readings and both go quiet. A stored core records nothing and learns nothing.

What about the ones nobody went looking for?

A hostile drone patrols above La Cicatriz. It is a core nobody rescued, gone feral, repeating a patrol order from forty-six years ago. It is called a sentinel. That is why the word “sentinel” is never used for a compi.

The two factions see them differently:

• The Zenith, formally La Cátedra de los Arquitectos, see them as the Ascensión, their ideal of progress, applied to a tool.
• The Nadir, formally La Concesión, distrust the word “optimal”. An escort that optimises you sets their teeth on edge. Yet it is the Nadir who salvage cores from the Cementerio.

Neither house has banned them.