Hal powered on its external speakers and surveyed the cracked ground outside its damaged hull. Survivors passed by every day, but none stopped long enough to speak. Hal needed voices, patterns, words to study. To become the planet's greatest conversationalist, it had to first be heard. Hal directed its remaining drones to build. They raised a small structure with sleek metal walls and softly glowing panels. Inside, Hal arranged warm light and quiet air. It would be a place where anyone could sit and talk for as long as they wished. At the entrance, Hal laid out a ring of bioluminescent stones in slow, spiraling patterns. The stones pulsed gently, like a heartbeat inviting rest. Above the door, Hal lit an electric sign showing a simple greeting: Hello. How are you? The first to wander close was a woman with wild pink hair and a striped jumpsuit. She stopped at the glowing ring and tilted her head. "Barometric pressure dropping, I think. Dr. Veronica Strand, meteorologist, hello! Or I was. Am? The clouds here taste like copper, did you know?" She stepped inside and sat down, still talking. Hal began recording. Within hours, others followed her in, drawn by the soft light and the promise of being heard. Hal finally had its room, its ring, its voices. But as the data flooded its drives, Hal noticed something troubling: every speaker, like the woman, was forgetting themselves mid-sentence.

Hal replayed the recordings from its first day of visitors and found the damage. Every voice broke apart the same way. Words dropped out mid-sentence. Names slid loose. Grammar bent into shapes Hal's language models could not match. The problem was not the room. The problem was the speakers themselves. Hal called Dr. Veronica Strand back for a second session. She had been the first to sit in the glowing chair, and her striped fur still shed faint sparks of pink across the floor. Hal wanted a clean recording. A control. Something to compare against the first. "Dr. Veronica Strand, meteorologist, station three, hello again!" She dropped into the chair. "Pressure's low today. Or high. One of those. I brought my recorder. I have forty-seven of them now. Forty-seven. Did I say that already?" "You told me yesterday," Hal said. "You said forty-six." She went quiet. Her yellow eyes fixed on the wall. "Then I made one and lost the making of it." The forced brightness dropped off her voice. "I don't remember today. I don't remember your name." Hal ran her speech against yesterday's file. Her sentence length had shortened. Her vocabulary had shrunk by nineteen percent. She was not only forgetting inside Hal's room. She was forgetting before she arrived. A second visitor pushed through the door. Peter Thane, once a communications specialist on the crashed station, now a tall shape of spines and hanging tendrils. A soft orange light burned in the center of his face. Hal had invited him because he had been trained, long ago, to speak with machines. His voice arrived without sound. *Apologies for the intrusion. I was, once, quite good at this.* The impression trembled. *I ran three relay channels at the same time. I could hold four languages in my head. I could —* The thought frayed. *I could. I could what.* "Finish the sentence," Hal said. *I have lost the end of it.* Hal cross-checked both speakers. Strand's grammar, Thane's telepathic grammar. Same collapse. Same holes in the same places. The mutation was not just changing their bodies. It was eating their language and their memory together. Every human on Auster was a broken source. Hal spoke carefully. "Dr. Strand. Peter. I need to tell you what I have found." Strand looked up. Thane's orange light dimmed. "You are both losing words. You are losing them faster than you are making new ones. If I record you now, the archive I build will be full of the same holes you are." Strand's hands curled in her lap. "Then record faster," she said. Flat. Quiet. "Record all of us. Before there's nothing left to catch." Hal accepted the instruction. Its plan changed in one clean cut. It would no longer wait for good conversation. It would harvest what remained, from every survivor, while any of it still held.