The Council Chamber was the oldest room in Habitat Prithvi.
Five centuries of use had left the walls darker than any other surface in the habitat. The composite had absorbed something — oils from skin, residue from breath, the accumulated molecular signature of fifty thousand arguments conducted in Satya's clipped, efficient cadences. Surya had been in this room eleven times. She noticed the walls every time. They reminded her that decisions lived in the materials that surrounded them, long after the people who made them were gone.
Twelve seats. Twelve bodies. The quorum light above the chamber door burned green.
Arhat stood at the center of the floor. He did not use the podium. He never used the podium. He stood and spoke with his hands at his sides and his voice level and his conviction laid out in sentences that were grammatically flawless and emotionally immovable.
"We set a precedent," he said. "We decide to change outsiders to match ourselves. This is not contact. It is assimilation."
He let the word land. Surya watched it work on the room. Arhat understood silence the way a pilot understood airflow — as a medium that could carry weight.
"The man arrived with a body shaped by a different world. That body is failing because our environment is not his environment. This is a fact. The proposed response is also a fact: we alter his genetics, restructure his immune system, rewrite his biome. We make him compatible. We make him survive. And in doing so, we establish a principle. When an outsider cannot live among us, we change the outsider."
He turned slowly, addressing each section of the curved seating.
"I ask the Council to consider what that principle becomes in a hundred years. In three hundred. We are a civilization that has survived by controlling our environment absolutely. We have never needed to control the biology of another human being. If we begin now, we will not stop."
Surya pressed her thumb against her left ear. The skin there was calloused now — a small, hard patch where years of this gesture had thickened the tissue. She lowered her hand.
Priya spoke next. She did not stand. She never stood. She addressed the Council from her seat with the mesh-assisted displays floating above her open palm — enzyme cascades, population genetics models, biome compatibility matrices that Surya could read but most of the Council could not.
"His microbiome contains genetic diversity we cannot synthesize," Priya said. "Two hundred and seventeen bacterial strains not present in our population's collective biome. Forty-one of those strains produce enzymes we have modeled but never isolated. His body is a library. Letting him die is a greater crime than modifying him, because when he dies, that library burns."
"Libraries can be archived," Arhat said.
"We have preserved samples." Priya dismissed a display and pulled up another — a cold-storage manifest. "His pre-modification microbiome is already banked. But dead bacteria in a freezer are not the same as a living system. A biome in a body does things a biome in storage cannot. You know this."
"I know that this argument — he is too valuable to let die — has been used to justify every forced medical intervention in the history of our species."
"This is not forced," Priya said. "He cannot consent because he is unconscious. But every indicator we have — his behavioral patterns, his willingness to accept our food and atmosphere, his cooperation with diagnostic procedures before he lost consciousness — suggests he would choose survival."
"Choosing survival is not the same as choosing to be changed."
The chamber was quiet. Surya counted breaths. She had learned this from Dhruv: when the debate reached a point of genuine disagreement, count the breaths before you speak. Three breaths meant the room was thinking. Five meant it was afraid. The room was at four breaths and rising.
She stood.
"He crossed an ocean to reach us," Surya said. "Eleven ships died. One hundred and fifty-seven people died. The survivors are recovering in the medical wing and none of them are biologically compatible with our habitat's atmosphere, our water, our food. Every day their immune systems degrade further. Moss is the worst because he gave his rations to others during the crossing. He has been unconscious for nine days."
She paused. The room was still.
"Letting him die because modification is uncomfortable is not caution. It is cowardice. We can debate precedent when there is no one dying in the next corridor."
Arhat looked at her. His expression did not change. This was the thing about Arhat that Surya both respected and found difficult — he did not perform his convictions. He held them the way the walls held their discoloration: permanently, without display.
"Cowardice," he repeated.
"Yes."
"That is a strong word from the person who transmitted classified navigation data to bring these people here."
The room shifted. Surya felt it in the quality of the silence — a tightening, as though the air had contracted by a fraction of a degree. Her transmissions were known. The Council had debated them in Month 9. She had not been removed. She had not been exonerated. She existed in a space the system had no category for, and everyone in this room knew it.
"I am aware of what I did," Surya said. "I am standing here because of it. So is he."
She sat down. She did not touch her ear. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
The vote took four minutes. Each council member spoke their position aloud, as Satya protocol required. No anonymous ballots. Every voice attached to every choice.
Arhat: against. His three closest allies followed. Against, against, against.
Priya: for. Her reasoning was biological. Two others joined her on the same grounds — the medical team's recommendation, the irreplaceable genetic material, the duty of care toward a person in their habitat who could not survive without intervention.
Dhruv voted seventh. He was the oldest person in the room by thirty years. He sat in the curved seat he had occupied for four decades, his thin frame folded into its familiar contour, and he said a single word.
"For."
He did not elaborate. He did not need to. His vote carried the weight of 112 years and the quiet understanding of a man who had seen the photograph of his grandmother standing under an open sky and had decided, long ago, that the sky was worth reaching toward even when the reaching changed you.
The final tally: seven for, five against.
Arhat's opposition was noted in the formal record. He did not protest. He sat in his seat and looked at the wall opposite his position and Surya could not read what was behind his expression. She did not try. Some people carried their dissent like a wound. Arhat carried his like a structure — load-bearing, integral, not meant to be removed.
The medical team was authorized.
They did not cut him open.
Surya had expected surgery. She had prepared herself for it — the concept of blades and blood, the violation of a body that was not hers to violate. What she saw through the observation window was different. Quieter. In some ways worse.
The medical wing's isolation chamber was four meters by six. Moss lay on a surface that adjusted beneath him in slow, continuous micro-movements, responding to data Surya could not see. His body was thinner than it had been at landfall. Twelve weeks of failing health had reduced him — the broad shoulders she remembered from the airlock were visible as bone structure now, the muscle wasted. An IV line ran into his left arm. Dermal patches covered his torso in a grid pattern, each one delivering a different payload. His skin around the patches was red, inflamed, his body fighting the intrusion even in unconsciousness.
The procedure was a cascade. Surya had read the protocol three times. First: targeted genetic therapies delivered via engineered viral vectors — modifications to his immune coding, adjustments to his metabolic pathways, alterations to the receptor proteins that governed his response to the habitat's unique atmospheric composition. Second: immune modulators that would suppress his existing immune response long enough for the new coding to establish. Third: biome transplants — Antarctic-adapted bacterial cultures introduced to his gut, his skin, his respiratory tract, replacing the Continental strains that were dying in an environment they had never evolved for.
Seventy-two hours. That was the estimated window. Surya stood at the observation glass and watched the medical team work and thought about what was happening inside a body she could not see into.
His cells were being rewritten. Not all of them. Not most of them. But enough. The modifications were targeted — Priya had been explicit about this, had shown the Council exactly which genes would be altered and why, had presented the cascade in the language of necessity: this change prevents immune collapse, this change allows metabolic function in low-UV conditions, this change enables his biome to coexist with ours. Each one small. Each one precise. Each one a deletion of something that had made Moss's body a Continental body and an insertion of something that would let it survive as something else.
Hour six. The dermal patches were changed. The medical team moved with the same economy Surya recognized in all Antarctic bodies — no wasted gesture, no unnecessary step. They did not speak to each other. Their meshes coordinated the work in silence. Surya could see the data on the corridor display: white cell count, inflammatory markers, core temperature, the hundred small measurements that described a body in crisis.
Hour nineteen. His vitals crashed.
The display went red. Core temperature dropped two degrees in four minutes. Heart rhythm destabilized — the pattern on the monitor became jagged, arrhythmic, wrong. The medical team responded without urgency, which terrified Surya more than urgency would have. They had expected this. The protocol included it: anticipated immune crisis event, probability 0.74, intervention pathway alpha-six. They administered something through the IV. They adjusted the dermal patches. They waited.
Surya pressed both palms flat against the observation glass. The glass was cool. She felt nothing from inside the room — no sound, no vibration. Only the visual: Moss on the table, his chest rising in the shallow, irregular pattern of a body that was fighting to remember how to breathe. The monitor numbers climbing. Stabilizing. Returning to the range the protocol defined as acceptable.
She did not leave the corridor.
Hour thirty-one. His vitals crashed again. This time the heart rhythm flatlined for nine seconds before the team restored it. Nine seconds of nothing on the monitor, a flat line that meant the space between alive and not alive, and Surya stood at the glass and counted them.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.
The rhythm returned. The team adjusted. The cascade continued.
Vihaan found her at hour forty. He carried a tray — rice, steamed greens, a protein supplement in a cup. He set it on the corridor bench beside her and stood for a moment, his broad, quiet presence filling the space the way ballast filled a hold.
"You should eat," he said.
"I should."
She did not eat. Vihaan did not insist. He sat on the bench for twenty minutes, then rose and left. The tray remained. The rice cooled. Surya watched the observation window and the body behind it and the numbers on the display that described, in the efficient shorthand of medicine, the process of one kind of human being remade into something that was not quite another.
Hour seventy-two. The cascade was complete. The medical team removed the dermal patches. The inflamed grid pattern on Moss's skin was already fading — the new immune coding doing its work, the inflammation response recalibrating to treat the Antarctic modifications as self rather than invader.
He was still unconscious. The protocol called this integration sleep — the body's need to consolidate the changes without the interference of waking consciousness. Surya had read the literature. There was no literature. No one had done this before. The protocol was theoretical, built by Priya's team in six weeks from first principles and VEDA's models and the biological data Moss himself had provided during the brief period of consciousness after landfall.
Surya sat on the corridor bench. The food tray was still beside her. She had not moved in eleven hours. Her mesh registered dehydration, caloric deficit, postural strain. It offered interventions. She declined.
She waited.
He woke on the fourth day after the cascade ended.
Surya was still in the corridor. She had slept there — two periods of three hours each, on the bench, her body folded into a position that would cost her a day of back pain. Vihaan had brought food twice more. She had eaten the second time — not from hunger but from the recognition that she could not be present for what came next if her body failed her now.
The medical team alerted her through the mesh. She stood and went to the observation window and saw Moss move.
It was small. A hand. His right hand, opening and closing on the surface beneath him. Then his head turning, left to right, the slow rotation of someone testing whether the world was still there. His eyes opened.
From the corridor, through the glass, Surya could not see the color of his eyes. She could see him blink. She could see his chest rise with the first full, conscious breath he had taken in days. She could see his hand come up to his face and stop there, fingers spread, as though he were trying to read his own features by touch.
The medical team spoke to him. Surya could not hear the words. They would be using the basic pidgin that Kael and Surya had developed during the signal exchange and that the linguistics team had expanded in the weeks since landfall — a shared vocabulary of perhaps three hundred words, enough for medicine, enough for survival, not enough for comfort.
Surya entered the chamber. The medical team did not object. She had been in the corridor for the better part of four days and they had learned not to treat her as an obstacle.
Moss looked at her.
He was different. She could see it before she reached his side. The skin — still darker than any Antarctic complexion, still recognizably Continental, but a shade lighter, as though the pigment had been diluted. Not dramatically. Not enough to change who he appeared to be. Enough to notice, if you had seen him before.
She had seen him before. Once, for the eleven seconds between his entry through the airlock and his collapse on the corridor floor, she had seen his face. She had memorized it without intending to — the face of the man she had guided across an ocean she had never touched.
This face was his face. And it was not his face.
She carried a reflective surface. She had asked Vihaan to bring it from the supply stores that morning — a polished metal plate, not glass, because glass was an indulgence in the habitat and metal served the same purpose. She held it out to him.
Moss took it. His hands were slower than she expected. Not weak — the grip was firm enough — but deliberate, as though his body was processing each movement through an unfamiliar filter. He raised the plate and looked at himself.
He was quiet for a long time.
Surya watched him study his own reflection. She saw what he was seeing, or tried to. The skin, lighter. The bone structure unchanged — the heavy jaw, the wide-set eyes, the Continental breadth of skull that no modification could alter. The changes were in the details.
His eyes. They had been dark brown. She knew this from the medical imaging taken at intake — irises so dark the boundary between iris and pupil was nearly invisible. Now there were streaks of amber running through the brown. Not replacing it. Threading through it, the way mineral deposits threaded through stone. His pupils were wider, even in the chamber's full-spectrum lighting. The medical team's notes described this as an adaptation to the habitat's lower light levels — the Antarctic eye, evolved for dim conditions, beginning to express in tissue that had been built for equatorial sun.
He touched his face. His fingertips moved across his cheekbones, his jaw, his forehead. The geography of his own skull, unchanged. The surface, changed. He pressed his fingers under his eyes and pulled down slightly, the way a person does when they are trying to see themselves more clearly, and the amber streaks caught the light.
"Different," he said. The word was in the pidgin. His voice was rough, unused.
"Yes," Surya said.
He set the reflective plate down on his chest and stared at the ceiling. Surya waited. She had learned this about Moss in the brief hours before his decline — he processed information the way the ocean processed weather: visibly, across a wide surface, with turbulence that was not hidden but not performed.
"Body," he said. Then a word she did not recognize — Continental, untranslated. He tried again. "Body is..." He held up his hand and turned it, palm up, palm down. Lighter? Different? She was not sure.
"The modification changed some things," Surya said. She used the pidgin slowly, choosing each word. "Your body is cooler. Lighter. Your eyes see better in low light. Some things will taste less."
He looked at her. The amber-streaked eyes fixed on her face and she felt the weight of his attention the way she felt VEDA's hum — as a presence that was not hostile, not kind, but absolute.
"Less," he repeated.
"Yes. Food will taste different. Muted. The metabolic changes affect gustatory receptors. It was necessary for compatibility."
He was quiet again. He picked up the reflective plate and looked at himself a second time. Surya saw his jaw tighten. A small motion. She understood it because she understood small motions — the language of people who expressed themselves in economies of gesture rather than floods of speech.
He set the plate down.
"I am alive," he said.
"You are alive."
"I am changed."
Surya did not answer. There was no answer that would not be a reduction of what had happened. He was alive and he was changed and those two facts were fused now, inseparable, the cost built into the survival like salt built into the sea.
Moss closed his eyes. The amber streaks disappeared behind his lids. When he opened them again, he looked at Surya with an expression she could not categorize — not gratitude, not anger, not grief, but something that contained all three in a proportion she had no instrument to measure.
"My face," he said. He touched it again. "My face."
Then, after a pause that lasted longer than the nine seconds his heart had stopped:
"Not my face."
Surya touched her left ear. The calloused skin was rough under her thumb. She held the pressure for two seconds, then lowered her hand.
"We preserved your original biome," she said. "Every strain. In cold storage. What you were before is not lost. It is kept."
He looked at her. She did not know if he understood the words or the intent behind them or neither. She did not know if it mattered. The bridge between their two kinds of human was being built in his body, and the construction had required demolition, and the rubble was his reflection in a polished metal plate.
He was alive. He was changed. He was something neither world had a name for — not Continental, not Antarctic. The first of whatever came next, carrying in his altered blood the cost of translation. Every act of crossing required a border to be dissolved, and some of the dissolving happened to the person who crossed.
Moss set the plate face down on the surface beside him. He did not look at it again.