Dead Reckoning
Senna has spent fourteen years minimizing her overlay. A small indicator at the edge of vision, easily ignored. Twenty-one unspent points. A designation she earned but never acknowledged. The Integration measures her constantly, and she has responded by refusing to look. A Fringe-space story about the distance between what the system sees and what you're willing to admit.
Dead Reckoning
by Charlie Forêt
A short story set approximately 14 years after the events of Signal Zero.
©2026, by Charlie Forêt, all rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
The Null Margin was what you got when someone who loved you handed you both their best asset and their worst debt simultaneously, and then had the poor timing to die before you could argue about it.
Fourteen years after my mother first flew her through a Flux-scoured trade corridor on the edge of what most people called the Fringe and most other people called "the reasonable boundary of human habitation," the ship was still running. Barely, and with the mechanical personality of a grudge, but running. The Integration overlay had been active for about as long. Though my mother had been five years into her relationship with the system when she died, I had been significantly less committal about the whole thing.
The overlay was present. I'd acknowledged that much. It floated in the upper-right quadrant of my vision like an uninvited houseguest who had decided the question of their residency was settled and I was simply going to have to adapt. The numbers there were the same numbers that had been there last month and the month before: Integration Level 7, Designation SCOUT, and a set of attributes I'd learned not to look at too closely on the grounds that looking at them too closely felt like reading your own autopsy.
My mother had found the system meaningful. She'd invested her stat points with intention, studied the designation trees, asked the other Fringe captains about skill drops and Rift schedules. "It's a tool," she'd told me, the last time we'd disagreed about it. "You don't stop using a navigation computer just because you don't understand how it works."
She'd been right, probably. But she'd also been running cargo through the Kaspar Corridor when the Unintegrated came through it, and neither the Integration nor any of her carefully allocated attribute points had changed how that ended.
So. Not a tool I was in the habit of picking up.
...
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