Leo wiped the grease from his hands onto his worn jumpsuit as he entered the Imperial Station’s grand dining hall. The message had been clear. All station personnel, level three, mess hall, 1,800 hours. What it hadn’t mentioned was that tonight the hall would be filled with nobles, dignitaries, and officers celebrating the emperor’s arrival.

The human mechanic froze at the entrance, suddenly aware that his oil stained clothes and calloused hands marked him as distinctly out of place among the glittering assembly. But hunger gnawed at his stomach, and he’d worked a double shift in the engine rooms. He spotted an empty seat at a corner table, partially hidden by a decorative pillar, and made his way toward it.

He didn’t notice the golden insignia on the tablecloth. He didn’t see the guards stationed at a respectful distance. He only saw an empty chair and collapsed into it with a grateful sigh. “You’re not supposed to be here,” a soft voice said from across the table. Leo’s head snapped up. A young woman sat in a hovering chair that hummed with anti-gravity technology far beyond standard issue.

Her dark hair was woven with threads of silver, and her green eyes studied him with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. She wore a simple white gown, but the fabric shimmerred with embedded quantum threads that marked it as worth more than Leo earned in a year. I Leo started to stand, but she raised a hand. Stay, please.

It’s been 3 hours of people bowing and scraping. You’re the first person who’s looked at me like I’m just a person. Leo hesitated, then slowly sat back down. I’m Leo. I work in the lower engine sectors. I think I got the wrong message about dinner. Anna, she replied. And you’re at the right place. Just the wrong table.

This one’s reserved for the emperor’s family. She gestured to herself with a ry smile. population one. I should really do you know anything about neural interfaces? Anna interrupted, leaning forward slightly, her hover chair adjusted automatically, maintaining the perfect angle. The question caught Leo offg guard. I Yeah, actually I work on the cybernetic integration systems for the station’s mechanical arms.

Why? Anna’s eyes lit up with an intensity that made Leo forget about the guards, the nobles, and his grease stained clothes. Because I’ve had 47 specialists from 14 different worlds tell me that nothing can be done about my condition. The racing accident damaged my neural pathways too severely. The chair is as good as it gets.

She said it matterof factly, but Leo heard the frustration underneath. He’d heard that tone before. in his own voice when experts told him a problem was unsolvable. Can I ask what specifically they said was damaged? For the next 20 minutes, Anna explained her condition while Leo listened, occasionally asking technical questions that made the guard shift uncomfortably around them.

The dinner continued, but their corner seemed to exist in its own bubble. The problem, Leo said finally, is that they’re thinking about it wrong. They’re trying to bridge the gap with technology that mimics the neural pathways. But human engineers, we learned something different when we started colonizing lowgravity moons. What’s that? Sometimes you don’t fix the bridge.

You change how you cross the river. Leo grabbed a napkin and started sketching. Look, your C4 through C7 vertebrae are damaged, right? And they’ve tried to create artificial neural connections. But what if instead of trying to send signals the old way, we reroute them? Use your intact neural pathways, the ones for your arms and upper body, and create a translator system.

Anna stared at the napkin, her eyes moving across Leo’s crude diagrams. A translator? Like learning a new language? Your brain wants to say, “Move legs.” The translator intercepts that intention from your functional pathways and converts it into signals that bypass the damaged area entirely. It’s how we control the exoders in zerog intentionbased rather than direct neural firing.

That’s Anna’s voice caught. That’s actually brilliant. Why didn’t any of the specialists? Because they’re specialists, Leo said with a shrug. They know everything about neurology or everything about cybernetics. But humans, we’re generalists. We’re the ones who take the servo system from a cargo loader and jury rig it to fix a broken airlock.

We steal ideas from everywhere. Anna was quiet for a long moment. Then she smiled. A real smile that transformed her entire face. Leo, the mechanic who sat at the wrong table. How would you like a job? I have a job. A better job. As my personal engineer, I’ll get you access to any technology you need, any resources.

If this works, if it works, Leo interrupted. You’re going to have to promise me something. What? That you’ll teach me the right way to eat with all these fancy forks. because if I’m going to be working with the emperor’s daughter, I should probably learn which fork is for salad.” Anna laughed, a genuine, delighted sound that made several nobles turn their heads.

“Deal, though, I should warn you, my father is going to have you thoroughly investigated.” “Will he find anything interesting?” “Probably just a lot of parking violations and a tendency to solve problems that everyone says are unsolvable.” She extended her hand across the table. Partners. Leo shook it, his grease stained fingers clasping her delicate hand.

Partners. Across the dining hall, the emperor watched his daughter laugh for the first time in years. He turned to his adviser and said, “Find out everything about that mechanic, and don’t you dare reassign him. Sometimes the wrong table is exactly where you need to