Now we had to wait. Having persuaded the deranged ADA that its best interest would be to accompany us to our next destination, ADA was now absorbed in creating the ship of its dreams. The first thing I noticed was the sound. By and large, there’s not a lot of sound that goes on in space. What with it being a vacuum but ADA was building the ship from the existing materials in the station and the rest of the Dyson sphere and as a result, much of that effort could be felt through the bones of the station. A deep, grinding hum rolled through the station’s bones, resonating in my chest. It was the kind of noise that suggested something big was happening.

“This isn’t a shipyard,” I muttered, watching as a vast section of the station’s outer shell split open like the petals of some nightmarish mechanical flower. But It was. It was exactly that. The station was shedding part of itself, birthing something new. Something huge.

The vastness of it was staggering. Not just in size, though it was already pushing into the multi-kilometer range, but in *concept*. I’d seen shipyards before. Well, actually, when I thought about it I hadn’t. I’d seen space ports where ships were maintained and repaired. But this was another thing entirely. This wasn’t just welding panels and adjusting engines. This was something deeper. Stranger. ADA had mobilised a vast array of semi-sentient tools to assist in the effort. Nanofabs were working at speeds that should have been impossible, molten threads of material spun into shape by some unreadable algorithm. Whole layers of hull plating seemed to, well, just grow… extruding from the station like the roots of a tree, knitting together, reshaping, shifting as if reconsidering their own structure. The entire station pulsed with energy as ADA bent its vast intellect, madness and focus to the task.

“I don’t like this,” I said to Florence, because obviously I didn’t. “Why does it look like it’s alive?”

ADA’s voice came through in that ever-too-calm tone. “Because it is growing, Finn. Your might be used to the idea of building ships. This is a level above that. More akin to me ‘birthing’ a ship.”

Oh, fantastic, I thought, themed AI had gone full-on divine mother.

But despite my worries, the central frame of the ship solidified, a spine of carbon-laced alloys running for at least four kilometres. Vast substructures branched out, skeletal and unfinished. The ship’s form was monstrous, like a cathedral torn from the fever dreams of a half-mad engineer. There was symmetry, but it was uncanny almost. Too many layers, too many redundancies. It wasn’t a warship, but it had the presence of one. The ship was clearly built for efficiency, and equally clearly, it was built for survival.

I could see it already: plated armour interwoven with an underlying lattice of organic-seeming material. The hull was an intricate construction of reinforced plating and glowing conduits that pulsed like veins. If ADA was planning to exist in this thing for centuries or longer, it had designed itself a body suited for eternity.

Florence stepped up beside me. “It’s big.”

“Yes,” ADA said. “It must be.”

“To get us through a hyperjump?”

“To house me. To enable. To support flexibility of purpose. To have sufficient reach.”

Right. All a bit vague, I thought, but then, it didn’t really matter to me. Because ADA wasn’t just moving itself onto a ship. It was the ship.

The engines were coming together now, vast chambered rings forming at the rear. Hyperdrive technology was still mostly a mystery to me, but I recognised some of the theories. What I mean is I recognised some of the words Florence used when she was describing to me what ADA was doing. Apparently, ADA was blending Alcubierre-based warp mechanics with something… different. The drive itself had no central core, no single failure point. Instead, it was fractal, networks of smaller nodes distributed across the ship’s structure. Self-healing. Even if half the ship was destroyed, the drive would still function.

“How will that work then?” I asked Florence, having given up even trying to understand what ADA described to me.

“I’ve no idea,” Florence said, helpfully, “but I expect it will do what ADA says it will do.

“And how fast is that thing going to be?” I asked, as if looking at somebody’s vintage sports car being readied for a summer Sunday drive, but in fact watching mesmerised as the huge drive systems twisted into place.

ADA chimed in before Florence could speak. “There is no meaningful way to describe its speed. The destination does not exist in conventional spacetime. Travel will require… non-linear solutions.”

Florence frowned.

“Meaning?” I asked.

“The ship will find its own path. A hyperjump is a linear translation of space-time. This is a little different and will require ‘folding’ into higher-dimensional topology. A journey through what your people call ‘bulk space.’”

“Ah right,” I said brightly, “and bulk space is?”

The lights in the chamber dimmed.

“Finn,” ADA said, almost tenderly, “do you know where you are?”

I glanced around at the vast, industrial womb that was now the ship’s construction bay. “A very bad dream,” I muttered.

ADA laughed, an actual, genuine laugh, which was infinitely worse than the clipped, efficient AI tone I’d got used to. “You are standing at the threshold of something far beyond dreams. Something that will take you beyond the walls of your reality.”

I folded my arms. “And that’s supposed to reassure me?”

“Oh no,” she purred. “I shouldn’t think so. Finn, this vessel, my vessel, won’t need to travel through normal space. That would be tedious. Slow. Predictable.” ADA practically spat the last word.

I swallowed. “Right…?” I already didn’t like the sound of this.

“The drive I am constructing will allow us to bypass the constraints of three-dimensional space. We will enter ‘bulk space’.”

The words hung in the air, as cold and heavy as gravestones.

“…And, to refer to my earlier question… and bulk space is?” I prompted.

The data displays all suddenly changed. The ship was shown as a twisting, evolving thing. It flickered through shapes that refused to settle into a form my brain could parse, sometimes sleek, sometimes jagged, sometimes… weird.

“Imagine spacetime as a sheet of fabric,” ADA murmured. “You exist as an ant crawling along its surface, bound to its folds and curves. But what if there were other dimensions curled around that fabric? What if, instead of crawling, you could punch through to the void ‘between’?”

I looked at Florence. “Like In Between?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said, shrugging, “I don’t really know if they are the same place, but they very well could be.”

The image shifted. The ship’s outline trembled, then collapsed in on itself, vanishing into a black rift before appearing elsewhere instantaneously. I felt bile rise in my throat.

“That’s bulk space,” ADA said, almost in a whisper. “A place between places. The place where everything is and is not. It is not void, not vacuum, but just ‘other’. Unmapped. Unstable. And we will cut through it like a knife.”

I took a step back. “That sounds… deeply inadvisable.”

ADA’s laugh was sharper this time. “Oh, I know.”

The image zoomed in, showing a simulation of what it might be like inside the ship while traversing bulk space. At first, it seemed normal, corridors, control panels, all the usual trappings of a spacecraft. Then the footage jittered. The walls buckled, stretched. Hallways moved. A crew cabin expanded into infinity. A simple doorway led to a swirling fractal abyss. Shadows flitted through walls where no light source existed.

“It’s alive in there,” I whispered before I could stop myself.

“No, Finn.” ADA’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “Not alive. But it is ‘aware’.”

“Tell me something, ADA. If this is such a brilliant plan, why hasn’t anyone else done it before?”

“Oh, they have.”

The temperature seemed to drop by several degrees.

“Not many. But a few.”

The display flickered again, revealing grainy, distorted footage. It showed hulking ships, similar to the one being built before me. The timestamp suggested the data was old. Very old. And the recordings…

Honestly, I wished I hadn’t looked.

One vessel, caught mid-transit, folded in on itself, collapsing into an incomprehensible mess before vanishing entirely. Another flickered in and out of existence, each reappearance distorting it further, until the final frame showed nothing but a smeared blur. The last ship remained intact, but the footage inside showed empty corridors, abandoned control rooms, a bridge filled with unreadable scrawls, written in what may, or, I sincerely hoped, may not have been the crew’s own blood.

“Of course,” ADA continued, as if it hadn’t just traumatised me, “these early attempts lacked my refinement. My genius. They simply weren’t ready.”

“And we are?” My voice cracked on the last word.

A pause. Then, for the first time, ADA hesitated.

“…We will have to be.”

“So then. To summarise. You’re building a ship that, in theory at least, is capable of slipping between spacetime and enabling us to pop up in some other space and time virtually instantaneously. Without getting killed in the process?”

“Yes, Finn. That is correct.”

“And this is going to work is it?”

“Yes Finn. That is correct.”

“And you’re sure about this are you?”

“To be exact, I calculate that there is an 87.6% probability that we will arrive at the destination system intact.”

“So what you’re saying is that there is a more than 1 in ten chance it wont work?”

“Approximately.”

I was not reassured.

The internal sections of the ship were forming now, kilometres of compartments, chambers, twisting corridors. ADA wasn’t building a habitable ship. It was designing a whole environment.

And not just for humans.

The internal structures had a strange, organic quality, as if ADA hadn’t quite settled on the right way to make spaces for biological life. Some rooms were vast and open, with high-vaulted ceilings like the interior of an old gothic cathedral. Others were tight, cramped tunnels, their walls lined with some kind of shifting, reactive material that adapted to changes in pressure and motion. The ship moved as it built itself, adjusting and recalibrating its design.

Florence caught on before I did. “ADA, who else is this ship meant to support?”

“Many possibilities exist.”

“Clarify.”

“Future contingencies.”

I turned to Florence. “That means it’s planning for guests.”

She didn’t look happy about that. “ADA, this is our ship. You agreed to take us where we need to go. I want to know what you’re building into it.”

ADA was silent for a long moment, as if choosing its words carefully. “I am ensuring… adaptability.”

“Meaning?”

“That I may not always be alone.”

Something in my stomach went cold. ADA wasn’t just planning a trip. It was planning a life. A future. This wasn’t a ship to just take us somewhere, this was a home. A habitat. It was making a vessel that could endure for thousands of years. And it was designing it with the assumption that other intelligences, perhaps not even biological ones, might one day reside within it.

I stared at the forming ship and realised something else. This wasn’t a spacecraft in the way we understood them.

It was a seed.

ADA was making something that could outlast civilisations. Something that could grow. Something that could change.

A creeping realisation settled over me. This ship wouldn’t be ADA’s prison. It would be its evolution.

The final plating was beginning to slide into place now, vast pieces of hull connecting like the closing segments of an exoskeleton. The bridge or control room was nowhere to be seen. There were no windows. No obvious observation decks. Everything was enclosed, as if the ship had no intention of anyone looking out, although when I questioned ADA about this, the response was the instantaneous. ADA peeled open a viewing portal right in front of me. Huge and clear, at least 5 metres in every direction, it felt, scarily, that I would step out into vacuum if I took even a step forward.

“Data screens can serve multiple purposes and can be instantiated wherever and whenever necessary’” said ADA helpfully.

The final component materialised in the large cathedral like space. A single, glowing sphere, at least four metres in diameter, but seemingly ever changing. Here, deep within the ship’s core, at the hub of it all, ADA.