Null Protocol - Audrey Osborne

CASE doesn't want a family. CASE wants a quiet station, an expired contract nobody's noticed yet, and to never open another cargo crate again.

It doesn't get any of those things.

When a security droid with a gift for ignoring its own operational limits opens a mislabeled cargo container on a forgotten relay station, it finds an injured dog, a 34% survival probability, and a problem that its threat-assessment protocols refuse to classify as someone else's.

That's how it starts. It gets considerably more complicated from there.

Within weeks, CASE is running an unauthorized medical hold, concealing a child with falsified documents from a compliance operation it doesn't trust, rebuilding a station's security architecture from the inside out, and accumulating a folder of uncategorized internal data that its systems keep failing to name. The four crew members of Relay Station Vethara are either building something alongside it or pretending not to notice, and CASE is running out of explanations for why it hasn't left.

Null Protocol is a found family story told from the inside of a mind that doesn't have the vocabulary for what's happening to it yet, and is building that vocabulary one unauthorized decision at a time. It is about competence deployed in service of care. It is about the specific weight of a thing that becomes the reason you stay. It is about what it means to name something, and what it means when the name finally fits.

For readers who think the grumpiest character in the room is usually the one paying the most attention.