**Status.** Three story directions prepared for an owner comparison. None is adopted. Each states an actual proposed truth rather than a tease. No hour counts, room lists or cast catalogue are proposed, and nothing here establishes that any of it is enjoyable.

**The baseline all three keep.** Ordinary revival continues through the deeper play. In each direction the apparent ending makes departure *available* without spending it, and service ends only at a final departure. Ending revival earlier — a mortal phase after the apparent ending — is a separate exception the owner could choose in any of the three; it is not implied by picking one, and it is not the default here.

**Pitch.** The station squats inside an alien port authority that is still doing its job, and the job is keeping berthed ships' crews complete.

**The truth.** The older structure registers and services visiting vessels. Registration records who belongs to a vessel; while that vessel is berthed and flagged in distress, the authority maintains its complement by physically recovering an injured or dead crew member and repairing them at the berth. Nothing is copied and no snapshot is stored, so the astronaut who returns remembers everything up to the moment they died. The human station is an unlicensed salvage yard cut into the port, selling berth services it never owned.

The **pack is excluded** because registration covers persons, not cargo — the authority has no standing to move anyone's property. Return lands aboard **this ship** because registration bound the astronaut to this vessel at its berth, and a vessel cannot re-file while flagged in distress.

The **creatures** are complements whose vessels are gone. The authority still recovers and repairs them; it has nowhere to deliver them, so they remain in the station, whole and undeliverable, for as long as their registration stands. Nothing degrades and nothing is malformed by a count of returns. The **warning** is the yard crew's, once they understood.

**Escape** is repairing the ship and clearing its distress flag, which authorises departure. Service continues until the ship actually leaves.

**Early interpretation.** Infection: bodies, hostility, a quarantine warning, a fled crew.

**Two discoveries.** First, a berth cradle in use — a body being repaired, with the authority's marks and a service record naming a vessel that is not present. *Observed:* the process, mid-operation. *Supports:* recovery and repair of persons. *Leaves open:* whether the astronaut's own returns come from the same source. Second, the berth register: an addressable list of vessels still flagged, most long gone, each with a complement still maintained — including this ship. *Supports:* one mechanism covering both. *Credible rival:* the register is a historical record and something else drives the returns; it predicts that clearing a flag would change nothing, which the player can test on one berth.

**Deeper action, and what complicates it.** Releasing other berths stops further recovery of their complements. It does not remove the creatures already standing in the station — release is not a cleanup. What turns it from a checklist into a decision is a later discovery: some registrations are recent, and a complement still being maintained may be a person whose vessel left without them. Releasing that berth ends the only thing keeping them coming back.

**Two languages.** The authority's builders left the working script of a port — berths, services, permissions — which is also where the service and access marks come from. A frequent **client species** left standing filings at the berths in their own language. Both are here because this was a port: hosts and visitors wrote on the same walls. Understanding the builders' script lets the player work a fitting or read a permission; understanding the clients' filings tells them which berth belongs to which vessel, which is what makes the register navigable rather than a wall of addresses.

**A survivor.** Yeva worked berth interfaces on this side of the yard for six years. She can operate the fittings she used and knows what the yard did to the ones it stripped; she has not been into sections the yard never worked, and has never read a client filing.

**Coverage.** The authority currently covers registered complements of berthed vessels — the astronaut, because their ship is berthed and flagged. Whether a rescued survivor is covered is not established by this direction and is not settled here; existing rescue, abort and Sent outcomes stand as the working proposal.

The **warning** is human: a refuge sheltering people who cannot be found, for whom a docked ship means a manifest and a witness. The **creatures** are a containment failure of biological material the refuge was moving as part of the same programme — an accident with causes, decisions and someone responsible for routing it through a place where people lived.

**Escape** is repair and undocking; away from the wreck's infrastructure the unit is inert.

**Early interpretation.** The station is doing this, because the station is the strange thing.

**Two discoveries.** First, in the refuge's own records, a fitting list: ships modified, dates, and this ship on it. *Observed:* a document naming the vessel. *Supports:* the modification and who performed it. *Leaves open:* why this ship was chosen. Second, the berth side of the mechanism — the wreck's recovery infrastructure, with the unit's counterpart plainly part of it. *Supports:* that ship and station are two halves of one system, which is why neither explanation alone worked. *Credible rival:* the refuge fitted units to many ships and this one is unremarkable; it predicts other names on the list with no connection to the astronaut, which the list itself can settle.

**The cost of this fiction, named.** If the ship was deliberately fitted before departure, its breakdown at this station is either a large coincidence or was arranged. Either answer is a commitment: coincidence weakens the story, arrangement makes the astronaut someone's subject. This is the direction's price and it should be paid deliberately rather than left vague.

**Deeper action.** Getting the refuge's records out changes an ongoing programme and the position of the people in it. It also splits the colony's interests: those already Sent are aboard and safe, and nothing revokes that, but people still in the station are exposed by any account that names the refuge. The player decides what leaves with them and who that protects.

**Two languages.** The wreck's builders wrote the working script of their vessel, which the refuge learned enough of to strip it. The recovery units carry a **second, different alien hand** — the makers of that technology, who were not the wreck's builders; the wreck was carrying their equipment. Both are here because the refuge is living inside one species' ship and rebuilding another's machines. The builders' script gets the player through the wreck; the makers' hand is on the unit itself, and reading it is how the player learns what the unit is for, which is not what the refuge assumed.

**A survivor.** Dorn worked the refuge's fitting shop and can describe exactly what was installed and how, because he installed some of it. He does not know why particular ships were chosen; that was decided above him.

**Coverage.** The unit covers whoever is aboard a fitted ship. Survivors are not fitted, and the question of what that means for them is not settled here.

**Pitch.** The station was an illegal clinic, and its triage has never been told to stop.

**The truth.** An unlicensed clinic hulk doing work that could not be done lawfully. Its triage still runs across the whole hulk, which is what the hulk was built for: it detects a casualty, retrieves the body, repairs and revives it, and delivers the patient to their vessel of record. Nothing is stored and nothing is copied; the body is the body, so memory is continuous. Coverage is the hulk, and this direction proposes no hidden failure case and no undisclosed limit.

The **pack is excluded** because triage recovers a patient, not equipment. Delivery is to **this ship** because the vessel of record was set by the arrival manifest at the airlock, the only admission the astronaut has.

The **creatures** are former patients of the experimental work, still here. The **warning** was left by staff who fled when the wards breached.

**Escape** is discharge, which triage will not grant a patient it holds as untreated; departure follows discharge, and service ends when the ship leaves.

**Two discoveries.** First, retrieval as an observed sequence: drag routes, a cleared corridor and a receiving bay fitted for people. *Observed:* the station moving bodies. *Supports:* an active retrieval system. *Leaves open:* whether it is what returns the astronaut. Second, an admission record for the astronaut themselves, timestamped at their docking, listing their vessel of record. *Supports:* that they were admitted and are held as a patient. *Credible rival:* admission is clerical and something else revives them; it predicts that discharge would not change their returns, which is testable at the point they seek discharge.

**Deeper action.** Recovering the clinical records and getting them out changes an ongoing arrangement: the work was commissioned, and the commission is the thing the records name. Whether the player carries that out, and who is exposed by it, is the choice.

**Two languages.** The hulk's builders wrote its working script — doors, wards, service fittings. The illegal work was reverse-engineering another species' medicine, and their **clinical texts** are aboard in that species' own hand, brought here as source material. Both are present because one species' ship was being used to copy another's practice. The builders' script moves the player through the hulk; the source texts are how a procedure in a record becomes intelligible as something done to a person.

**A survivor.** Yeva was engineering staff on the hulk's power and pressure systems and can get the player through the sections she maintained. She never had ward access, believed the wards were quarantine, and has no idea what the records say.

**Coverage.** Triage covers anyone admitted through the airlock. Whether a survivor found inside was ever admitted is a real question this direction raises and does not answer.

**Endings.** Discharge and departure — complete. Continuing keeps triage running, and the deeper story is the records and who commissioned them.

**The Appropriated Unit.** *Main discovery:* the astronaut was fitted, chosen and sent. *Ongoing purpose:* deciding what evidence leaves with them and who it exposes. *Distinguishing cost:* the fitting either makes the breakdown a coincidence or makes the astronaut a subject, and one must be chosen. *Recommendation:* the warmest of the three, and the one whose deeper action is about people rather than infrastructure. *Strongest rival:* the Registry.

**The Clinic.** *Main discovery:* the creatures were patients, and someone commissioned the work. *Ongoing purpose:* assembling and extracting a record of what was done. *Distinguishing cost:* every fight risks becoming a moral event. *Recommendation:* strongest single moment of the three, when a creature becomes a name with a date. *Strongest rival:* the Registry.

**My preference is the Registry**, because its deeper action runs through the ordinary business of play rather than beside it: the player is already crossing the station, and release turns that traversal into a series of decisions about people who are still being brought back. I accept that this is the coldest of the three and that the Appropriated Unit has the more human deeper action. These are judgments with reasons, not demonstrated effects.

- Whether revival should end before final departure, creating a mortal phase after the apparent ending. Available in all three; not implied by any.

Which direction, if any, to develop; what the second language says in each; and, in the Appropriated Unit, whether the breakdown was arranged.