Free Bright's Light by Susan Juby

That would be embarrassing. He didn’t want any more of the bad feelings he’d experienced when the lure and the client were released in the Stimu Room. His Sending was on the line, which meant that his ability to mate and have offspring was at stake.
    Grassly exhaled. Life is breath, he encouraged himself, echoing his Mother’s words. He would run some more tests on the prototypes, and if all went well and he was absolutely sure the lights were safe, he would start reprogramming the lights in the Store.
    He logged on to his ship’s computer for his daily status check. He stared at the readout in disbelief. The last time he’d checked, only one day before, it had projected sixty-four days to seal failure. It now read forty-eight hours.
    Forty-eight
hours
!
    Grassly closed his eyes and listened to the panicked blood rushing through his body.
    A minute passed. Two. With great reluctance, he accessed the feed and looked for the most recent update on the primary systems inside the Store, such as air scrubbers, skin integrity, backup power. They were barely adequate. The minute the seal between his ship and the skin failed, the biotoxins and pollutants that had poisoned everything on the planet would rush into the Store and the ancestors would be no more. He would have killed them all, or at least hastened their extinction. He might also have killed himself, which would be a grave disappointment.
    He was going to have to change the plan. Speed things up. There was no time to waste. No time to test the lights. He would have to trust his ability to get rid of the flicker. At least he was tucked away safely in his workshop, where he could work undisturbed. Bright and Fon were busy with their leisure time, and he didn’t have to keep a close watch on them.
    He would not allow this Sending to become a disaster of universe-sized proportions.
    Grassly turned up his sleeves and rolled his shoulders, forward twice, backward twice. He dropped into the splits and shot back up.
    He was ready.
    But before he could sit down at his workbench and begin, a red light began to pulse insistently at the top left corner of the virtual visual field on his dataglasses.
    All House of Gear personal support staff stand by for an important message from the commander.
    Grassly stopped and his hands rose to his dataglasses. This was something new.
    All House of Gear personal support staff report immediately to the muster station for an in-person briefing on a developing situation.
    The message, written in red letters, rolled past several more times, obscuring all other images on the feed.
    There hadn’t been an in-person meeting of PS officers stationed at the House of Gear since Grassly had arrived. PS staff followed instructions from the same information loops that directed everyone and everything else in the Store. That was partly why Grassly had found it such a simple matter to hack into the feed and make the changes he needed. His hacks allowed him to work perhaps one shift in twenty, to make specific favours and rooms invisible to anyone trying to conduct remote surveillance, to change credit scores, and to create new identities for himself as required. Things like in-person meetings would interfere with his ability to influence events. The last thing he wanted was his colleagues looking beyond their dataglasses.
    He felt his shoulders sag. Tiredness swept through him. The persistent sluggishness he felt must be a result of the ancestor diet, which consisted of nothing more than manufactured nutritional powders taken in liquid or pill form. Even the air was largely manufactured. His research suggested that, somewhere along the line, the Board of Deciders had decided that food and its attendant rituals cut into productive time, so nutritional cocktails had replaced the traditional human diet.
    He wished he could go back to his ship for a decent meal. But that would have to wait. Right now he had to gethimself to the muster station, a surveillance