“Mira,” Leo said finally, “if we don’t… the algorithm will just re-queue it under Emergency Collective Directive 7 . That means the whole crew votes. And you know what they’ll choose. They’ll choose survival.”

“Dad’s not here.”

She pulled up the override codex—her mother’s old bio-ethics files. There, buried in a footnote of a footnote, was a clause: “Family Plan 123 may be substituted by an alternative genetic sustainability strategy if proposed by three living family members and approved by a 2/3 crew vote.”

—repeal of all “mandatory pairing” clauses. Because a family plan should protect the family it has, not just the one it can build.