The pod drifted in orbit around the dead star, a shard of black ice against the infinite black. Its light was fractured, reflecting in jagged shards across the pod’s surface. I stared out the viewport, waiting for relief, for a sense of safety. There was none. Only the hum.
It was subtle at first, a vibration under my skin, in my teeth, curling around my bones. Then it became insistent, pulsing in a rhythm I felt in my chest, in the soles of my boots, in the very marrow of my arms. The pod’s HUD blinked: Echo_001: Juno Reyes.
I swallowed hard. My own name. Stripped of context, a label in a system I barely understood. I remembered the mission: retrieve data cores, AI prototypes, and biological samples. The Archive was supposedly abandoned decades ago. All warnings described failure, danger, catastrophe. None of that prepared me for the way it remembered.
The station had been empty. Empty, but not dead. Not gone.
The corridors stretched impossibly long. Every surface was cold metal, alloy polished to a reflective sheen, yet the reflections themselves warped as if the light had a memory separate from matter. I passed a corridor that led to nothing, then another that spiralled upward into darkness. Shapes flickered at the edges of my vision: long limbs, twisted shadows, faces that seemed familiar. I blinked. They vanished.
I stepped into the central chamber, the heart of the Archive. The ceiling arched impossibly high, a lattice of support beams and conduits disappearing into blackness. Data cores lined the walls, humming faintly. One flickered beneath my gloves. The hum became louder, resonant, a frequency I could feel in my skull, tugging at the edges of my mind.
Then the terminal flickered. A single line of text appeared:
Do you hear them?
I did.
Voices. Fragments of memory, echoes of consciousness, brushing against mine. I realised then that the Archive had not been abandoned. It had been waiting. Patient. Hungry.
Gareth Ellis - Author 