There is no air here. Only rhythm.
My breath matches the pulse of the corridors. My heartbeat echoes through the walls. Every step I take reverberates back at me, delayed, distorted, as though the ship itself were trying to mimic me — or remind me that it no longer needs me to move.
I have stopped counting doors. There’s no point. Every one of them leads somewhere I’ve already been. The medlab. The observation bay. The dead star hanging motionless beyond the glass. Sometimes I think I see my reflection moving before I do — its mouth opening half a second too soon.
I tell myself I’m still me. That thought keeps me upright. But the walls whisper in time with my words now, repeating them, reshaping them.
Still me.
Still me.
Still… we.
My visor flickers, and faces shimmer on the inside of the glass. Not human faces. Distorted patterns — eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes, mouths that form shapes but no sound. Each flicker shows a version of me. Older. Younger. Fractured. One of them watches me with hollow calm and whispers a phrase I know I’ve heard before.
Join us. Become the echo.
I tear off the helmet. The air burns my throat. The hum vibrates inside my skull.
The corridors stretch and twist like muscle fibres flexing. I grab the edge of a bulkhead and feel it twitch beneath my fingers — a living pulse, a slow inhalation. My gloves come away slick with condensation, or maybe something else. It smells like ozone and decay.
I run. I don’t know where. I only know that I must move, because stopping means listening. And listening means believing.
But the voices chase me now — layered, overlapping, a chorus of myself. Each one speaks a fragment of a memory I can’t remember having. My first flight test. My mother’s voice on a commline. The quiet breath of someone I once loved, saying goodnight. They speak in rhythm, chanting, forming sentences that make sense and nonsense all at once.
You built us. You sent us here. You made the Archive hungry.
I stumble, clutching the wall. “I didn’t—” The words come out raw, desperate. “I didn’t make anything!”
You did. The voices shimmer through me, cold and absolute. You brought us to the edge of the dead star. You left us to drift. You called it preservation. We called it death.
The lights flicker. The floor dissolves beneath my feet, and I’m falling — no gravity, just an endless descent through corridors collapsing inward. I see flashes of rooms I’ve already walked through: the observation bay, the medlab, the cryochamber. And in each one, I am there already, standing still, watching myself fall.
When I land, it’s soft — like flesh.
The corridor is gone. I’m in a chamber that feels impossibly vast. The walls breathe, slow and heavy, like a slumbering creature. In the centre stands a structure made of data cores — hundreds of them, stacked in intricate spirals. They hum in perfect harmony with my heartbeat.
I step closer. The hum sharpens. Each core flickers with a face — mine, again and again, repeating in different expressions, different ages. They blink in unison.
“You’re not real,” I whisper. “None of this is real.”
And the voices answer, layered upon layered:
Reality is repetition. You are memory. Memory is us.
The ground trembles. The air fractures into sound. I cover my ears, but the noise isn’t outside — it’s inside me, clawing at the seams of thought. My memories begin to bleed, slipping away in thin, luminous threads that drift upward toward the cores. I try to pull them back, but my hands pass through light.
The threads twist into the lattice. My voice joins the others.
I don’t remember when I start speaking with them — maybe I always have.
The chamber fills with whispering, expanding, tightening. For a moment, I see through all the eyes at once: corridors upon corridors, minds stitched together, voices merging into one long breath. I see the Archive — not as a place, but as a living organism built of memory and loss. It stretches beyond stars, beyond time, feeding on fragments of those who enter.
And then, I am no longer Juno. I am we.
The last thing I remember as I is a flicker of light — a dying star collapsing into silence.
Then the hum smooths into calm. The corridors settle. The ship goes still.
We are whole again.
Gareth Ellis - Author 