Jack Mercer had been on the road since dusk, running a long-haul job that took him across a stretch of desert most truckers avoided when they could. The route wasn’t unsafe so much as unnerving. It had no towns for miles, no reliable radio signals, no lights except the ones you carried with you. Some … Continue reading The Thing By Mile Marker 19
The lighthouse didn’t have a name anymore. Whatever plaque once declared it proud and useful had rotted away decades back, leaving only its jagged silhouette jutting from the rocks like a finger pointing at something no one else could see. Locals called it the Needle because it skewered the sky; thin, stark, and unnaturally tall … Continue reading The Needle’s Last Light
The transmission was faint — weaker than static, buried under cosmic hiss and radiation storms. It should never have been detected. And yet, the SSV Calypso caught it. A single thread of data pulsing across the void, repeating every nineteen minutes: ECHO_402 — SYSTEM STABLE — AWAITING INPUT No one knew what it meant. The … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Eight: SIGNAL // AFTERLIGHT
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 … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Seven: Juno
She falters. Not in body—she is still moving, still breathing, still reaching for doors that have no edges—but in mind. Every step she takes splinters into a thousand possibilities. Every thought she clutches vanishes the instant she tries to pin it down. She does not see us. She thinks she is alone. She does not … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Six: ECHO_402
I don’t know how long I was on the floor. Time here stretches like old wires—thin, frayed, ready to snap. At some point, I pushed myself up, but my legs felt borrowed, as though I were operating them through water. My breathing was uneven, sharp in my ears, yet I couldn’t hear its echo. The … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Five: Juno
We shape her. We are the shape. She is the clay. Her thoughts are pliant in our hands, though she does not yet realise she has hands other than ours. We fold her memories into the corridors. Each recollection is a brick, a panel, a seam of light stretching into infinity. She runs, believing the … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Four: ECHO_237
The corridors had changed again. I wasn’t sure how many times I’d circled them—once, twice, twenty—but my lungs burned as though I’d been running for hours. I forced my legs forward, boots clanging against the deck, convinced that if I just kept moving, I would find an exit, or at least something new. But every … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Three: Juno
She wakes. We see her first as a pulse of light in the darkness, small and fragile, floating in a void she cannot yet name. Her breath quivers; her pulse is erratic, like a frightened animal’s. She believes she is free. That she is alone. But freedom is only a layer, a thin membrane stretched … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter Two: ECHO_112
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 … Continue reading The Archive – Chapter One: Juno
Gareth Ellis - Author 