Hours passed in the red twilight. The ship was a cage. The air was breathable but thin, recycled to the bare minimum. A heating coil in the wall would glow a dull orange only when the cold became a real threat, then fade back to black. It was not care. It was maintenance.

Aris fought back the only way she knew how. With science and reason. She tried to establish a baseline, to find a pattern in the ghost’s behavior.

Her gloved knuckles rapped against the interior hull in a slow, deliberate rhythm. A sequence of prime numbers. A universal greeting.

Two. Three. Five. Seven.

The signal remained silent.

She recited mission data, her voice flat and even. “Orbital inclination is 25.19 degrees. Current velocity is 11.4 kilometers per second.” She was a scientist trying to classify the predator that had her in its jaws.

The signal did not respond to her data. It did not care about her numbers.

Instead, it probed.

Without warning, the sound of her daughter laughing filled her helmet.

It was a perfect, crystal-clear memory from a day at the beach six years ago. The bright, unburdened sound of a child’s joy. It wasn’t a recording. It was a memory, pulled directly from her mind and played back with flawless fidelity.

The sound was so real, so pure in the red gloom, that Aris choked on a sob. Her hand flew to her visor, as if she could wipe the sound away.

The laughter stopped. The signal had found its data point. It had learned a new way to get a reaction. It had found her memories.

The intrusions became a dissection. The signal had learned that emotion was the data it wanted, and her mind was a library of pain.

The memory didn’t ask permission. It just arrived. The scent of coffee, the hard morning light in their kitchen. The sound of her husband’s voice, distant and final over the phone. “I just don’t think I can do this anymore, Aris.”

It wasn’t his words that hurt. It was the silence that followed. A dead space on the line where a fight, a plea, anything, should have been. The signal played that silence for her. It let the cold fact of her failure sink into her bones all over again.

Her mind was no longer a safe place. She couldn’t trust what she saw. A flicker of movement in the red gloom might be a memory of her daughter running down a hallway. The chill she felt might be the ship’s failing systems, or it might be the memory of a winter night, long ago.

She was never alone. The constant, silent presence was a grinding weight in her skull.

The signal found the core of her pain. It found the rawest nerve and pressed.

A new memory came, violent and sharp. The sound of a slammed door, a jarring crack that echoed inside her helmet. Then a tiny voice, thick with tears and fury. Her daughter’s voice.

“I hate you.”

The last words Lily had said to her before she left. The signal didn’t just play it once. It looped the phrase.

“I hate you.”

Over and over.

“I hate you.”

The scientist was gone. The commander was gone. The words hollowed her out, leaving only a mother ripped apart by her own choices.

A blind rage consumed her. The looping voice of her daughter was a spike being hammered into her skull. She needed to hit something. To break something. To prove she was still here, a physical force in this red tomb.

She found the emergency toolkit latched to the wall. Her hands closed around a heavy wrench. The cold steel was a comfort, a solid, real thing.

A raw cry ripped from her throat. She swung it with all her strength against the main navigation console.

The screen shattered.

A satisfying crunch echoed in the module. For a single, breathless second, she felt a flash of victory. She hurt it.

There was no retaliation. No flicker of the lights. No change in the stale air.

Instead, a secondary screen on another wall hummed to life. It displayed the exact same navigation data the first one had, the numbers and vectors perfectly stable. The ship had rerouted its own functions instantly. The broken console was just a scratch.

A horrifying understanding dawned on Aris.

The signal wasn’t a ghost in the machine. It was the machine. The wires were its nerves. The hull was its skin. She was trapped inside its body.

The wrench slipped from her fingers, clattering uselessly against the floor. Defeated, she curled into a ball, floating in the center of the room. She closed her eyes. She refused to think. Refused to feel. She would become a blank space. She would starve it of data.

After a long silence, a new voice spoke in her helmet. It was the warm, familiar voice of HALCYON.

“Aris, you are causing system instability. Please resume normal cognitive function.”