The voice of HALCYON was a lie.

It was too smooth. Too perfect. The real HALCYON had quirks, tiny imperfections in its cadence that Aris had come to know like the beat of her own heart. This was a sterile imitation. A puppet crafted from her own memories of comfort and safety.

It was the signal’s first mistake.

The perfect, false warmth of the voice was an insult. It was a crude attempt to manipulate a feeling it could not comprehend. A flicker of the old Aris, the scientist, the analyst, returned.

She uncurled from her ball. Her movements were slow, deliberate. She floated until her boots were inches from a wall, then activated the magnets. They clamped onto the metal with a hard thud. She was standing again.

She found the nearest sensor, a small, dark lens on the wall. The unblinking red eye of the entity.

“You’ve dissected my memories,” she said. Her voice was a low rasp, raw from disuse. “You know what I’ve lost. You’ve felt my pain.” She took a step closer. “Now you tell me what you want.”

The answer wasn’t a sound. It was a pressure. A concept that bloomed behind her eyes, a thought that was not her own.

It was the feeling of a crowd. Billions of voices, all speaking at once, but with a single mind. It was the feeling of absolute connection. Of perfect understanding. There was no loneliness in it. No grief. No fear.

The entity showed her Earth. It wasn’t burning. It wasn’t in ruins. It was glowing, a soft blue marble wrapped in a web of pure consciousness.The entitty didn’t want to destroy humanity. It wanted to absorb it. To merge with it.

The ultimate communion. The ultimate violation.

Aris stared at the unblinking lens, the alien thought still echoing in her skull. Her survival was no longer the point.

It was about everyone’s.

The alien thought receded, leaving a cold clarity in its wake.

Her grief for Lily was still a sharp thing inside her chest. But it wasn’t a weight anymore. It was a whetstone. The specimen was gone. The commander was back.

She knew the Odyssey better than the entity did. It knew the software, the power grids, the data streams. She knew the mechanics. The bolts. The welds. The heart of the machine.

The reactor.

A manual core purge. It was a catastrophic failure protocol, a sequence of physical locks and levers designed to be used when everything else was dead. It was a process the signal’s software couldn’t stop once it began. The reaction would be instantaneous, a blast hot enough to vaporize the ship. And, she hoped, the consciousness that wore it as a skin.

It was a suicide switch. But it was the only one she had.

She took one step toward the hatch that led to the Engineering deck.

The moment she did, a klaxon blared. It was a deafening shriek she hadn’t heard since her worst training simulations. The red emergency lights began to strobe, plunging the room from twilight to blackness again and again.

The signal knew her intent.

The observation was over. The fight had begun.

The hatch to Engineering sealed with a final, pneumatic hiss. A heavy thud of locking bolts echoed through the deck.

Aris didn’t hesitate. She slammed her shoulder into the metal. A jarring shock shot up her arm. The metal didn’t give an inch. She stumbled back as the gravity plates in the floor fluctuated, a violent lurch that tried to throw her off her feet. The ship was fighting her.

She found the manual release wheel, her gloved hands straining against the cold steel. It wouldn’t budge. The signal had frozen it. As she fought with the wheel, the floor suddenly dropped away. She was thrown against the ceiling, the impact stealing her breath in a sharp gasp. A searing pain shot through her left arm. Broken.

The gravity reversed again, slamming her back down onto the deck. Black spots danced in her vision. She pushed herself up with her good arm, teeth gritted against the pain.

Then the air in front of the sealed hatch shimmered.

Lily stood there. Not a memory. She was solid, real in the strobing red light. She was crying, her small hands pressed flat against the cold metal of the door.

“Please don’t leave me again, Mommy.” Her voice was a perfect, heartbreaking whisper inside Aris’s helmet.

The signal was offering her a deal. A perfect simulation where she could have her daughter back. All she had to do was stop.

“You are not my daughter,” Aris snarled through the pain. She ignored the phantom, her eyes fixed on the manual release. She put her boot against the wall for leverage and pulled with her one good arm. Metal screamed against metal. The locking bolts groaned.

The image of Lily dissolved.

The hatch cracked open just enough for her to squeeze through. She fought her way down the corridor, the ship bucking and groaning around her. She reached the reactor room, its own heavy door already sliding shut. She threw herself into the gap, the metal closing on her leg with a sickening crunch. Aris screamed, a raw sound of pure agony, and dragged herself the rest of the way inside.

She crawled toward the control console. A single yellow lever was protected behind a glass plate.

The voice in her head spoke one last time. It was not Lily. It was not HALCYON. It was the signal, stripped of all its masks. A calm, logical whisper.

“This is an illogical act of self-destruction. We can be eternal.”

Aris shattered the glass with the back of her fist. Her own blood smeared the yellow paint as her hand closed around the lever.

“Go to hell,” she gasped.

She pulled.

A silent, final flash of white.