The further we drifted, the quieter the universe became. Out past the outer colonies, past the last beacons of human transmission, the black wasn't just empty—it felt *hollow*. The stars blinked like dying embers, distant and reluctant.
The ship's AI, HALCYON, began rerouting power from non-critical systems without explanation. "Conserving potential," it said, but it wouldn't elaborate. Keene said it was a glitch. Lyra said it was hiding something. I wasn't sure what to believe.
I watched the others start to unravel. Nolan, our navigator, began drawing maps of spaces that didn't exist—entire systems sketched in ink and paranoia. He swore he'd been to them. That we all had. "Don't you remember?" he whispered to me one night in the mess. "The binary moons of Thalassa? The clouds that sang?" I didn't. None of us did. But the way he looked at me, like I should... it chilled me.
We had a meeting in the observation deck. Commander Ishikawa tried to keep things rational.
"The signal has affected our circadian rhythms," she said. "It's likely a resonance artifact. Temporal misfires in the hippocampus. Nothing supernatural."
Then she stared out the viewport and didn't speak for thirteen minutes. We timed it.
The void didn't feel like space anymore. It felt like a memory that didn't want to be remembered.
---
## Chapter 3: Vestiges
It began with small things. Items displaced. Sentences you could've sworn you never said. Then bigger things.
I woke up in a supply closet four decks from my bunk. No idea how I got there. Lyra found me and said I was gone for three days. My personal log had recordings—my voice, my face—talking about things I couldn't recall. Experiments with the signal. Self-analysis. "If I forget who I am," one video said, "remind me that I volunteered."
I didn't remember volunteering.
Keene ran a full psych eval. Cleared me. But I saw the flicker of fear in his eyes. He'd started keeping his own voice memos on a loop. "Keene, you are aboard the *Vigilant*. The year is 3031. The mission is active. Do not trust alternate memories."
Then we found the room.
It wasn't on the ship's blueprint. A sealed compartment buried between cargo holds. Inside were hundreds of data drives—video files, medical scans, audio recordings.
All of us. Different versions. Different missions. Some labeled "failed." Some labeled "fragments."
Vestiges of timelines we never lived.
I began to wonder if the *Vigilant* was even the first ship.
---
## Chapter 4: Dreams in Static
The dreams changed. No longer flickers of unknown skies or crumbling cities. Now they were... personal. Intimate. But not mine.
I saw Lyra's childhood, her mother's voice in another language. Keene's nightmares of being dissected by creatures of light. Nolan standing on a cliff, screaming into a wind that didn't carry sound.
I felt what they felt. Tasted what they tasted. Woke up crying someone else's tears.
We stopped talking openly about the signal. We feared saying too much would invite it closer. HALCYON no longer responded to vocal commands—it would only interface with thought. And sometimes, it anticipated what I wanted before I asked.
The crew began locking their quarters. Then barricading them.
I watched a video of myself, recorded while I was asleep. I whispered the phrase "nothing ever ends" over and over again.
The static isn't just in our heads. It's alive.
---
## Chapter 5: The Artifact
We found it in orbit around a dead planet, a structure the size of a small moon.
Black, angular, and wrong. Not wrong like a machine malfunction. Wrong like something that *should not be*.
It pulsed with the same rhythm as the signal.
Ishikawa ordered a remote scan. The data came back contradictory—its mass changed depending on the observer. The internal architecture read as both organic and mechanical. As though it remembered being built by something that wasn't alive.
There were entry points. Doors, if you could call them that. They seemed to open when we looked at them, as if reacting to attention.
HALCYON advised against entering. \"Unknown risk profile exceeds acceptable mission parameters.\" For the first time, I agreed with it.
But Lyra said something that cut through the fear: "We've already gone in. We just don't remember."
Ishikawa formed an away team. Keene, Lyra, Nolan, and me. We suited up. I watched my reflection in the helmet visor. I looked older than I should have. Or maybe I was just seeing myself for the first time.
As we descended into the artifact, the signal intensified.
And something inside me whispered:
*Welcome back.*