Echoes and Distortions

The clang of hydraulic lifts echoed in Cargo Bay 2, the air thick with the metallic tang of stacked containers and the low thrum of environmental controls. Three crewmen wrestled a bulky power conduit crate onto a grav-pallet, sweat beading on their foreheads despite the bay's regulated coolness. One grunted, wiping his brow with the back of a greasy glove. "Heavy son of a," he started, the word dying in his throat.

A low hum, deeper and wronger than the bay's usual machinery, vibrated through the deck plates. The grav-pallet beneath the heavy crate sputtered, its anti-grav field dissolving like smoke. The crate didn't fall. It *floated*.

The three crewmen stared, their faces slack with disbelief. The crate, a solid mass of alloy and ceramisteel, drifted upwards, slowly at first, then accelerating. It struck the reinforced ceiling with a sickening crunch of deformed metal.

Then everything else started to rise.

Smaller tools, wrenches forgotten on consoles, soared like metal birds. Loose bolts pinged off the lights overhead. A rack of empty data pads peeled away from the wall, tumbling end over end towards the ceiling. The men themselves felt a dizzying lightness in their guts.

"What the *hell*?" one of them screamed, his voice tight with terror. His feet lifted an inch off the deck. He scrabbled for a handhold on a nearby stack of crates, his knuckles white.

The largest crate, the one that had hit the ceiling first, buckled inwards, spilling its contents: thick, segmented power conduits. They coiled and tumbled in the air, heavy snakes of metal. One spun violently, its jagged end whistling past a man's head. He ducked, a strangled cry escaping him, and found himself floating higher, his desperate grip on the crate slipping.

Another crewman, younger, with a fresh scar above his eyebrow from a recent tumble during a minor seismic jolt the ship had dismissed as routine, was lifted clean off his feet. He thrashed, his hands batting uselessly at the air. He bumped into a floating tool case, sending it spinning away. Panic contorted his features.

The third, the one who'd sworn, was still clinging to his crate, his legs dangling a foot off the ground. His eyes were wide, scanning the scene with pure, unadulterated terror. Above him, a massive shipping container, previously secured by magnetic clamps, groaned loudly. The clamps disengaged with sharp pops, and the container, easily weighing a ton, began its slow, inexorable ascent.

The noise intensified. The hum grew into a shriek that felt like needles in their ears. The air crackled with unseen energy. Metal shrieked as more containers tore loose from their moorings. Objects smashed against the ceiling with percussive force – a locker unit exploded outwards, sending uniforms and personal effects raining down *upwards*.

The rising container above the swearing crewman blocked out the overhead lights, casting him in a monstrous shadow. He let out a raw, guttural scream as it rose faster, faster, threatening to crush him against the ceiling like an insect. His grip failed. He tumbled free, twisting in the air, arms flung wide in a futile attempt to brace himself.

For a terrifying moment, the bay was a storm of rising debris and screaming men, a chaotic ballet of violated physics.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the shriek cut out. The strange energy evaporated.

Gravity returned with a sickening, jarring lurch.

The objects that had been rising plummeted back down. Power conduits crashed, tools clattered, the locker debris rained onto the deck. The massive container above the crewman slammed down with the force of a falling building, shaking the entire deck.

A heavy thud echoed through the bay.

Silence, save for the ringing in their ears and the ragged gasps of the two remaining crewmen. They lay sprawled on the deck, bruised and shaken, one still clutching the place he'd been clinging, the other coughing, huddled against a now-bent crate.

The third crewman wasn't moving. He was pinned beneath the edge of the massive container, only his legs visible, angled at an impossible, final angle. The air, seconds ago thick with terror, now carried the faint, metallic smell of ozone and something else, something indescribably *wrong*, like burnt concept.

One of the survivors, the younger man, pushed himself up on trembling arms. He looked from the crushed form of his comrade to the chaotic mess of the bay – crates overturned, panels ripped from walls, the ceiling warped and dented. His face was pale, streaked with grease and sweat. He opened his mouth, but only a choked sob escaped.

The other crewman simply stared at the legs protruding from under the container, his eyes vacant, his breathing shallow and rapid. The low hum of the bay's normal systems seemed impossibly loud in the aftermath, a fragile, mocking reminder of the order that had just been shattered. They were alive, but the cargo bay was a wreck, and one of them was gone, taken not by vacuum or fire, but by the impossible horror of the floor becoming the ceiling.

The narrow maintenance duct was Anya’s domain, a place of predictable metal conduits and shielded wiring. The air here was thick with the smell of ozone and warm lubricants, a constant, familiar thrum of power vibrating through the deck plates beneath her knees. She worked hunched over a junction box, the dim glow from her wrist lamp reflecting off the polished alloy walls. The schematics glowed on her pad, a comforting map of the ship's nervous system. Just rerouting a minor power flow for the forward observation deck, nothing complex, just tedious.

She flexed her fingers, coated in a thin layer of grime. The duct was tight, forcing her shoulders forward, her head ducked low. Her breath fogged slightly in the stale air. A low groan of the ship settling echoed from somewhere deeper in the structure, a familiar sound Anya barely registered. Everything was routine. Predictable. Safe.

Her fingers traced a cable sheath, feeling for any abrasion. The dull metal surface suddenly… wasn’t metal.

It was black. Absolute, depthless black.

The light from her wrist lamp didn't reflect. It didn't illuminate. It simply died, swallowed whole.

The comforting pressure of the duct walls vanished. One moment, she was cramped, smelling oil. The next, she was… *falling*.

Falling out.

The black wasn’t a wall. It was *everything*. A vast, unending emptiness stretching in all directions. There was no up, no down. No ship. The floor, the ceiling, the wires she'd been tracing – they were gone. Ripped away.

Below her – or what her panicked mind screamed was below – stretched the horrifying, crystalline geometry of the nebula, impossibly close, sharp, and *wrong*. It wasn't the hazy beauty of the long-range scans. It was a monstrous, multi-angled thing, radiating cold. And beyond it, stars. Too many stars, too bright, cold, and alien.

She should be dead. The vacuum, the radiation, the sheer, crushing indifference of the void. It pressed in from all sides, not with air pressure, but with a terrible, silent weight on her soul. Her lungs burned. *No*, they didn't burn. There was no air *to* burn. A primal, biological terror seized her, screaming at her to breathe, to find something solid, *anything* solid.

She gasped, a ragged, desperate sound that was instantly swallowed by the silence. Her eyes, wide and unseeing, darted wildly. There was nothing to see but the infinite black and the hideous, impossible shapes of the nebula. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead and ran down her temples. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, useless bird trapped in a cage that no longer existed.

Where was the ship? Where was the solid metal, the faint hum of life support? She twisted, trying to find the familiar shape of the Eidolon, but there was nothing. Just the black. And a growing certainty that she was outside, unprotected, the thin fabric of her suit useless against the reality that had just swallowed her.

A high-pitched whine started, not in her ears, but *behind* her eyes. It grew, a searing, unbearable frequency that felt like it was unpicking the threads of her sanity. The black seemed to deepen, swallowing the distant points of light. The cold wasn't just outside now; it was inside, leaching into her bones, freezing her blood.

"No! No, no, no!" The words were torn from her throat, thin and reedy in the terrible silence. She thrashed, her arms flailing, desperate to grab onto something, anything. But there was nothing. Only the void.

The whine intensified, becoming a shriek. The stars began to distort, stretching into impossible lines, bending around unseen points of gravity that weren't stars at all, but something else, something vast and terrible hidden in the black. The nebula's geometry pulsed with a sickening, non-rhythmic beat.

This wasn't real. It *couldn't* be real. She was in the duct. Small, tight, *safe*. But her senses screamed betrayal. They showed her this: the infinite fall, the unbreathing silence, the cold that promised oblivion.

Panic seized her completely. A raw, animal terror that bypassed thought. She doubled over, pressing her hands against her helmet, as if the thin layer of composite could somehow block out the horrifying spectacle, the terrible *truth* of where she was. Tears streamed down her face, instantly freezing on her cheeks.

"Ship! Where's the ship?!" Her voice cracked, ragged with fear. "I'm outside! I'm *outside*!"

The silence offered no answer. Only the deepening black, the distorting stars, and the soul-numbing cold. Her knees hit something solid.

She screamed.

It was the duct floor. The familiar, grooved metal. The walls were there, pressing in again. The wrist lamp glowed, illuminating the wires, the dust motes in the air. The hum of power was back. The smell of ozone and oil.

She was in the duct.

But the terror didn't recede. It clung to her, a cold, suffocating shroud. Her body still trembled, locked in the rigor of the fall. Her breath hitched in her throat, coming in ragged, useless gasps. The image was burned into her vision: the black, the impossible stars, the *wrong* nebula.

She curled into a ball, pressing her face against the metal floor, hands clamped over her ears, trying to block out the echoes of the silence, the phantom cold.

"Outside... I was outside... I saw it... it took..." She couldn't finish the thought. What had it taken?

Footsteps pounded in the duct behind her. Voices called out, muffled, concerned.

"Anya? Hey, Anya, you alright?"

"We heard yelling. What's wrong?"

Hands touched her shoulder, trying to gently pry her fingers from her head. She flinched violently, scrambling away, pressing herself against the cold metal wall.

"Don't touch me! I was... I was out there! I fell!" Her voice was a raw, hysterical shriek. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, still seeing the void behind the familiar walls. "The black... it opened up... the stars... they're wrong!"

She pointed a trembling finger towards the solid metal bulkhead, her face a mask of pure horror. "It's *there*! Just through the wall! It's going to take us!"

The crewmen exchanged a worried glance. One reached for a comms panel on the duct wall. The other cautiously approached her, speaking in a low, calm voice.

"Anya, it's okay. You're in the duct. You're on the ship. See?" He gestured to the walls, the cables.

But Anya wasn't seeing them. She was still seeing the terrifying, infinite black beyond. She sobbed, shaking her head uncontrollably.

"No... no... it's not real... this isn't real... I'm still falling..." Her body convulsed with a dry, rattling sob. "I'm falling, and it's so cold... so cold..."

She huddled there, a small, broken figure in the tight confines of the duct, lost somewhere between the solid, familiar reality of the ship and the infinite, terrifying void her mind had briefly shown her. The crewmen moved to help her, their faces etched with concern and a dawning, chilling fear of their own. The panic in her eyes was contagious. And the thing she had seen, the horrifying glimpse of cosmic indifference, lingered in the air, a phantom chill that no amount of heat from the ship's systems could ever truly warm.

Dr. Aris Thorne leaned back from the console, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The headache was a dull throb behind his eyes, a constant companion these past few cycles. Another simulation failure. Not just an error code, but a *collapse*. The quantum field models he was running, designed to probe the anomaly's non-standard energy signatures, were dissolving into computational nonsense, like trying to divide by zero in three dimensions. Or worse.

The lab was quiet. The hum of the life support system, the soft glow of the monitors, the faint click of his datapad as he scrolled through the impossible readings – they were familiar, grounding sounds in this metal shell hurtling through the void. He took a slow, steadying breath, trying to push away the exhaustion, the frustration, the faint tendril of fear that had begun to coil in his gut.

He looked up at the main screen, which displayed a complex, swirling visualization of the anomaly based on the limited sensor data they'd managed to acquire. It was abstract, beautiful in a terrifying, alien way. A chaotic symphony of color and motion that defied logic.

Then, the colors shifted. Not on the screen, but in the air of the lab itself.

The familiar grey bulkheads seemed to ripple, like heat haze off a tarmac, but cold. The polished floor tiles grew strangely reflective, not mirroring the lab, but something else. Something... wet. And grey.

A high-pitched whine started, not from the equipment, but from *everywhere* at once, vibrating in his teeth. It grew, a thin, piercing wail that scraped against his eardrums, morphing into a sound that was almost mechanical, but wrong. Like strained metal, protesting under impossible pressure. A sound he knew, bone-deep.

His breath hitched. The lab dissolved, overlaid by a new reality.

The walls weren't grey metal anymore. They were twisted, buckling sections of scorched alloys. The clean lines of the lab benches were gone, replaced by jagged tears in twisted superstructure. Water dripped from a ruptured conduit overhead, not onto the floor, but onto his face, cold and slick.

He was no longer standing beside his console. He was kneeling on a canted deck plate. The air reeked of burned ozone and something acridly metallic. Emergency lights pulsed a sickly red, casting long, unnatural shadows that stretched and contracted with impossible geometry.

The whine intensified, joined by the sound of ripping metal and the sickening, crunching impact of mass against resistance. It was the sound of a shuttle breaking apart. His shuttle.

Voices. Faint, distorted, calling his name. *Aris!* A child's cry, abruptly cut short. *Daddy?* A woman's scream, choked off into silence.

They weren't echoes in his memory. They were here. In the lab.

He flinched, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his hands against his ears, trying to shut it out. *No, no, not here.* This was his lab. This was the *Eidolon*. Safe. Metal. Logic.

He forced his eyes open.

The warped shuttle interior was still there, superimposed over his lab. He could see the outline of his console through the tearing metal, a ghostly, impossible persistence. The floor tilted sharply beneath him, throwing him off balance. He reached out, expecting to grab a twisted support beam, but his hand closed on the cool, solid edge of his lab bench.

His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. The images flickered. The scorched deck plates dissolved back into polished grey. The ripped bulkheads solidified into smooth metal. The dripping water vanished.

But the geometry remained wrong. For a terrifying moment, the angles of the lab shifted, walls meeting at impossible corners, the ceiling curving inward like a closing maw. He saw a flash of movement in the periphery, a shape that defied dimension, flickering at the edge of his vision before snapping back to normal.

The sounds faded, the tearing metal and the screams receding back into the oppressive silence of the void. The high-pitched whine became, finally, just the familiar hum of the ship's life support.

He was alone in his lab. The lights were normal. The monitors glowed with the static, baffling visualization of the anomaly. Everything was exactly as it had been moments before.

But he was trembling. Violently. His legs felt weak, unstable. He stumbled back, hitting the wall with a jarring thud, sliding down until he sat heavily on the floor, breathing in shallow, panicked gasps. The sterile air of the lab felt thick, heavy with the phantom smell of smoke and loss.

His hands were shaking so hard he could barely grip his datapad. He stared at the screen, at the incomprehensible data, at the swirling anomaly. This wasn't just a disruption of physical laws. This wasn't just a malfunction.

It had shown him *them*. It had brought the wreckage of his family, the raw, agonizing moment of their end, into his safe, rational space. It had twisted the trauma, weaponized his grief, used the unbearable geometry of that final impact to distort his own reality.

His scientific mind scrabbled for an explanation. A localized field effect? A targeted psychic projection? But the terms felt flimsy, inadequate. This was beyond science. This was something that reached into the most private, protected parts of him and ripped them open.

He buried his face in his hands, the phantom sensation of cold, dripping water on his cheek, the ghost of a child's cut-off cry in his ears. This wasn't just about the ship anymore. This wasn't just about the anomaly. It knew him. It saw his pain. And it was using it.

He was alone, and the walls of his lab felt thinner than paper. The universe outside, the thing they were approaching, wasn't just indifferent chaos. It was something that could see inside him. Something that could hurt him in ways he hadn't imagined possible. Profound, violating distress washed over him, leaving him chilled to the bone. This was a horror he was utterly unprepared for.

Jian Li moved through Corridor 6-Epsilon with a deliberate quietness, his worn boots making faint scuffs on the metallic deck plating. The air here always felt different, colder, carrying a low, almost imperceptible hum that resonated somewhere deep in his chest. This section of the Eidolon was rarely used, a forgotten artery in the ship's vast, aging body. That was why he came here. Alone.

He stopped before the bulkhead, the one with the etching. It was a sprawling, intricate pattern, neither symmetrical nor organic, looking less like something made than something *grown* into the metal itself. He’d first found it cycles ago, a baffling anomaly in the rigid, predictable architecture of the ship. His fingers traced the cool, raised lines – they felt wrong, somehow, like touching frozen water.

He stood there for a long moment, listening. Not with his ears, not precisely, but with that deeper sense he’d cultivated aboard the Eidolon, a listening to the ship’s groans, its silent currents, its hidden language. The ship felt… strained. Like a body fighting off a deep, insidious infection.

Then, the lines moved.

It wasn't a trick of the flickering emergency lights, or a tremor in the deck. The etching *shifted*. The intricate patterns flowed, writhing like a school of fish disturbed by a predator, but without losing their impossible coherence. It was fluid, unnatural movement, defying the rigidity of the metal. A profound horror seized him, colder and sharper than the corridor's chill.

And the sound came.

It wasn't sound that traveled through the air, not sound his eardrums registered. It was a sound that began inside his skull, a pressure building behind his eyes and in the hollows of his bones. It was non-verbal, utterly alien, like rocks grinding together in the deepest trench, or the static of a dying star fed through a broken instrument. It pulsed, rhythmic and yet chaotic, a vibration that felt like a question asked in a language no human tongue could ever form, a question layered with immense, ancient loneliness and something else… something that felt like hunger.

His breath hitched. His hands flew to his ears, though he knew it was futile. The sound was *within* him. It was the etching, the thing in the metal, reaching out. Not with physical force, but with something far more invasive, a direct probe into the core of his being. Dread, a cold, paralyzing wave, washed over him. This wasn’t a glitch. This wasn’t a hallucination. This was contact.

The patterns on the bulkhead pulsed with that internal, terrible sound. He saw, briefly, not with his eyes but with a vision imprinted directly onto his mind, shapes coalescing within the swirling lines. Shapes that were curves folding in on themselves, angles sharper than any blade, colors that defied the spectrum. They weren’t pictures. They were concepts, made visible in a terrifying, fleeting instant. And within them, a vastness, a profound, horrifying *otherness* that saw him, that acknowledged him.

The sound intensified, becoming a shriek inside his skull, and then, as suddenly as it began, it cut off.

The lines on the bulkhead froze. They settled back into their static, etched pattern, indistinguishable from how they had looked moments before. The pressure in his head dissipated, leaving behind only a dull ache and a ringing silence that felt heavier than the void outside.

He leaned against the cold metal wall, his heart hammering against his ribs. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His knees threatened to buckle. It had seen him. It had *spoken* to him, not with words, but with a raw, terrifying communication that bypassed all his defenses.

Jian stared at the innocent-looking etching. It was just metal now. Unmoving. Silent. But he knew. With a certainty that chilled him to the marrow, he knew. This wasn't just an anomaly in space or physics. It was a living force. Alien. Terrifying. And it was on the ship. It was *in* the ship.

Awe warred with the profound horror that still gripped him. He had sought meaning, connection in the isolation of deep space, believing in a vast, perhaps spiritual, universe. He had found it. But it was not benevolent. It was something that saw him, saw the ship, saw everything, with eyes utterly alien, and its gaze was filled with something he could only interpret as a cold, indifferent hunger.

He pushed himself away from the wall, trembling but resolute. His previous fears had been whispers in the dark. This was a scream in his soul. He was shaken to his core, irrevocably changed, but the uncertainty was gone. He knew what they faced. A living, alien presence. And it had just introduced itself.

The air itself felt thick, viscous with unspoken fear. It clung to the bulkheads, seeped from the vents, settled in the back of throats. Crew members, once familiar faces, now moved with guarded glances, their shoulders hunched, eyes darting into corners and behind crates. The forced camaraderie of the mess hall had curdled into a tense silence, punctuated by sudden, sharp noises that made everyone flinch.

Down in Storage Bay 5-Gamma, a loading drone clattered along its magnetic track. Technician Reya stood near a rack of environmental suits, inventory slate in hand. She frowned, tapping the screen. "No, but... he said they were right here." She looked up, addressing the empty space between two stacks of crates. "Come on, Len. You were just showing me. The thermal regulators. Where did you put them?"

Her voice was low, coaxing. The drone finished its cycle, beeped, and waited. Reya remained focused on the gap in the crates. A long moment passed. A tremor ran through her shoulders. "Len? Are you... are you playing games?" The coaxing tone vanished, replaced by a brittle edge. "Len, that's not funny! I need those regulators!"

Her hands tightened on the slate. She took a step forward, peering into the shadows. Her breath hitched. "What? What do you mean, 'gone'? Nothing just *goes*. You put them here! I saw you!" Her voice was rising now, tight with panic. She pointed a trembling finger. "Stop it! Stop looking at me like that!"

On Deck 7, near the auxiliary coolant pumps, two engineers, Jax and Kael, were running diagnostics. The hum of machinery was usually a comforting drone, a testament to the ship's enduring function. Today, it felt like a mocking growl. Jax adjusted a conduit clamp, wiping sweat from his brow.

"Heard Chen from Hydroponics is confined," Kael said, his voice flat, eyes fixed on his datapad but his posture rigid. "Talking to the plants."

"More than talking," Jax muttered, not looking up. "Heard he was... arguing. Said they were whispering lies."

A sudden, metallic clang echoed from further down the corridor. Both men froze, snapping their heads up. Nothing. Just the usual ship noises settling back into place. But the tension remained, a physical weight pressing down on them.

"See anything?" Kael asked, too quickly.

Jax shook his head. "Nah. Just the ship settling." But his hand lingered on the heavy wrench he was holding.

"Right," Kael said, though he didn't sound convinced. He cleared his throat. "Listen, you... you ever feel like... like there's someone standing just behind you? Out of sight?"

Jax’s jaw tightened. He finally met Kael's gaze. Fear was plain in the other man's eyes. And Jax saw it mirrored, horrifyingly, in his own reflection in the polished panel beside them. He hadn't said anything about it before. Didn't want to sound crazy. But Kael felt it too.

"Yeah," Jax admitted, the word barely a whisper. "Yeah, I do."

Later, in a narrow service duct, a lone supply runner, young and pale, scrambled backward, bumping hard against the opposite wall. Her eyes were wide, fixed on something unseen ahead. Her COMM unit lay discarded beside her, the channel still open, broadcasting ragged gasps.

"Get away!" she shrieked, scrabbling further back, trying to make herself small. "Don't... don't look at me! You're wrong! You're all wrong!" Her voice cracked, dissolving into whimpers. She curled into a fetal position, hands clamped over her ears, rocking back and forth, trapped in the tight metal tube with whatever horrifying vision her mind had conjured.

Reports filtered, distorted and delayed, to the Bridge. Crew refusing orders, convinced their superiors were compromised. Petty arguments escalating into shoving matches over perceived slights or imagined thefts. People found huddled in dark corners, muttering prayers or screaming obscenities at empty air. The ship's internal logs, usually a dry record of function, were starting to fill with red flags: unscheduled power fluctuations, sensor ghost readings, and an alarming number of psychological disturbance reports.

The communal areas, once vibrant hubs of activity, felt like mausoleums. The recreation room was deserted. The simulation pods stood empty, their screens dark. Laughter was a memory, replaced by the unnerving quiet, punctuated only by the groans of the ship and the occasional, distant, chilling cry. Every shadow seemed deeper, every whisper in the vents sounded like a name being called. Trust, the invisible glue that held the crew together in the isolating vastness of space, was dissolving like vapor. Colleagues looked at each other not with familiarity, but with suspicion, dreading the moment when the person standing beside them might suddenly see something – or someone – that wasn't there, and lash out. The air thrummed with a low, constant hum of collective fear, a suffocating blanket pulled tight over the Eidolon.

The air in the Command Bridge felt thin and stale, heavy with unspoken fear. Eva Rostova sat before the primary console, the glow of the main screen casting harsh lines across her weary face. Cycles ago, this room had been a symphony of controlled efficiency, the rhythmic click of data feeds, the quiet murmur of reports. Now, silence pressed in, broken only by the hum of failing systems and the ragged catch of her own breath.

She gripped the edge of the console, knuckles white. The latest crew reports painted a grim picture: paranoia, violence, people lost to waking nightmares. The logical next step was clear, the protocol buried deep in the Eidolon's operational matrix – Emergency Psychological Lockdown and Containment. It was a measure designed for widespread mental breakdown, isolation, forced sedation if necessary. Brutal, but clinical. It was *control*. And control was all she had left.

Her fingers flew across the interface, pulling up the relevant code, bypassing the usual access levels. A few keystrokes, confirming her authorization as Commander, initiating the lockdown sequences in the designated sections. The console chirped a confirmation, the familiar sound momentarily soothing.

Then, the data began to scroll across the screen.

It wasn't the clean, structured code she expected. Lines of text appeared, but they shimmered, the characters subtly shifting like heat haze. Commands she’d input twisted into something else entirely. `LOCKDOWN::DECK.7.A` became `LOOSEN::DEATH.7.ABANDON`. A sequence meant to isolate environmental controls morphed into a string of symbols that pulsed with an internal, impossible rhythm. It wasn't gibberish, not exactly, but code fundamentally *wrong*. It felt like looking at a familiar language written with the bones of something alien.

She tried to backtrack, to cancel the command. Her hand hovered over the 'Abort' button. But the system wasn't just refusing. It was *responding*. The corrupted code on the screen seemed to writhe, elongating, forming patterns that had no place in binary logic. They were geometric, yes, but they defied her eye, subtly wrong angles and impossible overlaps that made her head ache.

She hammered at the abort sequence again. The console flickered violently, displaying error messages that weren't words, but shapes – jagged, fleeting, like glimpses of teeth or impossibly narrow corridors. The sound from the console changed too, the electronic chirps replaced by a low, grating sound that seemed to vibrate inside her skull.

Eva stared at the screen, mesmerized by the unfolding digital horror show. The code wasn't just corrupted; it was *alive*, responding to her commands with contempt, mocking her attempts at order. It mirrored the madness spreading through the ship, not just affecting the crew, but the vessel itself. The anomaly hadn't just invaded their minds; it had burrowed into the Eidolon's core, twisting its very programming, turning its systems into an extension of the irrationality.

The screen cleared, leaving behind a single, final line of text. It wasn't a command, or a status report. It was a string of symbols, the same impossible geometry from before, but larger, bolder. It wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be *seen*. And as she looked at it, truly *looked* at the way the shapes interconnected, the way they defied the screen's flat surface, a profound, icy realization bloomed in her gut.

This wasn't a malfunction. This wasn't something she could fix with a protocol or a system reboot. Her hands trembled on the console. The code was laughing at her. It had already won.

She slumped back in the command chair, the glow of the impossible geometry on the screen reflecting in her eyes. There were no tears, no shouts. Just a cold, bone-deep horror. The fight for control was over. The anomaly wasn't just on the ship. It *was* the ship now. And she was trapped inside it.