Cracks in the Mind

The air in Cargo Bay E tasted of ozone and stale packing foam. Early Cycle 15 glowed sickly through the filtered ceiling panels, casting long, distorted shadows across stacks of secure containers. Two crew members, Tech Specialist Anya Sharma and Loader Unit Operator Ben Carter, stood nose-to-nose near a stack of environmental suits. Anya's breathing was ragged, sharp. Ben’s face was a mask of bewildered anger.

“Say it again, Ben,” Anya hissed, her voice tight as a stretched wire. Her finger, trembling, jabbed towards his left cheekbone. “Just say it again.”

Ben shuffled his feet, his usual easygoing slouch replaced by a rigid defensiveness. “I said, Anya, it’s just a shadow. The light’s bad in here, you know that.” He tried to shrug, a small, nervous movement. “My face is fine. It’s *me*.”

“No.” Anya’s voice rose, cracking. “It’s not a shadow. It’s… off.” She leaned closer, eyes wide and fixed on his face as if deciphering an alien script. “The slope. It’s wrong. It dips *too* much. Since when does it do that? Since when does your face do that?”

Ben recoiled as if struck. “Anya, what in the stars are you talking about? It’s always been this way!” He pushed a hand through his short-cropped hair, agitation making his movements jerky. “Look at me. It’s Ben! We had ration packs together yesterday, remember? Argued about the texture of the nutrient paste?”

“That wasn’t you,” Anya whispered, a horrifying certainty hardening her features. Her eyes darted, scanning his face with frantic intensity, looking for other deviations. His left eyebrow, did it twitch too often? The scar over his lip, was it slightly more faded than she remembered? Details she’d never consciously noted now screamed as glaring, undeniable proof. “The way you chew. You swallowed… too fast. You never swallow that fast.”

“What?!” Ben threw his hands up. “Swallowing? Now you’re saying my *swallowing* is wrong?” His anger flared, hot and confused. “You’re not well, Anya. You need to go see Medical. Like, right now.”

Mention of Medical seemed to snap something in Anya. Her eyes narrowed, losing their bewildered terror and gaining a sharp, animalistic fear. “You want to take me there, don’t you?” she growled, backing away slightly but lowering into a defensive crouch. “Put me with the others.”

“Nobody’s putting you anywhere!” Ben pleaded, stepping forward, reaching a hand out tentatively. “We’re friends. Just… let me help you to Medical. Please.”

His outstretched hand, his plea, seemed to be the final confirmation for Anya. A raw, guttural scream tore from her throat. “You’re not Ben! You’re not Ben! What did you do with him?!”

She lunged.

It wasn't a clean punch. It was a frantic, clawing attack. Her nails raked across Ben’s cheek, drawing thin lines of red. Ben cried out, stumbling back, trying to shield his face.

“Anya! Stop it! What the hell?!”

But Anya wasn't hearing him. She was lost in the terrifying conviction that the man in front of her was a monstrous imitation, wearing Ben's face like a poorly fitting mask. She grabbed a discarded piece of strapping material, whipping it towards him. Ben ducked, the plastic strap whistling past his ear.

He shoved her hard. Anya yelped, hitting a metal container with a clang, but she was back on her feet instantly, snatching a heavy spanner left lying on a pallet.

“Get away from me!” she shrieked, swinging the spanner wildly. Ben scrambled away, tripping over a loose cable. He fell to the deck just as the spanner came down, missing his head by inches and leaving a deep gouge in the metal floor.

The clang echoed through the cavernous bay. Other crew members, scattered amongst the containers performing routine checks, froze. Heads turned. Whispers started, eyes wide with alarm.

“Security! Someone call Security!” a voice shouted from across the bay.

Anya stood over Ben, panting, the spanner raised again, her face contorted by fear and a desperate, misplaced rage. Ben scrambled backward on the floor, eyes fixed on the weapon, his previous bewilderment replaced by stark, unadulterated terror.

Footsteps hammered on the metal deck plates. Two members of the Security team, identifiable by the reinforced plating on their suits and the non-lethal stunners holstered at their hips, sprinted into the bay.

“Sharma! Drop the weapon!” the lead officer yelled, drawing her stunner.

Anya didn’t react to the command. Her focus was solely on the 'imposter' at her feet. She swung the spanner again, a desperate, final attempt to silence the thing wearing her friend’s face.

A sharp crackle filled the air. A beam of blue energy shot from the stunner, hitting Anya squarely in the chest. Her body stiffened, muscles seizing violently. The spanner clattered to the deck. She crumpled, hitting the floor with a thud, twitching uncontrollably for a moment before going still.

The Security officers rushed forward, one checking Anya, the other helping Ben to his feet. Ben was shaking, tears tracking through the blood on his cheek.

“She… she thought I wasn’t me,” Ben stammered, staring at Anya’s unconscious form with horror. “Just because of… because of my face.”

The crew members who had gathered at a distance slowly dispersed, their movements hesitant. Their eyes didn’t just look at Anya or Ben or the Security officers. They looked at each other. A chill, cold as vacuum, settled over Cargo Bay E. The ease was gone. Every minor facial asymmetry, every unusual twitch, every slightly off vocal inflection, could now be seen as a sign. A confirmation. The wrongness wasn't just in the ship anymore. It was in the faces of the people beside them.

The sim-lights in Aris Thorne’s private quarters had cycled to a dull, ambient purple, simulating the deep void outside, a color meant to induce calm and signal rest. It did neither. Aris sat slumped on the edge of his narrow bunk, the air thick and stale despite the filtration system humming dutifully. The quiet should have been a relief, but every rustle of his coveralls, every distant thrum of the ship’s failing systems, grated on his nerves. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to rub away the persistent ache behind his sockets, a dull throb that had become a constant companion since the anomaly had become *present*.

He squeezed harder, trying to banish the geometric noise that still flickered at the edges of his vision, the impossible angles that had briefly overlaid his lab just cycles ago. Pure stress, he’d told himself then. Lack of sleep. The strain of trying to reconcile empirical data with… with *this*. This pervasive, fundamental wrongness.

A soft click sounded from the other side of the room. A subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the air pressure. He didn't open his eyes immediately, assuming it was the ventilation adjusting, another system quirk he’d meticulously documented in his log before tossing it aside in frustrated futility.

“Aris?” A woman’s voice. Soft. Familiar. Too familiar.

He went rigid, his hands dropping from his eyes.

Standing near the small replicator unit was Elara. His Elara. Or something that looked like her. She wasn’t wearing her usual comfortable shipsuit; instead, a simple earth-weave dress he hadn’t seen in years, the one she’d worn the last time they’d visited a real park, under a real sun. Her dark hair was pulled back loosely, just as he remembered. But her smile… it was too wide. Too fixed. Like a picture, not a person.

A knot of ice formed in his stomach. This wasn't real. This couldn't be real.

Another figure materialized beside her. Smaller. A boy. Leo. He clutched a worn data-pad, just like the one Aris had given him for his tenth birthday. His face was pale, and his eyes, Elara's eyes, seemed to hold a depth that was all wrong.

Then a third figure. Anya. His daughter. Younger than he remembered, no older than five, holding a frayed plush toy, a faded star-whale. Her gaze wasn't on him, but slightly past him, fixed on the empty space where the wall met the ceiling.

“Elara? Leo? Anya?” His voice was a dry, choked rasp. He pushed himself slowly off the bunk, his legs unsteady. The floor felt strangely soft under his feet, like walking on sand.

Elara tilted her head, that fixed smile unwavering. But her body began to shift. Not subtly. Dramatically. Her left arm elongated, stretching towards the ceiling, her elbow joint bending in four places, her fingers multiplying, becoming thin, needle-like extensions that scraped soundlessly against the metal panels above. The dress twisted with the change, the fabric stretching taut, revealing impossible bone structures beneath, sharp and angular.

Leo’s head rotated slowly, unnaturally, until his chin rested on his shoulder. His neck didn't twist; the very geometry of his skull seemed to fold in on itself, the skin pulling tight over impossible planes. He still held the data-pad, but the screen now displayed not games, but a swirling, nauseating pattern of overlapping polygons that pulsed with sickly light.

And Anya. Little Anya. Her small body began to compress, her limbs drawing inwards, her chest cavity flattening, as if being viewed through a lens of infinite negative curvature. The star-whale plush toy stretched with her, its seams splitting to reveal not stuffing, but a glimmering, iridescent internal surface that pulsed faintly.

They made no sound of pain, no cry of distress. Only the soft, terrible whisper. It wasn’t coming from their mouths, which remained fixed or distorted, but seemed to originate from the space *between* them, from the air itself, a low, sibilant murmur that crawled into his ears and settled directly into his skull.

*“The structure… you saw it…”* Elara’s stretched arm pulsed, the needles twitching.

*“…the folds… you let them…”* Leo’s impossibly twisted head vibrated with the sound.

*“…the angles… they remember…”* Anya’s compressed form shuddered, the star-whale’s internal light flaring.

The words were nonsensical, yet deeply personal. They spoke of geometry, of structures, of the Shard. And they spoke of his failure.

*“…you looked away… from the collapse…”*

*“…focused inward… while we unmade…”*

*“…your equations… couldn’t save us…”*

Each whispered phrase felt like a physical blow. He hadn’t been there. He had been buried in data, in theory, in the cold, clean world of numbers, while his family had been torn apart in a shuttle caught in a sudden, inexplicable gravity shear, a vortex of spatial distortion the initial reports had described with clinical detachment. But the whisper wasn't clinical. It was accusation. It was *knowing*. Knowing his guilt.

He stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet, landing hard on the bunk. The vision intensified. The space around them seemed to stretch and warp, the metal walls of his quarters rippling like water, mirroring the impossible shapes of their bodies. The purple light pulsed faster, hotter. The whispers grew louder, a chorus of distorted, beloved voices.

*“…the Shard… its logic… your failing…”*

*“…we are its truth… the shape of sorrow…”*

*“…you built the frame… for our undoing…”*

His breath hitched, caught in his throat. He clamped his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the sound, the sight, the horrifying blend of his deepest trauma and the anomaly’s alien geometry. This wasn’t just a hallucination born of stress. This was *targeted*. The Shard wasn't just messing with reality; it was finding the cracks in their minds, weaponizing their pasts. His research… his obsessive focus on the geometry of the anomaly… it had shown it where to strike.

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, burying his face in the rough fabric of his coveralls. “Not real,” he choked out, over and over. “Not real, not real, not real.”

The whispering continued, weaving his grief with the Shard’s impossible mathematics, twisting love into accusation, memory into horror. He felt cold sweat prickling his skin, a tremor running through his body. He squeezed tighter, trying to force himself into oblivion, into the simple, undeniable fact of the bunk beneath him, the stale air in his lungs.

Slowly, mercifully, the sound began to fade. The pressure behind his eyes eased slightly. The impossible geometry at the edge of his vision receded. He kept his eyes shut for a long moment, listening only to the ragged sound of his own breathing and the distant hum of the failing ship.

Finally, tentatively, he opened his eyes.

The sim-lights were still purple. The air was still stale. His quarters were empty, the furniture exactly where it should be, the walls solid, unwarped metal. No elongated limbs, no folded skulls, no whispering chorus of the dead. Just the oppressive quiet of his small, lonely room.

He remained curled on the bunk, trembling, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. His mind raced, not with scientific theories, but with a chilling, undeniable certainty. The Shard wasn't just an external force, a physical or energetic anomaly. It was something that could reach inside, find the rawest, most vulnerable parts of you, and twist them into something monstrous. And it had seen him. It had seen Elara, Leo, and Anya. It had seen his guilt.

He stared at the opposite wall, seeing not metal, but the lingering shadow of impossible angles, hearing not silence, but the faint, chilling echo of those familiar, accusing voices. This wasn't just a problem for his instruments anymore. This was a personal, horrifying war for his sanity. And the enemy knew exactly where to stab.

Jian Li stood in the observation gallery of the Medical Bay, the filtered light harsh and unforgiving on the pale faces in the treatment pods below. The air conditioning unit whirred steadily, a sterile counterpoint to the low moans and restless shifts from some of the patients. Most lay still, lost in stress-induced sleep or catatonia. But it was the man in Pod 7 that drew his attention, a young technician named Kael who'd been brought in hours ago, rambling about walls that breathed.

Kael wasn't moaning. He was talking.

His eyes were wide open, fixed on a point above the ceiling where nothing existed but the smooth, white composite. His lips moved rapidly, forming sounds that were guttural and sharp, utterly alien. Not any known language, not even fragmented, nonsensical English like some of the others produced in their delirium. This was structured, complex, a torrent of sound that felt less like communication and more like… recitation.

Jian leaned closer to the reinforced glass. Kael’s hands were held up, fingers splayed, as if tracing lines in the invisible space before him. His head tilted, following something only he could see. A strange, almost reverent expression flickered across his face, overlaid with a desperate intensity. He gestured, sweeping his hand through the empty air, then bringing it back to his chest, pressing his palm flat against his sternum. The sounds pouring from him rose in volume, a frantic, urgent tone entering the alien cadence.

The medical staff moved quietly between pods, used to the strange behaviors by now, attributing them to mass hysteria or some unknown environmental toxin. One of the nurses, a woman with weary eyes and tightly pulled-back hair, approached Kael's pod, syringe in hand.

"Just a mild sedative, Mr. Li," she murmured, noticing him. Her voice was low, tired. "Help him rest."

Jian didn't respond, his gaze locked on Kael. The technician was shaking his head now, violently, interrupting the flow of alien sounds. His expression twisted from reverence to pure terror. He drew his arms in tight, shielding his face as if from an unseen blow. The sounds devolved into choked gasps, ragged and wet.

"What is he saying?" Jian finally asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The nurse paused, looking at Kael with a practiced, detached sympathy. "We don't know. Nonsense, mostly. Sometimes it sounds... rhythmic. Like chanting." She tapped on the pod control panel, preparing the injection.

Kael screamed. It wasn't a human scream. It was a sound ripped from raw metal, a shriek that cut through the sterile air, vibrating in Jian's bones. His body seized up, arching against the restraints on the cot. The alien sounds were gone, replaced by that single, horrifying metallic cry. His eyes rolled back in his head, the whites stark against his flushed skin.

The nurse gasped, dropping the syringe. "Code white!" she yelled into her comms, her composure breaking.

Kael’s body went rigid, then limp. His arms flopped to his sides. The terrifying shriek died, replaced by a shallow, ragged breathing. His eyes remained open, staring unblinking at the ceiling, but the life, the motion, the interaction – it was gone.

Medical staff swarmed the pod. They checked vital signs, adjusted monitors, their movements swift and practiced, but their faces were etched with confusion and fear.

Jian stood frozen, his hands pressed flat against the cool glass. He had seen the etching shift, heard its faint resonance. He had felt the ship hum with a wrongness that went beyond malfunction. For a time, in the quiet of the Hydroponics Bay, tending to the living things, he had entertained a terrible, secret thought: that the anomaly might be a form of divine contact, a breaking open of reality to reveal something sacred, vast, and utterly Other.

But watching Kael, hearing that inhuman shriek, seeing the switch from interaction to this vacant, hollow state… it wasn’t contact. It was violation. Possession. Something had reached in and stolen Kael, leaving only an empty shell behind. That fleeting look of awe on Kael’s face, before the terror, before the collapse – it wasn't the face of someone encountering the divine. It was the face of someone witnessing something that was fundamentally, cosmically *wrong*, something that saw humanity not as creation, but as canvas, or perhaps, as clay to be reshaped.

His gut twisted. The unsettling was giving way to a deep, cold dread. This wasn't wonder. This was horror. And it was here, inside the ship, taking root in the minds of the crew. His initial secret wonder felt like a blasphemy now. This wasn't god. This was something else. Something that should not be. Something that consumed.

He felt a chill deeper than the Medical Bay's regulated temperature. He wasn't sure he could ever see the stars the same way again. Or look at a blank wall without wondering what might be looking back.

The soft glow of the data terminal illuminated Eva Rostova’s face, picking out the new, fine lines etched around her eyes. Bridge Archive/Log Station was a quiet corner, tucked away near the back of the command deck, rarely used for anything more strenuous than pulling up personnel files or checking historical system readouts. A thin layer of dust coated the console surface, undisturbed for cycles. The air here felt stagnant, insulated from the low hum and distant metallic groans that had become the Eidolon’s unsettling soundtrack.

Eva ran a thumb along the edge of the console, her concentration absolute. She needed certainty. The chaos, the fear, the whispers of impossible rooms and vanishing crew… it was a sickness spreading through the ship, a toxin in the air she needed to neutralize. And control started with information. With facts. If she could just piece together the timeline, understand *when* things started deviating, she might find a pattern, a vulnerability.

She had pulled up the general personnel logs first. Status reports, assignments, medical clearances. Standard, reassuring data. Then she’d cross-referenced them with internal movement logs – the records automatically generated whenever a crew member passed through certain key junctions or accessed specific restricted areas.

It was tedious work. Sifting through hundreds of entries, looking for discrepancies. Her eyes were starting to burn. She rubbed at them, pulling back from the screen for a moment, the faint, persistent ache behind her temples a familiar companion now.

Then she saw it.

A log entry for Technician Third Class Anya Sharma. Stamped Early Cycle 16. A system access request for Hydroponics Bay 7-Delta.

Eva stared at the date. Early Cycle 16. Today.

Her breath hitched. Anya Sharma had been reported dead in the Cargo Bay incident, Cycle 80. Eighty cycles ago. Weeks. Her name was on the official list. Eva had read it herself. Signed off on the report.

Her fingers trembled as she hit the command to pull up Anya Sharma’s full personnel file. Yes. Status: Deceased. Date of Incident: Late Cycle 80. Confirmed by multiple witnesses.

Yet, here was a log entry. *Anya Sharma, accessing Hydroponics Bay 7-Delta, 04:17, Early Cycle 16.*

Maybe a system error? A timestamp glitch? The anomaly was affecting systems. Aris had said as much. Corrupting code. Making impossible readings.

She ran a diagnostic on the log file. Source code clean. Timestamp accurate to the system clock. No flags for corruption.

She dug deeper. What about other "deceased" crew members? Lieutenant Commander Elias Vance, lost in the Engineering Section collapse, Cycle 13. Eva pulled up Vance’s logs. There, dated Mid Cycle 15: *Elias Vance, accessing Auxiliary Power Junction 12, 11:03.*

Impossible. The Auxiliary Power Junction 12 had been sealed off since Cycle 14, deemed structurally unstable after a gravity fluctuation. Vance was dead long before that. Even if he wasn't, he couldn't have accessed a sealed, dissolving section of the ship *months* after he supposedly died.

Her mind began to reel. Sweat pricked her forehead. The dust motes dancing in the terminal light seemed to pulse with a sickening rhythm. Dead crew members, logging activity in parts of the ship that shouldn't exist or were already gone.

She scrolled faster now, a cold dread coiling in her stomach. Ensign Kael Jensen, officially deceased, the victim of a bulkhead sealing itself with impossible speed, Cycle 14. *Kael Jensen, Medical Bay, 19:51, Late Cycle 15.*

The Medical Bay log confirmed the entry. A medical officer had signed off on Jensen’s arrival. Had Jian Li been there? Jian had mentioned something about Kael. Something about… contact.

Eva’s head swam. Had she misremembered? Had Kael survived the bulkhead incident? No, she remembered the report. Remembered the rescue team’s horrified faces. Remembered signing the death certificate.

But the ship logs were the truth. The official record. The system didn't lie. It *couldn't* lie. It was the bedrock of their reality on this vast, metal beast.

Unless…

Unless the logs were lying. But that meant… everything was suspect. Her own memories. The official reports she’d signed. The crew manifests. The casualty lists. The ship’s very structure, if these dead men were walking its corridors weeks after their demise.

She leaned closer to the screen, the glowing text blurring slightly. Was she tired? Stressed? Was this another psychological trick, like the warping corridors, the impossible frost, the whispers? Was the anomaly infecting her mind, planting false memories or making her see things on the screen that weren't there?

She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her fingers hard against her eyelids. *Breathe, Rostova. Think.* The logs. The official, encrypted logs. Accessing them required multiple clearance overrides. They were immutable. Secure. They had to be real.

So if the logs were real, then her memories were wrong. Kael Jensen hadn't died behind that bulkhead. Elias Vance hadn't been lost in engineering. Anya Sharma wasn't dead. Or maybe they were dead *now*, but they had been alive *then*, logging these impossible entries in impossible places. The timeline was collapsing, twisting like the corridors.

A faint, metallic groan echoed from deep within the ship, a sound that seemed to resonate in her bones. It wasn’t structural. It felt… alive.

Eva’s hands hovered over the keyboard, the certainty she had sought dissolving like mist in the morning sun. Who was alive? Who was dead? Was she alone here on the bridge, or were others moving through the ship, ghosts in the machine, logged and accounted for even as their physical forms decayed or vanished?

The quiet corner suddenly felt vast, empty, and terrifyingly exposed. Every flicker of the terminal light, every distant clank of the ship settling, felt loaded with potential meaning, or perhaps, none at all. She couldn’t trust the data. She couldn’t trust the ship. And worst of all, she couldn’t entirely trust the clear, sharp memories in her own head. The world had tilted, and she was no longer sure which way was down. She was commander of a vessel that might be actively deceiving her, using the records meant to ensure order to instead sow insidious, paralyzing doubt. The very ground beneath her feet felt unstable.

She swallowed hard, the air thick and cold in her throat. She was adrift, alone in a sea of fabricated data and fractured reality, and the only chart she had was her own mind, which might already be compromised. Paranoia prickled at the base of her skull. Who could she talk to? Who would believe her? Who else was seeing these things? Or was it just her? Just her, alone with the impossible logs of the dead.

The briefing room was small, stripped down to bare functionality. A single table of scarred grey composite, three uncomfortable chairs. No windows, just blank bulkheads that felt colder than they should. The air hung thick and heavy, tasting faintly of ozone and something sharp, like fear. Jian Li sat opposite Dr. Aris Thorne and Commander Eva Rostova. The silence between them stretched, taut and brittle. Jian’s hands rested flat on the table, palms down, fingers splayed as if seeking purchase on solid ground. His knuckles were white.

Aris leaned back, arms crossed, his expression a familiar mixture of weary patience and intellectual detachment. He’d been listening to Jian’s fragmented theories, the ones that went beyond atmospheric pressure shifts and gravitational anomalies. Eva sat straighter, rigid, her eyes fixed on Jian’s face, a flicker of something unreadable in their depths – curiosity, perhaps, or a deeply buried dread she refused to name. The recent disquiet about the ship logs gnawed at her, leaving her receptive, against her will, to ideas outside of standard operating procedure.

“...and the energy readings, Aris, they aren’t just unusual.” Jian’s voice was quiet, measured, but held a tremor. “They’re… dissonant. Like a frequency that shouldn’t exist. Not just in physics, but… in everything.”

Aris shifted, a small sigh escaping his lips. “Jian, we’ve been over this. The Shard is an exotic energy phenomenon. Its interactions with conventional spacetime are unpredictable, yes, unprecedented. But 'shouldn’t exist' is not a scientific descriptor. It defies *our* current understanding, certainly, but that doesn’t make it inherently… wrong.” He stressed the word, a faint note of challenge in his tone.

Jian shook his head slowly, his gaze distant, fixed on a point beyond the opposite bulkhead. “Wrong is exactly the word. You feel it, don’t you? In the air. In the silence between the sounds. This isn’t just physics breaking down. This is… degradation.” He finally met Aris’s eyes, a raw intensity in his own. “Not just of structure, or gravity, or the mind. But of being. Of… spirit.”

Eva leaned forward slightly. “Spirit?” Her voice was low, a hint of caution in it. She was a woman of action, of concrete problems and measurable solutions. The psychological effects had rattled her, but Jian’s language pushed into territory she actively avoided.

“Yes. It feels… like the opposite of life,” Jian continued, warming to a concept he had clearly been wrestling with alone. “Like anti-spirituality. Imagine everything that makes something *real*, something *right* – consciousness, connection, the feeling of existing in a meaningful way. This anomaly… it doesn't just break those things. It *unmakes* them. Actively erodes the very fabric of what it means to *be*.”

Aris uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly. “That’s a philosophical interpretation, Jian. A spiritual one, as you said. My instruments measure energy fields, spatial distortions, probabilistic shifts. They don’t register ‘spirit’ or ‘wrongness’.” He tapped the table lightly with his index finger. “The hallucinations, the spatial anomalies, the temporal distortions… they can be explained by extreme, localized warping of the spacetime continuum affecting neural processing and perception. It’s terrifying, yes, but it’s physics, however alien.”

“But why?” Jian pressed, his voice gaining a quiet desperation. “Why is it doing this? Your physics explains *how* it might be happening, yes. The impossible shapes, the bending space. But does it explain the *intent*?”

Aris frowned. “Intent? Jian, it’s a physical phenomenon. A cosmic event. It doesn’t have intent.”

“Doesn’t it?” Jian’s voice dropped lower, becoming almost a whisper, carrying a weight that silenced even Aris. “Look at what it does. It preys on fear. It weaponizes trauma. It twists beauty into nightmare. It makes crewmates look alien to each other. It doesn’t just break systems; it breaks connection. It doesn’t just disrupt reality; it *mocks* it. Everything it touches, it makes inherently, fundamentally… worse.”

He looked at Eva, then back at Aris. “I've felt it. The etching in the corridor. It pulsed. Not with energy, but with… malevolence. It wants to *unbe*. And it wants us to join it.”

Eva felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. *Malevolence*. The word hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. She had attributed the psychological breakdown to the immense stress, the isolation, the impossible events. But Jian’s absolute conviction, the way his eyes held a depth of fear and understanding that went beyond mere science or fear of death… it resonated with the creeping unease she felt, the sense that this was something ancient, vast, and utterly hostile. She remembered the impossible logs, the dead walking, the ship actively lying to her. Was that just physics? Or something else?

Aris rubbed a hand over his chin, his expression troubled but still resistant. “Correlation is not causation, Jian. The stress and isolation are immense. Psychological fragility is a known outcome of deep space exposure. The anomaly exacerbates it, certainly, by assaulting the senses and fundamental reality. But to assign it consciousness, let alone malevolent intent…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “That is a leap unsupported by any empirical data.”

“Empirical data doesn’t cover the shape of a soul,” Jian said, his voice regaining some strength, though it was brittle. “Or the feeling when something that should be whole is being torn apart, piece by piece, from the inside out. This anomaly isn’t just different, Aris. It is *anti*. It is the negation of something vital, something good. And it is spreading.”

Eva watched them both, the scientist clinging to his logic, the mechanic embracing a terrifying, alien spirituality. She felt caught in the middle, her foundation of order and control crumbling. Jian’s words, spoken with such quiet certainty, felt like a physical blow, echoing the silent scream trapped within her when she looked at those impossible logs. It wasn’t just a malfunctioning ship; it was something *wrong*. Jian had given a name to the terror she couldn’t articulate, the dread that had nothing to do with G-force or atmospheric pressure. It was the dread of confronting a force that didn't just want to destroy them, but to dissolve them, to unmake the very concept of them.

The silence returned, heavier this time, filled with the unspoken weight of cosmic dread. Aris remained skeptical, his scientific training a bulwark against the tide of fear and the unknown. But Eva, looking at Jian’s haunted eyes, felt a terrifying certainty settle deep within her gut. Jian was right. This wasn’t just a problem to be solved with equations or engineering. This was a confrontation with something inherently, terrifyingly, *unholy*. And she had no idea how to fight that.

The air in the Deck 7 corridor tasted like old sweat and fear. Not the quick, sharp fear of a sudden alarm, but the slow, corrosive kind that settled in your teeth. They stood shoulder to shoulder, a dozen shapes huddled under the emergency lighting, their faces grim and smeared with what looked suspiciously like dried lubricant. They were blocking the access junction to Engineering Section 4. Not guarding it, blocking it. Like zealots before a shrine.

“This section is clean,” the one nearest the junction panel rasped, his voice low and tight. He held a length of conduit pipe like a sacred club, his knuckles white. His eyes, bloodshot and wide, darted back and forth, seeing things that weren't there. Or maybe they were.

Another, a woman with tangled hair pulled back from a face tight with conviction, gripped a maintenance cutter, its plasma edge retracted but clearly visible. "Stay back," she hissed. "Don't let the rot spread."

They’d sealed the blast door behind them hours ago. Welded it shut, someone had reported over the increasingly unreliable comms. Welded themselves in, trapped with whatever terrors haunted this particular stretch of corridor.

The Security Team, five strong but looking far too few, formed a hesitant line twenty meters down. Their pulse rifles were lowered, not aimed, not yet. Commander Eva Rostova’s orders had been clear: isolate, assess, *avoid lethal force if possible*. That last part felt like a cruel joke now, looking at the wild, desperate light in the crew members’ eyes.

"Put the weapons down," shouted the Security Captain, his voice amplified by his helmet speaker, trying to cut through the delusion. "This is the Eidolon. You are crew. Let us through. We need access to Section 4."

A man in the cultish group laughed, a short, sharp sound that grated. "Eidolon? This isn't the Eidolon anymore. Not all of it. Some parts… they've been touched." He gestured vaguely with his conduit pipe towards the junction, towards the bulkheads themselves. "This section? We cleansed it. Drained the infection. Sealed it off. You try to open it, you let it back in."

"There is no infection!" the Captain countered, taking a slow, measured step forward. "There is just… stress. The anomaly is affecting minds. Let us help you."

His words were met with a wave of guttural sounds, somewhere between a growl and a chant. The woman with the cutter raised her weapon slightly. "He lies," she spat, her voice shaking with fervent belief. "They're already corrupted. Look at their eyes. Dead. Empty."

The Security Captain stopped. He knew the look they were talking about. He’d seen it in the mess hall, seen it in the corridors. People staring through you, mumbling to themselves, or worse, seeing things you couldn't. But these people were armed. And they were organized. This wasn't just individual breakdown; it was a shared madness, given form and purpose. They had created their own reality, carved it out of the ship’s twisting metal, and they were going to defend it.

"Last chance," the Captain warned, his voice losing its hopeful edge, steel creeping in. His team shifted, pulse rifles coming up, though still not fully aimed. The air hummed with the suppressed energy of the weapons, a counterpoint to the low, frantic energy of the crew group.

"Purify!" someone yelled from the back of the cult group.

"Cleanse the unclean!" another screamed.

Their eyes weren't just wide; they were glazed with a terrifying certainty, a conviction that went beyond reason or argument. They weren't just afraid; they were righteous. They were protecting their ‘clean’ space, defending it against the ‘infected’ world outside their self-imposed boundary.

The man with the conduit pipe raised it high. The woman with the cutter took a step forward, her face contorted with a mix of terror and fury. "They seek to contaminate!"

The Security Captain didn't hesitate. He saw the movement, the intent. His own weapon barked, a controlled burst of plasma. The man with the pipe stumbled back, dropping his weapon, a smoking hole appearing in his chest. He didn’t scream. He just made a wet, gasping sound before collapsing.

The dam broke.

The cult group surged forward with a collective shriek of rage and anguish. The woman with the cutter lunged, the plasma edge flickering. The Security Team reacted instantly, forced into a brutal, desperate defense. Pulse rifles spat blue energy, each shot met with a cry, a thud, the sickening smell of burnt flesh. Crew members, once colleagues, charged with improvised weapons – wrenches, lengths of cable, even bare hands – eyes wide with a terrifying, alien fervor. They weren't just fighting; they were flailing, desperate to keep the 'unclean' at bay, driven by a delusion more powerful than self-preservation. One Security Officer went down under a pile of bodies, flailing against frantic punches and desperate bites before another Officer put a single, merciful shot into the mass.

The narrow corridor became a maelstrom of violence and terror. There was no strategy, just primal instinct and the desperate, final act of men and women utterly convinced they were saving themselves from a horror only they could see. The sounds of combat echoed horribly in the enclosed space – plasma fire, wet impacts, hoarse shouts, and the chilling, broken cries of crew members whose minds had already left the ship, even as their bodies attacked. The Security Team, sickened but grimly efficient, were forced to neutralize the threat, each shot a confirmation of the depth of the psychological rot that had infected the Eidolon. There was no reasoning with this, no negotiation. Only violence. And death.

The observation deck was supposed to be a sanctuary. A place where, even surrounded by the cold, mechanical womb of the Eidolon, you could gaze out at the vast, indifferent tapestry of stars and remember your place within something larger, something... real. But tonight, facing inward, away from the reinforced viewports, felt safer. Quieter. Less likely to show you something that shouldn't be there.

Eva Rostova stood near the center of the deck, arms crossed, her posture rigid, the silence heavy on her shoulders. Her eyes scanned the bare metal walls, the recessed lighting, the subtle hum of the ship’s life support – tangible things she could anchor herself to. The sounds of the chaos elsewhere were thankfully muffled here, a low thrum of distant shouts, the occasional sharp, report of what she refused to identify.

Dr. Aris Thorne leaned against a support column, running a thumb over the polished synth-steel. His usual sharp intensity was dulled, replaced by a weary, almost haunted look. He wasn't looking at the walls or the floor. He was looking somewhere beyond, his gaze distant, focused on nothing in the immediate space.

Jian Li sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the curved inner wall, his eyes closed. He looked calmer than either of them, his breathing slow and even, but a tremor ran through his hands, just visible where they rested on his knees.

None of them spoke. There was little left to say that hadn't been uttered in hushed tones, frantic comms, or terrified whispers over the past cycles. They were the remnants. Command, Science, Soul. What was left of the core, frayed and cracking.

A strange stillness descended, heavier than the silence. The hum of the ship seemed to fade, not abruptly, but… smoothly. As if it was simply no longer relevant. The ambient light, usually a sterile white, shifted, deepening to a bruised purple, then an impossible, swirling black that felt colder than vacuum.

Aris straightened from the column, his breath catching. Eva felt a prickling on her skin, a sensation like static discharge but deeper, rattling bone. Jian Li’s eyes snapped open, wide and luminous in the unnatural light, his mouth parting in a silent gasp.

They weren't looking at each other. They weren't looking at the interior of the observation deck anymore.

Without moving, they were outside.

Not just outside the ship, but *around* it. The Eidolon wasn't a vessel anymore. It was colossal, impossibly vast, a mountain range of metal and conduits stretching further than sight could grasp. And it was *breathing*. Slow, heavy undulations rippled across its hull plates, a rhythmic expansion and contraction that sent tremors through the phantom space around them.

But it wasn’t empty space.

Around the breathing ship were structures. Not built, but *grown*. Jagged spires of pure shadow that seemed to pierce dimensions. Cubes that rotated on impossible axes, their faces shifting colors that defied the visible spectrum. Arches that twisted back into themselves, leading nowhere and everywhere at once. Non-Euclidean architecture, made real and terrifying, humming with an energy that felt ancient and wrong.

The 'sky' was a pulsating smear of colors that had no names, pierced by distant, impossibly large stars that weren't stars. Sounds came not through ears, but directly into the mind – a low thrum that was also a wail, a whisper that was also a scream, a symphony of alien concepts that tore at the edges of comprehension.

And the Eidolon, their ship, pulsed within it all, a fragile, metallic heart beating in a monstrous, impossible body. Eva felt a visceral horror, seeing their sanctuary, their *home*, transformed into something so profoundly alien, so alive in the wrong way. Aris saw the mathematical impossibility of the structures, the perfect, terrifying logic of their non-existence in this reality, and a cold dread seized him, the kind that shatters the foundation of everything you know. Jian Li felt the presence behind it all, not a god, not a demon, but something vast, ancient, and utterly, chillingly indifferent, an entity that simply *was*, and its being twisted everything it touched.

They were small, insignificant motes of dust floating in a nightmare landscape, tethered only by the horrifying shared vision. Time stretched, bent, then snapped.

The impossible colors vanished. The sounds cut out. The sensation of being outside, small and exposed, vanished.

They were back in the observation deck. The sterile white lights were steady. The hum of the ship’s life support was back, a familiar, comforting drone. The walls were solid metal. The viewports showed empty, normal space.

Three figures stood or sat, blinking in the sudden normality.

Eva Rostova straightened further, her hand instinctively reaching for the non-existent comm on her collar. Her breath hitched.

Aris pushed off the column, stumbling slightly, his eyes wide, fixed on a point just past Eva’s shoulder.

Jian Li unfolded his legs, rising slowly, his face pale, the serene look replaced by profound fear.

Silence. Not the heavy silence from before, but a stunned, ringing emptiness.

Eva looked at Aris. His eyes met hers, and in their depths, she saw the same impossible colors, the same mathematical terror that had just flooded her own mind. He nodded, a sharp, jerky movement, confirming without a word.

She turned to Jian Li. He was already looking at her, his gaze meeting Aris’s, then settling on Eva. His expression was one of absolute, undeniable shared experience. The tremor in his hands was worse now.

Three sets of eyes. Different people, different roles, different ways of seeing the world. But for a terrifying, fleeting moment, they had seen the *same* thing. The same impossible ship, the same breathing horror, the same alien structures.

It wasn't just happening to individuals anymore. It was happening to them together. A shared delusion. A collective nightmare made real.

The psychological threat wasn't isolated. It was contagious. It was everywhere. And it could take them, together or apart, into a reality that wasn’t theirs. The confirmation hung heavy in the air, more solid and terrifying than any bulkhead. They weren't just losing their minds; their minds were being sculpted, collectively, into something else. Something alien. Something that saw the Eidolon not as a ship, but as a body. Its body.