Entities from Beyond

The emergency lights strobed a sickly orange, painting the mid-ship corridor in disjointed, frantic pulses. Watercondensation wept from ceiling panels that shouldn't have condensation, clinging in perfect, unnatural beads. Junior Officer Kaelen tightened his grip on the thermal scanner, the cheap plastic slick in his suddenly sweaty palm. He was deep in the warped section, the area the maintenance logs now flagged with a simple, baffling error code: *STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY – NON-EUCLIDEAN*.

His breath hitched in his throat, a thin, reedy sound lost in the ship’s low, groaning hum. That hum felt different here, layered with something else, a frequency that vibrated not just in his ears, but in his teeth. The air itself felt *wrong*, thick and somehow thinner at the same time, tasting faintly of burnt sugar and something like ozone.

He ran the scanner along the bulkhead wall. It registered cold, standard hull plating. Nothing. He took a step, his magnetic boots clicking faintly against the deck plating. Then he froze.

The wall in front of him, a standard gray bulkhead with a faded red stripe indicating a junction point, didn't just warp or buckle. It *peeled*. Like a thin, painted sheet of paper being pulled slowly from a wet surface. Except it was meter-thick metal.

Kaelen blinked. Once. Twice. His brain, struggling, tried to superimpose the expected gray plating over the impossible sight unfolding before him. It didn't work.

The peeled section didn't reveal wires or conduits or insulation. It revealed *color*. Not colors he had names for. Impossible shades that shifted and bled into each other without transition, colors that felt loud and cold and deeply, profoundly *wrong*. And beyond the color, not structure, but *geometry*. Lines that curved inwards on themselves, angles that should not exist, surfaces that seemed to face multiple directions at once. It was a nightmare made solid, rendered in a spectrum that mocked human vision.

He couldn't breathe. His chest was tight, his lungs screaming for air that wouldn't come. His eyes burned, trying to comprehend the visual assault.

From within that impossible space, something emerged. It wasn't fluid, not solid, not gaseous. It was a *shape*. A shape that didn't fit in three dimensions, a thing of impossible angles and surfaces that pulsed with the same nameless colors. It extended, not with movement, but with a terrifying, silent *unfurling*, pushing into the corridor, into *his* reality. It wasn't large, perhaps the size of a small maintenance drone, but its presence felt vast, ancient, and utterly alien.

It hung there for maybe a second, maybe a year. A single, crystalline point on one of its surfaces seemed to catch the emergency light and refract it into a thousand different directions at once, each beam a different, agonizing color.

Then, with a sound like tearing canvas mixed with ripping metal and a choked gasp, the peeled-back wall snapped shut. Instantly. Violently. It slammed back into place, becoming solid, unremarkable gray bulkhead again. The impossible colors vanished. The non-Euclidean shape was gone.

Kaelen stumbled backward, hitting the opposite wall with a clatter. The scanner slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the deck. He sank to his knees, hands pressed against his eyes, though he knew it wouldn't un-see what he just had. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. He wanted to scream, but no sound came out. Just a strangled, rattling choke.

He fumbled for his comms unit, somehow managing to activate the channel to the bridge. His voice, when it finally came, was a shaking whisper, barely audible over his ragged breaths.

"Bridge... Bridge, this is Officer Kaelen... Mid-ship corridor, warped section..." He had to force the words out, each one a fight. "I... I saw it. It peeled. The wall... it just... peeled back."

A voice, calm and familiar, cut through the static in his mind. Commander Eva Rostova. "Kaelen, report. What peeled back? Structural failure?"

"No... No, Commander." His voice trembled uncontrollably now. "Not failure. It opened. And there was... there were colors, impossible colors... and shapes... like nothing you've ever seen. And something came out..."

Silence stretched across the comms, thick with disbelief.

"Kaelen," Eva's voice was sharper now, tinged with urgency, "Are you injured? Are you hallucinating?"

"Not injured. Not... not hallucinating." He forced his eyes open, staring at the utterly normal, gray wall in front of him. It looked solid. Immovable. "It was real, Commander. It was *real*." He swallowed hard, the taste of ozone still on his tongue. "A... a shape. It came out. Just for a second. And then... then the wall closed again. Like nothing happened." He drew in a shuddering breath. "But something did. Oh god, something *did*."

He could hear faint, urgent whispers on the bridge channel, other voices reacting to his fractured report. But Eva's voice cut through them again, quiet, deadly serious.

"Stay put, Officer Kaelen. Maintain visual. Do not approach the area."

Kaelen could only nod numbly, though she couldn't see him. He stared at the wall, the normal, gray, solid wall, and felt the impossible colors burning behind his eyelids, the non-Euclidean geometry etched onto his retinas. It wasn't just a report anymore. It was a witness account. It was proof. Something tangible, something alien, was here. And he had seen it. And he was terrified.

The primary research lab hummed with a low, almost desperate energy. Dr. Aris Thorne, tie loosened, dark circles under his eyes like smudged ink, leaned over the main console. Monitors flickered with complex waveforms, probability gradients, and tensor analyses that looked less like physics and more like fever dreams. He’d spent the last cycle recalibrating every sensor array he could access, tearing apart redundant systems and cannibalizing theoretical physics prototypes. Standard energy-matter detection was useless. Gravity sensors wept garbage data. Subspace field readings were a flatline or a shriek of static. But the probabilistic waveform analyzers... they were singing a terrifying new tune.

He hadn't slept properly in cycles, fueled by synth-stim and an obsession that gnawed at his sanity like a persistent itch under the skin. The report from Officer Kaelen, garbled and panicked as it was, hadn’t been a surprise. It was confirmation. Now, he had data. Cold, hard data, rendered in impossible fluctuations.

"There," Aris murmured, more to himself than anyone. His fingers danced across the holographic interface, isolating a specific signature. It wasn't a spike of energy. It wasn't a mass reading. It was a knot, a twist in the fundamental likelihood of *being*, manifesting as a deviation from the expected quantum state. A distortion.

The signature was moving.

He zoomed out, overlaying the anomaly's track onto a projected schematic of the *Eidolon*. The schematic, usually a crisp, predictable blueprint, was itself unstable, sections flickering, geometry shifting like a badly compressed image. But the distortion track ignored the apparent physical structure. It moved *through* walls that shouldn't allow passage, traversed distances that defied conventional spatial relationships, flowed around sections that, according to the ship’s core systems, were no longer there.

His breath hitched. It wasn’t moving *on* the ship. It was moving *within* the ship’s newly impossible architecture.

"Source tracking," he ordered the console, his voice tight. A new line, shimmering with probability math, appeared on the display, charting the entity's path. It passed through a section that, according to Kaelen’s report, had visually peeled back. Then it went somewhere else, somewhere that the schematic showed as solid bulkhead, yet the waveform distortion glided through it effortlessly.

He traced the path, following the improbable vector. It doubled back on itself in places, not like turning around, but like experiencing the same point from multiple spatial directions simultaneously. It appeared to be moving *within* the fabric of the ship itself, or perhaps the fabric that the ship was becoming.

Aris leaned closer, eyes scanning the chaotic data feeds spilling onto auxiliary screens. Every reading was a violation of established physics, yet here it was, empirically measured. Not a malfunction, not a hallucination, but a quantifiable deviation in the universe's underlying probability field. This was the data they had been searching for, the scientific evidence of the impossible.

But it didn’t explain. It only cataloged a violation. It didn’t fit into quantum mechanics, didn’t align with relativity, didn’t even register on the most advanced theories of exotic matter or energy. It was something else. Something… *fundamentally* else.

A cold dread, sharp and precise as a scalpel, pricked at his mind. It wasn't just that this defied understanding; it was that his most advanced tools, modified explicitly to look for the *unexpected*, were still only seeing the shadow of something far more complex. He felt like a primitive astronomer trying to describe a black hole with only a telescope and the concept of gravity.

He adjusted the filters, trying to isolate sub-patterns within the main distortion signature. Were there multiple entities? Were they interacting? Or was this one singular, vast presence flowing through the ship like blood through veins? The data was too noisy, too chaotic. But the movement was undeniable. Purposeful? Random? He couldn't tell. It simply *was*, a ripple in the likely, a presence in the improbable.

Aris ran a hand through his thinning hair, the static electricity making the fine hairs stand on end. He stared at the monitor, the glowing lines and numbers blurring slightly at the edges. This thing, this *distortion*, was real. It was here. And it was navigating a ship that no longer obeyed the laws of space and time, doing so with an apparent ease that was deeply unsettling.

He keyed in a command, logging the data, tagging it with every descriptor he could muster: "Probabilistic Waveform Anomaly," "Spatial Distortion Entity," "Non-Euclidean Presence - Type Unknown." The terms felt inadequate, pathetic attempts to pigeonhole a phenomenon that seemed to exist outside the very concepts they represented.

The rational part of his brain, the part trained over decades to seek patterns, to find rules, to build models, screamed in frustration. How could he understand something that broke every rule he knew? Yet, a deeper, more primal part of him, the part that had stared into the abyss of his own trauma and found nothing but emptiness, felt a strange, terrible pull. This was the ultimate puzzle. The universe revealing a secret layer, a hidden reality. And while it was terrifying, it was also... intoxicating.

He had the data. He had the proof. Now, he just needed to find the logic. To find the *why*. Even if the ‘why’ was something that would shatter the foundation of everything he believed. The pursuit consumed him. The fear was a dull thrum beneath the intellectual fire. He had to understand. He *had* to. The knowledge, however negative, however terrifying, was the only thing that felt real in this disintegrating reality. He leaned back, cracking his stiff neck, the glow of the monitors reflecting in his haunted eyes. The entities were here. He had the data. Now, he just needed to find the key.

The Chapel hadn't been used much in the last cycles. Now, it was less a place of quiet reflection and more a tomb. The vaulted ceiling, once a soothing curve of composite steel and ambient light, seemed to *sag* in the middle, like stretched fabric. The pews were still bolted down, but several had twisted on their mounts, facing odd angles, some even tilted like dominoes mid-fall. Dust, thick and gray, settled on everything, undisturbed. Except for where Jian Li knelt.

He wasn't praying. Not in the way he used to. Kneeling felt like the only posture left, a small act of defiance against a universe that demanded you cower. The air here felt thinner, colder than the rest of the ship, carrying that faint, alien scent he’d detected cycles ago, stronger now, laced with something else, something sharp and bitter like ozone and burnt sugar.

He wasn't seeing things. Not illusions born of fear, like the others. He was seeing things that *were*. They weren't human. They weren't even animal. The terms 'angel' and 'demon' felt like childish babble now, the clumsy attempts of a primitive consciousness to categorize forces utterly alien to its understanding.

He had seen one in the empty corridor outside the mess hall, late last cycle. It hadn’t moved in any way he understood. It hadn't walked, or floated, or crawled. It had *manifested*. One moment, the corridor was empty, just warped metal and flickering emergency lights. The next, there was... *it*.

It wasn't a shape. Not really. It was a sensation given impossible form. A field of pure *grief*, perhaps, coalescing into a swirling vortex of midnight blues and deep violets, edges sharp as shattered glass, but somehow without being solid. It pulsed, not like a heart, but like a dying star, drawing the light into itself, making the air around it hum with a terrible resonance. He felt it in his bones, a profound, crushing sadness that wasn't his own, but flowed from this impossible entity. He could almost hear a sound – not with his ears, but in his mind – a low, mournful thrum that promised only emptiness.

Another time, near the hydroponics bay he used to tend, he'd seen something different. This one felt like *rage*. It wasn't red, or fiery. It was a jagged structure of blinding white and searing yellow, a geometric nightmare of impossible angles that seemed to tear at the fabric of space around it. It didn't roar, but the air vibrated with a silent scream, a pure, incandescent fury that made the metal plates of the corridor wall bulge and creak. He felt a primal urge to lash out, to break something, anything, just to match the intensity of its presence. It was the feeling of being utterly insignificant, stepped on, crushed, and striking back with the force of a collapsing star.

They were concepts, given flesh... but not *flesh*. More like pure, distilled emotion, manifested in forms the human eye struggled to accept. Forms that made the mind recoil. They weren't benevolent or malevolent in any way he understood morality. They simply *were*, expressions of forces that existed beyond the small, comfortable box of human experience. They were beautiful in a terrifying, cosmic sense, like looking directly into the raw engine of creation and seeing only indifference, only the vast, uncaring processes of existence.

He closed his eyes, the images still seared behind his lids. The comfort he once found in prayer, in the belief in a guiding hand, in angels and demons warring for human souls… it felt hollow now. A child's fairy tale in the face of this indifferent, beautiful, horrifying truth. These things weren't concerned with human morality or human faith. They were as far above human concepts of good and evil as a galaxy was above a single grain of dust.

He had seen them pass through bulkheads as easily as air. He had seen the ship's structure recoil from them, the metal groaning and warping as they moved, as if the ship itself was a fragile membrane in their presence. They weren't *in* the ship; the ship was briefly *in* *them*, passing through their terrible, abstract forms.

He traced a pattern on the dusty floor with a shaking finger, a symbol from his old faith. It felt meaningless. The comfort of ritual, the structure of belief, it was all crumbling. It was worse than finding out God didn’t exist. It was finding out existence was filled with things that were utterly alien, utterly indifferent to humanity, forces that could shatter reality and human minds alike, simply by *being*.

Fear wasn't just a feeling anymore. It was the air he breathed. It was the taste in his mouth. It was the certainty that everything he believed, everything his people had built their understanding of the universe upon, was a fragile illusion, easily pierced by horrors that wore the guise of pure, terrible feeling. His soul didn't feel threatened; it felt *irrelevant*. Drowning not in fire, but in an infinite, cold ocean of meaninglessness. The angels and demons he had learned about were just shadows on a cave wall. The real world was a terrifying, beautiful, indifferent void, and he was staring directly into it. And the entities were staring back, perhaps not even seeing him, simply existing in their awful, magnificent truth.

The air in the commons area, what remained of it, tasted sharp. Like a storm hitting metal, but wronger, colder. Static prickled the skin on forearms. Thirty-two people, packed shoulder to shoulder, had crammed into this space five minutes ago, drawn by the promise of warmth that hadn't been reliable for weeks, the stale scent of ration packs, the low hum of conversations clinging to normalcy like barnacles to a dying whale. Now there were thirty-one.

The man nearest the center of the room, tall and reedy, had been gesturing with his hands as he spoke, explaining something about atmospheric processors. His voice, thin and reedy itself, had cut through the low murmur. And then, without a sound of tearing metal or shattering composite, a patch of space where his torso should have been simply wasn't.

It wasn't a hole. Not empty volume. It was… absence. A patch of darkness that drank the weak emergency lighting, not reflecting but *consuming*. It had a strange, vibrating edge, like heat haze but cold, somehow. The reedy man’s head and legs remained for a heartbeat, suspended, before the void pulsed outward infinitesimally, like a ripple in still water. His mouth had opened, a sound starting, a choked, impossible noise, cut short before it could properly form into a scream. His limbs twisted, then folded inward into the absence, not ripped or torn, but simply... unmade. The void snapped shut just as silently as it had opened.

Silence. Thick, immediate, suffocating.

A woman, huddled by the bulkhead, gagged, a thin, rattling sound in the sudden quiet. Others stared, eyes wide and fixed on the space where the reedy man had stood. A technician dropped the wrench he’d been fiddling with; it clattered on the deck plates, the sound obscenely loud.

A scent drifted in the air, sharp and chemical, like burning ozone, but underneath it, something else. Something metallic and somehow *hungry*. And fear. Raw, animal fear, thick enough to taste.

A voice crackled over a handheld comm unit, the sound startling. It was Eva. Distorted, but her voice. “Report. What was that? I’m seeing… nothing on internal sensors. What happened?”

No one answered.

A younger woman, her face pale and slick with sweat, pointed a trembling finger at the now-empty space. "He... he just... he's gone. He isn't here." Her voice was a reedy whisper, mirroring the man who wasn't.

"Gone where?" Eva's voice, tinny and demanding, grated. "Casualties?"

Another witness, a heavily built man whose usual stoicism was shattered, finally found his voice, rough and disbelieving. "Unmade, Commander. Just... *gone*. Like he was never here at all."

Silence from the comm unit this time. A longer silence.

The air still held that acrid, hungry tang. The fear wasn't just a feeling in their guts; it was in the fabric of the room now, etched onto the pale, horrified faces. They had seen the impossible. They had seen death, but worse. They had seen a person, a colleague, an undeniable physical presence, simply cease. Erased. The Shard wasn’t just breaking the ship or their minds. It was reaching inside, plucking out individuals, making them nothing. And they had seen it happen. All of them.

Eva Rostova stood on the bridge, a forced stillness in her posture. The main viewscreen showed only the endless churn of the nebula, a chaotic smear of color that did little to soothe the gnawing tension in her gut. Below, the crew worked in hushed, unnaturally careful motions, their faces pale and drawn. The incident in the commons, the way that man had simply been *unmade*, had solidified the fear into something cold and heavy. It wasn't malfunction. It wasn't madness, not entirely. It was… deliberate.

She turned away from the main screen, her gaze sweeping across the various consoles and readouts. The ship was a patchwork quilt of flickering displays and blank screens, a testament to the pervasive, unpredictable interference. System diagnostics were meaningless. Sensor data was a joke. Her authority felt like a thin veneer over a crumbling structure.

Her eyes fell on the polished frame of one of the smaller viewports, usually kept gleaming by the maintenance crew. It reflected the muted light of the bridge, a curved distortion of her own tired face and the dim control panels behind her. But as she watched, the reflection shimmered. Not the gentle ripple of heat haze, but a sharp, impossible shift.

The bridge reflection wasn't there.

Instead, the polished metal showed... something else. A space that wasn't the ship. It was vast and dark, but not the familiar darkness of space. This dark was active, alive, somehow. And the shapes within it. Not stars. Not nebulae. Impossible geometries of negative space, entities that defied the eye, shifting and pulsing in ways that made her mind ache just to perceive them. They weren’t solid, not in any way she understood. They were like holes that moved, tears in existence given horrific, fluid form. A brief, terrifying glimpse. A single beat of a heart she hadn't realized was pounding in her chest.

Then, it was gone. The reflection snapped back to normal, showing her own strained face, the ordinary, damaged bridge behind her. The sudden return to mundane reality felt like a blow. Her breath caught in her throat, a silent gasp.

Had she seen that? The quick, impossible window? Or was it the stress, the whispers of mass hysteria finally catching up to her? She squeezed her eyes shut for a second, then opened them, staring hard at the polished frame. It showed only the bridge. Her reflection stared back, wide-eyed and unnerved.

No. It wasn’t a hallucination. The suddenness, the alienness of it, the sheer *wrongness* burned behind her eyelids. The man in the commons, unmade. This, a brief, terrifying peek at the place he'd gone to.

The Shard wasn't just breaking reality on the Eidolon. It was a goddamn *window*. A crack opening onto something vast, horrifying, and utterly indifferent. And it was showing them what was on the other side.

A shiver, cold and deep, traced its way down her spine. The polished frame felt cold beneath her fingertips. The familiar metal of her ship. But it had shown her something else. Somewhere else. A place where existence was cheap, where impossible things lived, and where reality itself was merely a fragile, permeable membrane. The ship wasn't just falling apart. It was being consumed, piece by piece, crew member by crew member, into *that*.

She pulled her hand back, her skin prickling. The bridge suddenly felt smaller, more fragile. The polished surfaces that once seemed merely decorative now felt like eyes, reflecting not just the ship, but hinting at the vast, hungry darkness that was pressing in.

The air in the Communications Station vibrated with a low, persistent hum that felt less like machinery and more like something vast breathing just beyond the bulkheads. Communications Officer Tam stood before his console, knuckles white where they gripped the edge. The screen wasn't showing clean data streams or ship-to-ship traffic; it was a chaotic mess of static, fragmented waveforms, and symbols that flickered with impossible colors. The system logs were a cascade of errors, each one a tiny punch to the gut. Ship systems vs. Anomaly interference. The fight was everywhere, bleeding into everything. And winning.

Tam adjusted his headset, wincing as a spike of high-pitched feedback shrieked through it. "Commander? Still getting nothing. Just... noise. Corrupted packets, ghosts on every channel. It's like the anomaly isn't just blocking, it's..." He trailed off, searching for the right words. "It's *broadcasting* over us. Like a massive, broken radio."

Eva Rostova stood behind him, arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the chaotic screen. The rigid control she usually exuded was frayed at the edges, replaced by a grim tension that pulled at the corners of her mouth. "Keep trying, Officer. Focus on priority channels. Distress frequencies. Anything from the Kepler system."

Tam nodded, his fingers dancing over the holographic keyboard, commands disappearing into the storm of interference. The station lights flickered, casting long, dancing shadows across the cramped room. The hum intensified, a resonant frequency that made his teeth ache.

Then, a change. Not a clean signal, but a sudden, violent shift in the noise. A wave on the waveform that wasn't random. It had… structure.

"Wait," Tam breathed, leaning closer. "Wait, I'm getting something."

Static shrieked, tearing at his eardrums even through the filter. Beneath it, faint at first, then surging forward, came a sound that curdled the blood in his veins.

Screams.

Not the brief, sharp cries of pain, but long, drawn-out wails of pure, absolute terror. Layered, overlapping, building into a cacophony of human agony. They weren't just loud; they felt *close*, somehow, vibrating in the very air around them.

"Filter that!" Eva snapped, stepping closer. "Is that... from the Kepler system?"

Tam fumbled with the controls, his hands shaking. "Trying to isolate... there's another sound..."

The screams continued, a choir of the damned, and woven through them, something else began to assert itself. A sound like immense, grinding metal plates shifting, but without the distinct impact, just the endless, tearing drag. And beneath *that*, a third layer. Music. But it was music that defied every rule of harmony and rhythm. Notes that should not exist together formed chords that made no sense, following a beat that pulsed and stumbled erratically. It was both nauseating and horrifyingly compelling. Non-Euclidean music. It felt like listening to logic break down in sonic form.

The combination was a physical assault. The screams, the grinding, the impossible music – it was a symphony of cosmic wrongness. Tam squeezed his eyes shut for a second, trying to block it out, but it was inside his head.

"The signal... it's looping," he choked out, opening his eyes. The waveform on the screen showed the same pattern repeating every few seconds. The same sequence of screams, the same grind, the same impossible melody. An endless, horrifying cycle.

Eva stood frozen, her face pale. This wasn't a distress signal. This was... a record. A snapshot of pure, unadulterated horror, caught and played back eternally. The terror in the screams was palpable, the grinding sounded like existence itself being flayed, and the music... the music was the sound of a reality that cared nothing for human form or sanity.

"Where is it coming from?" she asked, her voice tight.

Tam shook his head, staring at the screen. "I don't know. It's... everywhere. And nowhere. The source data is just... corrupting as it comes in. The anomaly's interference... it's not just static. It's shaping the signal. Moulding it."

He didn't have to say what it was moulding it *into*. The screams, the sounds of destruction, the alien music. It was showing them. Showing them what happened. What *is* happening.

The loop played on, the screams tearing at their nerves, the grinding a physical weight, the music a violation of sense. Hope drained away like water through a sieve. If this was the only communication getting through... if this was all that was left...

Suddenly, the chaotic waveform on the screen surged one last time, a peak of impossible energy. The sound intensified, the screams reaching a peak of agonizing volume, the grinding a teeth-on-edge screech, the music twisting into a final, discordant flourish.

Then, silence.

Not the clean silence of a cut signal, but the abrupt, dead silence of a void. The waveform flatlined, replaced once more by the mundane chaos of static. The hum of the station returned, blessedly ordinary, but it felt thin, fragile.

Tam pulled his headset off, letting it clatter onto the console. He swallowed hard, his throat dry.

Eva didn't move, didn't speak. She just stared at the blank screen, her eyes wide and hollow.

The sounds were gone from the comms, but they lingered in the air, in the sudden, heavy quiet. The screams echoed in their minds, a testament to unimaginable suffering. The grinding sound felt etched onto the very hull of the ship. And the impossible music... it felt like the lullaby of whatever nightmare they were sinking into.

They weren't just isolated. They were alone with the echoes of the consumed. The silence that followed the transmission wasn't relief. It was the sound of finality. The sound of the door slamming shut on a universe they no longer understood.