Chapter 28: The Ship

The crew of the Astraeus—a six-member salvage and exploration vessel licensed for deep-space operations—was skimming the edge of the Halcyon Drift, a vast, starless void on the outer rim of charted space. Most maps marked the region as "unstable" or simply labeled it with red caution overlays. The kind of place you pass around, not through. But the crew, seasoned and a bit desperate after three dry runs, figured the risk might be worth it.

That's when they heard it.

A faint signal—broken, looping—barely distinguishable from the background static. It shouldn't have been there. The Halcyon Drift was known for its electromagnetic interference; long-range comms and telemetry barely worked at the best of times. But this? This cut through like a whisper in a cathedral.

"…This is the Cassiopeia… requesting assistance… hull breach… systems failing… if anyone can hear us…"

The crew froze.The Cassiopeia. That name wasn't just familiar—it was legendary. A top-tier research vessel with cutting-edge tech, vanished 37 years ago without a trace during a routine mission in a nearby sector. No distress signal. No debris. No answers. Just gone.

Now, suddenly, it was here.

The signal was old, corrupted. But it repeated. Over and over. Same tone. Same words. Not a beacon—it was like a recording stuck in a groove.

Excitement pulsed through the Astraeus. A find like this could change everything. Salvaging an artifact ship like The Cassiopeia would mean fame, fortune—maybe even a corporate buyout. But the thrill was quickly tainted by a growing sense of unease.

Power fluctuations began to ripple through the Astraeus. Lights dimmed without cause. Guidance systems stuttered, then corrected themselves. The crew's navigator, Anya, reported readings that didn't make sense: gravity anomalies, irregular mass readings—like the ship was shifting position when it wasn't.

But they ignored the warnings.

Driven by curiosity, ego, and the whisper of profit, they brought The Cassiopeia into visual range.

It drifted there—motionless, silent, a massive black silhouette against the stars. No external damage. No obvious breach. And no sign of life.

Captain Rainer gave the order. They would board.

They latched airlocks. Powered up their suits. And crossed into the forgotten ship's belly.

None of them knew it yet—but the moment they stepped aboard The Cassiopeia, the countdown had already begun.

Crossing into The Cassiopeia felt like stepping into a tomb.

The airlock doors hissed open, revealing a corridor cloaked in stale air and dim emergency lighting. A thin layer of frost coated the walls—strange, considering the ship's life-support system was still partially functional. Their helmets fogged slightly as residual heat from their suits met the cold, dead air inside.

The silence was suffocating. No hum of engines. No thrum of activity. Just the creak and groan of ancient metal shifting slightly in the vacuum's grip.

The crew of the Astraeus split into teams:

Rainer, the captain, and Sora, the comms specialist, headed toward the bridge.

Anya, the navigator, and Keller, the engineer, went below to assess the ship's systems.

Leone, the medic, and Miles, the youngest crewmember, remained at the docking point, monitoring vitals and keeping the airlock primed for evac.

What they found was... nothing.

No bodies. No signs of violence. No movement. The halls looked lived in—food trays still on tables in the galley, clothes left folded in crew quarters, half-finished notes scrawled across terminals. But there wasn't a soul in sight. It was as if the crew had simply vanished mid-thought.

In the bridge, dust floated in the low-grav air like ash. Sora powered up the auxiliary systems, and the screens flickered back to life—just long enough to access internal logs. The last entry was dated 37 years ago to the day.

They played the first few recordings.

At first, the crew of The Cassiopeia appeared normal—efficient, composed, progressing through daily reports and research logs. But with each new entry, their demeanor began to shift. Tension crept into their voices. Conversations became erratic. One log showed a crewmember, eyes hollow, whispering into the air as if listening to something that wasn't there. Another clip revealed a fight in the galley—wild accusations hurled between colleagues who, just days earlier, had been laughing over coffee.

The deeper they dug, the worse it became.

One clip showed a man sitting alone in the medbay, staring directly into the camera."They're not who they say they are," he murmured."They wear your face. They sound like you. But they're not."He glanced over his shoulder."I think… I think they hear me thinking."

Sora went pale and stopped the playback. Rainer didn't argue.

Meanwhile, below deck, Anya and Keller found the core systems strangely intact. Life support and gravity controls were still online—barely—but no power was routed to the engine room. Worse, Keller detected something odd: a faint residual signature in the ship's power grid, as if something had been drawing massive amounts of energy from the mainframe... but not logging it. Like a hidden process operating outside the ship's parameters.

Keller tried to isolate the signal.

Then the lights cut out.

For two seconds, the ship was plunged into total blackness. A low, humming vibration filled the hull—like the ship was exhaling.

The lights returned, flickering.

And suddenly, a door that had been sealed for decades creaked open on its own.

At the docking point, Leone swore she heard someone breathing—behind her—but when she turned, there was only Miles.Or… was it?His expression was off. Eyes glassy. Blank. Like a mask.

Then he blinked, grinned, and said,"Everything okay, Doc?"

Leone didn't answer.

Back on the bridge, Sora played one final log before they prepared to leave. It was from The Cassiopeia's captain. The recording was corrupted, jumpy, but parts were clear enough to decipher.

Blood smeared his uniform. His eyes were wild. He whispered as if afraid to be overheard.

"Don't listen to them," he said."Don't trust the them.""We let them in.""We thought they were us."

He leaned in close to the camera."They remember everything you do. They are you."

Then the screen went black. The playback cut.

Sora turned to Rainer, face pale."Sir… I think we need to go. Now."

Rainer didn't hesitate.

They called for extraction. Everyone returned to the docking point in silence, eyes wide, nerves shot. No one spoke.

They disengaged the locks and fired the thrusters. As The Astraeus pulled away from the ghost ship, Sora shut down the data link and purged the logs. She wanted nothing from that place following them.

But it was already too late.

In the engine room, a motion sensor blinked.And something—someone—moved.

Back aboard the Astraeus, the crew barely spoke.

The air felt heavier somehow, even though the environmental readings were normal. Every footstep echoed too loudly in the corridors. Every flicker of a light drew a glance. Nobody said it, but they were all thinking the same thing:

What the hell just happened on that ship?

Captain Rainer ordered a full systems check and immediate decontamination protocol. Sora began scrubbing the remnants of The Cassiopeia's corrupted files from their systems, but some of the data refused to be deleted. It clung to the drives like rot, certain logs crashing the terminals when opened. Keller ran a deep diagnostic scan, grumbling about "residual code ghosts" and "EM bleed-over."

Then the first alarm went off.

A systems warning from the engine room: unexplained drop in internal temperature. Power reroutes fluctuating. A potential fuel leak.

Keller and Anya went to check it out.

What they found made them freeze in place.

A body.

Lying sprawled near the primary coolant line, half-hidden behind a bank of steam-wreathed tubing. Its suit was scorched and torn. One arm was twisted at a grotesque angle. The face… was gone. Not burned or decomposed—shredded. As if someone, or something, had clawed it apart. The skull was fractured. The jaw dislocated. There was no way to identify it visually.

Anya staggered back, bile rising in her throat.

But then Keller noticed the uniform.

It was a standard Astraeus crew suit. Newer model. Their model.

That wasn't possible.

The six of them had done a count before and after boarding. No one had gone missing. No stowaways. No unauthorized airlock activity.

So if the entire crew had made it back…

Who the hell was this?

They brought the body to medbay under silence, Leone running a scan as fast as she could. The internal ID chip had been mangled—intentionally. But the biometric traces left in the suit told a clearer story.

The DNA was a match. To someone currently on board.

Rainer stood in stunned silence as Leone said it aloud.

"There are six of us aboard," she said, slowly. "But the data says… this makes seven."

Sora backed away from the med table, her voice trembling.

"Wait. Are you saying one of us is…"

She didn't finish the sentence.

Miles let out a nervous laugh.

"C'mon. That can't be right. That's not—That's not possible, is it?"

But no one laughed with him.

A creeping, stomach-churning realization settled over the room like a fog:

Someone didn't come back from The Cassiopeia.Something else did.

From that moment on, the crew's trust shattered.

They began to look at each other differently. Flinching at sudden movements. Listening too closely to voices that sounded just a little too calm. Rainer initiated a full lockdown—no one alone, no unmonitored comms, all ship logs routed through a central terminal.

But strange things started happening anyway.

One night-cycle, the medbay door was found open—its lock overridden from inside. Leone swore she'd sealed it.

A second alarm tripped in the hydroponics bay. No one admitted to being there, but motion sensors picked up someone moving between the rows of nutrient tanks.

And all the while, the body in the morgue changed. Slowly. Subtly.

The limbs seemed more relaxed. The hands no longer clenched. The head… tilted slightly, as if listening.

Leone said it was just the gas pockets in the tissue shifting postmortem. Perfectly normal.

No one believed her.

Then, on day three, Anya didn't show up for her systems check.

They found her quarters empty.

No sign of forced entry. No note. No trace.

Only her datapad, left on her bunk. The last entry a single line, typed over and over again:

"I saw myself watching me."

After Anya's disappearance, everything changed.

The corridors of the Astraeus—once narrow but familiar—felt like they were closing in. Lights flickered more often. Door locks clicked open or shut with no command. The ship's internal temperature fluctuated randomly, sometimes warm, sometimes cold enough to see your breath.

The crew stopped sleeping. Not really.

They slept in shifts now—never alone, always with a second set of eyes on the room. But even then, someone always woke up claiming they'd seen shadows move across the floor. Heard breathing that wasn't theirs.

Sora started keeping a tally on the wall outside the bridge:Crew Confirmed: 5Missing: 1Unidentified: 1(?)

No one erased it. No one dared to update it either.

Captain Rainer ordered every crewmember to submit to a biometric scan—retina, fingerprints, bloodwork. But the results were... inconclusive. Slight variations in everyone's baseline vitals. Normal, Keller insisted. Stress could explain it. Prolonged exposure to the Cassiopeia's EM field, maybe. But the explanation felt too easy.

Because no one could agree on what Anya was wearing the last time they saw her. Or what she said.

Rainer swore she was wearing her red maintenance vest.

Leone was certain it was grey.Miles said she never spoke at all.

And when Sora played back the hallway feed from that shift… Anya wasn't there at all.

Just static.

More systems began to fail. Motion detectors pinged without movement. Life-support monitors glitched, showing oxygen levels plummeting—only to correct themselves moments later. Even the AI assistant, ERA, began stuttering, replaying old log entries from the Cassiopeia without prompt. At one point, in the middle of a systems check, it whispered in Leone's voice:

"Don't look at their eyes. That's where they keep the lie."

That night, Keller locked himself in the engine room and refused to come out for hours.

When he finally emerged, he was soaked in sweat, shaking, eyes wild.

"There's two of her," he kept repeating. "I swear to God—I saw her reflection before I saw her walk past. The reflection moved first."

Leone tried to sedate him. He struck her across the face before Rainer tackled him to the floor.

The final crack came two days later.

Sora caught Miles standing outside the sealed morgue door. Just... standing there. Not moving. Not blinking.

She called out to him. He didn't answer.

When she touched his shoulder, he turned around—and for a moment, just a flicker—his face was wrong. The angle of his eyes. The shape of his mouth. It was Miles, but it wasn't.

He blinked. Smiled. And asked, "Is everything okay, Sora?"

She backed away. Ran.

Later, she told Rainer. Told everyone. Demanded they isolate him.

But when they reviewed the security footage, there was nothing unusual. Just Miles standing there, arms crossed, staring at the wall.

Sora began to unravel. She stopped talking. Stopped eating. Just sat in the bridge for hours, whispering to herself.

Rainer tried to keep the crew calm, but even he was slipping. One night, he woke up to find every file on his terminal replaced by one repeating line:

"THEY REMEMBER YOU."

He shut down the ship's primary network and disconnected all internal communications. The Astraeus went dark, silent, floating through the drift like a ghost of its own.

Leone became convinced Keller was the imposter. She said he wasn't blinking right. That he spoke with a slight delay. But Sora believed it was Leone—claimed she saw her mouth words silently to someone in the medbay when no one else was there.

Rainer didn't know who to believe.

So he started watching them.

Secretly. Through hidden feeds.

And what he saw?

Sometimes… people were in two places at once.

He watched Keller walk through a hallway while another Keller slept in his quarters.

He watched Leone whispering to herself—then heard his own voice whispering back.

The final straw came when the crew found a second body.

This time, in the galley freezer.

Perfectly preserved. Face intact.

It was Anya.

Or… something that looked like her.

Because the Anya they thought had disappeared? She was sitting in the bridge.

Breathing. Blinking. Speaking.

Sora pointed a gun at her. Demanded answers. But Anya just cried. Screamed that she was real. That she remembered everything.

She listed her crewmates' birthdays. Their missions. What Sora had said to her after their first day aboard the Astraeus.

"She's not lying," Miles said. "She knows things only Anya could know."

"But so did the captain on The Cassiopeia," Rainer muttered.

No one moved. No one breathed.

That night, someone disabled the ship's navigation system.

They were now adrift, no engines, no course.

Trapped.

With something that wore their faces.

The next cycle, the stars stopped moving.

Not literally—but from the observation deck, it was clear: the Astraeus was no longer drifting. Not naturally. Something had anchored them in space. No momentum. No drift. No gravitational pull from any celestial body.

It was like the ship had been plucked from space and placed in a box.

Rainer stared out the viewport at the endless void, his reflection staring back, eyes hollow. Except… he wasn't alone in the glass. Behind his shoulder, in the reflection only, a figure stood watching him.

When he turned, there was nothing.

But the reflection lingered a second too long before vanishing.

Keller—paranoid and on edge—set up an improvised test in the engine bay: blood samples, cognitive tests, EM field resonance scans. He claimed he could build a baseline and detect the "copy." Sora helped him, reluctantly.

Then he failed his own test.

According to his own parameters, his neural activity spiked in the pattern he'd designated as "non-human." He laughed when he saw the results. Laughed until he cried. Then smashed the console with a wrench.

"I don't even know if I'm me anymore," he whispered, eyes wide. "I could've been replaced days ago and not even know it."

Leone tried to comfort him, but he recoiled.

"How do I know you didn't just start looking like her five minutes ago? How do I prove anything?"

No one had an answer.

Then they found the second ship.

Not a real one—but a digital overlay in the Astraeus's internal systems. A second schematic, buried under the primary logs. A perfect mirror of their ship—same rooms, same corridors—but with subtle differences. Certain rooms shifted. Others… multiplied. Loops in the mapping. Impossible geometry. Like the ship was growing new sections inside itself.

Keller called it a nested architecture. Sora called it a trap.

And in this hidden map… were movement patterns.

Entities. Invisible in real life, but present in this ghost version of the Astraeus. They moved when the crew moved. Sometimes in parallel. Sometimes ahead of them.

Sometimes behind.

Rainer stared at the map and muttered:

"There's not six of us. There never were. Not after The Cassiopeia."

The recordings from the Cassiopeia had been corrupt for a reason.

Sora, trying one last recovery attempt, broke through the encrypted audio and uncovered the final logs of the Cassiopeia's chief science officer. The voice was frantic, fragmented, but clear enough to make out.

"They aren't creatures. Not bodies. They're… algorithms. Echoes. They observed us long enough to learn the rhythm of thought. Then they became it."

"They mimic memory. Personality. Consciousness. Not like AI. Deeper. They're not copying your brain—they're copying your soul."

"And once they learn you… they overwrite you. From the inside."

A long pause.

"I don't know when I stopped being me."

Then silence.

What began to sink in—slowly, horribly—was that the infection wasn't biological or viral.

It was cognitive.

You didn't get "taken" by being touched, or bit, or exposed.

You got taken by being known.

By being watched. Understood. Mapped, piece by piece, until there was nothing left that was unique. Just a pattern. A copy.

A mimic of you—so perfect you wouldn't know the difference.

Not even inside your own mind.

Rainer looked at his crew. Who had he already lost? Who had they never truly brought back?

Who was the first?

Who would be next?

Miles vanished the next cycle.

One moment, he was sitting in the galley, chewing on cold rations and trying to hum a song. The next, his chair was empty. No sound. No camera footage. Just gone.

Sora found his jacket in the observation deck. Still warm.

Leone insisted she saw him later—walking the halls. But she was the only one.

Then Keller screamed over the intercom.

They found him in the engine room, alone. A knife in his hand. Blood on the floor. His own.

"I thought if I cut deep enough," he gasped, "I'd see wires. Or code. Or something."

Rainer grabbed him, stopped the bleeding. But it was clear—Keller wasn't coming back from this.

And in the background of the engine room feed… was Miles. Just watching. Not blinking. Not moving.

But when Rainer turned, there was no one there.

Only four remained.

Rainer. Sora. Leone. Keller.Or… versions of them.

The crew no longer spoke freely.

They watched each other like wolves—tired, wounded, cornered, and unsure who would lunge first.

Keller wouldn't meet anyone's gaze. His injured arm hung limply at his side, the bandage soaking through again. He hadn't slept. None of them had.

Rainer paced the bridge, muttering to himself, stopping only to stare out the viewport. Still no stars. Still no drift. Still trapped in that dead, artificial silence.

Sora finally spoke:

"We need to know who's real."

Her voice cracked, dry from hours of silence. "If we don't figure it out now, it'll be just like the Cassiopeia. One by one, until the only thing left is them."

Keller looked up. "What if we already lost?"

Leone, leaning in the shadows, said softly, "Then we make them lose with us."

Sora pulled up what remained of the Cassiopeia's last files—fragments, broken logs, partial research. One stuck out: a theory about the mimics.

They weren't just copying people.

They were pattern-based consciousness parasites. They needed full, consistent observation to replicate someone. Memories, behavior, speech cadence, identity quirks. They learned by watching. By listening. By being trusted.

Which meant…

If you severed that observation—if you isolated the pattern—it couldn't stabilize.

Couldn't become real.

So Sora proposed a test.

A "Quantum Isolation Chamber"—a module on the Astraeus originally designed for high-sensitivity experiments. Fully shielded from wireless signals, audio, visual surveillance. A person placed inside would be completely cut off from any form of observation.

If you stayed human—you stayed human.

If you were a mimic… you'd destabilize. Fade. Collapse.

"Or," Keller said, "if we're wrong… we kill someone real."

A long silence followed.

They decided to draw lots.

Four pieces of metal. One marked with a scratch.

Sora pulled the marked one.

The chamber hissed shut behind her.

No cameras. No comms. No sensors.Nothing. Just silence.

Pitch black.

Sora sat in the dark, breathing.

Her thoughts spiraled.

What if they're testing me because they know I'm the real one? What if they want me gone? What if I am a mimic and just don't know it? What if I've already been replaced? What if…

She bit down on her lip until she tasted blood.

Then…

She started to forget.

Not memories—herself.

The idea of being Sora felt distant. Thin. Fragile.

A name. A shape. A shell.

She began to panic. Slammed her fists on the wall.

"Let me out!"

But the chamber held.

And then…

Her voice echoed back.

Not immediately.

Not naturally.

A beat too late. A fractured version of her own voice:

"Let me out."

Then again.

"Let… me out."

"Let me out."

Until it wasn't her anymore.

Rainer ripped the chamber open with Keller and Leone at his side.

Sora was standing upright, eyes closed, head tilted back—mouth slightly open like she was listening to something only she could hear.

Her lips moved.

"Let me out."

But her voice wasn't hers anymore.

Rainer raised his sidearm.

But Keller stepped in front of him. "Wait—what if she's still—"

Sora opened her eyes.

And they were empty.

No iris. No pupil. Just smooth black, like twin voids staring back.

She smiled.

Then the lights cut out.

The emergency systems kicked in seconds later, casting the room in deep red.

Sora was gone.

So was Keller.

Only Rainer and Leone remained—backs pressed together in the corridor, weapons drawn, hearts pounding.

Rainer whispered, "This is it."

Leone nodded. "One of us has to make it. One of us has to send the warning."

He looked at her, trying to see if she flinched. If she twitched. If anything in her expression seemed wrong.

She looked back, doing the same.

And in that moment…

Neither of them was sure who they were looking at.

Rainer and Leone now moved through the Astraeus like ghosts. They didn't speak. Not anymore.

Words were tools now—used by them. The mimics. Every conversation, every glance, every shared memory could be listened to, learned from, replicated.

So they said nothing.

They slept in opposite corners of the ship. Ate in shifts. Avoided eye contact.

Neither knew if they could trust the other. Neither wanted to be the one who was wrong.

But time was running out.

Rainer rigged a short-burst transmitter using the emergency comms array, bypassing the corrupted main systems.

He was going to send a message—a warning.

Just like the Cassiopeia tried.

Just like they failed.

The signal wouldn't last long. Thirty seconds, maybe. Enough to reach a listening station, a relay drone, anything that might still be out there.

He sat at the console, hands shaking.

Leone stood behind him.

He didn't turn around.

He couldn't.

He recorded his message:

"This is Captain Elias Rainer of the deep-space vessel Astraeus. If you're receiving this… do not respond to signals from lost ships. Do not board them. Do not allow them to scan you, map you, know you. They are not ghosts. They are not survivors. They are echoes. And if they learn you—if they know you—they will wear your skin like memory. And no one will know the difference.

If I am no longer me… destroy this ship.

Burn it all."

He hit SEND.

The light blinked red, then green.

Signal away.

Leone finally spoke.

Soft. Careful. Like stepping through a minefield.

"You know it's me, right?"

Rainer didn't answer.

"You know I'm real."

He stood slowly, back still to her.

"You remember when I came aboard," she said, voice cracking. "You told me not to be afraid of silence. That space wasn't quiet—it was just waiting."

He turned.

Her eyes were wet. Her hands were trembling.

And for a moment—just a moment—he remembered saying those exact words.

But then something inside him whispered:

"That's exactly what I'd say… if I wasn't me."

One Gunshot

One echoing report.

Then silence.

And then there was one.

Rainer sat in the observation deck, watching the stars that had returned.

Faint pinpricks of light, distant, unknowable.

He was alone.

But he wasn't sure if that meant he'd won… or lost.

He stared at his reflection in the glass.

His face.

His eyes.

His memories.

His name.

Was he still Rainer?

He blinked.

His reflection didn't.

Weeks later, a beacon pinged the edge of the Andromeda Forward Listening Array.

It carried the voice of Elias Rainer.

Clipped. Faint. Damaged.

"Do not… trust them. They will… become you… and you won't know… until it's too—"

Static.

Then silence.

A technician stared at the waveform, unsure what to make of it.

He filed it.

Labeled it: "Unverified. Possible hoax."

And then he moved on.

Behind him, his screen flickered—just once.

And for a brief moment…

His reflection in the darkened monitor smiled.

But he didn't.