The Echo of Stars
The message came in fragments—garbled, static-filled, desperate. A ghost of a voice, distorted by time itself.
"Do not trust the echoes."
Commander Kael Raines stood motionless in ECHO-7's control room, his eyes locked on the incoming transmission. It was coming from the station's own coordinates—but timestamped seventy-two hours into the future.
He swallowed hard.
Behind him, the observation window framed a dying red star, its surface roiling in slow-motion solar storms. Beyond it stretched the Rift—a massive tear in the fabric of space-time, shifting and shimmering like an open wound in the cosmos.
For six months, Kael and his crew had studied the Rift, trying to decipher its purpose. It was growing. It was changing. And now, it was speaking to them.
Dr. Elena Voss, lead physicist and Kael's oldest friend, turned from the console, her face pale. "Commander… there's more."
The audio continued, voice barely recognizable beneath the distortion.
"The loop resets every seventy-two hours. If you're hearing this, we're already dead."
Kael's breath caught.
Then the station lights flickered.
Somewhere down the corridor, something moved.
And the cycle began again.
---
Day 1 – 0700 Hours
Kael woke with a sharp inhale, heart pounding.
Something felt wrong. The dream—no, the memory—of the transmission lingered like static in his brain.
He sat up in his quarters, the dim glow of ECHO-7's artificial lighting casting long shadows. The metal walls felt too familiar, as if he'd been here too many times before.
The station intercom crackled to life.
"Commander Raines, report to the control room. We've picked up an anomaly."
Kael exhaled slowly.
It was happening again.
He pulled on his uniform and stepped into the corridor, feeling the faint vibrations of the station's engines beneath his boots. The same sterile air. The same hum of machinery.
But now, he knew what was coming.
---
The control room was a circular hub lined with holographic displays and instrument panels. His crew was already gathered, their faces illuminated by shifting data streams.
Dr. Voss turned as he entered, brushing a strand of auburn hair behind her ear. "You're not going to believe this," she said.
Kael already knew what she was going to say.
She gestured toward the main monitor, where a waveform pulsed erratically. "It's a signal from within the Rift. But… it's coming from us."
"Do not trust the echoes."
The room fell silent.
Kael clenched his fists. Seventy-two hours. That's all they had.
---
Day 3 – 0200 Hours
The first death happened fast.
Dr. Elias Marquez, the station's engineer, was working on rerouting power when the lights failed. The security cameras only caught a glimpse—his own shadow moving toward him before the feed cut out.
When Kael and the others arrived, Marquez was gone.
Not a trace left.
And then, the world reset.
---
Day 1 – 0700 Hours
Kael woke up gasping, gripping his sheets.
The station was exactly the same as before.
Except for one detail.
He remembered everything.
The others didn't.
He tried to warn them. He told them about Marquez's death, about the loop, about the shadow that moved just before the reset.
They thought he was cracking under pressure.
Until it happened again.
---
By the third loop, Kael wasn't alone in remembering.
Dr. Voss and Lieutenant Joran Hale, the station's security officer, began waking with the same gnawing sense of déjà vu.
"It's learning," Hale muttered, pacing the control room. The dim emergency lighting cast jagged shadows on the walls. "It's watching us."
Kael agreed. The Echo—the entity that moved in the station's blind spots—wasn't just mimicking them. It was replacing them.
Marquez disappeared again, but this time, they found something.
A smear of something organic on the bulkhead. But when Voss scanned it, her face turned white.
"It's… human DNA," she whispered.
Kael stared at the dark stain.
Marquez hadn't just died.
He'd been consumed.
---
By the tenth loop, there were two Echoes.
One of them looked exactly like Dr. Voss.
Kael tested her. Asked her questions only the real Voss would know. She passed.
But the other Voss did, too.
Hale raised his weapon. "We can't take chances."
The two Vosses stared at him, identical expressions of horror on their faces. "Please," they said in unison.
Kael's hand hovered over his sidearm.
Then the lights flickered.
And the decision was made for him.
---
Voss—the real one, hopefully—finished her calculations.
"The Rift isn't just a tear in space," she said. "It's a loop. A recursion. We're stuck because it keeps rewriting reality."
Kael studied the swirling anomaly beyond the viewport. If they didn't break the cycle, the Echoes would replace them all.
"Then we go through," he said.
Hale exhaled. "That's suicide."
Kael met his gaze. "So is staying."
---
The station was crumbling. The Rift's gravity was pulling it apart.
The escape pod was prepped.
Kael, Voss, and Hale made a run for it, the echoes behind them. He could hear his own voice calling from the shadows.
"Come back."
"You belong here."
Kael clenched his teeth and fired the thrusters.
The pod hurtled into the Rift.
And everything collapsed.
---
Kael woke to silence.
The pod floated in unfamiliar space. A blue-white sun burned in the distance. The Rift was gone.
Voss stirred beside him. "Did we make it?"
Kael exhaled. "I think so."
Then the radio crackled.
"Do not trust the echoes."
Kael's blood ran cold.
He turned to Voss.
She was smiling.
But her eyes were wrong.
---
The End.
---