The Freight That Sang to Itself

The Rook-Spar sang.

Not with sound.

With memorylight.

Through the freighter's hull, violet threads of recollection rippled across the inner bulkheads, creating shapes no system had programmed—fractals of long-deleted laughter, spectral echoes of human motion. The corridors pulsed like veins.

The ship had no one left to serve.

So it served memory.

Kye stood on the upper gantry as the Vaultseed's glow expanded into a symphonic hum—a song only the metal remembered. It wasn't melody. It was presence. A record not of facts, but of feeling.

And it began with the cargo.

He entered Hold A, where no crates remained. The logs said it had once held climate modules, fresh nutrient pods, medikits. But none of that mattered now.

Because the hold remembered who had once stood inside.

The song bent.

> A young woman pressing her hands against a hull, whispering her child's name so it wouldn't vanish in vacuum. A pilot scribbling a poem on a ration wrapper before docking with nowhere to deliver. A child who sang to himself between gravity flickers, not because anyone listened—but because the echo sounded like company.

Kye stood still.

And sang the child's last note.

The Vaultseed responded.

> "Confirmed: Unwitnessed memory stabilized."

A pulse of light stitched itself into the paneling.

Not as a plaque. Not as a tribute.

As roots.

He wandered into the next hold.

Hold B did not sing. It rattled.

Tension echoed off the ribs of the ship.

> "Here," the ship whispered. "We carried decisions that were never forgiven."

A captain who chose silence during a systems mutiny.

A cryopod ejected with no record.

A medic who closed her own eyes as she altered the log to erase someone's final moment.

Kye walked through each one.

Not judging.

Just listening.

Each memory tightened into a thin thread, fed gently into the Vaultseed's branching core.

Not all roots grow clean.

But all carry weight.

He returned to the central deck as the ship's hum slowed.

The lights dimmed.

The Chronicle did not speak.

But in the quiet, the Rook-Spar exhaled one final line:

> "You didn't fix us. You heard us."

And from somewhere in the engine stem, the faint sound of humming returned—not recorded.

Remembered.