Chapter Six - The Loop
Maeve dreamed in static.
She stood on a deck that wasn't quite real—walls flickering in and out like a broken transmission. Shapes moved beyond the bulkheads, whispering in voices she couldn't understand. She wasn't alone, but whatever was with her wasn't alive in the way she understood life.
A voice echoed through her mind, cold and clinical.
"Observation resumed. Loop integrity breached. Repair required."
She tried to scream. Nothing came out.
Elias jolted awake to the sound of metal scraping.
Not nearby. Below.
He grabbed his light and moved fast, heart pounding. Maeve's bunk was empty.
He found her in the same hallway near the sealed cryo chamber—the one they hadn't opened.
Her hand hovered just above the lock panel. Her eyes were unfocused, pupils too wide.
"Maeve!" Elias grabbed her shoulder.
She blinked. The spell broke. "I—I didn't mean to come here."
"You were sleepwalking."
She shook her head. "No. I heard something. Like… someone inside."
They stared at the cryo door.
Then Elias saw the display.
The pod inside was active.
Not Maeve's. Another one.
They pried it open.
The body inside was long dead. Bones. Decay sealed in ancient frost. Whoever they were had died in their sleep.
But the strangest part wasn't the corpse.
It was the recording looped on the screen above it:
"Subject Maeve Calder: behavior drift detected.
Repeating cycle predicted.
Terminate sequence recommended."
Maeve turned white.
"Why is there a termination command with my name on it?"
Elias didn't answer. He didn't have one.
But he saw something else in the corner of the pod—wedged in a maintenance hatch:
A data crystal, blinking faint blue.
Back in the ship's core, Elias plugged it in. A damaged file opened.
A video.
It was Maeve—years ago, younger, sharper-eyed. In a lab coat. Speaking into a camera.
The footage glitched.
Elias stepped back.
Maeve's voice, the one beside him now, trembled. "I was the scientist?"
He turned to her slowly.
"No," he said. "You are the experiment."
The ship groaned around them.
Lights dimmed, then surged.
The walls themselves seemed to pulse.
Maeve collapsed, clutching her head. "It's starting again," she gasped. "The loop—something's trying to restart it."
Elias knelt beside her, grabbing her hand. "Then we break it."
"But what if breaking it means I disappear?"
His grip tightened. "Then we do it together."
She met his eyes—and for the first time, something inside her steadied.
From deep within the ship, a door unlocked with a hiss.
A path neither of them had seen before opened up—leading into the old data core.
The heart of the loop.
The final memory.
And possibly, the end of them both.