Echoes of Vasco Karras

I am writing this from a rented room above a noodle stall on the forty-third level of Kassel Spire, where the ventilation ducts smell of synthetic pork fat and the walls vibrate faintly whenever the mag-rail passes. I have been here eleven days. I have not left except once, to buy a burner slate from a parts dealer two corridors over, and I paid in physical chip-coin so there would be no trace. I am writing this because I need to understand what happened aboard the Perihelion Sable, and because the only way I have ever understood anything is to put it into words, even words no one will read.
I was a data auditor. That is what my contract said, and that is what I believed I was. Vasco Karras, licensed systems reviewer, cleared for Tier-4 corporate access, hired by Nuno Angelopoulos Logistics to perform a routine compliance sweep on a mid-haul freight runner before its insurance renewal. The Perihelion Sable was a Class-7 orbital hauler, three hundred meters of grey-plated hull and slow-burn thrusters, running a loop between the Kassel orbital ring and the mining platforms out past the second Lagrange point. I came aboard at Dock 9-Kappa on a Tuesday morning, with a hard case of diagnostic tools and a coffee I had not finished. The crew barely looked at me. That is how these jobs go. The auditor is furniture.
The ship’s log system was called SERIN — Standard Environmental and Records Interface Node — and it lived in a brushed-steel terminal bolted to the wall of the records room, which was really just a repurposed storage closet with a fold-down chair and a strip of blue working light overhead. I remember the light specifically. It had a flicker at irregular intervals, not fast enough to be annoying, just fast enough to make you feel like something was watching you blink. I plugged in my audit rig, entered my credentials, and began pulling the standard eighteen-month operational record. Fuel consumption, crew manifests, maintenance flags, atmospheric readings, navigation logs. Routine. I was barely paying attention. I had done this forty, fifty times.
Then I found the entry for Crew Member Seven.
The Perihelion Sable had an official crew of six. I had the manifest in front of me: Captain Adaeze Mfon, engineer Yuki Strand, two cargo handlers named Brecht and Olo, a cook named Pilar, and a systems technician listed as Jamal Adebayo. Six people. Six biometric registrations. Six bunk assignments. But SERIN’s personnel logs showed a seventh entry, threaded through the records with the quiet consistency of something that had always been there. The name attached to it was Vasco Karras.
I sat very still for a moment. The blue light flickered.
My name. My biometric signature — not a copy, not a spoof, but a signature that matched my own implant codes at the deepest cryptographic layer, the layer that is supposed to be anatomically unique, derived from the specific electrical resonance of my neural mesh. According to SERIN, Vasco Karras had been aboard the Perihelion Sable for fourteen months. Vasco Karras had eaten in the galley, had slept in Bunk 7-C, had logged maintenance checks on the atmospheric scrubbers, had filed three personal log entries — voice recordings, not text — and had disembarked at Kassel Dock 9-Kappa on the same Tuesday morning I had boarded. We had, according to the timestamp, crossed the docking threshold eleven minutes apart.
I pulled the voice recordings.

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About the Author

Calen Ward — He spent 3 years without AI on his mothership in Terra Nova colony after terrible star blast. It made him one of best detectives of 23rd century being able to break human brain without AI Codex.

— Calen Ward

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Categories: Cyberpunk, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, cyberpunk, data theft, first person, framed narrative, ghost record, identity, immersive sci-fi, neural mesh, orbital hauler, sci-fi, short story

August 4, 2026

10min-stories