The morning shift at Relay Station Kestrel-9 starts the way every morning shift starts.
I pour recycled coffee into a scratched titanium mug. I check the overnight packet queue. I log my access credentials into the comms console, and the console hums back at me like it always does — low, steady, indifferent.
My name is Perla Gallardo. I am a signal analyst for the Helix Territorial Survey Corps. I have been stationed on Kestrel-9 for eleven months. My job is to receive transmissions from the outer survey colonies, verify their integrity, compress them, and forward them to the Corps hub at Veridia Station.
It is not exciting work.
I prefer it that way.
The coffee tastes like rust and synthetic vanilla. I drink it anyway and pull up the morning queue on my secondary screen. Forty-two packets from Colony Brenn-7. Sixteen from the Arco cluster. A maintenance ping from a relay buoy near the Drift. Standard. All standard.
Then I see it.
One packet. Sender tag: Colony Mira-4.
I set the mug down.
Mira-4 has been silent for nine weeks.
The official record says communication disruption due to a solar interference event near the Mira system’s primary star. It happens. I have seen it before with colonies in high-radiation orbits. The Corps sent a diagnostic drone. The drone confirmed the relay antenna on Mira-4’s surface was still structurally intact. The silence was logged as “anomalous but non-critical.”
Nine weeks of silence. And now this.
I do not open the packet immediately. That is protocol. I run a source verification sweep first, check the transmission path, confirm the origin coordinates. Everything checks out. The packet originated from Mira-4’s surface transmitter at 04:17 station time. Compression format is standard Corps-issue. Header data is clean.
I open it.
The file inside is not a standard report.
It is a single audio transmission, fifty-one seconds long, and the sender ID reads: DR. CARMELA CABRERA, CHIEF GENETICIST, MIRA-4 COLONIAL RESEARCH DIVISION.
I put on my headset. I press play.
At first there is only static — the deep, layered static of deep-space transmission, the kind that sounds like breathing if you listen long enough. Then Cabrera’s voice comes through, and I feel my spine go rigid.
She sounds calm. That is the first wrong thing. She speaks the way someone speaks when they have moved past fear into something quieter on the other side of it.
“This is Dr. Carmela Cabrera, Mira-4. If you are receiving this, the antenna relay has been restored. I don’t know how long it’s been. I have lost track of time. I need you to listen carefully before you do anything else.”
A pause. The static breathes.
“Do not send a crew. Do not send a medical team. Do not send anyone who is not prepared to quarantine on arrival and remain quarantined. What happened here is not a disease. I want to be clear about that. It is not a pathogen. It is a process. And it is still happening.”
Another pause. Longer.
“We found something in the substrate samples from the southern basin. A sequence. A biological sequence unlike anything in the Corps taxonomy. We thought it was inert. We were wrong. It doesn’t infect. It… it reads. It reads your genome the way a scanner reads a document, and then it begins to… edit. I don’t have better language for it than that. I’m sorry.”
Her voice wavers for the first time.
“I am the only one left who can still speak. The others are… they are still alive. I believe they are still alive. But they are not… they are not what they were. And I don’t know how much longer I have before the sequence reaches the stage it reached in them. I am documenting everything. All of it. The full research record is attached in a secondary packet on a delayed send — it will transmit in six hours. That record is what matters. Not me.”
A breath. Slow. Deliberate.
“If someone is listening to this, please understand: the sequence is not malicious. I don’t think it’s anything at all in the way we mean that word. It doesn’t want anything. It’s just doing what it does. But what it does to a human body is… it is not reversible. And the research record will explain why that matters more than any of us.”
The transmission ends.
I sit very still for a long moment.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply