space slashers

volume 2

The Unmaking
 Chapter 1: Arrival Into Nothing

We should not be here.

I know this now. I knew it the moment we crossed the threshold into this place that should not
exist, into the dark maw of a void that does not hunger—does not consume—but simply
unmakes. But I was not always so certain. There was a time, only days ago, when I believed in
knowledge, in science, in the fundamental certainty of the universe. I believed in the precision of
instruments, in the cold logic of data. I believed in the maps that charted the stars, the
mathematics that bent the fabric of space itself. I believed in the records that told us what was
and what was not.

But what, I ask now, does it mean to believe in something that can be erased? For what are
facts, if they can be undone? What is reality, if it can be rewritten? What am I, if the universe
decides that I am nothing at all?

The first reports had been dismissing anomalies—small inconsistencies in deep-space surveys,
minor errors in the cosmic ledger. Astronomers noted deviations in known stellar formations,
gaps where light should have been, deviations in mass distributions where entire clusters once
stood. “Data corruption,” they said. “Instrumentation failure.” And for a time, I believed them.
Even when the official charts began contradicting human memory—when seasoned navigators
insisted there had once been stars where now there was only blackness—I dismissed it as
faulty recollection, an error of the mind, the inevitable drift between fallible perception and
immutable fact.

But then the disappearances began.

Not just stars. Not just planets. But entire systems.

Blotted from the sky.

Not swallowed. Not collapsed. Not torn apart by cataclysm.

Simply—gone.

And so, they sent us.

The Oblivion was a deep-space reconnaissance vessel, outfitted with the most precise sensors
available, equipped for long-range stellar surveys and anomaly mapping. Our orders were
simple: chart the missing sector. Identify the cause. Report our findings. We set out with twelve
crew—men and women of science, hardened spacers who had seen the unrelenting void and
laughed into its abyss. We were not fearful. We were prepared. And yet, as we drifted deeper
into that lightless reach, a silence settled upon us. Not merely the silence of space—that ancient
hush of vacuum and distance—but something heavier.
A silence that did not feel empty.

But rather, watchful.

We detected a signal on the third day.

Faint. Fragmented. A whisper against the static of the universe.

At first, we thought it a mistake—a ghost transmission, the garbled remnants of a beacon from
long-dead colonies or derelict ships. But the deeper we listened, the more certain we became.
This was not the echo of something that had been. This was something that was still here.

“…oblivion… if anyone… hear us… it’s already ins—”

And then silence.

Captain Garret furrowed her brow, tapping the console. “Playback.”

The comms officer complied. The message repeated.

But now, it was different.

Not garbled. Not fragmented.

It was gone.

No transmission had ever played.

The system logs held no record of its existence.

“…did you hear that?” I asked, my throat dry.

Garret turned to me, expression unreadable. “Hear what?”

The following hours were spent in silent calculation, recalibrating our instruments, analyzing
what little data we had. We searched for proof of the transmission. There was none. We
checked the ship’s internal logs. There was nothing recorded. We searched the database for
any evidence that the stars once mapped in this sector had ever existed. But now, the records
showed only empty space.

That was when Ellis screamed.

I turned sharply. He was standing by the viewport, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, hands
trembling.

“Ellis?” I asked. “What is it?”

He didn’t turn, only lifted one shaking finger and pointed.

I followed his gaze.

To blackness.

To nothing.

And yet—not empty space.

This was a thing. A presence. A darkness deeper than vacuum, not an absence of light, but an
absence of being.

And as I stared into it, I felt something uncoil in my chest. Not fear, but recognition — the deep,
visceral knowledge that something was watching back.

“…We shouldn’t be here,” Ellis whispered.

His voice was shaking.

I did not know it then, but he would be the first to vanish.

And I would be the last to remember him.

 Chapter 2: The First Disappearance

Ellis was gone.

I did not see him vanish. There was no sound, no flicker of movement, no shift in the air. One
moment, he was there, his face pale and tight, his hand still raised toward the void beyond the
viewport. The next, there was nothing. No body, no trace. Just empty space where a man had
stood.

I took a step forward, my heart hammering. “Ellis?”

The others did not react. Garret, Santos, and the rest of the command crew remained at their
stations, scanning, adjusting, recalibrating. The ship’s systems hummed steadily, the lights
flickered in their low, rhythmic cycle, the AI whispered through the consoles as it processed
calculations. No one turned toward the viewport. No one seemed to notice the absence beside
me.

I swallowed hard, glancing around, my pulse thudding in my ears. “Ellis is gone.”

Garret finally looked up, blinking once before frowning. “Who?”

My breath caught in my throat. “Ellis. Dr. Ellis. The astrophysicist. He was standing right here.” I
gestured toward the viewport, at the space he had occupied only seconds ago. “You all saw
him.”

Santos exchanged a glance with Jaro at the communications console. Jaro shook his head. “We
don’t have an Ellis on board.”

I stared at him. The words did not make sense. I could still see him in my mind, the hard line of
his jaw, the thoughtful furrow of his brow, the way he had pressed his fingers against the glass
as if trying to reach through it. But no—more than that, I could recall entire conversations,
calculations we had discussed, a joke he had told over breakfast in the mess. He had been
here. I had spoken to him. We had worked together for months.

Hadn’t we?

I turned back to Garret, my throat dry. “Check the logs.”

Garret exhaled sharply, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. But she turned to her console,
running a search through the ship’s personnel files. I waited, the room suddenly too cold, the
hum of the ship too loud in my ears.

A moment later, she glanced at me, unimpressed. “No Dr. Ellis on board. No astrophysicist in
our crew manifest.” She turned the display so I could see for myself. Twelve names, exactly as
there had been when we launched. But Ellis’s was not among them. There was no blank space,
no gap where he had once been. Just a perfect, uninterrupted record, as if he had never
existed.

“Check mission logs,” I said, my voice uneven. “Look at any record of today’s observations. He
ran the calculations—he was—” I stopped. I was struggling to recall the details now, though only
moments ago, they had been crisp in my mind. What had we been discussing? The gravitational
inconsistencies, yes, but what had he said? I had the impression of his voice, the sound of it,
but the words were blurring, slipping from my grasp even as I reached for them.

Garret sighed but humored me, pulling up the logs. The records were intact. Everything we had
observed, every instrument scan, every calculation. But no mention of Ellis. No calculations in
his hand. No notes in his voice. No sign that he had ever spoken a word aboard this ship.

“I’m not sure what you think you remember,” Garret said, her voice patient but edged with
growing impatience. “But we don’t have an Ellis. We never did.”

I turned away from her, scanning the room. “Santos,” I said, my voice sharper now, pleading.
“You remember him. He was standing right here. You looked at him when he screamed.”

Santos frowned, shifting in his seat. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, his brow
furrowing.

He hesitated.

For the first time, uncertainty flickered across his face.

“I…” He trailed off. He rubbed his hands together absently, as if trying to warm them. “I don’t…”
Another pause. A muscle tensed in his jaw. “What were we looking at, just now?”

“The anomaly,” I said quickly. “The black sector. You saw him react to it. We all did.”

Santos blinked rapidly, glancing toward the viewport. His fingers flexed on the arm of his chair.
He let out a slow breath. “I—yeah. Yeah, I remember looking at something.” But his expression
remained confused, his eyes shadowed. “But I don’t remember Ellis.”

The name wavered in my mind, insubstantial. I swallowed, suddenly cold. I had to hold onto it,
had to keep speaking it. That was the only way to keep it real.

I turned to Garret again. “Something’s wrong.”

She exhaled sharply. “Look, I’m not sure what you’re experiencing, but—”

The lights flickered.

All at once, every screen in the command deck blinked off, then back on. The ship’s hum shifted
in tone, the AI hesitating midsentence before resuming its low, mechanical murmur. I saw Garret
stiffen. Santos sat up straighter. Even Jaro, normally unfazed, pulled his hands from his console,
flexing his fingers as if he had just touched something too warm.

Garret ran a diagnostic. The results came back normal. No fluctuations in power, no
malfunctions. Just a momentary disruption—brief, meaningless. The sort of thing that happened
occasionally aboard any ship.

But I watched as she ran another check, more slowly this time. A deepening crease formed
between her brows.

Something was missing.

I could see it in her posture before she spoke.

“…our mission orders are gone.”

A silence stretched through the room. I took a step closer, my heartbeat a slow, heavy thing
against my ribs.

“What do you mean, gone?”

Garret didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flicked across the screen again, rereading,
confirming. Finally, she shook her head. “I mean there’s no record of them. The system still lists
this ship as active, still shows our flight path, but our mission file is gone.”

Jaro pulled up a secondary log. “No deletion record.” His voice was quiet. “No evidence of a
purge. No indication there was ever a file at all.”

Santos exhaled, long and slow. He rubbed at his temple, as if something deep inside his head
had begun to ache. “So what does that mean?”

Garret straightened. Her expression was unreadable, but her knuckles were white where she
gripped the console’s edge.

“We don’t have a reason to be here.”

I turned back toward the viewport, toward the blackness beyond. The weight of it pressed
against the ship, against my mind. I had the sharp and sudden certainty that we had gone too
far, stepped past some threshold into something we had no words for, something the universe
itself refused to acknowledge.

Something that was already unraveling us.

I swallowed, my throat dry. I tried again, one last time.

“Ellis.”
No one reacted.

His name was already gone.

 Chapter 3: Something Watches

Ellis was gone.

I did not see him vanish. There was no sound, no flicker of movement, no shift in the air. One
moment, he was there, his face pale and tight, his hand still raised toward the void beyond the
viewport. The next, there was nothing. No body, no trace. Just empty space where a man had
stood.

I took a step forward, my heart hammering. “Ellis?”

The others did not react. Garret, Santos, and the rest of the command crew remained at their
stations, scanning, adjusting, recalibrating. The ship’s systems hummed steadily, the lights
flickered in their low, rhythmic cycle, the AI whispered through the consoles as it processed
calculations. No one turned toward the viewport. No one seemed to notice the absence beside
me.

I swallowed hard, glancing around, my pulse thudding in my ears. “Ellis is gone.”

Garret finally looked up, blinking once before frowning. “Who?”

My breath caught in my throat. “Ellis. Dr. Ellis. The astrophysicist. He was standing right here.” I
gestured toward the viewport, at the space he had occupied only seconds ago. “You all saw
him.”

Santos exchanged a glance with Jaro at the communications console. Jaro shook his head. “We
don’t have an Ellis on board.”

I stared at him. The words did not make sense. I could still see him in my mind, the hard line of
his jaw, the thoughtful furrow of his brow, the way he had pressed his fingers against the glass
as if trying to reach through it. But no—more than that, I could recall entire conversations,
calculations we had discussed, a joke he had told over breakfast in the mess. He had been
here. I had spoken to him. We had worked together for months.

Hadn’t we?

I turned back to Garret, my throat dry. “Check the logs.”

Garret exhaled sharply, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. But she turned to her console,
running a search through the ship’s personnel files. I waited, the room suddenly too cold, the
hum of the ship too loud in my ears.

A moment later, she glanced at me, unimpressed. “No Dr. Ellis on board. No astrophysicist in
our crew manifest.” She turned the display so I could see for myself. Twelve names, exactly as
there had been when we launched. But Ellis’s was not among them. There was no blank space,
no gap where he had once been. Just a perfect, uninterrupted record, as if he had never
existed.

“Check mission logs,” I said, my voice uneven. “Look at any record of today’s observations. He
ran the calculations—he was—” I stopped. I was struggling to recall the details now, though only
moments ago, they had been crisp in my mind. What had we been discussing? The gravitational
inconsistencies, yes, but what had he said? I had the impression of his voice, the sound of it,
but the words were blurring, slipping from my grasp even as I reached for them.

Garret sighed but humored me, pulling up the logs. The records were intact. Everything we had
observed, every instrument scan, every calculation. But no mention of Ellis. No calculations in
his hand. No notes in his voice. No sign that he had ever spoken a word aboard this ship.

“I’m not sure what you think you remember,” Garret said, her voice patient but edged with
growing impatience. “But we don’t have an Ellis. We never did.”

I turned away from her, scanning the room. “Santos,” I said, my voice sharper now, pleading.
“You remember him. He was standing right here. You looked at him when he screamed.”

Santos frowned, shifting in his seat. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, his brow
furrowing.

He hesitated.

For the first time, uncertainty flickered across his face.

“I…” He trailed off. He rubbed his hands together absently, as if trying to warm them. “I don’t…”
Another pause. A muscle tensed in his jaw. “What were we looking at, just now?”

“The anomaly,” I said quickly. “The black sector. You saw him react to it. We all did.”

Santos blinked rapidly, glancing toward the viewport. His fingers flexed on the arm of his chair.
He let out a slow breath. “I—yeah. Yeah, I remember looking at something.” But his expression
remained confused, his eyes shadowed. “But I don’t remember Ellis.”

The name wavered in my mind, insubstantial. I swallowed, suddenly cold. I had to hold onto it,
had to keep speaking it. That was the only way to keep it real.

I turned to Garret again. “Something’s wrong.”

She exhaled sharply. “Look, I’m not sure what you’re experiencing, but—”

The lights flickered.

All at once, every screen in the command deck blinked off, then back on. The ship’s hum shifted
in tone, the AI hesitating midsentence before resuming its low, mechanical murmur. I saw Garret
stiffen. Santos sat up straighter. Even Jaro, normally unfazed, pulled his hands from his console,
flexing his fingers as if he had just touched something too warm.

Garret ran a diagnostic. The results came back normal. No fluctuations in power, no
malfunctions. Just a momentary disruption—brief, meaningless. The sort of thing that happened
occasionally aboard any ship.

But I watched as she ran another check, more slowly this time. A deepening crease formed
between her brows.

Something was missing.

I could see it in her posture before she spoke.

“…our mission orders are gone.”

A silence stretched through the room. I took a step closer, my heartbeat a slow, heavy thing
against my ribs.

“What do you mean, gone?”

Garret didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flicked across the screen again, rereading,
confirming. Finally, she shook her head. “I mean there’s no record of them. The system still lists
this ship as active, still shows our flight path, but our mission file is gone.”

Jaro pulled up a secondary log. “No deletion record.” His voice was quiet. “No evidence of a
purge. No indication there was ever a file at all.”

Santos exhaled, long and slow. He rubbed at his temple, as if something deep inside his head
had begun to ache. “So what does that mean?”

Garret straightened. Her expression was unreadable, but her knuckles were white where she
gripped the console’s edge.

“We don’t have a reason to be here.”

I turned back toward the viewport, toward the blackness beyond. The weight of it pressed
against the ship, against my mind. I had the sharp and sudden certainty that we had gone too
far, stepped past some threshold into something we had no words for, something the universe
itself refused to acknowledge.

Something that was already unraveling us.

I swallowed, my throat dry. I tried again, one last time.

“Ellis.”
No one reacted.

His name was already gone.

 Chapter 4: Names and Erasure

There was a logic to fear. A structure to panic. A sequence of responses that followed distress,
that rose in predictable waves, each action feeding the next. A crisis began, alarms blared,
orders were given, procedures followed. That was how it was supposed to work.

But there were no alarms now. No orders. No protocols for this. Just a silent understanding, an
unspoken weight pressing down on us as we stared at the screens, at the absence that should
not have been. The ship hummed steadily, its systems perfectly functional, its engines ready to
fire, its air clean and breathable. But there was nowhere to go.

Jaro had not moved from his station. His fingers hovered over the controls, stiff and rigid, as if
caught between action and futility. Garret’s shoulders were squared, her jaw tight, the muscle
there ticking as she tried to find an answer, tried to put together pieces that no longer fit. Santos,
normally the first to push back, to challenge, to force a solution into being, had not spoken in
minutes.

I stepped closer to the console, careful, slow, as if any sudden movement might fracture what
was left of reality. “Try again.”

Jaro did. A manual override, a recalibration, an attempt to force the system to do something,
anything, but the result did not change.

Nothing.

No coordinates. No trajectory. No relay station. No known stellar formations. The ship

recognized its own position within its systems, knew its own dimensions, its functions, its
engines. It knew what it was.

But there was nothing outside of it.

Garret inhaled through her nose, rubbing at the corner of her eye with her knuckle before
straightening. “Fine. Then we do it manually. Pick a direction, move us forward. If we’re in a data
void, we’ll hit a field boundary eventually.”

It was rational. The kind of order she was trained to give, the kind that turned chaos into a
problem to be solved.

Jaro didn’t move.

Santos cleared his throat, and it came out hoarse. “It won’t work.”

Garret turned her head sharply, the muscles in her arms tensing. “Why not?”

He was staring at the viewport, the black pressing against the glass. His hands flexed once
before settling into fists. He shook his head. “We can’t move through nothing.”
“We’re not in nothing,” Garret snapped. “We’re in space. There’s always something.”

Santos let out a slow, rough breath. “Then tell me where the stars are.”

No one answered.

Garret turned back toward the controls, set her jaw, and said nothing.

Jaro swallowed. He sat back slowly, his chair creaking under the shift of weight. “We can still
try,” he said, but it was not confident. Not reassuring. He entered the command. The ship
responded. There was a flicker of engine power, a slight vibration in the floor beneath our feet
as the Oblivion adjusted course.

Then nothing.

No motion. No inertia shift. No indication that we had moved at all.

I felt it before I understood it. The realization crawled up the back of my skull like a cold hand, a
whisper of something unseen and awful.

Garret’s breath hitched. “What happened?”

Jaro’s hands were still on the controls. He looked down at them, at his own fingers, then back at
the screen. He pressed another command. Another. Another. The engines cycled, the thrusters
engaged, the readings confirmed movement. But we did not move.

Santos pushed back from his seat, shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”

Jaro’s voice was quiet. “It is if there’s nothing to move through.”

The ship knew its own functions. It knew its own mechanics. The system confirmed movement
because it had fired the necessary systems. It had done what it was programmed to do. But we
were still here, unmoved, untouched. Not because of failure. Not because of damage.

Because there was no external frame of reference.

No resistance. No pull. No mass outside of our own.

We had nothing to push against.

Garret’s hand curled into a fist on the console. Her breathing was too steady, too controlled, the
way it got when she was keeping something down, when the impossible was trying to edge its
way in.

“Options,” she said finally, her voice hard. “Alternative propulsion methods. We still have mass
ejection. We still have—”
Jaro interrupted. “We still have thrust. We don’t have space.”

Garret turned toward him, her expression darkening. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Jaro exhaled through his nose, slow, measured. “None of this does.”

Santos ran a hand down his face, his shoulders pulling in tight. “Alright,” he muttered, half to
himself. “We’re assuming this is an external factor. But what if it isn’t? What if this is a
perception issue?”

Garret frowned. “Explain.”

Santos gestured vaguely toward the room, then the viewport. “What if we’re moving, but we
can’t tell? What if our instruments are compromised? What if this is—”

“—a hallucination?” I finished, my voice dull.

Santos hesitated. “A neurological effect. We’re in an unknown space, a gravitational anomaly,

something interfering with our perception of movement. It’s possible.”

I shook my head. “It’s not.”

Santos scowled, shifting to look at me directly. “How do you know?”

I swallowed. I shouldn’t have said it. Not yet. Not while Garret was still holding the
line, still trying to keep structure in place. But the words had already formed, and they had the
weight of certainty behind them.

“Because I remember the stars.”

The silence that followed was different than before. Not just heavy, not just tense. Cold.

Santos didn’t speak, didn’t argue. He just watched me, waiting, as if he already knew what I was
about to say.

Garret was the one to break the pause. “We all remember the stars.”

I turned to her, my hands numb. “Do we?”

Her jaw clenched. “Yes.”

“Name one.”

The breath she had been about to take caught. Her eyes flicked slightly to the side, unfocused,
like she was searching. But nothing came. Nothing surfaced. Her expression didn’t change, but
the rigidity in her posture, the tension in her arms, all of it spoke to the absence of what should
have been there.

She wasn’t the only one.

Santos looked away. Jaro’s fingers twitched on the console. I felt my own mind straining,
reaching, trying to grasp at something that should have been so simple. But I could not name a
single star in the galaxy. Not the ones we had passed. Not the ones that should have marked
our course. Not even Sol, the star of our own origin.

It was gone.

Not hidden. Not lost.

Erased.

I turned back toward the viewport. The black beyond was no longer an absence. It was not
space. It was not a field of vacuum. It was something else. Something that did not just obscure,
but removed.

Something that did not consume.

Something that unmade.

Garret’s breathing was slow and measured, controlled down to the last molecule of air she took
in. I could see the fight in her, the refusal to acknowledge what had already taken root.
“This isn’t real,” she said.

I did not argue with her.

Because soon, I knew, she would no longer exist to say it at all.

 Chapter 5: Another Vanishes

There was nothing left to navigate by. No fixed points, no distant suns, no gravitational markers.
The Oblivion hung in the dead center of something immeasurable, something vast in a way that
could no longer be defined by scale. The instruments confirmed we were still moving—velocity,
propulsion, acceleration, all according to the laws of physics. And yet, there was no sensation of
motion. No reference for direction.

We had not stopped. But we had nowhere to go.

Garret had stopped issuing commands. Not officially, not in a way she would acknowledge, but
there was a difference now. A hesitation. A slowness that had crept into the way she carried
herself. The rigidity in her posture remained, but it was no longer the sharp tension of control. It
was something else. The slow bracing against an inevitable impact.

Jaro had abandoned the trajectory calculations and moved on to deep-system diagnostics,
pouring over internal scans, searching for anything corrupted, anything missing that could
explain what had happened to our navigation. His fingers moved through line after line of code,
restless, methodical, looking for errors that did not exist.

Santos had taken to standing near the viewport, though he did not look out. His arms were
crossed over his chest, shoulders curled inward, his gaze fixed on something unseen. The
movement of a man trying to shrink into himself, trying to take up less space in a world that was
becoming increasingly untrustworthy.

And me—I was waiting.

Not because I wanted to. Not because I had accepted whatever was happening. But because I
understood now that we had stepped over a line. A threshold that could not be undone. We had
arrived somewhere that had no return path. And whether or not we accepted it, whether or not
we admitted to it, did not matter.

The only thing left to do was see what happened next.

The first change came with the silence.

Not the silence that had already been there—not the deep hush of deep space, not the lingering
absence of the mission orders, not the cold void pressing against the hull.

This was different.

This was something removing sound itself.

It started as a static in my ears, a low hum beneath my own thoughts, so faint that I barely
noticed at first. Then it became a pressure, a fullness, a slow tightening in my skull, the weight
of something being pushed out. I turned my head, blinking, shaking it slightly, trying to clear
whatever had settled there. But it was not in my ears. It was deeper than that.

And then I realized—I could no longer hear the hum of the ship.

I could still feel the faintest vibration beneath my feet, the mechanical thrum of the Oblivion’s
engines. The systems were still running. The ship had not shut down. But the sound of it was
gone.

I looked toward Jaro. His fingers still moved over the console, but the keystrokes were silent. No
soft tap of his fingertips against the interface, no faint click of selections being confirmed. I
opened my mouth to speak, to ask him if he heard it too, but before I could say a word, Garret
was already sitting up straighter.

She heard it.

Santos looked up, eyes slightly unfocused.

Garret reached for the ship’s internal comms, pressing her fingers against the panel. It should
have made a sound. It should have signaled the connection, sent a soft chime through the deck,
something to indicate the system had acknowledged the command.

But there was nothing.

Her lips parted slightly. She pressed it again.

Still nothing.

She turned toward Jaro. “Say something.”

Jaro’s gaze flicked to hers, uncertain, but he obeyed.

His mouth opened. I saw his lips move. I saw the shape of the word form—“Test.”

I did not hear it.

I did not hear anything at all.

The silence was absolute. Not muffled. Not blocked. Just gone.

Jaro looked down at his hands, at his own throat, and something passed through his
expression. A slow, creeping understanding. His mouth opened again, moving faster this time. I
could see the words spilling out, something urgent, something sharp—but none of us could hear
him.

I turned to Garret. She was watching him, but her face was unreadable. She lifted a hand, held
up four fingers.
Jaro hesitated, then nodded. He lifted his own hand and held up four fingers in return. He had
understood. He had seen.

Garret’s hand lowered.

Santos’ voice—silent, but unmistakable—formed one word.

How?

Jaro shook his head.

Santos clenched his jaw, took a slow breath.

And then—another soundlessness filled the room.

A movement, a shift in the air that was not wind, not atmosphere displacement, not anything
explainable. A sensation like space itself stretching, thinning, curling inward, pressing against
something unseen.

I turned sharply toward the viewport.

At first, there was nothing. Only the same blackness. The same abyss that had pressed against
us since we arrived. But then, something moved.

Not a shape. Not a presence. Not an object.

Something in the blackness itself.

A folding. A creasing.

Like the void had exhaled.

Like the nothingness had shuddered.

I felt it in my chest. A tightening, a twisting. A pressure, deep and cold and vast beyond
measure. And then, just as it had started, it stopped.

Garret’s hand was already hovering over the controls, but there was nothing to respond to. No
alert. No warning. No indication from the ship that anything had changed.

But something had.

I turned my head back toward the others.

Santos was still there. Jaro. Garret.

The four of us.

And then the weight of the realization struck me so hard that my body went cold.

The four of us.

There were supposed to be five.

I turned my head sharply, scanning the room, my heart hammering, my pulse a slow, thick
weight in my veins. I counted again.

Four.

Who was missing?

I tried to picture the fifth figure, tried to recall their face, their name, their voice. But there was
nothing.

Just a gap in my mind.

A gap in reality.

I turned to the others, but none of them were reacting. None of them had stiffened, had moved,
had changed expression. None of them had even noticed.

I opened my mouth to speak, to ask, to force the words into being, but no sound came out.

And I realized—

It had already happened.

I had already forgotten them.

We all had.

The space between us where they had been was smooth, untouched, unclaimed. It was not an
absence. It was not an emptiness. It was just… nothing.

Santos ran a hand over his mouth, his fingers shaking slightly.

Garret exhaled slowly, turning toward the console.

She was going to try again.

To search for a course. To send a message. To make a plan.

Because she did not know.

Because she could not remember.

Because the void had taken something again, and this time, it had taken it so cleanly that even
the wound was gone.

The others did not notice.

And soon, I knew—

Neither would I.
 Chapter 6: The First Death

There was no pain in forgetting. No sharp edge, no tearing sensation, no violent fracture of
thought. It was quiet. A soft erosion. A smoothing over of something that had once been jagged
and distinct, a gentle dissolution of memory, like ink bleeding into water until it was too faint to
see.

That was the most terrifying part.

The absence was not a wound. It did not hurt. It did not ache. It did not leave behind a space
that begged to be filled. There was only the silence where something had been, and the silence
did not demand an explanation. It simply existed, as it had always existed, unchallenged,
unremarkable.

I knew this. I felt it, deep in my bones, even as the logic of it slipped through my fingers. There
had been five of us. I could not prove it, could not name the one who was missing, could not
picture their face, but the certainty remained, lurking beneath the surface like a voice I could not
quite hear.

And I knew, with a certainty that turned my stomach, that soon, that certainty would be gone too.

The others had already lost it.

Garret was still at the console, hands moving over the controls with slow, deliberate precision,
though she had stopped speaking aloud, as if somewhere, in the back of her mind, she still
recognized that sound no longer existed here. Jaro had moved on from diagnostics and was
scanning for signals now, though I did not know what he expected to find. There was nothing left
to detect, nothing left to measure. But the act of trying was all we had left, so he kept doing it.

Santos had turned away from the viewport. He did not look at the black anymore. He kept his
head down, his hands curled into fists at his sides, his shoulders hunched forward. I could see it
in him, the way he was gripping onto his own body as if trying to hold himself together.

He did not know what he had lost.

None of them did.

And if I was still aware of it now, it was only because I was next.

I closed my eyes, forced a slow breath into my lungs, pressed my fingers into my temples, trying
to root myself into something, anything. I forced my mind backward, tried to retrace the
sequence of events that had brought us here, tried to recall the sound of voices that no longer
existed.

But my own thoughts were unstable, shifting, slipping, smoothing over. I could feel the shape of
something unformed, a hollow impression in my mind where a memory should be, but it was too
faint to hold onto. It was like staring at a word until it lost its meaning. Like repeating a phrase
until it became a string of empty syllables.

Soon, I would forget that I had ever remembered at all.

I forced my eyes open, turned sharply toward Garret.

She was frowning at the console.

There was a change in her posture, a tension that had not been there before, something that
flickered across her face in a quick, sharp flash before she smoothed it away.

She was seeing something she did not like.

I stepped forward, hands braced against the edge of the console. I did not speak—there was no
point—but I let the weight of my presence press into her space, waiting, watching, until she
exhaled sharply through her nose and turned the display toward me.

The screen was blank.

Not dark. Not off. Not malfunctioning.

Just empty.

The logs were gone. The entire history of the Oblivion—its launch, its trajectory, its crew
manifest, its mission parameters. Every file, every stored piece of data, every entry that proved
we had ever existed.

I saw it in her expression then. The understanding. The knowledge that I already held. The
creeping awareness that we were being erased piece by piece, that we were losing ourselves to
something we could not fight, could not see, could not stop.

She did not look at me. She only turned back to the console, fingers tightening into fists at her
sides.

Santos let out a breath, low and shaking, rubbing at his eyes. He had not looked at the screen.
He did not need to. He had already lost his faith in the systems. He had already resigned
himself to the fact that they would find no answers there.

Jaro was still trying. I could hear the soft, rhythmic tap of his fingers against the console, his
attempts at searching the void for signals, for any trace of something beyond us. He would keep
doing it until the last moment, until the console no longer registered his presence, until the ship
no longer registered him at all.

Garret moved suddenly.

She stood, her chair scraping against the floor as she pushed it back. She strode toward the
emergency equipment panel and tore it open, yanking out one of the magnetic sealers. She
turned back toward us, her jaw set, her shoulders squared.

I did not need to hear her voice to know what she was saying.

She was going to mark the wall.

She was going to make a line, an imprint, something that the ship could not erase, something to
anchor us, something to hold onto.

Santos and Jaro watched her, unmoving, silent, their expressions unreadable.

She lifted the sealer.

Pressed it against the metal surface.

Drew it down in a slow, steady motion.

And the moment she pulled it away—

The mark was gone.

There had been no sound when it vanished. No flicker, no disruption, no indication that anything
had changed. One moment, there had been a line in the metal, fresh and sharp, and the next,
there was nothing.

Garret stood still.

Her fingers curled around the sealer, her knuckles white, but her face remained carefully, utterly
blank.

She turned back toward us.

Her eyes were dark.

We had known.

Of course, we had known.

But to see it happen. To watch it happen. To witness something so solid, so undeniable, so real,
simply blink out of existence without a trace—

That was something else entirely.

Santos moved first. His steps were slow, deliberate, like he was trying not to startle something
that might be watching, something that might take notice.
He reached out, his fingertips skimming along the wall where the mark had been, as if he could
feel the absence of it, as if the space itself still held the shape of something it had just devoured.

Jaro had stopped typing.

Garret let out a slow, measured breath, forcing herself back into movement, back into control.
She turned toward me, and I could see the question in her gaze, the same one that was in my
own mind.

What now?

I had no answer for her.

We had tried to leave. We had tried to act. We had tried to fight. And none of it mattered.

None of it had ever mattered.

Santos backed away from the wall, rubbing at his temple. He opened his mouth like he was
about to say something, then shut it again, his throat working against a sound that no longer
existed.

Garret moved back to the console, her motions slower now. More deliberate.

She was thinking.

She would try again.

Because that was what she did. That was what she had always done.

She would fight until the end.

Until there was nothing left of her to fight.

I turned back toward the viewport.

The void had not changed.

It did not need to.

Because it was waiting.

And soon, it would not have to wait at all.

 Chapter 7: It Becomes Flesh

There was no pain in forgetting. No sharp edge, no tearing sensation, no violent fracture of
thought. It was quiet. A soft erosion. A smoothing over of something that had once been jagged
and distinct, a gentle dissolution of memory, like ink bleeding into water until it was too faint to
see.

That was the most terrifying part.

The absence was not a wound. It did not hurt. It did not ache. It did not leave behind a space
that begged to be filled. There was only the silence where something had been, and the silence
did not demand an explanation. It simply existed, as it had always existed, unchallenged,
unremarkable.

I knew this. I felt it, deep in my bones, even as the logic of it slipped through my fingers. There
had been five of us. I could not prove it, could not name the one who was missing, could not
picture their face, but the certainty remained, lurking beneath the surface like a voice I could not
quite hear.

And I knew, with a certainty that turned my stomach, that soon, that certainty would be gone too.

The others had already lost it.

Garret was still at the console, hands moving over the controls with slow, deliberate precision,
though she had stopped speaking aloud, as if somewhere, in the back of her mind, she still
recognized that sound no longer existed here. Jaro had moved on from diagnostics and was
scanning for signals now, though I did not know what he expected to find. There was nothing left
to detect, nothing left to measure. But the act of trying was all we had left, so he kept doing it.

Santos had turned away from the viewport. He did not look at the black anymore. He kept his
head down, his hands curled into fists at his sides, his shoulders hunched forward. I could see it
in him, the way he was gripping onto his own body as if trying to hold himself together.

He did not know what he had lost.

None of them did.

And if I was still aware of it now, it was only because I was next.

I closed my eyes, forced a slow breath into my lungs, pressed my fingers into my temples, trying
to root myself into something, anything. I forced my mind backward, tried to retrace the
sequence of events that had brought us here, tried to recall the sound of voices that no longer
existed.

But my own thoughts were unstable, shifting, slipping, smoothing over. I could feel the shape of
something unformed, a hollow impression in my mind where a memory should be, but it was too
faint to hold onto. It was like staring at a word until it lost its meaning. Like repeating a phrase
until it became a string of empty syllables.

Soon, I would forget that I had ever remembered at all.

I forced my eyes open, turned sharply toward Garret.

She was frowning at the console.

There was a change in her posture, a tension that had not been there before, something that
flickered across her face in a quick, sharp flash before she smoothed it away.

She was seeing something she did not like.

I stepped forward, hands braced against the edge of the console. I did not speak—there was no
point—but I let the weight of my presence press into her space, waiting, watching, until she
exhaled sharply through her nose and turned the display toward me.

The screen was blank.

Not dark. Not off. Not malfunctioning.

Just empty.

The logs were gone. The entire history of the Oblivion—its launch, its trajectory, its crew
manifest, its mission parameters. Every file, every stored piece of data, every entry that proved
we had ever existed.

I saw it in her expression then. The understanding. The knowledge that I already held. The
creeping awareness that we were being erased piece by piece, that we were losing ourselves to
something we could not fight, could not see, could not stop.

She did not look at me. She only turned back to the console, fingers tightening into fists at her
sides.

Santos let out a breath, low and shaking, rubbing at his eyes. He had not looked at the screen.
He did not need to. He had already lost his faith in the systems. He had already resigned
himself to the fact that they would find no answers there.

Jaro was still trying. I could hear the soft, rhythmic tap of his fingers against the console, his
attempts at searching the void for signals, for any trace of something beyond us. He would keep
doing it until the last moment, until the console no longer registered his presence, until the ship
no longer registered him at all.

Garret moved suddenly.

She stood, her chair scraping against the floor as she pushed it back. She strode toward the
emergency equipment panel and tore it open, yanking out one of the magnetic sealers. She
turned back toward us, her jaw set, her shoulders squared.

I did not need to hear her voice to know what she was saying.

She was going to mark the wall.

She was going to make a line, an imprint, something that the ship could not erase, something to
anchor us, something to hold onto.

Santos and Jaro watched her, unmoving, silent, their expressions unreadable.

She lifted the sealer.

Pressed it against the metal surface.

Drew it down in a slow, steady motion.

And the moment she pulled it away—

The mark was gone.

There had been no sound when it vanished. No flicker, no disruption, no indication that anything
had changed. One moment, there had been a line in the metal, fresh and sharp, and the next,
there was nothing.

Garret stood still.

Her fingers curled around the sealer, her knuckles white, but her face remained carefully, utterly
blank.

She turned back toward us.

Her eyes were dark.

We had known.

Of course, we had known.

But to see it happen. To watch it happen. To witness something so solid, so undeniable, so real,
simply blink out of existence without a trace—

That was something else entirely.

Santos moved first. His steps were slow, deliberate, like he was trying not to startle something
that might be watching, something that might take notice.
He reached out, his fingertips skimming along the wall where the mark had been, as if he could
feel the absence of it, as if the space itself still held the shape of something it had just devoured.

Jaro had stopped typing.

Garret let out a slow, measured breath, forcing herself back into movement, back into control.
She turned toward me, and I could see the question in her gaze, the same one that was in my
own mind.

What now?

I had no answer for her.

We had tried to leave. We had tried to act. We had tried to fight. And none of it mattered.

None of it had ever mattered.

Santos backed away from the wall, rubbing at his temple. He opened his mouth like he was
about to say something, then shut it again, his throat working against a sound that no longer
existed.

Garret moved back to the console, her motions slower now. More deliberate.

She was thinking.

She would try again.

Because that was what she did. That was what she had always done.

She would fight until the end.

Until there was nothing left of her to fight.

I turned back toward the viewport.

The void had not changed.

It did not need to.

Because it was waiting.

And soon, it would not have to wait at all.

 Chapter 8: The Ship Devours

The void did not move. It did not shift or change, did not pulse or breathe or expand. It did not
behave like a thing that existed. It did not behave at all. It was patient. It was inevitable. It had
no need for urgency because it had already won.

I knew this, but I could not say it. Even if sound had still existed, even if my voice had not been
swallowed alongside everything else, I would not have spoken the thought aloud. Because
Garret was still trying. Because Jaro was still working. Because Santos, though he had given up
on the ship’s instruments, had not yet given up entirely. They still needed to believe there was
something to be done.

And I—I still needed them to be here.

I watched Garret’s hands move over the console, her motions efficient, controlled, her
expression locked into focus. It was an illusion, but it was one she maintained with force, the
illusion of command, of control, of purpose. She had to try. She had to keep going, because
once she stopped—once she admitted there was nothing left to fight—what then?

Jaro had switched tactics. He was no longer looking for a way out. Instead, he was searching
the ship’s own logs, trying to catch something in the process of being erased, something that
might give us a hint of what was happening, something that might be slow enough for him to
see before it disappeared entirely. His fingers moved steadily, inputting queries, pulling up old
data, scanning for anomalies in a system that no longer followed rules.

Santos had taken a seat, his elbows braced against his knees, his fingers loosely threaded
together. He was staring at the floor. Not lost in thought, not analyzing, not trying to make sense
of anything. Just staring.

He was listening to something that was no longer there.

I looked away.

Garret shifted, pulling up a diagnostic scan. It should have been a standard report. A basic
summary of the ship’s current state, a confirmation that the Oblivion was still intact, still whole.

But the screen flickered.

For the first time, something responded.

For the first time, something spoke back.

Garret went rigid. Jaro sat up straighter. Santos lifted his head.

On the screen, the words unfurled slowly. Not typed. Not rendered by the ship’s system. Not
translated from an external signal. They did not belong to the Oblivion at all.
YOU WERE NEVER HERE.

Garret did not move. No one did. The words sat there, absolute and final. They did not change,
did not refresh, did not demand anything from us. They were not an instruction. Not a warning.

They were a fact.

Garret pressed a command. The screen blinked out. When it returned, the words were gone.

She exhaled, slow and steady, then turned to Jaro. He was still watching the screen, his hands
still poised over the controls, though he had stopped typing.

Finally, he moved. He ran another search. The logs flickered, the files shifted, the system
stuttered. And then—

THERE WAS NO MISSION.

Jaro’s mouth parted slightly. His fingers flexed on the console.

He did not try again.

Garret’s hand lowered.

Santos let out a slow, measured breath and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked at me, then
at the viewport, then back at me. He did not speak.

There was nothing to say.

It was not telling us to leave. Not telling us to act. Not instructing or commanding or guiding us
toward a decision. It did not need to.

Because there had never been a decision to make.

There had never been a mission.

There had never been a ship.

There had never been us.

Garret straightened, her expression unreadable. I could see her weighing it, testing it, trying to
find a thread to pull that would unravel the logic, but there was nothing left to untangle.

Jaro’s hands settled on his lap. He sat back, exhaling through his nose.

Santos leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

They had all seen it. They had all read the words. And still, we were sitting here, still looking at
each other, still breathing.
Had the Oblivion ever launched? Had it ever left port? Was there a home waiting for us? Was
there anything at all beyond the nothingness that surrounded us?

I closed my eyes.

It did not matter.

The realization should have hit like a crushing weight, should have pulled me down into panic,
into fear, into the natural instinct to resist, to deny. But it didn’t. It settled too easily. It felt like
something I had already known, something I had only needed to hear spoken aloud.

There was a stillness inside of me now.

A space where something had been.

Something I could not name.

Garret exhaled, shook herself once, then turned back toward the console. She was going to try
again. Not because she believed it would change anything, but because it was what she did.
Because she needed something to do with her hands, with her thoughts, with the last fragments
of her own resistance.

But she hesitated.

And that was when it happened.

The lights flickered. The ship’s hum wavered, the vibration beneath my feet stuttering for the
briefest moment. My skin prickled, a deep, unseen shift passing through me. The others felt it
too—I saw the way their bodies stiffened, the way their hands twitched, the way their eyes
darted toward the screens.

The systems reset. The controls blinked out, one by one, and when they returned—

Garret was gone.

There was no sound. No movement. No trace. No transition.

One moment she had been standing there, her hands braced against the console, her head
tilting slightly as she prepared to speak. The next, she was gone.

I did not turn toward the others. I did not need to.

Because there was no sharp intake of breath, no exclamation of shock, no rush to check the
console, to search for an explanation.

They did not react.

Because they did not notice.

Because there had never been a Captain Garret.

She was gone, and with her, any trace that she had ever existed. The last fragments of her
name dissolved into nothing, leaving only an empty space where my memory should have been.

I stared at the console where she had been standing.

Jaro ran another scan. The screen flickered. The ship hesitated, then responded.

The words unfurled.

THERE WAS NEVER A CREW.

Santos rubbed at his temple, his mouth pressing into a thin line. He looked toward the viewport,
his fingers flexing against his knee.

There was something in his face. A thought forming and fading in the same breath. I watched
his brow furrow slightly, watched his eyes narrow just a fraction—

And then it was gone.

Whatever he had been thinking, whatever had been building, whatever had been trying to
surface, it had been smoothed away.

The space in my own mind where Garret had been was closing.

The details were already unraveling. The sharp edges of her features dulling, the exact pitch of
her voice dissolving, the sense of her presence in the room already fading into the background
hum of thought.

I could still grasp the shape of her memory, for now.

But not for long.

Soon, I would forget that she had ever existed.

And soon after that, I would forget I had ever remembered at all.
 Chapter 9: The Final Stand

Jaro was still typing. Santos was still breathing. I was still here. But Garret was gone, and none
of us would remember.

I had held on as long as I could, clinging to the shape of her in my mind, but the void had
already begun its work. It did not pull. It did not force. It did not consume with teeth or claws or
malice. It only unmade. The details slipped first—the slight scar on her temple from an old
accident, the sound of her footfalls against the deck, the way she tapped her fingers against her
console when she was thinking. Then the conversations. The orders. The memories of her
speaking, of her standing at the helm, of her existence entwined with ours.

I tried to fight it. I forced my mind backward, tried to recall the moment she vanished, tried to
hold onto the image of her standing at the console. I could see it, still—just barely. The tilt of her
head, the sharp focus in her eyes. And yet, even as I tried to fix her in place, the memory
blurred at the edges, dissolving, as if she had always been part of a dream.

I turned to Santos. He was staring at the floor again, his hands flexing absently against his
knees. Jaro was still running scans, still trying to catch the impossible in the act. Neither of them
spoke. Neither of them reacted to the empty space where Garret had stood.

I wet my lips, reached for my voice—except, I had none. The ship was still silent. No words
would come. No sound would break the void’s grip.

I lifted a hand, knocked against the console. The impact was dull, the vibration absorbed, but it
was enough. Santos looked up.

I pointed to the space beside me.

His brows furrowed slightly, his lips parting just a fraction, as if some thought was forming,
something distant, just out of reach. He glanced at Jaro, then back at me. His mouth opened
fully, shaping a word I could not hear.

I recognized the shape of it.

Who?

I swallowed. Shook my head. It didn’t matter. I could not tell him.

Because I no longer knew.

The shape of the absence was still here, but the name had already slipped away. And even that
would not last much longer.

Jaro made a soundless exhale, shifting in his seat. His eyes flicked back to the screen. He had
pulled up a ship’s manifest.
It was empty.

His hands stilled over the console. He blinked slowly, staring at the list of nothing. I could see it
in his face, the quiet struggle, the instinct to argue against the impossibility. He was trying to
recall the names that should be there. Trying to conjure them from memory, from habit, from
anything that still tethered him to reality.

But there was nothing.

I turned toward the viewport, toward the void. It did not change. It did not move. It did not need
to.

There had never been a Garret.

There had never been a crew.

The space beside me was just that—space. Empty. Forgettable. Meaningless. And soon, it
would feel natural, unremarkable, as if nothing had ever been there at all.

Santos let out a slow, steady breath. He stood and walked to the viewport. I followed his gaze,
watching his reflection in the glass. He was still here. Still whole. Still present.

But for how much longer?

I did not know when the void would take him. When it would take Jaro. When it would take me.

But I knew how it would happen.

I would not see it. I would not feel it. I would not recognize the moment when it occurred.

I would only notice the absence, for a time. The vague sense that something had been lost,
something important, something I could almost remember if I just tried a little harder.

And then even that would fade.

And then, it would be as if they had never existed at all.

Jaro was staring at the manifest, his jaw tight, his fingers curling into fists on the console. He
exhaled once, slowly, deliberately.

Then he reached forward, tapped a single key.

A log entry appeared on the screen. Blank, waiting for input.

He typed his name.

I watched as he entered the letters carefully, one by one, pressing each key with slow,
deliberate force. He finished the last letter, hit confirm. The text sat there, solid, undeniable.
And then it was gone.

Erased.

The entry field was empty again.

Jaro inhaled sharply, then entered it again, faster this time, harder. Confirmed again. It
disappeared.

He clenched his jaw, his hands pressing hard against the console, shoulders rising and falling in
slow, shallow movements. He tried again.

Gone.

Again.

Gone.

Again.

Nothing.

He slammed his fists against the console. The motion was violent, sharp, and the only proof of it
was the shift in his body, the slight tremor that passed through the metal beneath my feet. No
sound. No impact. No response from the ship.

He turned his head sharply toward me, his eyes dark, burning. His lips parted, and I saw the
shape of my name form in his mouth. He was asking me something, demanding something.

I did not know what.

I did not know if I still had a name to give.

Santos turned away from the viewport, walking slowly, deliberately, toward the center of the
command deck. He reached into his uniform pocket, pulled something small into his palm.

A pen.

A simple, physical thing, separate from the ship’s systems, from the void’s touch. He turned
toward the bulkhead, fingers tightening around the barrel.

He pressed the pen to the metal.

Began to write.

I could feel Jaro watching. Could feel my own breath catch as the ink bled into the surface, as
Santos formed each letter with careful, desperate precision.
A name.

Not his own.

Mine.

He finished the last stroke. Stepped back.

And we waited.

The ink stayed.

It did not vanish.

Jaro exhaled sharply, a quiet flicker of something in his face—relief? No, not quite. Not yet.

But something had changed.

Santos turned toward me, meeting my gaze. There was something there, something deeper
than words. A question. A thought. A silent understanding.

We could be erased from the ship. From the systems. From the mission records, from history,
from memory itself.

But not from here.

Not from this.

Jaro moved suddenly, reaching for his own pen. He pressed it to the wall beside Santos’ mark,
writing his own name, fast, forceful, before the void could take the idea from him.

It stayed.

I took the pen from Santos’ hand.

Pressed it to the surface.

And wrote my name.

The letters held.

The void had taken everything. But maybe, just maybe—

It could not take this.

Santos turned away, exhaling slowly. Jaro sat back, rubbing a hand down his face.

We had something now. A thread. A tether. A sliver of resistance.

It was not much.

It would not save us.

But it was something.

And in the end, that was all we had left.

 Chapter 10: Escape Into Emptiness

Santos spoke again, and this time, I heard him.

Not clearly. Not as we once had, when sound was natural, effortless, a thing we took for
granted. This was different. Thin, distant, like a voice traveling through water, like the echo of
something half-remembered. But it was there.

Jaro froze at the console. His fingers hovered over the controls, his breath catching in his throat.
He turned his head toward us, eyes wide, cautious, as if afraid that moving too quickly might
snap whatever fragile thing had allowed this moment to happen.

Santos swallowed, exhaled, tried again. I watched his lips form the word, and this time, I heard
it—not perfectly, but enough.

“…hello?”

A single word. A small thing. A flicker of sound where there had been nothing.

Jaro’s hands clenched at his sides, his expression unreadable. Then he opened his mouth,
hesitated, and forced out his own voice.

“…can you hear me?”

The words were stretched thin, warped, barely more than vibrations clawing their way into
existence, but I nodded. Santos did too.

Jaro let out something between a breath and a laugh. His fingers flexed, his body trembling with
something uncertain, something raw. He turned toward me, his expression sharpening.

“Try.”

I hesitated.

Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I doubted that I could. But because I understood, in a
way I could not put into words, what was happening.

Something had given this back to us. Not the ship, not the void itself. Something else.

Something we had done.

The names.

They were still there, still carved into the wall in ink and pressure, defying the smooth, effortless
erasure that had taken everything else. They had stayed, and now, sound had returned,
however weak, however fragile.
I took a breath, shaped my voice around the silence, and spoke.

“…I’m here.”

Jaro closed his eyes for a moment, exhaling sharply. Santos let out something that might have
been a laugh, if it had been stronger, if we had been anywhere else, if this had not been a
victory measured in whispers.

We had something now. It was not enough. It would never be enough. But it was proof that the
void was not absolute.

Not yet.

Santos stepped back, rubbing a hand down his face. Jaro turned toward the console again, as if
searching for something to ground himself in, something to reorient him to the shape of reality.
But reality was not what it had been. It had already shifted, already fractured beneath the weight
of whatever had taken hold of us.

We had lost Garret. We had lost our mission. We had lost the very concept of why we were
here.

But now, we had sound.

A trade.

I swallowed, my throat dry. The thought crawled at the back of my mind, unwelcome, unspoken.

What had we traded for this?

Jaro must have felt the shift in me, because he turned his head sharply, his brow furrowing. I
shook my head, but he was watching me closely now. Santos, too.

They wanted me to speak.

But I did not want to say it aloud.

Because I knew, even if I did not understand how, that the void could hear us.

Santos ran a hand over his mouth, then turned toward the names on the wall. He stared at
them, his fingers twitching at his sides, his pulse still visible at his throat. Then he reached for
the pen again.

He clicked it once, testing the weight of it in his hand. Then, moving slowly, carefully,
deliberately, he pressed the tip to the metal and wrote something new beneath the names.

I stepped closer. So did Jaro. We watched as the letters took shape, bold and unmistakable, as
real as anything could be in this place.
Garret.

Santos let out a slow breath. He stepped back, capping the pen, his hand tightening around it.

We waited.

The name remained.

The ink did not dissolve, did not blur or vanish. There it was, written into existence, in the same
place where she had once stood, where she had commanded, where she had fought for us long
after the fight had become unwinnable.

Santos turned to me, and his eyes were dark, questioning.

I knew what he was asking.

If the names had given us sound, then maybe this would give us something more.

I did not answer. Not because I didn’t want to. But because I didn’t know what would happen if I
did.

Jaro pressed his lips together, then turned away sharply, back toward the console. He was
scanning again, running diagnostics on a system that no longer held records, no longer played
by the rules we had once understood. He wasn’t searching for information. He was searching
for something to do with his hands, something to anchor himself to, something to remind him
that we were not yet undone.

Santos stayed at the wall, staring at the name, his hand flexing slightly where he gripped the
pen.

I stepped toward the viewport, feeling the pull of it, the way the black seemed to stretch and shift
at the edges of my vision. The void was not moving. It did not need to.

But I could feel it watching.

I pressed my fingers to the glass. My own reflection stared back at me, my face pale, drawn,
hollow in a way I had not noticed before.

The void had taken so much.

It would not stop now.

Jaro let out a sharp breath, his chair scraping against the floor as he pushed himself back from
the console.
“No changes,” he muttered. His voice was clearer now, still rough, still weak, but stronger than
before. “Ship systems are the same. No new errors. No new losses.” He ran a hand through his
hair. “Whatever we did—it didn’t get worse.”

Not yet, I thought.

Santos turned toward us, his hand still loose around the pen.

Then—something changed.

The lights dimmed. Not a flicker, not a loss of power, but a shift. A pulling inward. A pressure in
the air, a density that should not have been possible in the weightlessness of space.

I turned toward the viewport, my breath catching.

The void was changing.

No, not changing. Focusing.

The blackness beyond the glass, once still and endless, had taken on a new shape. Not a
physical form, not something solid, but a shift in depth, in intent. A narrowing.

Like an eye turning toward us.

Jaro stood slowly, his body stiff, his hands pressing against the console. Santos didn’t move at
all.

The ship groaned. A deep, low sound, the first true noise we had heard from it in hours. It
shuddered through the walls, vibrating beneath our feet, the hull flexing around us like
something alive, like something responding.

Santos’ pulse was a visible rhythm at his throat, his breath coming too sharp, too fast.

I stepped toward the console, my fingers gripping the edge. Jaro was staring at the screen, his
face tense, unreadable.

The ship had received something.

Not a message. Not a signal.

A presence.

Santos let out a slow, measured breath. Then, carefully, deliberately, he reached out and
underlined Garret’s name.

The ship groaned again.

The blackness outside the viewport moved.

And I realized, too late, what we had done.
 Chapter 11: Oblivion

The void was moving now. Not in the way a thing should move, not with force or momentum, not
with speed or direction. It was shifting in a way that defied every fundamental law of physics,
bending around us, closing in—not as if we were being surrounded, but as if we were being
rewritten. The universe did not contain it. It was the universe. And it had decided that we no
longer belonged.

The ship groaned beneath my feet, deep and low, a soundless pressure that rippled through the
metal, through my ribs, through the marrow of my bones. It was inside the Oblivion now, inside
us, pressing against the space we occupied, making something unknown out of something that
had once been real. My skin prickled. My vision blurred for the briefest moment, as if my brain
itself had been caught in a static field. I clenched my jaw and forced my focus back into my
body, back into the here, the now, though even that had become uncertain.

Jaro was against the bulkhead, his hands spread flat against the metal, his breath coming too
fast, too uneven, his eyes darting between the screens as they flickered in and out of clarity. He
was trying to find something, anything, a pattern, an answer, a foothold against the erasure we
could not stop. His mind was still fighting, still pushing against the inevitable, but his hands were
shaking. I could see the way his fingers twitched, the way his shoulders locked, the way his lips
pressed into a tight, bloodless line. He had always been the one who looked for solutions. The
one who worked the problem, who found the gaps in logic, who fixed what was broken.

But this could not be fixed.

Santos had moved toward the viewport again, his posture rigid, his hands curled into fists at his
sides. He wasn’t looking at the glass, not fully—his eyes were slightly downcast, as if he were
resisting the pull of whatever was out there, resisting the knowledge that it was looking back.
His pulse was a visible tremor at his throat, his breathing shallow, his body taut with the effort of
holding himself together. He was still gripping the pen in one hand, his knuckles white against
the metal, his fingers refusing to let go. It was the only real thing he had left.

The ship lurched, and this time it was different. This time, I felt it. A pulling, not against my body,
but against my self, against the idea of my existence. The moment stretched, elongated, thinned
into something too fragile to hold. My thoughts wavered. My perception flickered. I blinked, and
for one brief, terrible second, I did not know where I was. I did not know what I was.

Then the moment snapped back, like a rubber band recoiling, and I gasped, staggering forward,
my fingers clutching at the nearest surface. I pressed my palm against the console, grounding
myself in the sensation of touch, the feeling of pressure, the undeniable proof that I was still
here.

But for how much longer?

Jaro turned toward me, his expression sharp, fractured at the edges. His lips parted, his voice
scraping against the silence.
“We have to do something.”

Santos exhaled sharply through his nose, tilting his head back slightly. “Like what?” His voice
was clearer now, the sound stabilizing, the weight of it settling in the air like a thing that could be
held. It should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.

Jaro gestured at the console, at the empty screens, the blank records, the ship’s systems that
still functioned but no longer registered anything outside of themselves. “We wrote our names,
and the void didn’t take them. We got sound back. That means something. That means we still
have some control.”

I swallowed hard. “So what are you suggesting?”

Jaro hesitated, and in that hesitation, I saw the cracks forming, the uncertainty coiling in the
space behind his eyes. But then his jaw set, and he lifted his hand toward the wall again, his
fingers curling around the pen.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and then, without another word, he pressed the ink to the metal and
wrote.

Oblivion.

It was already there, the word he had written before, but now he underlined it, hard, dragging
the ink beneath the letters, reinforcing them, making them deeper, making them stick. Santos
and I watched, our breaths caught in our throats, waiting, waiting for something to happen,
waiting for the universe to respond.

For one long, breathless moment, nothing did.

Then the ship screamed.

A deep, resonant vibration shook the entire deck, rolling through the walls, through the floor,
through the air, through me. The screens flashed, stuttering with symbols that made no sense,
text that was not text, something fractured, broken, ancient. The overhead lights pulsed,
darkening, pulling inward, collapsing into something that was not shadow but was not light
either.

The Oblivion was unraveling.

Jaro reeled back, dropping the pen. Santos braced himself against the bulkhead, his breathing
rough and unsteady. My vision swam for a moment, my balance tilting dangerously, my thoughts
feeling like they were being stretched thin, pulled apart, rewritten.

The viewport darkened.

No—the void moved again.

Not the way it had before, not subtle, not shifting, but folding inward.

It was collapsing around us, pulling the fabric of reality inward toward a single point, a
convergence, a compression, a final act of erasure.

Jaro forced himself upright, his voice raw. “It’s not just watching anymore.”

Santos shook his head, pressing his back against the wall, his fists clenched. “It’s waking up.”

I turned toward the viewport, my breath caught in my chest. The Oblivion had lost
everything—its mission, its crew, its history.

And now, it was losing itself.

The hull groaned, the pressure deepening, warping, like space was folding into something too
small, too tight, too unnatural to contain us. The ship shuddered violently, a gravitational force
curling in on itself, a slow, deliberate undoing.

Santos turned toward Jaro, toward me. “We have to go.”

Jaro laughed, a short, brittle thing. “Go where?”

I didn’t have an answer.

There was nowhere.

The screens flashed again, new words unfurling in that same, jagged, broken text.

YOU WERE NEVER HERE.

Santos clenched his jaw, turned toward the names on the wall, and before I could stop him,
before I could warn him, he lifted the pen and dragged a line through Garret’s name.

The ship convulsed.

The air thickened, the walls twisted, and for a single, agonizing moment, I felt myself being torn
apart.

Not my body.

Not my mind.

Something deeper.

Something older.

Something that had never been meant to be here at all.

And in that moment, as the void pressed against my existence, I knew—

This was not a black hole.

This was not an anomaly.

This was something waiting to be named.

Something that had been empty for so long.

And now, we had given it words.

 Chapter 12: Completely

The Oblivion was tearing apart—not like a ship breaking down, not like metal giving way to
stress, but like an idea unraveling. It had lost its shape, lost its purpose, lost the need to be a
ship at all.

Jaro’s body wasn’t gone. Not completely. The void had taken him, but not in the way a predator
devours prey, not in the way flesh is consumed. There was nothing left to consume. There was
just absence. His blood still coated the floor where he had fallen, but there was no body, no
remains, no proof that he had ever existed at all. Only the knowing. Only the feeling that
something should be there, that something had been ripped away, and that even the memory of
it was slowly being hollowed out.

Santos grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward. We couldn’t stop. The air around us
thickened, pressing against my skin, into my skull, deep inside my chest. A weight, a pull, a
force stretching outward. It had no direction, no gravity, no wind—only intent. The same way a
black hole drags light into itself, consuming without motion, without need. And it was faster now.
It had taken Jaro in seconds. Not just his body, but everything he had ever been. It would take
us, too.

Santos knew it. He didn’t say anything. He just ran. The corridors shrank as we moved,
collapsing, folding inward. They weren’t just closing. They were disappearing. I could see the
edges peeling away—not breaking, not shattering, but dissolving. The ship was being unmade.
So were we.

I could feel it now. Not pain. Not fear. Something worse. Something deeper. Something that told
me I had already started to forget myself. The airlock was ahead. Close. Santos let go of me
first, throwing himself toward the console, his hands moving, reaching for the override.

I turned back. And I saw it. Not a monster. Not a thing. The void itself. It had no body, no face,
no true form. It was just a cloud of nothing, a growing absence, a hole that stretched outward in
every direction, spreading like ink in water, like a shadow cast where no light had ever existed.
And it had shape only because it was wearing us.

I saw pieces of Jaro, stretched like mist, caught in the edges, his features half-formed, his
mouth open in a scream that no longer belonged to him. I saw Garret, Santos, myself. Not dead.
Not alive. Just dissolving.

And then—Santos screamed. His body wrenched backward, his hands torn from the controls,
his feet dragging across the floor, his fingers clawing at empty air. The void had him. I lunged
forward, reached for him, grabbed his wrist. Too late.

The blackness curled around his legs, pulling, stretching, twisting. I held on. His eyes locked
onto mine—wide, desperate, furious. The void wasn’t just erasing him. It was pulling him apart. I
could see his skin fraying at the edges, the pieces of him breaking away like dust, like smoke,
like something unreal unraveling in real time. His lips moved—a name, maybe mine, maybe his
own, but it came out as nothing. A whisper that never existed.

The pull was too strong. I couldn’t hold him. I lost my grip. He was gone. Not torn, not taken, not
even dead. Just gone. No body. No blood. No remains. Like he had never been here at all.

And I knew—I would forget him. I would lose him. Not just his voice. Not just his face. Every
moment. Every memory. Every proof that he had ever existed.

The void was coming for me next. I threw myself at the console. The override was still flashing.
The airlock hissed. A rush of air, a violent decompression, the void pulling, stretching, trying to
take me with it—

And then—The doors slammed shut. Silence.

I collapsed. Alone. I turned back, staring at the viewport. Nothing looked different. Space was
still there. The stars still burned, distant and indifferent.

But I knew what was missing.

I just didn’t know who.

 Chapter 13: The Void Remembers

The Oblivion was gone.

I knew that. I had seen it. Felt it. It had not exploded, had not broken apart into wreckage or ruin.
There was no debris, no drifting remains, no echo of destruction. It had been unmade.

I floated in the void.

The emergency pod was intact—if intact was even the right word. My body still existed inside it.
My lungs still drew breath. My hands still curled into my lap, nails pressing into my palms, a
small, human pain to remind myself that I was still here.

But the rest was gone.

There was no distress beacon blinking in the control panel. There was no star map, no
trajectory, no timekeeping. No connection to any network, no emergency signal bouncing off
relay satellites, no log of a mission, no evidence that the Oblivion had ever launched.

No proof that it had ever existed at all.

The controls worked. My fingers brushed over the screen, ran diagnostics, checked for
something, anything. But the pod registered nothing. No known location. No registered pilot. No
history of departure. I was floating in an empty space that had never been entered.

My thoughts felt thin, stretched at the edges. I struggled to hold onto them, to keep them clear,
to remember why I was here—who I was.

The viewport loomed before me, stretching wide and open. I had not turned toward it yet. I did
not want to. But I knew.

I already knew.

My fingers twitched. The screen blinked. I had not pressed anything, and yet—

PERSONNEL RECORD: UNAVAILABLE

MISSION LOG: UNAVAILABLE

DISTRESS SIGNAL: UNAVAILABLE

ERROR: NO DATA FOUND

There had been names. I had written them. I had held them. But they had slipped through my
fingers, as weightless as breath, as fragile as dust. I tried to speak, to say something, anything,
but the sound came out wrong. Thin. Distant. Already lost.
I turned my head.

The viewport was waiting.

The void was waiting.

It stretched before me, deeper than black, deeper than dark, something colder than the absence
of light, something that had never held light to begin with. It was not space. It was the end of
space.

And I could feel it.

I had left it behind. I had escaped it. But it was still inside me. It had taken Jaro, taken Santos,
taken Garret, taken every trace that they had ever been, and I had fought to hold onto them, I
had fought so hard, but already—

Already I was losing them.

Their faces blurred in my mind, their voices slipping away. No memories. Just the feeling that
something should be there.

I lifted my hand and pressed it against the glass. My reflection should have been there, but
there was nothing. No shadow, no outline, no proof that I had ever existed at all.

I did not know my own name.

The stars flickered in the distance, but they felt far. Too far. They had always been far, but now
they were something separate, something unreachable. They had nothing to do with me. I was
not part of their universe anymore.

I was something else.

The void shifted.

Not movement. Not light.

Just awareness.

It was watching.

Or maybe—it was remembering.

I should have been afraid. But the longer I stared, the more I understood.

There had been no mission. No ship. No crew. No me.

I was never here.

I had never been.

The black stretched forward, folding inward, pulling everything with it.

And I let go.