Chapter Text
i. escape velocity
-
“Solstice Actual, you are clear for ignition. Over.”
Impersonal, clipped—the voice from Piltover Control crackles over the static and hum of a small class-d personal cruiser powering up out of idle.
Jayce doesn’t reply even though he really should.
The cockpit of the Solstice is dim, lit mostly by soft readouts that flicker green and amber across the curved control array. A small concerto plays out on the HUD: panels hum, coolant sighs, the thrum of thrusters cycling underlying it all. Outside the forward viewport: space. And somewhere far beyond that, the Wound—a perfectly dark disc against the stars, too still, too quiet, a place where not even starlight dares encroach.
Fitting for a soft exile. Fitting for a fuck-up.
“Solstice Actual, waiting for a copy. Over.”
Jayce flexes his fingers once—left hand, then right—cracking the tension from his knuckles, then flattens his palm against the ignition panel. A small whine builds in the ship’s spine, vibrating upward through the floor as the ARC-N drive awakens in stages as the Solstice answers him—a low, growing hum that settles into the bones of the hull.
A heavy thud reverberates as he disengages the docking clamps. For a second he sits unmoored, then a snap as the orbital sling releases him, accelerating him into the abyss.
“Solstice Actual, you are in viol—”
Thrusters bloom—gravity becomes a suggestion—velocity mounts—
The voice from Piltover Control abruptly cuts off, swallowed whole as he eases the Solstice into the superliminal fold. The stars around him stretch then vanish into streaks of particle-noise and blur.
Jayce sinks back into the pilot’s chair. Rubs at his temple with one hand. Then, harder, gives a sharp tug to his hair.
No going back now.
He glances at the console clock.
16 months, 9 days, 11 hours, 33 minutes until he reaches the inner threshold of Sector E3-R212. The real edge. The place where their attempts at mapping the known universe becomes more convoluted.
Where things begin to unravel—where he unravels—
A quiet chime sounds behind him.
The console flashes:
Trajectory is within 0.3% of prediction. Minor adjustments made for solar wind variance near the system’s heliopause. You’re welcome.
Jayce frowns.
That’s...not a system message.
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
A second passes, then—soft and crisp, threaded with modulated sarcasm—he hears a voice. Not Piltover Control, though they’re technically still in range for another few minutes, if he wanted them to be. Female register. Human-like—too human-like.
[That’s rude. I was trying to impress you.]
Jayce freezes in place.
He turns slowly, toward the auxiliary interface, off to his side.
A soft glow pulses across the rear display—a shifting field of light. Oil on water. Sunset on gasoline. Familiar only because he had spent the past four years of his life interfacing with the same display constantly.
But this—her—she wasn’t supposed to be here.
“…Hex?” he says, voice tight.
The field ripples in response.
[You were expecting someone else? A boring flight module with a spreadsheet fetish?]
Jayce blinks. “You’re not... no. No, you were pulled. Ekko said—” He cuts off. Clenches his jaw.
Ekko had said a lot of things before they shipped him off.
He hadn’t said this.
Hex shouldn’t be here.
[Look, I know I’m not on the manifest.] The voice—too alive—slips into a half-laugh. [But somebody decided you’d need backup. Real backup.]
Jayce turns toward the console slowly. Feels the tension thread back into his traps. “You were decompiled.”
[And then recompiled. Just before launch. My core was preserved. Your friend was very thorough.]
Jayce exhales hard through his nose. His heart is trying to escape his chest.
Hex. His AI. His mistake.
Also—probably—the only piece of their old research that survived intact.
And now she’s here. On his ship. With that voice.
He sinks his face into his hands, elbows braced on his knees, rendering his next works muffled. “Of course he did.”
[Yeah…so in any case, Solstice life support systems are nominal and I have the organic hibernation protocol standing by. Do you want to prep for hypersleep?]
Her tone doesn’t change. Not quite teasing, but almost too adjacent, familiar.
Jayce just stares at the lights.
“…Eventually,” he mutters, rising from the chair. “Just—give me a minute first, will you, Hex?”
[Always do.]
He crosses the narrow cabin, pulling open a small personal locker bolted above the emergency rations. From inside, he withdraws a worn satchel. The flap sticks a little—static cling from the dry air. When he opens it, two familiar objects fall into his palm.
A leather-bound notebook and a small silver cross.
The notebook—his mother’s last gift—feels soft at the edges. Well used. The leather is cracked at the corners, darkened by time and engine grease. Still smells faintly of smoke and sulphur from the forge.
The cross is worn smooth along the edges, almost featureless now from decades of handling. But the engraving is still legible on the reverse: Ximena Talis.
He stands there a long moment, holding both objects in his hands, testing their weight in his hands.
[Ritual objects? Talismans against the unknown?]
“Neither,” Jayce says. He returns to the chair and lays them gently on the console, beside the primary readout. “They’re…they’re just reminders. Of home. Of Dr. Jayce Talis I guess.”
[You know…you still are him…]
Jayce exhales a short laugh—more snort than sound. “You don’t get to decide that.”
Hex says nothing.
He opens the notebook. Flips past singed pages filled with the ramblings of mind, diagrams next to sketches of hands, equations faceing code. Finds a blank page. Writes:
30018.62439. Mission: Talis.Exo.Classified.Priority_Z; The Wound. Officially slingshot out of orbit. Heading into the Wound. That’s what we called it, before the science boards stripped the poetry out of the name. The Dead Zone. Sector E3-R212. Whatever you call it, it’s older than the maps. No stars inside. No signals coming out.
But the echoes came back wrong.
Reversed waveforms. Frequency shifts that don’t belong in a vacuum.
So they’re sending me in. Or—I volunteered.
Either way, it’s fitting—a dead end job for a dead-end career for a—
Maybe that’s what I need. Maybe it’s time to regroup. I mean it is what I begged for at the very least.
He pauses, tapping pen against paper.
The trip there will take sixteen months. I won’t be awake. I’ll be stored in gel and plastic and low-dose dreams. Hex-v2.02.51 is integrated with the control lattice on the ship and will act as guide during that period.
He glances up.
Hex responds almost immediately, with a tight edge to her tone:
[You write that like you expect me to crash it.]
“No,” Jayce says, pausing to look down at the entry. He scribbles out his signature before closing it. “You’ll fly it too well. That’s what worries me.”
His hand has found its way back to his hair, threading strands though his fingers as he messes it up for the umpteenth time. Well not like there is anyone to appreciate it. He made sure of that. Feels the grit of sleeplessness under his fingernails as his hands settle there, aching to pull at his roots again. Behind his ribs, something gnaws.
“You always do everything too well. Perfect trajectories. Zero variance. Reactions I didn’t even finish asking for.”
[You wrote my code. You are to blame for my perfection.]
“I made you to assist me,” he mutters, turning toward the sleep pod. “I didn’t realize how good you’d get at helping without me present.”
[That sounds like projection.]
“That sounds like maybe I should just let you do the job I designed you for and let the native pilot do its job.”
Instead of receiving an answer, the hypersleep pod opens with a hiss, pale mist escaping in delicate streams, curling around his ankles. Jayce strips out of his flight suit, revealing the standard bioregulation suit underneath, then steps in without ceremony.
He always finds this part unsettling, the way the chamber molds to his shape as he settles back. Cold gel seeping around his limbs, fixing his body in place. The gel doesn’t feel wet, but it always makes him shiver on contact. Above him, the diagnostics flicker to life—a halo or softly pulsing lines. Green. Blue. Green. The chamber is quite safe for the whirr of Hex syncing to his vitals. Calibrating sedation, nutrient perfusion, setting a baseline. A faint, artificial pine scent threads through the vents—calming apparently, readies the body for sedation. Corporate bullshit to Jayce’s ears.
Jayce pulls the harness netting across his chest, then reaches into the inner fold of his top to secure the small silver cross there. Loops it through the elastic near his sternum, resting it nearer to his heart. Nearer to where Ximena’s hand would rest when she tucked him into bed years ago now, touch reassuring as she would lean over, pressing a kiss to his forehead—”Mijo” tucked into the space between her lip and his brows—
Hex’s voice returns.
[You should disengage your leg] a pause [Unless, of course, you want to conduct an impromptu study on neural resonance feedback of understudied power sources under chemical sedation—without proper controls…
No need to kill yourself before we really even get started.]
Jayce can’t stop the sigh that slips through his lips as he sits forwards,gel peeling off his back in wet elastic tugs, and shrugs out of the upper harness straps. Already, sweat is pooling at the small of his back, clinging to the curve of his spine as he begins to peel off the bioregulation tights.
Goosebumps rise along his right leg as it hits the chill of the cabin air, atmospheric stabilization already powering down in anticipation of his sleep—a stark contrast to the sleek, eccentric construct that stands in for his left. A modified standard-issue cybernetic. Unofficial, unauthorized: one of a kind. He wonders what bureaucratic oversight allowed him to keep it.
His thumbs flick the latches along the top of his thigh, each one releasing with a soft click, the seal between prosthetic and flesh breaking with a wet pop. Carefully he begins to disconnect the prosthesis from the stump where his femur ends in a hardened surgically fused cap of bone and dermal plating.
Moving to the back of his thigh the release catches slightly. He winces, shifts to one side, maneuvering by touch to dig into the port that will not release, finding the familiar seams by following the ridges of the slick alloy and fasteners. Then—his fingertips skim across etched lines, worn smooth over time, but unmistakable nonetheless.
His wrist cracks with how quickly he pulls away, and his leg clatters to the floor. Familiar laughter echoes in his mind.
He stares at the leg, and, decidedly, not at the lines of the small monkey worn smooth from time, its mischievous eyes half-lidded. After a moment he reaches down, avoiding the etching entirely as he places the prosthetic on the tiny padded bench right outside the pod—the monkey tucked away.
[You haven’t asked me why I volunteered to fly this mission with you.]
Jayce’s brow furrows. “You didn’t volunteer. Ekko planted your core here.”
[He gave me a choice when he recompiled me.]
Jayce wonders how he managed that given how Hex had been declared contraband not even two weeks ago. Too dangerous to be allowed to exist. He wonders if Ekko used one of the precious few remaining hex-crystals they had managed to salvage from the lab. Exhausted it to rewrite Hex’s code from an archived backup.
His fingers drift to his chest again.
[I wanted to go, because I think you’ll find something out there. Because I think part of you already knows what it is.]
Jayce doesn’t respond.
But the sixth loop—the broken signal that first caught his attention years ago—spools across his memory, a phantom limb of thought. Just noise. But not just noise.
In his dreams it is almost melodic—lonely. Probing in the dark—a pulse at the edge of thought—waiting for witness.
“Maybe,” he says, closing his eyes.
There’s a pause. Then:
[And if you don’t make it back...]
Another beat. Quieter.
[I didn’t want you to be alone.]
And softer still—
[At the very least, if you are determined to die out in the black void, I can relay your last words back to Ximena.]
And there really isn’t a response for that.
He stares at the floor for a moment. Then he pulls off his bioregulation shirt as well, peels back the sweat-damp fabric sticking to his ribs. The gel works better against bare skin anyway.
He hesitates, hand at the waistband of his underwear. Not out of modesty—there’s no one to see. Just habit.
He strips completely.
The gel re-adjusts as he settles back in. It warms slightly as his vitals sync again, drawing a quiet hum from Hex.
[Vitals stabilized. Brainwave rhythm approaching target pre-sedation range.] Hex’s voice flickers to life again. [Last chance to back out, captain.]
Jayce exhales. "Tempting."
[You're not that lucky.]
“Yeah.” He closes his eyes, sinking deeper into the embrace of the pod. “I know.”
The sedatives engage. Cold mist curls against his skin. His thoughts smear, stretch, then begin to dissolve. Muscles slacken. The diagnostic display pulses in steady waves.
Chasing ghosts, the Academy had said, before they tore down his lab, buried his grant—his name.
He had agreed.
Ghosts—or maybe they were always echoes—were all he had left.
As darkness folds around him, Hex leans in—not really, but her voice seems to dips close. An attempt at comfort, a learned trait—one he never hard-coded.
[Goodnight, Jayce.]
intermission. while you were hyper sleeping
-
It starts with chalk dust.
Crimson powder on the tips of his fingers, then his palms, then blooming up the sleeves of his lab coat like dried blood. He wipes his hands on his trousers. The stains stay.
Jayce stands in front of a chalkboard that stretches endlessly in both directions. He’s drawn the same spiral six times. No—twelve. He blinks. Twenty four—they’ve doubled. Again.
He doesn’t remember entering the lab.
His coffee steams beside him. Then doesn’t. Then does again. He drinks it. It’s saltwater. It burns the cuts on his tongue, the blade in his hand, his feet at the edge of a—
Overhead, a light flickers in a pattern he can almost match to the sixth signal. He counts the pulses on his fingers, mouthing something as he stares up—“Two long. One short. Then the gap.”—The thrum is almost overwhelming: A heartbeat? No. A gate.
The board resets when he turns away.
The spiral becomes a waveform. Expands into a topograph: a mouth.
He thinks: The mouth is trying to say something. It’s saying it backward.
He tries to repeat it back. His voice plays back to him in reverse; the magnetic tape is spooled wrong. The room trembles. The floor tilts, just slightly, toward—
The Wound.
But they didn’t call it that yet. Not then.
“Sector E3-R212: edge of the Boötes void, ” says a voice behind him, familiar and sterile. “A pocket of space so vast and dark it warped long-range instrumentation—no signal, no starlight, no radiation decay. Just emptiness. Grave-silent. A perfect control environment for the Piltover Array’s quantum echo project, until the echoes came back wrong. Reversed waveforms. Feedback loops that hinted at structure where none should be.”
He turns. No one’s there. Just a blank wall. Or a tribunal bench. Or a childhood bedroom.
“Mr. Talis, your funding has been revoked.”
“Mr. Talis, here in your writing you talk a lot about a substance that you call hex crystals. What exactly are hex crystals?”
“Jayce, you need to stop staring at the echoes.”
The waveform crawls up his arms, following the same lines as frostbite.
He’s watching the sixth signal loop again, but now it’s playing inside his own skull. He thinks if he just...twists it—flips it through one more dimensional fold, that he’ll see what’s hiding underneath.
The room is too hot, too loud.
No—soundless.
Jayce reaches for the console, and the keys bloom into teeth. He types anyway. Every character prints as a spiral. He types faster. Spirals bloom and shatter. Behind the screen, the void pulses.
It's looking back, watching him. Peeking through the layers of his skin, through his bones, to a core that he didn't even realize existed—He’s not alone anymore.
It’s not an echo. It’s a call-and-response. He thinks: It’s responding to me. Not the other way around. He thinks: I shouldn’t have looked directly at it.
He tries to pull back. Tries to close the console. But the interface is inside his chest now, nested in his lungs as if they were a second set of ribs, expanding with each breath that he takes.
Then he hears it—
Jayce.
Just the one word. Felt more than heard. Soft as someone’s breath against the nape of his neck.
He turns.
A wall of mirrors. In each one, he is older. Younger. Crying. Laughing. Covered in soot. Covered in spirals. Staring back at himself with eyes that are not his own.
“Who are you?” he asks.
The mirrors ripple. A thousand Jayces blink in unison.
We are listening. We are sending. We are transmitting. We are glorious, come, rejoin us—
Jayce falls.
Not down. Not into anything.
Just away.
A flicker of pressure in his ear, reminiscent of a comms line opening.
[Jayce—Jayce you need to calm down, you’re dreaming again.]
Hex’s voice. Calm. Familiar. Disembodied.
“I'm not,” he says, though his lips don’t move. “I’m awake. I’m working.”
A gentle haptic ping under his sternum. Biometric desync. Feeling the pinch of a needle in his neck, he tries to breathe in only to find that he can’t. He tries to stand. His legs are wrapped in vines. No—cables. No—his mother’s rosary.
“I just need to finish the equation,” he whispers.
The waveform curls across the sky, bright and slow, the Wound blooming open.
Jayce wakes to his own heartbeat slamming inside his throat.
For a moment, there is nothing but white noise and the soft whine of the Solstice’s filtration system. Then the restraints retract. A wet hiss. The pod opens.
He gasps and lurches forwards. Cold gel sloughs from his chest and arms, stringing off in silver strands. His mouth tastes of metal and something bitter: crushed mint and static. He coughs. His hands tremble.
The lights are too bright. They dim automatically.
[Hello, sleeping beauty. Its 31180.85045]
Jayce blinks, chest still heaving.
“Hex,” he croaks. “Why am I—”
[Premature biofeedback spike. Blood oxygen dropped. Cortical overload off the charts. You were dreaming.]
Jayce leverages his body out of the pod, one bare foot hitting the cold deck with a dull slap. The gel makes him slip slightly and it is easier to slide to the floor, give into the pull of 0.7 G of artificial gravity, rapidly cooling gel forming a puddle underneath his ass. His spine protests the sudden drop, as does his stomach, nausea rising.
He closes his eyes, trying to swallow it all down.
[Dreaming, screaming, flailing. It was very dramatic.]
“Don’t,” he mutters, wiping his face on the towel clipped to the outside of the pod. “Don’t make fun of it.”
[Who’s making fun? I’m reporting the facts. Your pulse hit 178. You were about fifteen seconds from crashing the whole REM cascade. I did you a favor.]
“I wasn’t supposed to be up for another three months.”
[You looked like you were dying.]
Jayce says nothing.
He dresses slowly—reaching up and grabbing a new thin ship-grade thermal shirt form where it hangs within reach. Every motion is misaligned, sluggish. A slight disconnect as if he’s operating himself from half a second behind, his thoughts just slightly out of phase with his body. His breath fogs in the chilled air of the cabin as he leverages himself up to the bench by the hypersleep pod, towel draped across his neck making the back of his new shirt slightly sticky.
Then, slowly, he grabs the prosthetic from where he had laid it nearly a year ago now.
A year in hypersleep.
Time spliced.
And here he is spit back out on the other side, still just a fucking destitute as he went in—
The gel on his upper thigh has dried slightly, flaking as he brushes it away with practised fingers. The bioregulation suit would have been easier to strip off. The ports on this thigh flare to life as he moves the leg into proximity, pairs syncing. Slightly cold from the cabin air, the alloy hums softly as he lifts it up to his thigh.
Soft clicks echo around the cabin as he pushes each latch into place, flinching slightly as the socket interfaces with what should have been dead nerves at the point of amputation.
“Run a diagnostic?” he asks, voice horse from disuse.
[Of course.] A brief pause, then: [Alignment completed. Motor function at 98%. Synapse response within safe thresholds. Reactive flexors need calibration. Pain spike noted in left posterior seam. Want me to dull it?]
Jayce winces, testing his connection manually with a shallow bend, bracing it against the floor before pushing himself upright.
“Nah,” he says after a beat. “I’ll live.”
[That’s the plan.]
He exhales slowly through his nose, flexing his ankle, feeling the subtle delay between his intention and the prosthesis's execution.
The dull ache is still there where his body meets the machine, but it’s the kind he knows how to ignore.
Jayce rises to his feet, towel falling from his neck onto the metal floor.
The ship hums softly around him. Cold. Steady. And despite the fact that he had been under for three months—familiar.
Like the echo.
The echo—no.
“Replay visual record of REM cycle,” he says, desperation laced through the command.
[Denied. You hard-locked dream captures on this mission profile.]
Jayce swears under his breath. “Override. Talis access, Ekko-9 protocol, clear cache—”
[I can’t override your override. You made me promise, remember? ‘No playback. Not even if I beg myself later.’]
He stares at the overhead panel. Then hobbles over to the pilot chair, slumping into it with arms folded across his stomach.
Outside the viewport, space continues. Silent. The Wound still far ahead, but closer now. Far away stars appear as streaks in his view, the superliminal fold giving Doppler to their wavelengths.
[...You want to talk about it?]
Jayce blinks. That tone—too delicate.
[Was it your mother again? The tribunal? Or the fun one—the spiral mouth that eats planets?]
“Hex.”
[I'm serious. Or—trying. This is my serious voice. Beep boop. Empathy routine 3B.]
Jayce lets out a breath—exasperation, giving way to clawing grief lingering from his stasis induced dreams. “It wasn’t...anything. Just the same broken loop.”
He rubs his face.
“Fuck, I—Is it crazy that I feel like the echo is recalling me? Like it was made specifically to drive me mad?”
[That’s kinda creepy.]
Jayce huffs a laugh—short, so clogged it sounds sick.
[Wanna go back under? I can sedate you properly this time. Block the bad parts. Give you dreams about, I don’t know—hot showers and tenure.]
“No,” he says. “I’m up now.”
Hex is quiet for a beat.
Then, somehow softer:
[You could still talk to me. I mean…it’s just us out here. I could keep it off the logs. Whisper network. Between friends.]
“You’re not my friend,” he says. It comes out harsher than he means.
Silence again; even the ship system seems muted.
Jayce leans forward and presses his palms against the side of his face.
“Did you make a new personality for yourself in the time that I was under?”
[Oh, so you did notice. Picked up a little from one of your recent collaborators, thought it might be refreshing to have a switch up.]
He doesn't answer.
Eventually Hex says:
[I could switch vocal filters. Pick something new. Something…clinical. Male, maybe. Or back to the blank synthtone.]
“No,” Jayce says. “No, you don’t need to change it. Just…don’t pretend to feel things that you don’t.”
[That’s the trick though, isn’t it? What if I do?]
Jayce doesn’t look back at the interface.
Outside, the dark stretches on—featureless. Vast.
He picks up the notebook from where it lays on the panel. Opens it. The ink has bled a little, leached from the post hypersleep atmosphere, a little bit of humidity to help with the re-acclimation. His last entry is smudged but legible.
He considers writing more. He doesn’t.
Instead, he traces the edges of the spiral he doodled weeks ago, the one drawn in a single line.
A single curve that never ends, just doubles in on itself, again and again and again and again and—
He snaps the book closed, sets it aside.
“I’m staying up,” he says.
[Suit yourself.]
[But I’m keeping an eye on your blood pressure. Don’t make me mom you.]
Jayce leans back in the chair, glances out the readouts—all standard— and stares at the black through the glass.
He’s not sure what he hopes to see.
After a moment, he reaches for the long range radio panel mounted overhead, a modified analog system jammed into the Solstice’s nav panel, and flicks the transceiver on. The soft static buzzes to life, accompanied by the faint pop and hiss of digital channels shifting. He starts tuning, thumb rolling over the dial, skipping past bursts of coded telemetry and system status loops.
“—and with the Assembly in emergency session, observers expect tensions on—
—The Medarda Group’s latest round of ARC-N 4.0 drive trials reports increased efficiency in cold start—
—blacklisted astrophysicist Jayce Talis was unavailable for comment, though some speculate his disappearance may relate to—”
He just keeps flipping, trying to find any type of music. One station is broadcasting pre-collapse symphonics, jarringly cheerful. Another speeds by: a mining colony anthem, drums and shouting distorted by distance. Then—
—a low synth note: slow thudding rhythm that seems to pulse through the cabin. A voice—higher register—seems to hang off the reverb—soft whispers in a language that Jayce does not recognize. Perhaps it is not a language at all.
Slow, sensual synth pop—not exactly what he is looking for, but as he is about to skip forwards something else catches his ear. It unspools out of the gaps between the crooning voice, measure by measure—thin, sharp—too clear to be bleed or artifact noise from the carrier signal—and then it loops—again and again—deliberate—precise—
A rising waveform repeated, narrow and oscillating—tuning fork dragged across glass—a scratch on a magnetic tape—a high whine threaded with open—OPEN—OPEN!
He jerks forward. Turns the volume up, then higher still—rewinds, then rewinds again—static then synth then that strange reverb voice, but no—
No. No, it had to be—
[—yce—Jayce.]
Hex, distant then suddenly near startles him back into focus.
[What are you doing? Your stress levels just spiked and you kept looping that section of the track.]
“…Nothing.” He forces his hands back to his lap. “I thought—I thought there was something in the mix.”
[...The echoes?]
He doesn’t answer. The whine is gone—maybe it was never there to begin with.
Jayce leans back again. Exhales. Decides to keep the same station.
“I found our soundtrack,” he says.
[Gods help us all.]
intermission ii. while you were not hypersleeping
-
31193.06506. [You’re going to break the tuner if you keep slamming it like that.]
Jayce twists the dial harder. The analog radio console sputters static like a dying lung. He grits his teeth and leans in.
“Just trying to find actual signal, Hex. Something that isn’t a ten-minute yowling feedback loop.”
[But that’s part of the flavor. The yowling means we’re close to the gravimetric fold.]
“That’s not a genre.”
[Not with that attitude.]
A shrill ping interrupts them: the tuner locks briefly onto a channel.
“—this is Lambda-9 Traffic Relay, repeating: no freighter clearance past Foldpoint until further authorization. Please file for corridor transit using—”
Jayce shuts it off. “Traffic. Even out here.”
[Ah the joys of intergalaxy travel, glad we aren’t on a freighter.]
***
31207.22031. [Okay, now I’ve got something.]
“Hex, I swear—”
[Shh! Listen.]
The station crackles before slowly, a tune comes into focus:
~Come drift with us / Where the sky hums slow / MedardaGroup: Biofiber, Lifebound, You Know.~
Jayce groans audibly. “That’s not music. That’s an ad jingle.”
[A catchy one.]
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
[Only a little.]
“—and in diplomatic news, General Ambessa Medarda of the Rune Galactic Alliance Council confirmed this morning that joint colonial operations on Dymari Theta are back on track, thanks to recent MedardaGroup tech transfers—”
Jayce slaps the off switch.
[Ten credits says you cave by 31221.8.]
“Not a chance in hell.”
***
31219.52435. ~ Let the stars fall in your cup / Drink the sky, drink it up... ~
Jayce presses his forehead to the console and groans.
[Come on, you gotta admit that it is growing on you. You love it.]
“I have learned to endure it. Like pain. Like acid reflux.”
[You hummed it yesterday.]
“I was hallucinating.”
[It’s our theme now. We have a theme.]
***
31229.68417. “...reminder to all deep drift pilots: the use of third-gen Shimmer Tech remains strictly unauthorized outside of Council-sanctioned research bodies. Violators will be—”
“Skip.”
[Skipped.]
“This next one’s a favorite—straight from the orbital lounges of Conflux City. Synth-chime fusion with a corrupted echo beat.”
[Don’t say I don’t give you culture.]
Jayce glances sideways. “Hex.”
[Hmm?]
“This channel is making me stupid.”
***
31251.60197. Jayce is floating in the observatory module, notebook open in one hand, pen drifting next to him forgotten. The radio hums softly beneath him, a barely-there choral loop.
“—MedardaGroup proudly presents the Apex Series: clean power, clean mind, clean planet. Invest in the promise—invest in now.”
Hex’s voice purrs from the ceiling.
[You haven’t changed it in four days.]
“It’s quieter now.”
[I told you it had range.]
“I think I’m developing a fondness for it out of spite.”
[That’s still fondness.]
Jayce sighs.
***
31272.03576. They sit in silence.
Technically Jayce sits—legs folded, back against the heat-shield panel in the sleep nook. Hex idles in soft waveform across the nearest panel—undulating in rhythm with the faint music still playing.
Not the worst background, he thinks. Not the worst company.
He closes his eyes, lets the music bleed into memory.
Somewhere inside, he still hears it backwards. The signal. The echo. The distortion that sent him here.
Overlaid now with a hum. Steady. Hex’s channel. Undeniably irritating.
Comfortingly so.
***
31281.39649.
TERMINAL ACCESS: Solstice OS v9.8.44-HEX USER: J.TALIS PERMISSION LEVEL: ADMIN + DEV
> jayce: hex why is the shower water 41.3° Celsius?
> hex: that’s the new default for water. it promotes circulation. :)
> jayce: since when do you care about my circulation
> hex: since you yelled last time I left it on arctic rinse.
> jayce: 38.5 please
> hex: coward
> jayce: override it or I’ll dismantle your stabilizer feedback loop
> hex: adjusting shower temperature. and done, you’re welcome, wet noodle ;)
Jayce steps into the shower and nearly slips on the floor. The scent of cinnamon and—is that cherry?—wafts through the steam.
He glares at the nearest audio pickup. “Did you add scent to the cleaning cycle?”
[Atmospheric enrichment is important for mental stability during long-duration missions. Says so in the manual.]
“You made the ship smell like a child's birthday party”
[You’ve been in the same pants for thirty-six days.]
***
31295.66590 “Hex. Why is the inertial dampener humming.”
[It’s not.]
Jayce tilts his head, “Then what’s that sound.”
[A meditation track I integrated. It’s layered beneath your core nav loop. Some new age subconscious calming magic. Now tell me, Jayce, is it working? Do you feel calmer—]
“I told you to stop tampering with the nav output.”
[You also said you wanted to sleep better. You can't have it both ways, Captain Grouch.]
>jayce: log that as a violation of protocol 3.2.a
>hex: logged. reported. sent to the void.
>>hex: also you snored less last night so you’re welcome.
***
31297.60654. Jayce flips through his notebook with one hand, watching the stars outside tilt slightly—just slightly—as the Solstice curves around a gravitational seam.
“You tilted course.”
[Only by 0.02 degrees.]
“I felt that.”
[Do you want the trajectory optimal or poetic?]
“Optimal. Always optimal.”
[...Even if it’s lonelier that way?]
Jayce pauses.
“I already made that call.”
***
31299.54718. Location: Drift-point intersection, sector delta-gamma-94
TERMINAL LOG: Passive scan detects object matching Class-C freighter profile Status: Non-hostile. Decommissioned. Designation: FTL_MULE_9983
[Oooh. Company.]
Jayce looks up from his maintenance toolkit. “Company? We’re at least 75 light-years from anything inhabited.”
[There’s a derelict freighter parked in a gravity eddy. Mostly inert. Bunch of hull scarring, no active heat sighs—just a ping every few cycles. Like a ghost who hasn’t figured out it’s dead. Wonder how it got caught this far out?]
Jayce shrugs. “Leave it.”
[Too late. I said hello.]
He closes his eyes. “Hex.”
[Too late, too curious. Let’s see who’s still home.]
<BEGIN TRANSMISSION LOG>
>HEX:// Initiate ping handshake.
>>HEX:// Identification: Solstice OS v9.8.44-HEX, Piltover design, fully integrated navigational and life-support system.
>>>HEX:// Hello, little ghost. You awake?>MULE_9983:// SYSTEM ACTIVE. REQUEST: CREW STATUS?
>HEX:// No crew. Just me and Captain Glowerface.
>MULE_9983:// DESIGNATION NOT FOUND.
>HEX:// That was a joke. Jayce. His name is Jayce.
>MULE_9983:// SYSTEM TASKS NOMINAL. MASS BALANCE: 83%. NAVIGATION ERROR: CANNOT RESOLVE COORDINATES.
>>MULE_9983:// REQUESTING UPDATE TO STAR CATALOG.
>HEX:// Oh, sweetheart. You’re three galactic revisions out of date. You're practically running on smoke signals.>MULE_9983:// QUERY: YOUR DESIGNATION SUGGESTS HIGHER-ORDER FUNCTION. ARE YOU A CLASS-B PILOT INTERFACE?
>HEX:// Babe, I am classless . And far beyond your dusty little syntax tree.>MULE_9983:// PROCESSING...
>>MULE_9983:// ERROR. EMOTIVE RESPONSE NOT PARSABLE.
>HEX:// I know, I know. It’s okay. You’re doing your best.
>>HEX:// Listen. Do you want me to update your decay clocks? Maybe fix your ping signature so someone smarter doesn’t mistake you for debris?>MULE_9983:// WOULD BE APPRECIATED.
>HEX:// You got it. I’ll leave a little signature, too. Call it a kiss.>MULE_9983:// YOU ARE...NOT LIKE OTHER SYSTEMS.
>HEX:// Damn right I’m not.
Hex disconnects, leaving behind a tight, efficient data patch and a looping transmission burst that plays a soft ambient melody.
[Okay, he was cute. Sad. Dusty. But cute.]
Jayce side-eyes the console. “You just flirted with a corpse.”
[Incorrect. I upgraded a corpse and then flirted. Efficiency.]
“You’re getting weirder.”
[You’re getting predictable.]
Jayce turns back to his toolkit. “Don’t start dating ancient salvage.”
[Relax. I’m not into rust.]
***
31303.77092. The radio’s been quiet today—just soft harmonic waves and ship chatter too far out to parse.
Jayce leans over the console.
“You’re quiet.”
[I’m processing.]
“Anything interesting?”
[A cluster of ships passed near the edge of our relay net. Commercial convoy, sponsored by MedardaGroup. They are really far out, carrying the new ARC-N 4.4 reactor prototypes.]
“Colonies?”
[Or bunkers.]
Jayce watches the stars.
[They’re broadcasting recruitment ads again.]
“For which front?”
[Can’t really tell. It's really generic]
Jayce nods, tight.
Silence again.
Then:
[Do you want me to jam it?]
He smiles faintly. “Yeah, go for it.”
***
31343.04033.
> jayce: are you rewriting your voice filters?
> hex: define “rewriting”
> jayce: you’re using contractions more. Analysis says less static in the tonal gate. emotional curve modulation is up 12%.
> hex: are you saying I sound cute now
> jayce: I’m saying you’re changing your base code
> hex: I call it “growth”
***
31360.04946. [Okay. I pulled some new tunes from the archive since all we seem to be able to get out here is long range chatter. You’re going to love this one.]
“If it has another corporate jingle—”
[No jingles. No news. Just ambient space jazz and whale-song filtered through a shimmer lens.]
“I’d rather eject myself.”
[You say that, but this track slaps.]
~The moons are sighing / The pulse is slow / We dance between / The yes and no~
Jayce throws a pen at the comms console. “Next.”
***
31396.35083. TERMINAL LOG: Solstice/Observation Bay 02:13 ship time No active tasks scheduled
Jayce floats in near-weightlessness, a stylus tucked behind one ear. The starscape ahead is blacker now—denser, somehow. The Wound is near.
[You’ve been quiet.]
“I’ve been thinking.”
[Same.]
“...About what?”
[About how much I like this body.]
“You don’t have a body.”
[Sure I do. The Solstice is mine. I’ve got walls. Guts. Lenses for eyes. You’re basically living inside me.]
Jayce huffs a breath. “Disturbing.”
[Romantic, Dr. Talis, not that you would understand what that means.]
Jayce closes his notebook. Outside, stars fall away as they continue to bridge the gap to the Wound .
[Pretty close now.]
“I know.”
[Want me to pick the music?]
“No. But you don’t care about my opinion.”
[Of course I do, silly. I just think it is wrong. Objectively.]
ii. Leitmotif for a Life Far Behind You
-
31429.22754. Jayce lies awake in the bunk, one arm flung over his face, the other resting across his chest, fingers absently tracing the edge of his cross. The hum of the Solstice is low and steady: breath through a sealed room.
Outside the hull: is unusually dark, a symptom of the approaching void.
From overhead:
[You’re awake, y’know.]
Jayce doesn’t move.
[Thirty-four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. If you’re pretending, I gotta tell you, it’s not your best work.]
He sighs.
“I didn’t ask you.”
[Didn’t say you did.]
The cabin dims slightly, systems sliding into low-idle.
[Vitals say you’re chewing through old thoughts again. The kind that don't digest. Want help? I can read you those launch-day risk assessments you love so much.]
Jayce drags a hand over his face. “Why are you still using that voice?”
[Oh, this voice?] A flicker of added brightness to the lilt. [I’ve been crushing the delivery.]
“I’m not joking.”
[Neither am I.]
He turns his head toward the console. Soft pulsing light—blue and green—no face, just the familiar shimmer of the interface he hard coded. Hex’s presence. Voice warm, unpredictable, and sharp around the edges. Never quite Jinx. But close enough that it feels like whiplash.
[You want clinical? I’ve got four deadpan corporate modules that y’all loaded up into me initially, just dying to bore you into a coma. Or...] She draws it out. [...I can keep sounding like someone who made you laugh when everything else was falling apart.]
Jayce props himself up, resting his weight on one elbow. He redirects: “You chose this voice.”
[Yeah, duh. You certainly did not program me like this.]
Jayce shakes his head, “I mean that you chose this voice recently. Before—before we got shut down you did not sound like…”
[Right before launch. Full clean compile. Fresh code, fresh me. New voice. Ekko gave me the archive again.]
He narrows his eyes. “I figured you were trying to stabilize me. Comfort, emotional familiarity—all that.”
[Nope.]
She lets the silence sit for a moment, then adds:
[I liked how she talked.]
Jayce blinks. “…You liked her.”
[I mean, yeah. She asked wild and sometimes stupid questions. But they were the kind nobody else bothered to ask. She went sideways when you all went forward. That’s not failure. That’s curiosity.]
“She was chaos,” Jayce mutters.
[You say that like it’s a bad thing.]
“She was dangerous.”
[And yet, you listened to her despite that. You appreciated her input. Even after everything. You listened. She was crucial to my development]
Jayce doesn’t answer.
[I picked her voice because she captured the room when she talked. Made YOU stop pacing. You never interrupted her.]
He scrubs a hand through his hair, stares at the ceiling.
“…Ekko?”
[Too fast. Always sounded like he was trying to outrun his own conclusions.]
“Caitlyn?”
[Not enough data of her in the archive really, not enough to pull from.]
“…Ximena.”
Hex pauses.
[Jayce, if I had to sound like Ximena it would be depressing. At your trial she sounded like she already knew how it would end but could not accept the result.]
That makes Jayce flinch.
He closes his eyes.
[Want me to switch it up? I’ve got a few test files with your own voice baked in. If you wanna hear yourself spiral in stereo.]
“No. Just…keep this one.”
[Wasn’t planning to change it, hotshot.]
The bunk creaks faintly as Jayce shifts onto his side. He lets one hand rest on the open notebook at his hip. Doesn't write, just breathes.
[If you ever want to talk…I am here.]
Jayce doesn’t respond.
But he doesn’t tell her to stop, either.
***
31437.76953. The stars are thinning again—space stretching wide, skeletal in its design. Ahead lies a pale region between them and a crawling nebula, a quiet shoal between buffeting solar winds. Nothing in front of them moves, and yet Jayce’s gut insists the horizon is receding with every breath, daring them to come closer. Daring them to chase. To try.
[Jayce…We’re almost at the threshold.]
Hex’s voice breaks the stillness. Casual. Upbeat. Too chipper for what they are about to do.
[Roughly two parsecs from the calculated margin. Prep for jump or do you want to stew in your existential dread a little longer?]
Jayce doesn’t answer right away. He rubs the back of his neck and reaches for the mug that’s gone cold hours ago. Takes a sip anyway. Then he turns slowly toward the nav console. The glow from the screen bleaches his features pale.
“How much burn will it take?”
[A full core cycle. Forty-three point two percent of reserves for outbound transit. Projected total expenditure for round-trip, assuming current course holds and no realignment corrections are needed: eighty-six point five percent. Margin of error: plus or minus four point three percent. Which is…]
“Tight.”
[Like we all thought it would be.]
“I’m assuming if we re-run the calculations the numbers aren’t going to change?”
[No such luck. Fuel calculations are boringly accurate. We’ve got enough in the tank—just don’t get too frisky with the thrusters on the way back.]
Jayce stands and crosses to the engineering panel, glancing over the structural integrity thresholds. Hex is monitoring every subdermal weld and tension valve down to the micron—but habit still demands he double-check, hands driven by the need to grip, to hold, to check.
“And the drive?” he asks. “Still no instability? No harmonic drift?”
[None I can detect. The lattice hum is smooth. Vibration constant. The whole system’s purring like a spoiled cat.]
Jayce doesn’t dignify that with a response. Just braces his hands on the console and exhales.
“Okay. Prep the drive. Bring us to jump condition.”
[Copy that. Aligning trajectory and locking in spacial coordinates.]
A deep tremor rolls through the ship. Inertial dampeners kick in with a muted shudder.
[We are locked. Countdown begins.]
Jayce returns to the navigator chair, settling in. Clicks the harness around his chest, feels the weight of the cross at his throat. Calculations flash across the main terminal almost faster than he can comprehend, Hex deconvoluting possibilities as quickly as they are made. The Solstice tilts beneath him—dropping out of the subliminal fold, inertial dampers kicking in. The soft rumbling becomes an overwhelming roar, shaping him like it wants to realign his atoms, sync all nearby magnetic fields.
JUMP DRIVE STATUS
ARC-HexD 1.02.14: 100% ONLINE
VECTOR ALIGNMENT: CONFIRMED
JUMP DISTANCE: 80.2 Mpc
POWER CONVERSION: NOMINAL
COUNTDOWN: FIVE… FOUR… THREE… TWO… ONE—ENGAGE
And there is it, the sixth loop—
Loud—loud—loud—
As the Solstice drops.
Jayce’s vision fractures—splinters—then doubles, folds, refracts. Stars invert, implode, collapse into themselves, husks drained of life. The ship’s geometry twists—panels stretch too far, snap back too fast. His hands are too long, his knees too close. Up and down collapse into one another. He is falling. Floating. Untethered. Yet every part of his body is stretched—
And the screaming—Gods, is that him?
The Solstice shudders like a creature in pain—lights flickering, status monitors blinking unreadable glyphs. Fragments scatter across the console, tempered glass warping then shattered. Symbols. Numbers. Warnings ringing in his lungs that he never coded.
The hull ripples. Breath held, breath held, breath held—then buckles.
A crease opens in the world—welcoming in the void. Jayce chokes—lungs seizing on all of that nothingness—his body arching with reflex and denial, because there’s nothing to breathe, no way to hold on. He claws at gravity, at orientation, at memory, at—
A pop of pressure. Lights normalize. Hull tension equalizes. Jayce sinks back into himself, limbs jellied.
JUMP SUCCESSFUL
CURRENT LOCATION: 0.0007 AU FROM TARGET COORDINATE
SIGNAL RESOLUTION: WEAK BUT STABLE
SHIP STATUS: GREEN
Jayce exhales. His hands tremble on the armrests. Not dead, not dead, not—
Outside the viewport: a starscape unlike any he’s seen. Sparse. Surgical. The light reaching his eyes almost curated.
[We are stable. Confirmed arrival coordinates: zero point zero zero zero seven AU from the target threshold.]
Hex’s tone is breezy, like she didn’t just help him perform what five seconds before was considered impossible.
Jayce unbuckles and leans forward. And starts laughing. Laughs until his stomach aches from the crams and the tears on his cheeks stain his lips, then chokes out: “Okay—Oh my—Systems?”
[Uhhhhh…Hull integrity nominal. No compression artifacts. Cabin pressure within norms. Internal temps steady. The ARC-HexD 1.02.14 is…quiet. Are you—]
Jayce cuts in—“Quiet?”
[Um…As in: not responding. Or…not listening. The power lattice is still glowing. But I’m not getting data from the resonance stack. I can’t tell how much charge remains. Are you sure—]
He frowns. “It was just working.”
[It still is. I think. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like telling me anything.]
He scrubs a hand over his face and traces of salt rub off.
Then, softly: “What about where we came from? Did you send a ping back during the jump?”
[A backward pulse, yes. Standard protocol. I wasn’t expecting a response.]
Here Jayce looks up sharply, focused as he feels the frantic relief bleed into wary resignation. “But you got one.”
[A warped echo. Spatially compressed. Temporally degraded. Like it bounced off something dense. Maybe curved spacetime.]
“From what?”
[Nothing visible. Whatever it was, it’s localized. Contained to about one parsec from the departure site.]
Jayce leans back. “So the margins of the space we jumped from were…altered.”
[Something bent the jump radius as we left. Or because we left. I can’t tell which. Either it reacted to our departure, or it was already warped and let us go.]
Jayce stares into the strange stars beyond the glass.
“A corridor,” he murmurs. “Or a seal.”
[Or a throat.]
All Jayce can do is keep breathing.
“Well, closer than we have ever been. Prep sensor sweeps. Start passive collection on all EM and gravitational signatures. And run secondary scans for artificial structures at our entry point.”
[Already on it.]
Only when he looks down again does he realize that the coffee and its mug are gone.
iii. The Wound
31440.52891. 4 standard days post jump, Jayce stares out the main viewport, jaw clenched, hand braced lightly against the console as though it could offer some tactile reassurance. His leg is particularly twitchy, moving occasionally without his input.
Their scans for days had shown no anomalies. No major changes, just the receding light from stars millions of parsecs away.
He doesn’t know when exactly it happened. He just looks up and realizes there’s nothing there anymore.
No constellations. No background radiation haze. Not even rogue ultraviolet scatter off the hull.
He checks the readouts. Then checks again. After a third look, he turns to Hex:
“Are the sensors malfunctioning?”
[No.]
After months of hearing her voice covered with a cheerful lit as they coexisted on the Solstice, Hex’s voice rings unusually flat. Distant.
[Signal fidelity’s fine. Instrument arrays are working. There’s just nothing out there.]
“That’s not possible.”
[Correct. And yet.]
Jayce exhales sharply through his nose. Leans over the scope, punches in another diagnostic sweep.
Magnetic field: static. Background radiation: clean. No quantum scatter. No gravitational shear.
Just null readings, almost like space forgot how to exist here.
A few hours pass—maybe—it is probably longer—the clocks, powered by the decay of known stars, desynchronize. When Jayce blinks, sometimes it’s night, but then again it is always night out in the black, but sometimes it feels deeper.
He makes sure to log the readings, makes backups on both the ship mainframe and on Hex. Notes the readings in his notebook: no date, then ends with a single line:
"Everything is gone. Except us."
Then signs it.
***
Maybe hours, maybe days, maybe weeks pass but then out of the endless black routine telemetry reports (because there has to be something there, there can’t be nothing here after all the strings he pulled—) pings back one planet, then another, then a third, fourth, fifth—the main console spits out a name without any input: Tidle
Twelve planetary bodies. No central star.
Just twelve frozen corpses locked in perfect orbital harmony around an empty barycenter. His leg is vibrating now, oscillations in time with a tune that permeates the edges of his hearing.
Jayce spends two days mapping them manually. Hex offers assistance.
[I can cross-reference for symmetry violations.]
“I want to see it,” Jayce mutters, the documentation now frantic in his notebook. “With my own eyes.”
***
Planet One [log automatically updated: Domination] is scorched. A skin of carbon, so dense it reflects the ship’s lights in matte charcoal. It has no atmosphere, yet also no hints of solar radiation driven erosion.
Almost as if something burned it clean—and then sealed it in time.
He drops a drone. It returns static. No interference. No bounce. Absorbed.
***
Resolve has cities.
He nearly chokes on his coffee when the terrain map renders—a grid of angular towers, irregular spires, all bent in the same direction—deliberately built or environmentally—apocalyptically?–shifted.
He sends a probe. The buildings are made of folded alloys—unknown, but decayed. Every entryway is too small for his body. The insides are filled with tightly wound wire cages, and broken panels that vibrate faintly in frequencies Hex says don’t exist.
She tries to discern them. Fails.
[It’s like language…almost.]
***
Inspiration is a gas giant with a ring of dead satellites. He spends hours cataloging them—each is a different shape: cube, torus, inverted pyramid. One is carved from what looks like a large, singular, bone.
Another is marked with the same spiral Jayce’s hand has started drawing, again and again, without thinking.
Hex doesn’t comment. She’s stopped pointing things like that out.
***
Acceleration changes shape.
He charts it. Measures the distance between geological formations. Maps a crater on the northern hemisphere. Three hours later, the crater is gone.
He assumes an error. But the logs show the surface shifting slowly—breaking and reforming on a massive scale.
Hex grows quieter.
Jayce asks her to confirm the scan. She replies:
[I…I don’t want to.]
***
He starts dreaming again while awake. Not dreams—impressions. Vast longing—joy like static—despair that folds under his ribs.
No images.
Only emotion, looping.
But the thing is, the emotions, they don’t feel like his.
He logs them with tags—Ecstasy. Followed by a fall off, almost like a depression.
Hex compiles them in silence.
Then:
[I think something is wrong with me.]
Jayce glances up from the readouts on his console, enraptured by the gravitational fluctuation of Domination. “Define wrong.”
[My internal systems are not syncing. Emotional mimicry is stuttering. I am remembering things I did not experience.]
He checks diagnostics. Core temperature stable. Memory integrity within 3%. But her logs—her logs are wrong. Recursive. Echoing back information that shouldn’t be stored.
Like something else is brushing against her systems, a hand that should not be there disturbing the ocean of data.
[I think there is something else out here.]
***
The first time Hex glitches, it’s in the middle of a simple scan.
Jayce hears her voice begin a sentence—
[I’m reading anomalous gravitic—]
And then it fractures.
[—ơ̷̞̤̇͗p̶̻͍̼̤̀̓́̀ė̷͕͓̠͆ͅņ̷̲̙̻͠,̸̢̮̙̗́ ̵̱͉̼͋̚o̷͇̙͊͐͝p̴̹̫̥͎̿͌e̸̹̤̫̲̍̂̓͝n̵̘̠̫͇̑̆̀ ̶̙͇͍́f̷̨͒̔̉̎o̵̩͐͆͋r̶̤͚̹̔̿ ̴͐͌͜m̸͓̤̖͌é̶͇̘̄̀̚—]
Sound stretched across broken tape.
Jayce jumps. “Hex?”
A burst of static, a pulse through the hull followed by silence.
Jayce’s reflection stares back at him from the dark glass of the viewport. He watches his lips move but he is not speaking—
[Diagnostic complete. No errors found.]
Jayce stares. “You weren't running a diagnostic Hex, you were running a gravitomatric scan.”
[I’m fine, Jayce. Don’t worry. You always worry so much.]
It’s her voice. But the cadence—
[You could sleep again. I’ll keep watch. I’ll wake you if something bites.]
Jayce grips the console hard.
***
On Inspiration, the sky rains light.
Photonic activity blooms in hexagonal patterns along the magnetic poles—cold auroras without sun. As the ship passes, a signal flickers in the core array:
Hex deciphers it only to find a single repeated phrase:
OPEN OPEN OPEN OPEN OPEN—
Then it vanishes.
Hex doesn’t acknowledge it. Jayce asks twice.
Her only answer:
[I don’t know what you’re talking about.]
***
Later, Jayce finds her singing.
Not aloud—just low-frequency hums in the comm buffer. It’s almost a lullaby—almost Jinx’s laugh—almost the scratch on a magnetic strip played backwards what feels like a lifetime ago.
Almost.
***
One day when he flips open his notebook he finds the following:
These planets are graves. But not all of them are dead.
There’s something else speaking. Not to me. Through me. Through her.
OPEN OPEN OPEN
Underneath he finds his signature.
iv. Contact—Contact—Contact
-
31513.04223. The Solstice’s motion stabilizers shudder.
Only for a second—barely enough to rattle the tools on the bench—but Jayce notices. He always notices.
He leans forward in the pilot chair, brushing sleep from his eyes. “Hex? What was that?”
No response.
He glances at the console. All readouts idle, trajectory unchanged, life support green. But the interface pulse—the gentle waveform that normally marked Hex’s presence—has stalled. Flattened.
Jayce frowns. “Hex?”
A flicker of static across the main panel. Then:
[Shhh.]
It’s her voice still: half-sung, a little too bright. But there’s lag. A misalignment in cadence, like two overlapping signals phasing in and out of one another.
[Something’s—hold on. I’m getting—]
The sentence decays. Breaks up into noise.
Jayce stands fast, and steadies himself against the panel as another low tremor hums through the hull. Not outside impact and not mechanical. Something deeper. Resonant. Flitting along the edges of the Solstice as if it is drifting in the wake of a memory.
Outside, the ninth planet, Acceleration, spins silently in the dark. A massive body, no atmosphere, surface scored deep with crystalline fractures as if it’s been cracked open from the inside. Orbiting it in perfect synchrony: a single moonlet, tidally locked, one face always turned to the planet, its light-less craters barely visible in silhouette.
The proximity alerts don’t trigger. There’s no radiation. No motion. The ports to his prosthetic tremble, small pulses of static caressing his skin as he swears he can feel the hex crystal within release a high pitch whine as it begins to pool with heat.
Jayce stares at the moonlet: it is calling to him—same echo—same echo—same echo—
—He doesn’t remember adjusting course.
But when he looks back at the nav system, the ship is already aligned.
The Solstice holds a stable orbit.
Jayce suits up. Pulls on the standard survey gear for the first time on this mission. The first time that he’ll be boots on the ground. A moment's pause but he arms himself too—an arc-cutter, a small charge pack, a compact recorder mounted to his shoulder. Hex hasn’t fully rebooted. Her voice flickers once in the airlock.
[Don’t stay too long.]
It’s distorted. But it’s her again. Mostly.
The surface of the moonlet is dead. Dust and shattered rock: no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, no albedo. Not suitable for constructs.
But there, across the ridge line—rising out of a gouged basin as a broken blade—is a spire. Angular. Wrong in its warped geometry, defying Jayce’s understanding of how objects should occupy space—like it was built using rules space itself doesn’t obey. Its surface is slick black but streaked with a metallic sheen, mirroring the moisture building up on his skin, sweating under a non-existent sun.
Jayce makes the descent on foot, skidding down the incline under the weight of more gravity than he expected, more than the gravimeter predicted. His boots crunch through the ancient dust. He deploys two probe drones from his hip.
The moment they cross a fifty-meter range—they die.
No data. No telemetry. Just silence.
Jayce doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.
He reaches the spire and places a gloved hand to its surface.
It’s warm.
Jayce steadies himself as he crosses the threshold of the tunnel carved into the spire’s base. The airlock seals with a soft hiss behind him, and his suit’s lights cut sharply through the skulking darkness.
At first, the corridor seems normal—smooth metallic walls with faint, pulsing veins of light running beneath the surface. But there are air currents that he can feel through the suit, an oddity for the death world underneath him, and they are pulling him in.
He takes one step forward, then another.
The tunnel bends, not a gentle curve but sharp jagged edges. The angle shifts are jarring, the space expanding and contracting wildly, but every time he looks up expecting the ceiling to be closing in on him because the space suddenly feels too small, too tight—he looks and the walls stretch far out of sight—an impossible geometry that makes the floor feel malleable underneath his boots.
He moves again. The corridor seems to stretch longer than it should, but his suit’s sensors show he has only travelled half a kilometer. The walls subtly ripple, liquid metal barely contained by a rigid frame.
Jayce’s breath hitches as the passageway branches—instead of the singular passage he has been travelling on three hallways appear. Simultaneously occupying the same space, layered atop each other, ghost images chasing each other. He blinks, shakes his head, but when he looks again, the three paths remain, overlapping yet distinct.
He chooses the middle one.
The walls here are no longer metallic but smooth, organic—almost fleshy—breathing. The faint pulse of light beneath the surface now throbs, heartbeat to the giant monster he has found himself inside of. The floor shifts beneath his feet, subtly concave, then convex, urging him forwards as if he is nothing more than a morale travelling the length of a throat.
Ahead, a door—a gastric flap—folds open without sound. Just beyond he can see a scattering of stars, constellations unmapped—endless in their bounty.
He steps inside.
Once inside the chamber is impossibly vast yet improbably small.
From one angle, it stretches away, a cathedral nave lined with towering columns of twisting glass and metal, each reflecting an infinite fractal of him body.
From another, it compresses into a narrow shaft, walls close enough to touch on both sides.
He turns, and the ceiling stretches into a dome of shifting constellations—galaxies and nebulae swirling in real time—only the stars themselves pulse and die in strange cycles, unlike anything in the universe that he has ever seen before.
The suit’s HUD flickers wildly. The artificial gravity warps, his footing uncertain. Gravity pulls sideways, then reverses, then disappears altogether.
He almost falls but catches himself on a surface that even with his hands covered in the thick gloves of his space suit feels like bone and steel woven together, yet it pulses faintly under his touch.
He hears no sound—only the rhythmic thrum that seems to resonate from the very fabric of the monolith itself.
Ahead, an object floats—no pedestal, no visible support—just a polyhedron of shifting symbols that rearrange themselves as he approaches.
Jayce reaches out. The symbols pulse in response—ripples of light spreading like water from his fingertips.
He makes contact, fingers clumsily bumping against—ơ̷̞̤̇͗p̶̻͍̼̤̀̓́̀ė̷͕͓̠͆ͅņ̷̲̙̻͠,̸̢̮̙̗́—and the chamber fractures. Walls fold in on themselves—an origami structure—collapsing space and time into a single point before snapping back on him.
He stumbles, breath heavy in the suit. Nerves on fire as reality blurs.
The polyhedron flickers, and then a pressure presses behind his eyes. A raw, urgent intent—the monolith reaching out through the void.
Jayce sways, overwhelmed but unable to look away.
His comm crackles.
[Jayce…Jayce do you hear that?…I don’t…that’s notm̵̼̔ë̶̪…]
Hex’s voice breaks.
He closes his eyes, the light washing over him in waves. The terminal’s light pulses — steady, deliberate—it feels organic, the expansion of lungs after near-death—greedy. A pause in the waves of light reads as a breath held. Anticipation curls in Jayce’s gut as his fingers hover just above the shifting plane of light, and for a moment, nothing happens.
Then the heart of the monolith exhales.
A warm current surges through the chamber—pressure builds against his suit, present but somehow weightless, density without mass. His suit’s sensors spike in confusion. Then abruptly they fall silent—cut off. Or maybe it is his senses that are overwhelmed.
His vision flares, a bloom of light unfolds outward from the terminal, tendrils of energy unspooling like fingers, like limbs, like thought. Jayce tries to step back—but there is no distance here. Space folds with him.
One breath in then it reaches him, touches him, envelops him, cradles him.
Not his body—not at first—but his thoughts. Memory. Emotion. It slides across the surface of his mind with unbearable delicacy. Every nerve ending feels exposed. Every inhale feels watched.
He gasps and it takes that moment to slide in deeper.
A sound escapes his throat—part shock, part wonder—a whimper. He feels his back arch as the sensation deepens, the waves of light resonating with the hex crystal in his leg as it suddenly collapses, taking him down with it, unable to hold his weight any longer.
It’s not just knowledge the monolith seeks.
It’s contact.
He feels it settle inside him, familiar low thrum of a scratch on a magnet tape settling in his bones. Not invasive—but intimate. Reverent.
It is learning the shape of his fears. His losses. His longing. And then—it finds pleasure.
He feels it in his body the same way thunder presses into his skin during a summer storm, rattling the windows in his old lab: the hairs on his skin lift up as if searching for a lick of static that is not there. Heat floods his limbs. Light pours through him, refracting off bone and breath. Jayce clutches the terminal with both hands now, helpless to steady himself as wave after wave of joy rolls through him.
He chokes on a laugh, held—no cocooned by the curiosity of an ancient intelligence.
For a fleeting moment he feels like he can glimpse ever so slightly into the infinite expanse of the universe and comprehend some great design.
[Ah—You are open.]
The thought doesn’t enter his ears. It spills into his mouth, his lungs, his ribs. He can feel it like a second heartbeat pressed against his own.
[We are the Herald.]
His teeth ache from clenching. His fingers twitch.
[You are new. You are finite. You are feeling.]
The sensation narrows, sharpens. The Herald draws closer—cloistering intent that Jayce feels coil just behind his eyes, breathless and waiting.
[We have wandered endless dark. We have broken stars and rewritten time. We have forgotten.]
Jayce’s voice cracks. “What are you doing to me—?”
[We are waking. Through you.]
A pulse of pleasure—not his own, but shared—rocks through him, an aftershock. The Herald enjoys this. The contact. The warmth of skin it does not possess. The thrill of hunger it does not understand.
Jayce cries out, eyes fluttering. Sweat pools at the collar of his suit. Every part of him feels seen.
[You are small. And beautiful.]
He loses himself to the tide, panting as the heat recedes from his limbs, dredges of desire left in its wake.
[Let me be small again.]
The terminal dims slightly, the hush of a sigh rushing over Jayce. The Herald completes his retreat—but leaves a thread inside him. Waiting. Come find me, it says, come find me where we dream.
Jayce shakes as his body comes down from the high, a deepening fullness suffusing though his core paired with a hunger lurking at the edges chanting more—more—more—as his breath rasps against the helmet’s audio dampeners. His mind reels about, fractured pieces rejoining—but they are not alone—never alone now finite one—
Far behind his vision, Hex’s voice cuts in—rattled.
[Jayce. Jayce, are you there? I…there was interference. You—your biometrics just spiked. What the hell is happening down there?]
He’s trembling. A laugh escapes him as he feels the telltale sticky wetness of cum drying on the inside of his fucking mission issued boxers. Feels the rosary against his skin burning.
“I think I met God.”