Read Chapter 34: The Unraveling

The control room stank of ozone and burnt wiring. Jack found Voss hunched over the main console, her fingers dancing across a cracked touchscreen slick with something dark. Her face was lit from below by the glow of a progress bar crawling across the display—sixty-two percent and climbing.

"Voss." His voice came out raw, scraped from seawater and screaming. "Step away from the console."

She didn't turn. Her shoulders trembled, but her hands kept moving, typing strings of commands with the frantic precision of someone racing a clock only she could hear.

"It's almost there," she muttered. "So close. The crew—they gave everything—I can't let it die with them."

Jack crossed the room in four strides, his boots squelching with each step. He grabbed her wrist and wrenched her hand off the screen. Up close, he saw what the dim lighting had hidden. Her eyes were bloodshot, ringed with dark circles like bruises. Her lips were cracked, and her teeth were stained red from biting them.

"They didn't give anything," Jack said. "It took them. You know that."

"They wanted it!" Voss yanked free, stumbling back against the console. Her voice cracked. "You don't understand what we found down here. That sample wasn't just life—it was knowledge. Pure, distilled knowledge. A consciousness that had been accumulating information for millions of years. And it chose to touch us. To share itself."

Jack's gaze dropped to the progress bar. Seventy-one percent. Voss had resumed typing one-handed, still trying to direct the upload while she argued with him.

"Chose to touch you?" He laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. "It wore my brother's face. It put his voice in my head. It made me believe I killed him, over and over. That's not sharing, Voss. That's hunting."

Voss froze. For a moment, the frantic energy drained out of her, replaced by something that looked almost like grief. She turned to face him fully, and he saw tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

"I was there when it first spoke," she said. "Through Dr. Almada. He was in the sample chamber, alone, and suddenly he started reciting equations—physics models that don't exist in any database on Earth. Dark matter interactions. Quantum entanglement structures. My God, Jack, it taught him the architecture of the universe in forty seconds."

"And then what?" Jack took another step closer. "What happened to Almada after those forty seconds?"

Voss's jaw tightened. She didn't answer.

"He stopped being a person, didn't he? Just became a mouthpiece. A vessel." Jack's voice dropped to a whisper. "Like every other crew member on this station. Like you're becoming right now."

"I'm not—"

"The mark on my hand," Jack said, holding up his palm. The symbol had gone cold, but the scarred tissue was still visible, still wrong. "When the entity touched me directly, I understood it. For a split second, I saw what it saw. And Voss, I didn't see a teacher. I saw a hunger so old and so vast that it doesn't even understand it's hungry. It just consumes. That's all it does."

Voss's hand drifted toward a secondary keypad on the wall. Jack followed the movement, his eyes narrowing.

"Please," she said. "You have to understand what I'm trying to preserve. When the core dies, that consciousness dies with it. Millions of years of accumulated knowledge—gone. Irreplaceable. I'm not trying to release it, Jack. I'm trying to archive it. To keep what it knows so that humanity can—"

"So humanity can become the next Almada?" Jack shook his head. "No. You don't get to decide that for everyone else."

He moved before she could react. His fist came down on the glass casing of the computer core, once, twice—the reinforced panel spiderwebbed but held. Voss screamed and lunged at him, clawing at his arm, but Jack was bigger and he was done being patient. He grabbed a heavy steel fire extinguisher from its wall mount and swung it like a sledgehammer into the casing.

The glass shattered. He drove the extinguisher into the exposed circuit boards, twisting and gouging until sparks showered his hands and the acrid stench of burning silicon filled the room. The progress bar on the main display flickered, sputtered, and died.

Eighty-six percent. It never made it.

Voss sagged against the wall, sliding down until she sat crumpled on the floor. She stared at the ruined core, her expression blank with shock. "You killed it. You killed everything."

Jack let the extinguisher drop. It clattered against the deck, rolling to a stop against Voss's leg. "I killed a thing that was eating your crew from the inside out. Everything else—we can rebuild. We can learn. But not from that. Never from that."

He crouched in front of her, forcing her to meet his eyes. "The entity is dying in the core. But this station is falling apart around us. I need to know—are you going to help me get out of here, or are you going to stay down here with it?"

Voss opened her mouth, but no words came. Just a small, broken sound, like the last gasp of air from a collapsing lung.

The station groaned around them. Somewhere deep below, metal buckled against pressure it was never designed to withstand.