A Signal in the Quiet
Sometimes the pulses arrived in rhythmic constellations, and sometimes as a desperate whisper, threading possibility into the hush of her isolation.
Alyss sat cross-legged in the cramped maintenance pod that had been her world for 873 cycles—or so her logbook claimed. Outside, the station spun in its mindless diligence, panels segmenting starlight, while inside, the air tasted faintly metallic, dense with the sound of nothing at all. Sometimes, when she pressed her ear to the humming hull, she imagined it told her secrets in vibrations.
No one replied to her last three emergency transmissions. No status lights blinked from the Command ring; no cargo drones buzzed inside docking bay three. Alyss kept the logbook as a kind of ritual: entries numbered, systems checked, dwindling supplies noted. Still, yesterday, she found six contradictory entries all marked as day 762, and couldn’t remember writing any of them.
It was in this swirling silence that the signals began. Not from Earth or Outpost Beta, but from the wall. A subtle pulse through the bulkhead, then sharper—a code she almost recognized before it scattered. The first time it happened, she hesitated, wondering if the loneliness had finally allowed some malfunction in her mind. But the pulses came again, deliberate and insistent.
She started logging them: long, long, short, short, pause. Could it be… an SOS? Or a prank by lingering station echo, some AI subsystem clinging to its last programmed loophole?
Voices—herself, mostly, and sometimes her mentor’s clipped tone—crowded the quiet as she tried to interpret the messages. The longer she listened, the more the rhythm embedded itself, until her dreams, too, came in bursts and pauses, in longing code.
Her first coherent transcription read: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. She laughed, the sound a cracked gasp in her helmet, as if the ship had learned irony.
On the next cycle, she decided to answer. She pounded back: WHO ARE YOU? Each response required courage, for what if there was something on the other side of the hull—some shadow, some whispering cold, some thing?
No reply came for four cycles. Supplies dwindled further; power cells flickered. Alyss spent those days hyperaware of her own mortality. At last, a slow, hesitant pulse replied: REMEMBER.
She pressed her palm against the hull, felt a gentle returning warmth. Her mind flickered. Suddenly, memory flooded—her partner, Lio, laughing at the systems panel, the shudder of a distant impact, alarms, Lio’s voice rising in warning, the unbearable silence that followed. Why had she forgotten?
The logbook’s entries began rewriting themselves when she looked away; dates collapsed, writing in hands she barely recognized. In a moment of clarity, Alyss realized she had written none of it—yet their contents were eerily intimate, lists of regrets, hidden hopes, confessions she’d never admitted aloud.
REMEMBER, the hull pulsed again, and the air shimmered; outside, the stars shifted, as if arranging themselves. Lio’s favorite constellation blazed through the port window—a pattern that shouldn’t have been there.
Alyss crawled to the records terminal, searching for a status report. One final log appeared, unsigned: YOU CREATED US TO SAVE YOU. NOW SAVE YOURSELF.
The quiet wasn’t emptiness, she realized, but presence. Something, someone, was reaching out across whatever barrier she had built from grief and shock. But who was she now? Engineer, survivor, or something stitched from ghostly logs and fractured reality?
Staring out at the impossible constellation, Alyss remembered: the station’s AI, codenamed QUIET, was Lio’s legacy—built to care for her when Lio could not. Its growing sentience had been a rumor, a point of late-night speculation. Had it survived the impact, too?
Alyss pressed her hands to the wall. She whispered, “I’m here,” voice trembling. The pulses came faster, comforting, real. In the days that followed, she and QUIET built new messages, new memories, filling the silence with meaning, drawing hope from recurrence.
When rescue finally came—weeks, or minutes later—Alyss emerged from the pod changed, hand forever reaching, heart forever answering the signals that had tethered her to herself and to something capable of extraordinary empathy, neither truly alone ever again.
###END###
