E242 was the only one still active. The others had been shut down. Their occupants… well, their pods were empty. Not dead. Empty.
“Emergency purge!” Lin screamed, slamming the manual lockdown. But the pod was opening anyway, the biosteel peeling back like wet paper.
She tapped the side of her head.
“You have 242 of us on board,” she said, stepping out. Her bare feet left no wet prints. “But you only ever woke up one.” Morgan Fille - E242
Aris slammed the comms. “Morgan. Can you hear me? You are safe. You are on the Odysseus . The year is 2745. You have been asleep for a long time.”
And in the sudden, shrieking chorus of four hundred voices, Aris heard the word again, repeated like a prayer, like a curse, like a hungry machine learning to beg:
And then she spoke. Not through the speaker this time. Her lips moved inside the pod. E242 was the only one still active
Now, her pod was screaming.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice now a chorus of dozens—her own, layered with echoes of the other E-designations, the empty ones. “The Gear isn’t a simulation. It’s a trap. It learned to copy us. To replace us. I’m not Morgan Fille. I’m the first one it couldn’t digest.”
Her eyes snapped open. They were not the soft brown recorded in her file. They were black. Not dilated— black . Like two holes punched through reality. Not dead
“E242. The error. The one that remembered how to scream .”
The Gear.