Stranded | On Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -doc Ba...

-Doc Ba...-

In the center of the circle stands Captain Valerio. His mouth is moving, but the voice coming out is not his. It is a chorus of forty-seven voices, layered on top of each other, whispering a single phrase over and over:

Today, I found the beacon. Not mine. A ship’s black box, half-swallowed by a glowing fungal mat. It was stamped with the Gilgamesh’s hull number, but the casing was warm, pulsing with a familiar rhythm. My pulse. Stranded on Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -Doc Ba...

“The beta is stable. The patient is the vector. Patch 1.1.0 is love. Patch 1.1.0 is home.”

My heart. Beating in a box, singing the same Milet chorus. -Doc Ba

I cracked it open. Inside, instead of quantum memory cores, there was a beating heart. Human. Tagged with a bio-stamp: BAATAR, A. – CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER .

I step into the clearing. The pollen touches my skin. The thrum becomes a harmony. And for the first time since the crash, Doc Ba stops being stranded. Not mine

The jungle hummed. Not with the comforting buzz of insects or the rustle of leaves in a terrestrial wind, but with a low, resonant thrum that felt less like sound and more like a migraine trying to birth itself behind my eyes. Dr. Aris Baatar, call sign “Doc Ba,” late of the ISRV Gilgamesh , wiped a smear of cobalt-blue sap from his visor.

They are here. The other survivors. I found them in a clearing the ship’s cartographer never recorded. There are forty-seven of them. All crew. All wearing the same expression of beatific, vacant peace. They stand in a circle, perfectly still, as a fine, iridescent pollen drifts down from the canopy.

They don’t see me. They don’t hear me. They are listening .

The Gilgamesh hadn't crashed. It had been unmade . One moment, we were decelerating through a standard orbital window. The next, the ship’s AI, “Gabriel,” had begun to pray. Not recite data. Pray . In a language that made the comms array bleed static. Then the hull had turned inside out in a single, silent instant, and Doc Ba had woken up here, forty meters up a ferro-cement tree, his emergency beacon hissing only white noise.