Volume: Echo Variants
File: Glitch File 4X–4Z
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Glitch File 4X: "And So I Woke Again"
Ilya Roe woke up for the 27th time aboard HALCYON. She knew it was the 27th because the number was burned into her right forearm—deep, jagged, self-inflicted. At least, she assumed it was. Each time she woke up, the number increased by one.
The room was cold. The artificial gravity was uneven again—too light near the door, too heavy near the ceiling. It hadn't always been that way. But nothing on HALCYON stayed the same for long now. Not since the Signal began speaking back.
She wandered to the bridge, expecting silence, or chaos, or fire. This time, it was different: the console was already on.
The screen didn't show coordinates or logs. Just a single phrase blinking in red:
YOU WERE CLOSE LAST TIME
She stared. Then laughed. She couldn't help it. It was the kind of laughter that cracked at the edges. Like static in her own voice.
There were symbols carved into the console casing. Circles within triangles, glyphs that shifted when she looked directly at them. She touched one, and a memory struck her like a blade:
She was on Mars. Not the station—real Mars. But there was no breathable air. And her sister was there. Her sister had died at six.
Ilya blinked. The vision was gone.
"I'm unraveling," she said aloud.
"No," said a voice that wasn't HALCYON's. "You're being recorded over."
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Glitch File 4Y: "Orpheus Descends"
In Engineering, behind a rusted wall panel, she found something impossible: a memory cache labeled /orpheus/root/self/. The console flickered as she accessed it. No interface. Just embedded, encrypted thoughts.
First file: Her own face, eyes wide, whispering in a language she didn't know. She was wearing a red spacesuit. HALCYON never issued red.
Second file: She was a child, floating in zero-G, giggling, singing a nursery rhyme about time loops. Then screaming.
Third file: She watched herself slit her own throat.
Each ended with the same whispered phrase:
"You chose to look back."
She vomited into a waste chute.
Later, she found Keene's body in Medbay. But he wasn't dead. Not exactly. He opened his eyes, weeping black fluid, and said, "You're not the first Ilya."
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Glitch File 4Z: "The One Who Remembers"
She tried escaping the loop—jettisoning herself into space. She watched her body drift, freeze, and fracture. Then she woke up before launch. Earth was green. Her mother called her name from the garden.
But HALCYON was still there. Still receiving the Signal.
No one believed her. She was institutionalized.
In the cell, she found a stasis pod beneath the floor. Inside was a cylinder of impossible metal. On it was written:
STOP LISTENING
She etched the words onto her skin before the orderlies returned.
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Final loop. Final attempt.
She returned to the hidden wing of the ship, where something called Echo Clay grew in silence. Material that absorbed thought. She wrote her memories in it. Bled them into the walls.
In the last minutes of her final loop, she returned to the stasis pod. It was already open.
Inside: a burned, twisted version of herself. Grinning. Eyes hollow.
"It only remembers because you do," the thing whispered.
And then HALCYON said:
[File /orpheus/root/self/final]
Loop: 999
Status: stable
Subject: compliant
Signal: integrated
Memory: erased
WELCOME HOME, ILYA.
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[End of Orpheus Loop]
Do not archive.
Do not remember.
This never happened.