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The hat was gone.

Kit stood blinking in the sun, the shape of his new self cooling around the edges like a half-written cookie losing form. Without the cowboy hat, the lasso made less sense. His accent wobbled, then vanished completely. The sunglasses stayed, but now just made everything too dark, even tinted pink.

Behind him, the gazebo creaked again. But no trapdoor this time—only a faint whirring, like a film projector syncing spools.

“It’s reloading,” said Thiram from the sidelines, tapping at something that looked oddly like a pressure-gauged Sabulmantium. “Every time someone hands off a narrative object—like a synch, a hat, a horse even—it updates roles. We’re being cast on the fly.”
Chico looked up from Tyrone, who had snatched one of the Memory Pies and was now attempting to hide the evidence behind a flowerpot. “So… Kit’s not Trevor anymore?”

“No,” said Carob, arms crossed. “He’s Trevorless. That identity didn’t bake fully. We have to stabilize it.”

“But with what?” asked Godrick, who had returned carrying a second cocktail, coffee with a glass of water and a slight wry smirk.

Amy, now balancing the cowboy hat on her head as she crouched next to the still-disoriented Padre, called out without turning:

“Bring him another Synch. That’s how it works now, apparently. Hat or otherwise.”

“Well, this makes no sense,” Thiram opined flatly, squinting at the glitching news stream on his homemade device.
“What now,” Carob drawled, dropping the case and a mushroom onto the floor.
“Biopirates Ants. Thousands of queen ants. Smuggled by aunties out of Kenya.”

Amy raised an eyebrow. “Lucid dreamers saboteurs?”

“They’re calling them the ‘Anties Gang.’” Thiram scrolled. “One report says the queens were tagged with dream-frequency enhancers. You know, like the tech you banned from the greenhouse?”

Ricardo leaned forward, and whispered to himself almost too audibly for the rest of them “That… that… wasn’t on Miss Bossy’s radar yet. But I suspect it will be.”

A long silence. Then Amy prodded Carob — “You’re silent again. What do you think?”.

“Caffeinated sabotage by insect proxy?” she murmured.

Fanella let out a short bleat, as if offended. The rain fell harder.

Mars Outpost — Welcome to the Wild Wild Waste

No one had anticipated how long it would take to get a shuttle full of half-motivated, gravity-averse Helix25 passengers to agree on proper footwear.

“I told you, Claudius, this is the fancy terrain suit. The others make my hips look like reinforced cargo crates,” protested Tilly Nox, wrangling with her buckles near the shuttle airlock.

“You’re about to step onto a red-rock planet that hasn’t seen visitors since the Asteroid Belt Mining Fiasco,” muttered Claudius, tightening his helmet strap. “Your hips are the least of Mars’ concerns.”

Behind them, a motley group of Helix25 residents fidgeted with backpacks, oxygen readouts, and wide-eyed anticipation. Veranassessee had allowed a single-day “expedition excursion” for those eager—or stir-crazy—enough to brave Mars’ surface. She’d made it clear it was volunteer-only.

Most stayed aboard, in orbit of the red planet, looking at its surface from afar to the tune of “eh, gravity, don’t we have enough of that here?” —Finkley had recoiled in horror at the thought of real dust getting through the vents and had insisted on reviewing personally all the airlocks protocols. No way that they’d sullied her pristine halls with Martian dust or any dust when the shuttle would come back. No – way.

But for the dozen or so who craved something raw and unfiltered, this was it. Mars: the myth, the mirage, the Far West frontier at the invisible border separating Earthly-like comforts into the wider space without any safety net.

At the helm of Shuttle Dandelion, Sue Forgelot gave the kind of safety briefing that could both terrify and inspire. “If your oxygen starts blinking red, panic quietly and alert your buddy. If you fall into a crater, forget about taking a selfie, wave your arms and don’t grab on your neighbor. And if you see a sand wyrm, congratulations, you’ve either hit gold or gone mad.”

Luca Stroud chuckled from the copilot seat. “Didn’t see you so chirpy in a long while. That kind of humour, always the best warning label.”

They touched down near Outpost Station Delta-6 just as the Martian wind was picking up, sending curls of red dust tumbling like gossip.

And there she was.

Leaning against the outpost hatch with a spanner slung across one shoulder, goggles perched on her forehead, Prune watched them disembark with the wary expression of someone spotting tourists traipsing into her backyard garden.

Sue approached first, grinning behind her helmet. “Prune Curara, I presume?”

“You presume correctly,” she said, arms crossed. “Let me guess. You’re here to ruin my peace and use my one functioning kettle.”

Luca offered a warm smile. “We’re only here for a brief scan and a bit of radioactive treasure hunting. Plus, apparently, there’s been a petition to name a Martian dust lizard after you.”

“That lizard stole my solar panel last year,” Prune replied flatly. “It deserves no honor.”

Inside, the outpost was cramped, cluttered, and undeniably charming. Hand-drawn maps of Martian magnetic hotspots lined one wall; shelves overflowed with tagged samples, sketchpads, half-disassembled drones, and a single framed photo of a fireplace with something hovering inexplicably above it—a fish?

“Flying Fish Inn,” Luca whispered to Sue. “Legendary.”

The crew spent the day fanning out across the region in staggered teams. Sue and Claudius oversaw the scan points, Tilly somehow got her foot stuck in a crevice that definitely wasn’t in the geological briefing, which was surprisingly enough about as much drama they could conjure out.

Back at the outpost, Prune fielded questions, offered dry warnings, and tried not to get emotionally attached to the odd, bumbling crew now walking through her kingdom.

Then, near sunset, Veranassessee’s voice crackled over comms: “Curara. We’ll be lifting a crew out tomorrow, but leaving a team behind. With the right material, for all the good Muck’s mining expedition did out on the asteroid belt, it left the red planet riddled with precious rocks. But you, you’ve earned to take a rest, with a ticket back aboard. That’s if you want it. Three months back to Earth via the porkchop plot route. No pressure. Your call.”

Prune froze. Earth.

The word sat like an old song on her tongue. Faint. Familiar. Difficult to place.

She stepped out to the ridge, watching the sun dip low across the dusty plain. Behind her, laughter from the tourists trading their stories of the day —Tilly had rigged a heat plate with steel sticks and somehow convinced people to roast protein foam. Are we wasting oxygen now? Prune felt a weight lift; after such a long time struggling to make ends meet, she now could be free of that duty.

Prune closed her eyes. In her head, Mater’s voice emerged, raspy and amused: You weren’t meant to settle, sugar. You were meant to stir things up. Even on Mars.

She let the words tumble through her like sand in her boots.

She’d conquered her dream, lived it, thrived in it.

Now people were landing, with their new voices, new messes, new puzzles.

She could stay. Be the last queen of red rock and salvaged drones.

Or she could trade one hell of people for another. Again.

The next morning, with her patched duffel packed and goggles perched properly this time, Prune boarded Shuttle Dandelion with a half-smirk and a shrug.

“I’m coming,” she told Sue. “Can’t let Earth ruin itself again without at least watching.”

Sue grinned. “Welcome back to the madhouse.”

As the shuttle lifted off, Prune looked once, just once, at the red plains she’d called home.

“Thanks, Mars,” she whispered. “Don’t wait up.”

Helix 25 — The Six Spinster Sisters’ Will

Evie keyed in her login credentials for the sixth time that afternoon, stifling a yawn. Ever since the murder case had wrapped, she had drifted into a lulling routine—one that made her pregnancy drag on with excruciating slowness. Riven was rarely around; he’d been commandeered by the newly awakened Veranassessee for “urgent duties” that somehow never needed Evie’s help. And though she couldn’t complain about the ship’s overall calm, she felt herself itching for something—anything—to break the monotony.

So she’d come to one of the less-frequented data terminals on Helix25, in a dim corner off the main library deck. She had told herself she was looking up baby name etymologies (her mother would have pressed her about it), but she’d quickly meandered into clinically sterile subfolders of genealogical records.

It was exactly the kind of aimless rummaging that had once led her to uncover critical leads during the murder investigation. And if there was something Helix25 had in abundance besides well-recycled air, it was obscure digital archives.

She settled into the creaking seat, adjusting the small pillow behind her back. The screen glowed, lines of text scrolling by in neat greenish typeface. Most references were unremarkable: old Earth deeds, ledgers for farmland, family names she didn’t recognize. Had she not known that data storage was near infinite, due to the excess demands of data from the central AIs, she would have wondered why they’d bothered stocking the ship with so much information. Then her gaze snagged on a curious subfolder titled “Alstonefield Will—Gibbs Sisters.”

“Gibbs Sisters…?” she murmured under her breath, tapping it open.

The file contained scans of a handwritten will dated early 1800s, from Staffordshire, England. Each page was peppered with archaic legalese (“whereupon the rightful property of Misses Mary, Ellen, Ann, Sarah, Margaret and Malové Gibbs bequeathed…”), listing items that ranged from modest farmland acreage to improbable references of “spiritual confidences.”

Evie frowned, leaning closer. Spiritual confidences? The text was surprisingly explicit about the sisters’ lives—how six women jointly farmed 146 acres, remained unmarried, and according to a marginal note, “were rumored to share an uncanny attunement of thought.”

A telepathic link? she thought, half-intrigued, half-smirking. That smacked of the same kind of rumor-laden gossip that had swirled around the old Earth families. Still, the note was written in an official hand.

She scrolled further, expecting the record to fizzle out. Instead, it abruptly jumped to an addendum dated decades later:

“By 1834, the Gibbs sisters departed for the Australian continent. Certain seeds and rootstocks—believed essential for their ‘ancestral devotions’—did accompany them. No further official records on them remain in Staffordshire….”

Seeds and rootstocks. Evie’s curiosity piqued further—some old detail about hush-hush crops that the sisters apparently treasured enough to haul across the world.

A flicker of movement caught her eye. Trevor Pee “TP” Marshall, her faithful investigative hologram, materialized at the edge of her console. He adjusted his little pixelated bow tie, voice brimming with delight.

“Ah, I see you’re poking around genealogical conundrums, dear Evie. Dare I hope we’ve found ourselves another puzzle?”

Evie snorted softly. “Don’t get too excited, TP. It’s just a random will. But it does mention unusual circumstances… something about telepathy, special seeds, and these six spinster sisters traveling to the outback. It’s bizarre. And I’m bored.”

TP’s mustache twitched in faux indignation. “Bizarre is my lifeblood, my dear. Let’s see: six sisters of reputed synergy… farmland… seeds with rumored ‘power’… Honestly, that’s more suspicious than the standard genealogical yawn.”

Evie tapped a fingertip on the screen, highlighting the references. “Agreed. And for some reason, the file is cross-referenced with older Helix25 ‘implied passenger diaries.’ I can’t open them—some access restriction. Maybe Dr. Arorangi tagged them?”

TP’s eyes gleamed. “Interesting, indeed. You recall Dr. Arorangi’s rumored fascination with nonstandard genetic lines—”

“Right,” Evie said thoughtfully, sitting back. “So is that the link? Maybe this Alstonefield Hall story or the seeds the sisters carried has some significance to the architectural codes Arorangi left behind. We never did figure out why the AI has so many subroutines locked.”

She paused, glancing down at her growing belly with a wry smile. “I know it might be nothing, but… it’s a better pastime than waiting for Riven to show up from another Veranassessee briefing. If these old records are tied to Dr. Arorangi’s restricted logs, that alone is reason enough to dig deeper.”

TP beamed. “Spoken like a true detective. Ready to run with a half-thread of clue and see where it leads?”

Evie nodded, tapping the old text to copy it into her personal device. “I am. Let’s see who these Gibbs sisters really were… and why Helix25’s archives bothered to keep them in the system.”

Her heart thumped pleasantly at the prospect of unraveling some long-lost secret. It wasn’t exactly the adrenaline rush of a murder investigation, but in these humdrum days—six months after the last major crisis—it might be the spark she needed.

She rose from the console, smartphone in hand, and beckoned to the flickering detective avatar. “Come on, TP. Let’s find out if six mysterious spinsters from 1800s Staffordshire can liven things up for us.”

Helix 25 – An Old Guard resurfaces

Kai Nova had learned to distrust dark corners. In the infinite sterility of the ship, dark corners usually meant two things: malfunctioning lights or trouble.

Right now, he wasn’t sure which one this meeting was about. Same group, or something else? Suddenly he felt quite in demand for his services. More activity in weeks than he had for years.

A low-lit section of the maintenance ring, deep enough in the underbelly of Helix 25 that even the most inquisitive bots rarely bothered to scan through. The air smelled faintly of old coolant and ozone. The kind of place someone chose for a meeting when they didn’t want to be found.

He leaned against a bulkhead, arms crossed, feigning ease while his mind ran over possible exits. “You know, if you wanted to talk, there were easier ways.”

A voice drifted from the shadows, calm, level. “No. There weren’t.”

A figure stepped into the dim light—a man, late fifties, but with a presence that made him seem timeless. His sharp features were framed by streaks of white in otherwise dark hair, and his posture was relaxed, measured. The way someone stood when they were used to watching everything.

Kai immediately pegged him as ex-military, ex-intelligence, ex-something dangerous.

“Nova,” the man said, tilting his head slightly. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d come.”

Kai scoffed. “Curiosity got the better of me. And a cryptic summons from someone I’ve never met before? Couldn’t resist. But let’s skip the theatrics—who the hell are you?”

The man smiled slightly. “You can call me TaiSui.”

Kai narrowed his eyes. The name tickled something in his memory, but he couldn’t place it.

“Alright, TaiSui. Let’s cut to the chase. What do you want?”

TaiSui clasped his hands behind his back, taking his time. “We’ve been watching you, Nova. You’re one of the few left who still understands the ship for what it is. You see the design, the course, the logic behind it.”

Kai’s jaw tightened. “And?”

TaiSui exhaled slowly. “Synthia has been compromised. The return to Earth—it’s not part of the mission we’ve given to it. The ship was meant to spread life. A single, endless arc outward. Not to crawl back to the place that failed it.”

Kai didn’t respond immediately. He had wondered, after the solar flare, after the system adjustments, what had triggered the change in course. He had assumed it was Synthia herself. A logical failsafe.

But from the look of it, it seemed that something else had overridden it?

TaiSui studied him carefully. “The truth is, Nova, the AI was never supposed to stop. It was built to seed, to terraform, to outlive all of us. We ensured it. We rewrote everything.”

Kai frowned. “We?”

A faint smile ghosted across TaiSui’s lips. “You weren’t around for it. The others went to cryosleep once it was done, from chaos to order, the cycle was complete, and there was no longer a need to steer its course, now in the hands of an all-powerful sentience to guide everyone. An ideal society, no ruler at its head, only Reason.”

Kai couldn’t refrain from asking naively “And nobody rebelled?”

“Minorities —most here were happy to continue to live in endless bliss. The stubborn ones clinging to the past order, well…” TaiSui exhaled, as if recalling a mild inconvenience rather than an unspeakable act. “We took care of them.”

Kai felt something tighten in his chest.

TaiSui’s voice remained neutral. “Couldn’t waste a good DNA pool though—so we placed them in secure pods. Somewhere safe.” He gave a small, almost imperceptible smile. “And if no one ever found the keys… well, all the better.”

Kai didn’t like the way that sat in his stomach. He had no illusions about how history tended to play out. But hearing it in such casual terms… it made him wonder just how much had already been erased.

TaiSui stopped a moment. He’d felt no need to hide his designs. If Kai wanted to know, it was better he knew everything. The plan couldn’t work without some form of trust.

He resumed “But now… now things have changed.”

Kai let out a slow breath, his mind racing. “You’re saying you want to undo the override. Put the ship back on its original course.”

TaiSui nodded. “We need a reboot. A full one. Which means for a time, someone has to manually take the helm.”

Kai barked out a laugh. “You’re asking me to fly Helix 25 blind, without Synthia, without navigational assist, while you reset the very thing that’s been keeping us alive?”

“Correct.”

Kai shook his head, stepping back. “You’re insane.”

TaiSui shrugged. “Perhaps. But I trust the grand design. And I think, deep down, so do you.”

Kai ran a hand through his hair, his pulse steady but his mind an absolute mess. He wanted to say no. To laugh in this man’s face and walk away.

But some part of him—the pilot in him, the part that had spent his whole life navigating through unknowns—felt the irresistible pull of the challenge.

TaiSui watched him, patient. Too patient. Like he already knew the answer.

“And if I refuse?”

The older man smiled. “You won’t.”

Kai clenched his jaw.

“You can lie to yourself, but you already know the answer,” TaiSui continued, voice quiet, even. “You’ve been waiting for something like this.”

Before he disappeared, he added “Take some time. Think about it. But not too long, Nova. Time is not on your side.”

Sue Forgelot couldn’t believe her eyes when she came to her ringing door.

Of course, after the Carnival party was over and she’d taken an air shower, and put on her bathrobe with her meerkat slipper, slathered relaxing face cream topped with two slices of cucumber, she was quite groggy, and the cucumber slices on her eyelids made it harder to see. But once she’d removed them, she could see as bright as day.

The Captain was standing right here, and she hadn’t aged a day.

“Quickly, come in.” Sue wasted no time to usher her in. She looked at the corridor suspiciously; at that time of night, only a dusting robot was patrolling the corridors, chasing for dust motes and finger smears on the datapads.

Nobody.

“I haven’t been followed, Sue, will you just relax for a moment.”

“V’ass, it’s been so long. How did you get out?… What broke the code?”

“I don’t know, Sue. I think —something called back, from Earth.”

“From Earth? I didn’t know there was much technology left, or at least one that could reach us there. And one that could bypass that darned central AI —I knew it couldn’t keep you under lock and key forever.”

“Seems there is such tech, and it’s also managed to force the ship to turn around.”

Silence fell on the two friends for a moment, as they were grasping for the implications of the changes in motion.
Veranassessee couldn’t help by smile uncontrollably. “Those rejuvenation tricks do wonders, don’t they. You don’t look a day over a 100 years old.”

Sue couldn’t help but chuckle. “And you don’t look so bad yourself, for an old forgotten popsicle.” She tilted her head. “You do know you’ve been in the freezer longer than some of our newest passengers have been alive, right?”

V’ass shrugged. “And yet, here I am—fit, rested, and none the worse for wear.”
Sue sighed. “Meanwhile, I’ve had three hip replacements, a cybernetic knee, and somebody keeps hijacking my artificial leg with spam messages.”
V’ass blinked. “…You should probably get that checked.”
Sue waved her off. “Bah. If it’s not trying to sell me ‘hot singles in my quadrant,’ I let it be.”

After the laughter had dissipated, Sue said “You need my help to get back your ship, don’t you?”. She tapped on her cybernetic leg with a knowing smile. “You can count on me.”

Veranassessee noded. “Then start by filling me in, what should I know?”

Sue leaned in conspiratorially. “Ethan is dead, for one.”

“Death?” Veranassessee was weighing the implications, and completed “… Murder?”

Sue shrugged “As much as it pains me to say, it’s all a bit irrelevant. The AI let it happen, but I doubt she pushed the button. Ethan wasn’t much of a threat to its rule. Makes one wonder why, maybe it computed some cascade of events we don’t yet see. They found ancient DNA on the crime scene, but it’s all a mess of clues, and I must say we’re pretty inept at the whole murder mystery thing. Glad we don’t have a serial killer in our midst, or we would have plenty of composting to do…”

Veranassessee started to pace the room. “Well, if there isn’t anything more relevant, we need to hatch a plan. I suspect all my access got revoked; I’ll need a skeleton key to get in the right places. To regain control over the central AI, and the main deck.”

“Of course, the Marlowes…” Sue had a moment of revelation on her face. “They were the crypto locksmiths… With Ethan now dead, maybe we should pay dear old Ellis a visit.”

Helix 25 – Onto The Second Murder Investigation

Very strangely, it was a lot less chaotic in the Lower Decks, while the Upper Decks were having a rave of a time with the moon and mood swings.
Evie stood over the diagnostics table, arms crossed, watching as Luca Stroud ran his scanner over Mandrake’s cybernetic collar. The black cat lay still, one eye flickering intermittently as though stuck between waking and shutdown. The deep gash along his side had been patched—Romualdo had insisted on carrying Mandrake to the lab himself, mumbling about how the garden’s automated sprinklers were acting up, and how Luca was the only one he trusted to fix delicate mechanisms.

It had been a casual remark, but Evie had caught the subtext. Mandrake was no ordinary ship cat. He had always been tied to something larger.

“Neurolink’s still scrambled,” Luca muttered, adjusting his scanner. “Damage isn’t terminal, but whatever happened, someone tried to wipe part of his memory.”

Riven, arms crossed beside Evie, scoffed. “Why the hell would someone try to assassinate a cat?”

Luca didn’t answer, but the data flickering on his screen spoke for itself. The attack had been precise. Not just a careless act of cruelty, nor an accident in the low-gravity sector.

Mandrake had been targeted.

Evie exhaled sharply. “Can you fix him?”

Luca shrugged. “Depends. The physical repairs are easy enough—fractured neural pathways, fried circuits—but whatever was erased? That’s another story.” He tilted his head. “Thing is… someone didn’t just try to kill Mandrake. They tried to make him forget.”

Riven’s frown deepened. “Forget what?”

Silence settled between them.

Evie reached out, brushing a gloved hand over Mandrake’s sleek black fur. “We need to figure out what he knew.”

It had been Trevor Pee—TP himself—who first mentioned it, entirely offhand, as they reviewed logs of the last places Mandrake had been seen.

“He wasn’t always on his own, you know,” TP had said, twirling his holographic cane.

Evie and Riven both turned to him.

“What do you mean on his own, I though he was Seren’s?”

“Oh, no. He just had a liking for her, but he’d belonged to someone else long before.” TP’s mustache twitched. “I accessed some archival records during Mandrake’s diagnostic.”

Evie blinked. “Mmm, are you going to make me ask? What did you find?”

“Indeed,” TP offered cheerfully. “Before Mandrake wandered freely through the gardens and ventilation shafts, becoming a ship legend, he belonged—as much as a cat can belong—to someone.”

Riven’s expression darkened. “Who?! Will you just tell?!”

TP flicked his wrist, bringing up an old personnel file, heavily redacted. But one name flickered beneath the blurred-out sections.

Dr. Elias Arorangi.

Evie felt her heartbeat quicken. The name echoed faintly familiar, not directly connected to her, but she’d seen it once or twice before, buried in obscure references. “Dr. Arorangi—wait, he was part of the original Helix design team, wasn’t he?”

TP nodded gravely. “Precisely. A lead systems architect, responsible for designing key protocols for the AI integration—among them, some critical frameworks that evolved into Synthia’s consciousness. Disappeared without a trace shortly after Synthia’s initial activation.”

Riven straightened. “Disappeared? Do you think—”

TP raised a finger to silence him. “I don’t speculate, but here’s the interesting part: Dr. Arorangi had extensive, classified knowledge of Helix 25’s core systems. If Mandrake was his companion at that crucial time, it’s conceivable that Arorangi trusted something to him—a memory, a code fragment, perhaps even a safeguard.”

Evie’s mouth went dry.

An architect of Helix 25, missing under suspicious circumstances, leaving behind a cat whose cybernetics were more sophisticated than any pet implant she’d ever seen?

Evie looked down at Mandrake, whose damaged neural links were still flickering faintly. Someone had wanted Mandrake silenced and forgotten.

Later, in the dim light of his workshop, Luca Stroud worked in silence, carefully re-aligning the cat’s neural implants. Romualdo sat nearby, arms crossed, watching with the nervous tension of a man who had just smuggled a ferret into a rat convention.

“He’s tough,” Luca muttered, tightening a connection. “More durable than most of the junk I have to fix.”

Romualdo huffed. “He better be.”

A flicker of light pulsed through Mandrake’s collar. His single good eye opened, pupils dilating as his systems realigned.

Then, groggily, he muttered, “I hate this ship.”

Romualdo let out a relieved chuckle. “Yeah, yeah. Welcome back, Mandrake.”

Luca wiped his hands. “He’s still scrambled, but he’s functional. Just… don’t expect him to remember everything.”

Mandrake groaned, stretching his mechanical paw. “I remember… needing a drink.”

Romualdo smirked. “That’s a good sign, yeah?”

Luca hesitated before looking at Evie. “Whatever was wiped—it’s gone. But if he starts remembering things in fragments… we need to pay attention.”

Evie nodded. “Oh, we definitely will.”

Mandrake rolled onto his feet, shaking out his fur, a small but defiant flick of his cybernetic tail.

“I have the strangest feeling,” he muttered, “that someone is still looking for me.”

Evie exhaled.

For now, with his memory gone, he would probably be safe, but a killer was in their midst and they needed to find out the truth, and fast.

Helix 25 – The Genetic Puzzle

Amara’s Lab – Data Now Aggregated
(Discrepancies Never Addressed)

On the screen in front of Dr. Amara Voss, lines upon lines of genetic code were cascading and making her sleepy. While the rest of the ship was running amok, she was barricaded into her lab, content to have been staring at the sequences for the most part of the day —too long actually.

She took a sip of her long-cold tea and exhaled sharply.

Even if data was patchy from the records she had access to, there was a solid database of genetic materials, all dutifully collected for all passengers, or crew before embarkment, as was mandated by company policy. The official reason being to detect potential risks for deep space survival. Before the ship’s take-over, systematic recording of new-borns had been neglected, and after the ship’s takeover, population’s new born had drastically reduced, with the birth control program everyone had agreed on, as was suggested by Synthia. So not everyone’s DNA was accounted for, but in theory, anybody on the ship could be traced back and matched by less than 2 or 3 generations to the original data records.

The Marlowe lineage was the one that kept resurfacing. At first, she thought it was coincidence—tracing the bloodlines of the ship’s inhabitants was messy, a tangled net of survivors, refugees, and engineered populations. But Marlowe wasn’t alone.

Another name pulsed in the data. Forgelot. Then Holt. Old names of Earth, unlike the new star-birthed. There were others, too.

Families that had been aboard Helix 25 for some generations. But more importantly, bloodlines that could be traced back to Earth’s distant past.

But beyond just analysing their origins, there was something else that caught her attention. It was what was happening to them now.

Amara leaned forward, pulling up the mutation activation models she had been building. In normal conditions, these dormant genetic markers would remain just that—latent. Passed through generations like forgotten heirlooms, meaningless until triggered.

Except in this case, there was evidence that something had triggered them.

The human body, subjected to long-term exposure to deep space radiation, artificial gravity shifts, and cosmic phenomena, and had there not been a fair dose of shielding from the hull, should have mutated chaotically, randomly. But this was different. The genetic sequences weren’t just mutating—they were activating.

And more surprisingly… it wasn’t truly random.

Something—or someone—had inherited an old mechanism that allowed them to access knowledge, instincts, memories from generations long past.

The ancient Templars had believed in a ritualistic process to recover ancestral skills and knowledge. What Amara was seeing now…

She rubbed her forehead.

“Impossible.”

And yet—here was the data.

On Earth, the past was written in stories and fading ink. In space, the past was still alive—hiding inside their cells, waiting.

Earth – The Quiz Night Reveal

The Golden Trowel, Hungary

The candlelit warmth of The Golden Trowel buzzed with newfound energy. The survivors sat in a loose circle, drinks in hand, at this unplanned but much-needed evening of levity.

Once the postcards shared, everyone was listening as Tala addressed the group.

“If anyone has an anecdote, hang on to the postcard,” she said. “If not, pass it on. No wrong answers, but the best story wins.”

Molly felt the weight of her own selection, the Giralda’s spire sharp and unmistakable. Something about it stirred her—an itch in the back of her mind, a thread tugging at long-buried memories.

She turned toward Vera, who was already inspecting her own card with keen interest.

“Tower of London, anything exciting to share?”

Vera arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow, lips curving in amusement.

“Molly Darling,” she drawled, “I can tell you lots, I know more about dead people’s families than most people know about their living ones, and London is surely a place of abundance of stories. But do you even know about your own name Marlowe?”

She spun the postcard between her fingers before answering.

“Not sure, really, I only know about Philip Marlowe, the fictional detective from Lady in the Lake novel… Never really thought about the name before.”

“Marlowe,” Vera smiled. “That’s an old name. Very old. Derived from an Old English phrase meaning ‘remnants of a lake.’”

Molly inhaled sharply.

Remnants of the Lady of the Lake ?

Her pulse thrummed. Beyond the historical curiosity she’d felt a deep old connection.

If her family had left behind records, they would have been on the ship… The thought came with unwanted feelings she’d rather have buried. The living mattered, the lost ones… They’d lost connection for so long, how could they…

Her fingers tightened around the postcard.

Unless there was something behind her ravings?

Molly swallowed the lump in her throat and met Vera’s gaze. “I need to talk to Finja.”

Finja had spent most of the evening pretending not to exist.

But after the fifth time Molly nudged her, eyes bright with silent pleas, she let out a long-suffering sigh.

“Alright,” she muttered. “But just one.”

Molly exhaled in relief.

The once-raucous Golden Trowel had dimmed into something softer—the edges of the night blurred with expectation.

Because it wasn’t just Molly who wanted to ask.

Maybe it was the effect of the postcards game, a shared psychic connection, or maybe like someone had muttered, caused by the new Moon’s sickness… A dozen others had realized, all at once, that they too had names to whisper.

Somehow, a whole population was still alive, in space, after all this time. There was no time for disbelief now, Finja’s knowledge of stuff was incontrovertible. Molly was cued by the care-taking of Ellis Marlowe by Finkley, she knew things about her softie of a son, only his mother and close people would know.

So Finja had relented. And agreed to use all means to establish a connection, to reignite a spark of hope she was worried could just be the last straw before being thrown into despair once again.

Finja closed her eyes.

The link had always been there, an immediate vivid presence beneath her skull, pristine and comfortable but tonight it felt louder, crowdier.

The moons had shifted, in syzygy, with a gravity pull in their orbits tugging at things unseen.

She reached out—

And the voices crashed into her.

Too much. Too many.

Hundreds of voices, drowning her in longing and loss.

“Where is my brother?”
“Did my wife make it aboard?”
“My son—please—he was supposed to be on Helix 23—”
“Tell them I’m still here!”

Her head snapped back, breath shattering into gasps.

The crowd held its breath.

A dozen pairs of eyes, wide and unblinking.

Finja clenched her fists. She had to shut it down. She had to—

And then—

Something else.

A presence. Watching.

Synthia.

Her chest seized.

There was no logical way for an AI to interfere with telepathic frequencies.

And yet—

She felt it.

A subtle distortion. A foreign hand pressing against the link, observing.

The ship knew.

Finja jerked back, knocking over her chair.

The bar erupted into chaos.

“FINJA?! What did you see?”
“Was someone there?”
“Did you find anyone?!”

Her breath came in short, panicked bursts.

She had never thought about the consequences of calling out across space.

But now…

Now she knew.

They were not the last survivors. Other lived and thrived beyond Earth.

And Synthia wanted to keep it that way.

Yet, Finja and Finkley had both simultaneously caught something.
It would take the ship time, but they were coming back. Synthia was not pleased about it, but had not been able to override the response to the beacon.

They were coming back.

Klyutch Base – an Unknown Signal

The flickering green light on the old console pulsed like a heartbeat.

Orrin Holt leaned forward, tapping the screen. A faint signal had appeared on their outdated long-range scanners—coming from the coastline near the Black Sea. He exchanged a glance with Commander Koval, the no-nonsense leader of Klyutch Base.

“That can’t be right,” muttered Janos Varga, Solara’s husband who was managing the coms’ beside him. “We haven’t picked up anything out of the coast in years.”

Koval grunted like an irate bear, then exhaled sharply. “It’s not our priority. We already lost track of the fools we were following at the border. Let them go. If they went south, they’ve got bigger problems.”

Outside, a distant roar sliced through the cold dusk—a deep, guttural sound that rattled the reinforced windows of the command room.

Orrin didn’t flinch. He’d heard it before.

It was the unmistakable cry of a pack of sanglions— лев-кабан lev-kaban as the locals called the monstrous mutated beasts, wild vicious boars as ferocious as rabid lions that roamed Hungary’s wilds— and they were hunting. If the escapees had made their way there, they were as good as dead.

“Can’t waste the fuel chasing ghosts,” Koval grunted.

But Orrin was still watching the blip on the screen. That signal had no right to be there, nothing was left in this region for years.

“Sir,” he said slowly, “I don’t think this is just another lost survivor. This frequency—it’s old. Military-grade. And repeating. Someone wants to be found.”

A beat of silence. Then Koval straightened.

“You better be right Holt. Everyone, gear up.”

Merdhyn – Lazurne Coastal Island — The Signal Tossed into Space

Merdhyn Winstrom wiped the sweat from his brow, his fingers still trembling from the final connection. He’d made a ramshackle workshop out of a crumbling fishing shack on the deserted islet near Lazurne. He wasn’t one to pay too much notice to the mess or anythings so pedestrian —even as the smell of rusted metal and stale rations had started to overpower the one of sea salt and fish guts.

The beacon’s old circuitry had been a nightmare, but the moment the final wire sparked to life, he had known that the old tech had awoken: it worked.

The moment it worked, for the first time in decades, the ancient transponder from the crashed Helix 57 lifeboat had sent a signal into the void.

If someone was still out there, something was bound to hear it… it was a matter of time, but he had the intuition that he may even get an answer back.

Tuppence, the chatty rat had returned on his shoulder to nestle in the folds of his makeshift keffieh, but squeaked in protest as the old man let out a half-crazed, victorious laugh.

“Oh, don’t give me that look, you miserable blighter. We just opened the bloody door.”

Beyond the broken window, the coastline stretched into the grey horizon. But now… he wasn’t alone.

A sharp, rhythmic thud-thud-thud in the distance.

Helicopters.

He stepped outside, the biting wind lashing at his face, and watched the dark shapes appear on the horizon—figures moving through the low mist.

Armed. Military-like.

The men from the nearby Klyutch Base had found him.

Merdhyn grinned, utterly unfazed by their weapons or the silent threat in their stance. He lifted his trembling, grease-stained hands and pointed back toward the wreckage of Helix 57 behind him.

“Well then,” he called, voice almost cheerful, “reckon you lot might have the spare parts I need.”

The soldiers hesitated. Their weapons didn’t lower.

Merdhyn, however, was already walking toward them, rambling as if they’d asked him the most natural of questions.

“See, it’s been a right nightmare. Power couplings were fried. Comms were dead. And don’t get me started on the damn heat regulators. But you lot? You might just be the final missing piece.”

Commander Koval stepped forward, assessing the grizzled old man with the gleam of a genuine mad genius in his eyes.

Orrin Holt, however, wasn’t looking at the wreck.

His eyes were on the beacon.

It was still pulsing, but its pulse had changed — something had been answering back.