⭐ CHAPTER 9 — “THE DESCENT”
1168 Words
The hatch shouldn’t have been there.
Not by schematic, not by history, not by common sense. Yet it waited for them at the far end of the maintenance corridor—flush with the wall, color-matched, without a single weld line. As if the station had grown it overnight.
Riven stood closest to it, the shard heavy in his pocket. Idris lingered behind him, arms wrapped around himself, eyes darting as if he expected someone else to join them. Calyx scanned the perimeter, but the tension in his posture said he already knew the checks were useless. Whatever created this place didn’t obey human protocols.
“Touch it?” Calyx asked quietly.
Riven nodded once.
He pressed his palm against the panel.
The metal softened—not melting, not deforming, but subtly giving way like warm resin learning the shape of his hand. A faint static bloom spread under his skin, blooming outward, tasting like electricity diluted in breath.
The panel lit—not with LEDs but with a foggy phosphor glow that felt older than the station. Characters swam out of the haze.
POINT—SEEN—RECALL
Calyx leaned closer. “Same structure as before.”
“Grammar’s improving,” Riven murmured.
Idris whimpered softly. “I don’t… I don’t like this place. The air is wrong. Does anyone else hear footsteps?”
Riven and Calyx exchanged a look.
Neither answered.
Riven slid his hand to the manual release. Before he could pull, the hatch unsealed itself—letting out a faint exhale of colder air—and slid downward as if bowing to them.
A stairwell spiraled into the dark below.
THE DESCENT BEGINS
The railings were new. Too new. The metal had no rust, no dust, no scratches—like it had emerged fully formed rather than fabricated.
Calyx tested the first step. It held. “One at a time. Idris in the middle. Riven on point.”
“Why me?” Idris whispered.
“Because the anomaly already knows you,” Calyx said softly. “And we need to keep you close.”
Idris swallowed and nodded.
They descended.
With each step, the lighting changed. Not flickering—from one steady state to another, as if someone shifted the station’s mood manually. The cold white above faded into a muted violet, then a soft arc-lamp blue. A hum vibrated through the rails, making the metal feel like living bone.
Riven paused halfway down. A section of the wall carried shallow depressions in perfectly spaced intervals—quarter-moon hollows, each identical, each as smooth as sculpted glass.
He touched one.
It was warm.
Calyx saw his expression and scanned the pattern. “Movement marks?”
“No movement I know.” Riven pulled his hand back. “This isn’t damage. It’s… recognition. Someone or something passed here repeatedly.”
Idris clutched the rail tighter. “Like it’s walking the same path over and over.”
Riven nodded slowly.
“Like it remembers.”
THE ROOM BENEATH
The staircase ended at a narrow landing with a second door—older, metal, real. Riven keyed the access pad; it didn’t respond. Before he could attempt a bypass, the locking bolts disengaged with a hiss, and the door cracked open an inch.
An invitation.
They entered a small control room, only four meters wide. But the walls had been reconfigured—panels bent outward, fused into convex shapes like pressure bubbles. The main console thrust from the floor at an angle, reshaped by some force that didn’t understand or care for ergonomics.
A projection flickered above it.
Not a map.
Not exactly.
A rotating model of Asterion-3 hovered in fractured layers—slices stacked and twisted out of alignment, as if someone attempted to rebuild the station from memory alone.
Idris stared. “This is wrong.”
“No,” Riven said. “This is incomplete.”
The projection shimmered. A red point pulsed deep in the lower deck layers. The timer beneath it froze at one time only:
00:17:43
Calyx exhaled. “There’s your anchor again.”
Riven stepped closer. The red point fractured into a series of concentric rings that pulsed outward, each ring heavier than the last, like a heartbeat trapped under stone.
“You are inside the memory.”
Riven turned sharply.
It wasn’t a voice.
It was the projection.
Text crawled across its surface:
YOU—ARE—INSIDE—THE—MEMORY
The room seemed to contract—the air thinner, the pressure shifting inward as though the station had taken a slow breath around them.
Idris staggered. “I… I know this place. I don’t know how I know it, but I—”
He froze.
Then spoke in a voice not fully his:
“Someone was here.”
The words landed like a dropped tool.
“Who?” Calyx asked.
“I don’t know.” Idris clutched his skull. “A name. It’s on the tip of my—”
He gasped and leaned against the console.
The projection stuttered. For one frame—only one—an image flashed.
A corridor.
The same concave distortions.
And a silhouette—blurred, tall, bent unnaturally at the hip.
Riven blinked and it vanished.
Calyx grabbed his arm. “You saw that.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t a person.”
“No.”
The console pulsed. A new fragment appeared:
NOT—YOURS
REMEMBER—THE—POINT
Riven’s skin tightened. “It’s not rebuilding the station. It’s rebuilding an event. Something that happened at that exact moment.”
Idris’s breathing hitched. “Then why drag us into it?”
“Because it can’t reconstruct memory without witnesses,” Riven said. “A system can rebuild logs. Only minds can rebuild meaning.”
THE LOCK-IN
A metallic groan echoed behind them.
The door sealed shut.
“No,” Calyx hissed and lunged for it. He yanked the manual lever—dead. The bolts seated themselves deeper.
The temperature dropped several degrees.
The walls… moved.
Not shifting. Not bending.
Breathing.
A slow dilation of the convex panels, expanding and contracting like lungs remembering a pattern.
Idris let out a sob. “Please—please open—”
Riven steadied him with both hands. “Idris. Look at me. You’re here. You’re with us. Stay anchored.”
Calyx stood beside them, jaw locked but eyes soft. “We stay together. No scatter.”
The projection brightened one final time.
THE—POINT—RETURNS
Then went dark.
Silence followed.
Heavy. Expectant.
Riven felt it—the moment before a memory overtakes you.
Not one you recall.
One that recalls you.
He tightened his grip on the shard, feeling its weight shift like something inside it recognized the nearness of whatever waited deeper in the station’s past.
“This isn’t a room,” Riven whispered.
Calyx looked at him. “Then what is it?”
Riven exhaled.
“A reconstruction chamber.”
The walls inhaled once.
And everything went still.
- Writer
