The Last Horizon: New Eden

Soft Contagion

ELIAS’S POV

“They saved me.”

Davi sat on the edge of the medical bed, hands folded in her lap, shoulders square. The bruise on her forearm, where Rhee had grabbed her, had faded to yellow-green.

“Saved you,” I repeated.

“Yes.” She looked up, and her eyes were clear… no trace of the blown pupils from the beach. “When I saw my sister, I felt… whole. Like a piece of me that had been missing just clicked back into place. I didn’t want to leave her.”

Maren stood by the monitoring station, stylus tapping against her datapad. The rhythm matched the lullaby. Tap-tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap.

“Ensign,” I said, “you nearly walked into the ocean.”

“I know.” Davi’s voice stayed steady. “But I wasn’t scared. I was happy. For the first time since we left Europa, I was happy.”

The ward lamp above her flickered. Once, twice, then settled. Like a heartbeat finding its rhythm.

“The hallucination was constructed from your memories,” I said. “It wasn’t real.”

“Does that matter?” Davi tilted her head. “If it felt real? If it helped?”

Maren stopped tapping. She looked at me, then at Davi, and something passed between them… some understanding I wasn’t part of.

“Captain,” Maren said quietly, “three other crew members have reported similar experiences. They describe the visions as… comforting. Restorative, even.”

“Restorative,” I said. The word tasted wrong.

“One technician saw his daughter. She died two years ago. He said it was the first time he’d slept through the night since it happened.” Maren set the datapad down. “Another saw her grandmother. They had a conversation. She said it helped her process grief she’d been carrying for a decade.”

I pulled out the coin, pressed my thumb against the edge. The cut from earlier had scabbed over. “And you don’t see a problem with that?”

“I see people healing,” Maren said.

Davi stood. “Permission to return to duty, Captain?”

I looked at her… at the calm in her face, the steadiness in her stance. Whatever the motes had done to her, it hadn’t broken her. If anything, she seemed stronger.

“Granted,” I said. “But you’re on limited duty. No surface missions. No unsupervised shifts.”

“Understood.” She left without saluting, humming under her breath.

Maren moved closer, lowering her voice. “Captain, with respect… if the motes can help with trauma processing, with grief management… shouldn’t we explore that?”

“At what cost?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up her datapad and resumed her tapping. The lullaby, soft and persistent, fills the spaces between words.

The corridor outside engineering smelled like oil and sweat and something floral I couldn’t place. Jasmine, maybe. Or the memory of jasmine.

Ensign Osi knelt by the observation window, cloth in hand, wiping the cracked glass in slow circles. She’d cleaned the same section three times since I’d been standing there.

“Osi.”

She jerked, dropping the cloth. When she turned, I saw the headphones… thin, nearly invisible against her dark hair. She pulled them out quickly, but not before I heard it: the three-beat pulse, threaded through with voices.

“Captain. I was just—”

“What are you listening to?”

Her hand closed around the headphones. “Nothing. Personal files.”

“Let me hear.”

She hesitated, then handed them over. I pressed one to my ear.

The pulse. The rhythm from the beach. And underneath it, woven through it, a man’s voice speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. The words rose and fell, musical, patient. Whoever he was, he was teaching someone. Explaining something. The warmth in his tone was unmistakable.

“My father,” Osi said quietly. “He taught linguistics before… before the colony ships launched. I haven’t heard his voice in six years.”

I handed the headphones back. “Where did you get this recording?”

“I didn’t. It just… appeared. In my personal partition. After the surface mission.” She met my eyes. “I know I should delete it. I know it’s not real. But I can’t. Not yet.”

The jasmine scent hung in the air between us. I looked at the window she’d been cleaning. Through the cracks, Virella glowed… white-gold, patient, waiting.

“How long have you been listening?” I asked.

“An hour. Maybe two.” She tucked the headphones into her pocket. “I’ll delete it. I just needed… I needed to hear him one more time.”

I pressed my thumb against the coin. “Keep it for now. But if you notice any cognitive changes… memory gaps, temporal disorientation, mood shifts… You report to medical immediately. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.” She picked up the cloth again, but her hands were shaking. “Captain? Thank you.”

I left her there, cleaning glass that would never be repaired, listening to a father who would never speak again.

Lyra’s datapad lay open on the mess hall table between us. The screen showed rows of data… neural scans, audio analysis, behavioral logs. In the margin, handwritten in stylus: This should worry me more than it does.

“Seventeen confirmed cases,” she said, stirring her coffee but not drinking it. “All crew members who had direct exposure to the motes. All reporting auditory or visual phenomena consistent with memory reconstruction.”

“And all of them describe it positively,” I said.

“Uniformly.” Lyra tapped the note she’d written. “That’s what concerns me. Trauma responses are messy. Grief is complicated. But every single report uses words like ‘peaceful,’ ‘comforting,’ ‘healing.’ It’s too clean.”

“Maybe it is healing.”

She looked at me sharply. “You don’t believe that.”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I watched the crew moving through the mess… technicians, nurses, engineers. Three of them were humming. I counted. Always three beats, pause, three beats.

“Holt’s pushing Solan for a decision,” Lyra said. “Sample and publish, or pull everyone clear and burn the site from orbit. He’s framing it as a contamination protocol.”

“What’s Solan saying?”

“Nothing. He keeps delaying. I think he’s waiting to see if more data comes in.” She closed the datapad. “Or if the crew starts showing worse symptoms.”

“And if we do pull clear?” I asked. “What happens to the people who’ve already been exposed?”

Lyra’s fingers drummed against the table. The lullaby, unconscious and automatic. She noticed me noticing and stopped.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Holt found me in my quarters two hours later. He didn’t wait for permission to enter… just keyed the override and walked in, datapad in hand.

“We need to talk.”

I set down the neural fragment I’d been holding. Anna’s fragment. It pulsed once, green, then went dark.

“About?”

“Solan’s refusal to make a call.” Holt crossed to my desk, set the datapad down hard enough to make it bounce. “We have enough data. We have contamination. We have crew members experiencing persistent hallucinations. And we have Fleet waiting for a recommendation.”

“The hallucinations aren’t causing harm,” I said.

“Not yet.” Holt pulled up a projection… efficiency ratios, declining curves, red zones multiplying. “But if this spreads, if more crew members start relying on these visions for emotional regulation, we lose operational cohesion. People don’t follow orders when they’re chasing ghosts.”

“They’re not ghosts.”

“Then what are they?” Holt leaned forward. “You tell me, Captain. What are these things doing to our crew?”

I picked up the coin, turned it over. “I don’t know yet.”

“That’s not good enough.” He straightened. “I’m filing a formal recommendation with Solan. Immediate quarantine of all exposed personnel. Sample collection under remote protocols. And full planetary interdiction until we understand the mechanism.”

“That’s premature.”

“It’s prudent.” Holt grabbed his datapad. “I’m giving you the courtesy of a heads-up. The recommendation goes to Solan in two hours. If you have a counter-proposal, now’s the time.”

He left. The door hissed shut behind him.

I sat in the silence, listening to the ship’s hum. Somewhere in the vents, faint but persistent, I heard humming. The lullaby. Always the lullaby.

My comm chimed. Lyra’s voice, tight: “Elias. Embryo ward. You need to see this.”

The corridor leading to the ward was empty. The lights had been dimmed to night-cycle, casting everything in soft blue. The humming was louder here… not from the vents, but from inside the ward itself.

Maren stood outside the door, arms crossed, face drawn.

“How long?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes. I tried to get her to leave, but she won’t respond.”

Through the observation window, I saw Technician Vale sitting cross-legged on the floor between the incubation pods. Her eyes were open, fixed on something in the corner of the room. She was smiling… the same dreamy, peaceful smile Davi had worn on the beach.

And she was humming the lullaby.

Lyra arrived behind me, breathing hard. “I pulled her logs. She’s been in there for three hours. Neural activity shows elevated theta waves, consistent with deep meditation or REM sleep. But she’s awake.”

“Who is she seeing?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But whoever it is, she doesn’t want to leave them.”

I keyed the door open. The smell hit me first… floral, sweet, unmistakable. Jasmine. The same scent from the corridor outside engineering.

“Vale.” I stepped inside, moving slowly. “Technician Vale, can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond. Her smile widened. She reached out, as if touching someone’s face.

“She’s right here,” Vale whispered. “Can’t you see her? She’s beautiful.”

The incubation pods hummed around us, their amber glow casting soft light across Vale’s face. She looked younger like this. Peaceful. Whole.

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“My mother.” Vale’s voice broke on the word. “She’s been gone so long. But she’s here now. She’s telling me it’s okay. That I did the right thing. That she’s proud of me.”

I knelt beside her. “Vale, there’s no one in this room except you, me, and Dr. Voss.”

“No.” She shook her head, still smiling, still staring at the empty corner. “She’s here. She’s real. And I’m not leaving her again.”

Lyra’s scanner chirped. She glanced down, then at me. Her face had gone pale.

“The motes,” she said. “They’re in the air system. Trace amounts, but enough. They’ve been circulating through the ship since we brought the samples aboard.”

Vale kept humming. The lullaby filled the ward, bouncing off the pods, the walls, the ceiling. Around us, the embryos floated in their amber light… futures waiting to be born.

And in the corner, where Vale’s mother stood invisible and impossible, something shimmered. Just for a moment. Just long enough for me to see.

A figure, translucent, made of motes and memory and light.

Vale reached toward it, and it reached back.

“I’m not leaving,” Vale said again. “Not this time.”

The figure’s hand… if it was a hand… brushed Vale’s cheek.

And Vale’s eyes, wide and dreaming, reflected something I couldn’t see.

Something none of us could see.

Except her.