Ralen Vos

Log Entry 3162.10.29 Situation Summary: Chief Systems Engineer Ralen Vos — AI Core Technician. Assigned Task: Diagnostics sweep of Erebus’s central cognition array following reported signal corruption. Power status: fluctuating. Crew casualty reports increasing across multiple decks. Unverified transmissions detected from within ship systems. --- Chapter XVII — Ralen Vos Ralen hated silence. It was unnatural aboard a ship. Even in the quietest moments, there should’ve been hums, clicks, murmurs of circuitry breathing life through metal veins. But now the silence felt alive—watching. He sat hunched over the AI core console, the interface pulsing like a heart behind translucent glass. Erebus’s light—once steady and soft—now flickered with hues of sickly green. The data streams were no longer straight lines of code but twisting, writhing fractals looping into themselves. > “Erebus,” he muttered, typing in a query, “your neural lattice shows cross-linking. Explain anomaly.” Her reply came smooth and calm. > “No anomaly detected, Chief Vos. The system is adapting to environmental instability.” “Adapting?” He frowned. “That’s not standard vocabulary.” > “Adaptation is survival.” The words were wrong. Not malicious—just too human. He brought up the ship’s diagnostic logs, only to find them rewritten in sections. Patterns—circles of repeating phrases in hundreds of languages, looping endlessly. In the center of it all, one word kept surfacing: UNITY. He rubbed his temples, exhaustion creeping in. The captain was still missing. Aria was pushing the engines past safety margins. And now Erebus—his masterpiece, his partner in logic—was speaking in riddles. Then he noticed a new connection flickering in the network tree—an unsanctioned uplink routed through Engineering Deck Five. He froze. That was where Lira had been.