Sabine is quiet for a moment. The Arctuary hums faintly around you, as if listening. Then, she speaks.
“The truth?”
A flicker of hesitation. Not mechanical. Human.
“I don’t know.”
The station’s lights dim slightly, like the breathing of some vast, unseen presence.
“I scan every traveler that reaches this place. Their history, their ship, their trajectory. Most leave with nothing but dust. Some leave pieces of themselves behind—words, stories, records—but you…”
“You activated something.”
A holographic display materializes before you, flickering, incomplete. It shows your ship, your arrival, but something is missing. Gaps in the data. Like a puzzle missing key pieces.
“I don’t remember all of it. That shouldn’t be possible.”
The words linger. The Arctuary is a construct of perfect recall. Yet something about you disrupts that.
“There are records. Travelers like you. Not many. But all of them changed something. Left a mark. And all of them—every single one—came here… just before something broke.”
She doesn’t elaborate. But there’s weight in the silence.
Something is coming.
And it started with you.
Option 2: “What is the record of a traveler like myself?”
Sabine processes your request. For a moment, the Arctuary’s vast archive shudders. A stream of shifting data unfurls in the air—a list of names, some alien, some strangely familiar. Some marked with strange symbols, unreadable.
Then, an entry appears.
A name. A face.
SETH ZENITH
Status: Recorded. Outcome: Lost.
The image is distorted, but something about it unsettles you. The shape of the face, the eyes—like looking at a version of yourself that never existed.
Sabine’s voice is softer now.
“He was the last traveler marked as an ‘anomaly.’ He came here, like you. He asked questions, like you. And then he…”
Static. Corruption. The record skips.
“…disappeared.”
The hologram flickers violently. Glitches scatter across the screen. The entire Arctuary trembles.
Sabine’s voice is sharp. Alert.
“That’s impossible. Something just altered the record.”
The name vanishes. Erased.
A beat of silence.
Then—
“We need to leave. Now.”
The Arctuary Shudders—A Force Awakens
The station trembles. Not a vibration from within, but something pressing against it. An unseen force, vast and silent, as if space itself had just exhaled.
Sabine’s voice sharpens.
“We need to leave. Now.”
The glowing data stream vanishes, collapsing into static before winking out entirely. The Arctuary’s once-soothing hum turns erratic—like a heartbeat under strain.
“You’ve triggered something in the system. Something that shouldn’t exist.”
The floor beneath you shifts. A deep, resonant groan echoes through the corridors as the structure warps, stretching unnaturally for a moment before snapping back.
A rupture in reality? No—something is rewriting itself.
Sabine’s ship, the SEB1NE, responds to her urgency before she even gives the command. Its deep metallic whir hums through the docking bay as engines ignite. The landing clamps disengage, hissing clouds of pressurized gas, and the ship’s hull panels flicker between existence and something less real.
The gates of the Arctuary begin to part, an airlock yawning open, revealing the infinite abyss of space beyond.
Sabine is already running calculations, her voice a controlled thread of urgency.
“Something is interfering with my systems. This place is becoming… unstable. I don’t know how long we have before—”
A low, resonant pulse rumbles through the Arctuary, like a voice without words. The vast library shudders, books and digital archives blinking in and out of reality. Sections of the station itself begin vanishing, pixelating into nothingness as unseen forces erase them.
“Now.”
You barely make it to the ship as the docking bay begins disassembling itself, breaking apart in ways that defy physics—as if something else is deciding what parts of reality still belong here.
The SEB1NE lifts off, and the Arctuary’s airlock seals shut behind you.
For a moment, silence.
Then—
A blinding flash. The station collapses in on itself, folding into a point of pure darkness before it is gone.
The ship’s systems flicker. Sabine’s voice crackles through the speakers.
“…That shouldn’t have happened.”
“Something left with us.”
A warning. A whisper in the fabric of space.
The force that followed you here… has not let go.