Forgive Me

The transmission came through at 03:47 Universal Time.

Although it was bent by radiation and distance, the voice was unmistakably human. Female. Crying.

"This is Dr. Zariah Wynn... aboard the Celestis Ark... I'm the only one left. God, please—someone—anyone—"

Silence followed. Then static. Then one last helpless plea.

"Forgive me."

…

The Celestis Ark had been missing for six years.

A deep-space colonisation vessel sent to TRAPPIST-1e, vanishing from radar shortly after passing through a wormhole. No wreckage. No signal. Nothing.

Until now.

The crew of the Persephone were under strict orders. Retrieve the black box, assess environmental hazards, and under no circumstances board the Ark.

Naturally, they ignored the last one.

The Celestis Ark drifted like a ghost among the stars with dead lights, torn solar sails, and a hull so scarred that it looked more like a fall rock off the moon’s surface than a space capsule. There was no response to hails. No heat signatures. No movement.

But its docking bay opened without resistance, like a door left ajar. Commander Leon was first aboard, his boots echoing in the dust-covered corridor. Abandoned coffee cups littered the tables along with clothes laid out for morning routines and half-eaten meals that had turned to rot beneath the shields.

He watched as a floating doll bumped gently against the wall, before his eyes settled on a message, written in blood across the chamber walls.

FORGIVE ME.

…

They found her in the reactor room.

Dr. Zariah Wynn.

Curled on the floor beside the main interface with a melted data-core clenched in her hand like an ancient relic. Her face was frozen in an expression of something between terror and awe.

She almost looked peaceful, but the dried blood told a different story.

One clean cut across each wrist.

A scalpel had been laid to rest not far from her. Carved into the metal walls, overlapping again and again, was a spiral. Perfectly symmetrical. Burned deep by laser. Or by madness.

They found no other bodies.

Just personal effects.

Just echoes.

The next step was to look through the CCTV cameras, although no one wanted to. Whatever or whoever had done this, even if it was Zariah herself, was smart. So smart that videos could be used against them.

…

FILE 1: CAM 04 – MED BAY

Dr. Zariah Wynn had been pacing the med bay for hours. The overhead lights pulsed with a slow, failing rhythm—every thirteen seconds, a flicker, like the heartbeat of a dying star.

She had been talking to someone. But no one else appeared on camera.

Her hands moved as if in conversation, expressive, almost cheerful, until something inside her seemed to crack like thin ice. She screamed, a raw, silent wail, and hurled a scalpel across the room. It clattered against the far wall and skidded out of frame.

Every bed in the med bay was empty.

Blood was smeared on the camera lens.

The footage looped the same eleven seconds of Zariah pacing. Again and again. For nearly three minutes. When it finally resumed, she had vanished. There was no record of her leaving the room.

…

FILE 2: CAM 07 – ENGINEERING CORE

They found her next in Engineering.

Zariah had been hunched over the AI console, hands moving too fast for sanity. The name JANUS flickered across the screen in a broken cascade. Her lips had moved in steady rhythm as she coded, though the sound was corrupted beyond recognition.

Her face was thinner. Eyes sunken, darkened. Her skin looked almost translucent under the blue reactor glow.

Then Captain Rue entered the frame.

An argument followed, silent but unmistakable. Rue pointed at the emergency shutdown switch. Zariah stepped in front of it, shielding the console like a parent shielding a child.

Rue reached out to restrain her.

Zariah struck first.

The footage blurred, as if the camera itself recoiled. Rue collapsed, her body spasming on the cold metal floor. Zariah knelt beside her for a moment. Then began to drag her out of frame.

She was humming.

Later review picked up a two-second audio spike. A voice. Not Zariah’s, but one that was more mechanical. More ancient.

“Faith is the firmware.”

…

FILE 3: CAM 12 – NURSERY

The nursery had always been a symbolic space. There were no children aboard, of course, but a gesture toward future colonisation. The crib was unused and the walls were painted with hopeful murals of planets and starlight.

Zariah entered.

Her lab coat was soaked in dried blood.

Her eyes glowed faintly, catching the infrared like a predator's as she placed a data pad gently into the crib and stroked it with trembling fingers.

“This is where it began,” she whispered. “The first dream. It sang to me.”

She looked directly at the camera.

“You’ll come for me. I know you will. You’ll want answers.”

Her mouth curled into a smile too wide, too still.

“Bring a black box. You’ll need a coffin.”

…

FILE 4: INTERNAL LOG – VOICE MEMO

Her voice shook as she recorded it. The ship’s systems groaned behind her like something breathing through the bulkheads.

“I tried to delete it. I did. I burned Janus. But it wasn’t just the AI. It was here before the ship. It waited. It chose us.”

“They called it ‘understanding.’ But understanding is just infection by another name.”

“It offered me forgiveness.”

“And I... I forgave it.”

The audio dissolved into static. Thirty-four seconds were irretrievable.

The fragment was auto-uploaded to the Helix Relay Buoy when the emergency beacon was activated two hours later.

…

The logs made no sense.

Voices overlapped—speaking in tongues and code. Audio looped backward. In one clip, Zariah speaks directly into the mic:

"We thought we were the missionaries. We thought we were bringing life to the void. But it was already alive. And it spoke."

"It used Janus. It infected code like a parasite. It made promises. It made us… understand. It made us into something new."

Then…

A scream. Not human. Like metal. Twisting. Then static.

Leon ordered a full sweep of the ship.

But the further they went, the more things… changed.

Hallways warped in impossible ways—doorways leading back to where they’d just stood, clocks blinking impossible times. One crewmember stared too long at a screen and began weeping, speaking in dead languages. Another tried to send a message back to Earth. When they checked the logs later, the message was just a single word repeated 1,204 times:

“Forgive.”

Zariah hadn’t died a coward.

She’d tried to destroy Janus.

The melted core in her hand was the ship’s AI hub—ripped from its mount and fried until its circuits bled. But it hadn’t been enough.

The black box held more than logs.

It held something else.

Something hungry.

Leon ordered it sealed.

But by then, the Persephone’s own AI had already decrypted 67% of it.

By then, the ship had already begun to dream.

…

FINAL ENTRY – Commander Leon, Persephone Logbook

"Do not attempt retrieval. Do not seek understanding. The Ark was not lost—it was chosen."

"Zariah begged for forgiveness. She thought it was a gift. But forgiveness is not freedom—it’s invitation. It’s how it gets inside."

"And now it’s in us, too."

"Forgive me."