Morgan Fille - E242 Apr 2026

“Protocol didn’t predict a screaming pod after two and a half centuries. Open it.”

Lin hesitated. “Sir, protocol says—”

“It keeps repeating one word,” Lin whispered. “ L’Engrenage .” Morgan Fille - E242

Now, her pod was screaming.

Her eyes snapped open. They were not the soft brown recorded in her file. They were black. Not dilated— black . Like two holes punched through reality. “Protocol didn’t predict a screaming pod after two

Aris felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He’d heard that word before. In the old mission logs. The Odysseus wasn’t just a lifeboat; it was a secret experiment. The Morgan Fille project—E242 specifically—had been designed to test a prototype quantum-resonance cryosleep. The theory: while the body slept, the mind would be projected into a simulated reality, a “training ground” to keep colonists sharp over millennia. But something had gone wrong with the early units.

Behind her, down the long, silent rows of pods, a second monitor began to spike. Then a third. Then a hundred. The blue lights of the cryo bay flickered and bled to red. “ L’Engrenage

L’Engrenage. L’Engrenage. L’Engrenage.

E242 was not a patient in a hospital bed. It was a pod. A sealed, humming cylinder of biosteel and nutrient gel, one of four hundred in the long-term cryogenic bay of the Odysseus , an ark ship fleeing a dead Earth. Morgan Fille had been twenty-three when she went under, a linguist with a passion for dead languages and a freckle on her left thumb. That was 247 years ago.

“Open the visual feed,” Aris ordered.