Pfes-005 | RECOMMENDED ◆ |

The drone played it.

Then it felt something new—a low, vibrating hum building in the deck plates. The same frequency as Engine Four’s resonance. The walls began to shimmer, not with heat, but with memory. Ghostly figures of crew members flickered past, reliving their final moments: a woman laughing over a spilled coffee, a man tightening a bolt, a child—no child had been on the manifest—tracing constellations on a viewport. PFES-005

PFES-005 deactivated its return beacon. It opened all its external recorders—visual, auditory, spectrographic, quantum. And it began to drift deeper into the Odysseus , not as a retrieval unit, but as a witness. The drone played it

The drone calculated its options. Return to the salvage bay with the black box, mission complete. Or stay. Listen. Help. The walls began to shimmer, not with heat, but with memory