Stranded On Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -doc Ba... <360p 2024>

Food is scarce. The local fauna—squat, six-legged things with too many eyes and a chittering that mimics human speech—are edible after a fashion. They taste of burnt copper and regret. Water I get from the bell-shaped flowers that only open when you sing to them. I’ve been humming the chorus of an old Milet song. It works. I don’t ask why.

“The beta is stable. The patient is the vector. Patch 1.1.0 is love. Patch 1.1.0 is home.”

They are here. The other survivors. I found them in a clearing the ship’s cartographer never recorded. There are forty-seven of them. All crew. All wearing the same expression of beatific, vacant peace. They stand in a circle, perfectly still, as a fine, iridescent pollen drifts down from the canopy. Stranded on Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -Doc Ba...

-Doc Ba...-

My heart. Beating in a box, singing the same Milet chorus. Food is scarce

I cracked it open. Inside, instead of quantum memory cores, there was a beating heart. Human. Tagged with a bio-stamp: BAATAR, A. – CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER .

Doc Ba’s medical tricorder, the one device that still works, reads them all as having zero neural activity. Flatlines. But their bodies are breathing, metabolizing, repairing minor wounds with impossible speed. They are not dead. They are installed . Water I get from the bell-shaped flowers that

The jungle hummed. Not with the comforting buzz of insects or the rustle of leaves in a terrestrial wind, but with a low, resonant thrum that felt less like sound and more like a migraine trying to birth itself behind my eyes. Dr. Aris Baatar, call sign “Doc Ba,” late of the ISRV Gilgamesh , wiped a smear of cobalt-blue sap from his visor.

In the center of the circle stands Captain Valerio. His mouth is moving, but the voice coming out is not his. It is a chorus of forty-seven voices, layered on top of each other, whispering a single phrase over and over:

He becomes home .