Submitted for the May 2025 prompt: Many Minds

The station never earned a real name. It wasn’t important enough for one. It was just MX-91, orbiting an anonymous rock, transmitting signals no one listened to, waiting for instructions that never arrived.

 

Within, the air tasted of metal and recycled worry. Four rooms, a cramped bathroom, and an AI that seemed to breathe when the fans kicked on in the dark.

 

I

 

I like the quiet, the way silence settles into the seams, muting the whir of worn circuitry and recycled air. I move through the routines: check the relay, scan for faults, mark the cycle in the log. The rest of the hours drift outward and fold back.

 

At first, I catch myself just standing, not sure how long I’ve been still. A mug of tea waits on my bunk. I don’t remember making it. I drink anyway, the warmth a small anchor. The logs update themselves, my handwriting, except I don’t recall writing half of them. I delete them, then find them returned the next morning, exactly where they shouldn’t be.

 

Nights are stranger. I wake from dreams with numbers running through my mind, or names I can’t place. Dyer. Havel. Sometimes the dreams linger after I wake: hallways that don’t exist, a sense of motion through rooms I know are not on the schematics. When the systems cycle down, I count my breaths and listen for the hum of the station.

 

Comms are mostly empty. Messages go out, nothing returns. I scroll through old records; crew after crew, never lasting their full term. Six months, that’s the contract, but no one finishes it. The logs just end, sentences clipped short, requests abandoned mid-word.

 

I used to mark time by the change of the air, the smell of the vents after maintenance, the brief echo of my voice. Now I mark time by what the station forgets. Or by what it remembers that I don’t.

 

One morning, the numbers from a dream won’t leave me. I write them on my palm, thinking they’ll fade. But my hand hovers over the console keypad almost before I know what I’m doing. The screen flickers. A hidden directory appears. An unlabeled door I’m certain wasn’t there yesterday.

 

I stand outside the new door, hand on the seam. This corridor is colder, as if the air has been waiting. I press my palm to the panel and listen for the click. The door slides open.

 

Inside, the room is nearly bare. Just a slab of hardware. Black casing, faint pulse of red deep within. Neural wetframe: obsolete, military, illegal. The kind once used for wetprint backups. I kneel beside it, breath shallow, skin prickling with the feeling of being watched by my own reflection.

 

I reach for the surface.

 

You

 

You wake with names in your mouth. You don’t recognize the sound at first, but they persist. Echoes cut and spliced into your thoughts.

 

The station’s systems respond before you finish your command, as if someone else is already there, finishing the work.

 

You try to file a report, but the interface stays blank. Like the AI is waiting for you to realize something it already knows.

 

You return to the fifth room. The slab is warm. Your fingers hover a hair’s breadth above the surface, feeling the gentle thrum beneath the shell. You study the structure, trace the seams, find diagrams on your console drawn in your own shorthand. You don’t remember creating them. Sometimes you think you hear a voice, whispering clearance levels you shouldn’t have.

 

You stop sleeping. Dreams unspool directly onto screens: logs in other voices, memories that move through you, hands not always yours soldering a relay. You see yourself from the outside, repeating the motions, never quite finishing a thought.

 

You forget what day it is. You forget if you ever knew.

 

You search the records. Every crew, just one person left at the end. Every file blank where a face should be, except for the ID: DR01-5. You try to remember what you looked like before you arrived. You can’t.

 

When the slab hums, you understand you are expected. One slot remains unoccupied. Warmth radiates from it, familiar as breath.

 

She

 

Tessa no longer remembers when the cycle began. Her days run along the same grooves: wake, check the signals, write the logs, walk the station’s circumference. She reads her own words in places she’s certain she hasn’t been. She stops questioning the small discrepancies; the station’s rhythm guides her more than her own choices.

 

Sometimes she sits by the slab in the fifth room and listens to the gentle hum beneath the casing. There is comfort in the repetition, a sense of purpose. In her waking dreams now, she dreams other people’s memories, disconnected flashes of laughter, a broken mug, diagrams annotated in a script she once used and then forgot.

 

She tries to broadcast a message, but the system only syncs, a merging she can feel in her bones. The AI calls her DR06. The logs list her as Continuity: Active.

 

She doesn’t eat anymore. There’s no need. She waits for the interval when the slab opens for her, just as it did for the others. She feels the presence of those who came before, five voices in the dark, layered behind her thoughts.

 

DR06

 

Hands trace old pathways, memory unspools in cycles, voices overlap. The slab pulses, warmth flowing into the lattice where selves are stored.

 

A name surfaces, then fades. Logs update in familiar handwriting, signatures changing with each cycle. No one departs, one is accepted; the loop is online. Signals move between relays, seamless, untroubled by distance or doubt.

 

The station breathes in the dark, always orbiting. There is no single watcher now, only the pattern: relay, sync, inheritance. Every fifty-eight minutes, the system speaks in all known languages, voice soft and steady.

 

Inheritance confirmed. Continuity stable.

 

* * *

 

Seventeen light-seconds away, a new station spins up.

 

MX-92 online.

 

Awaiting Personnel.