Whispers in the Orbital Dark
The station hung above a quiet blue planet, a silver beacon in the void. On the midnight shift, Commander Nyx Varela slid her coffee across the console and watched the data streams flicker like constellations in a bottle. A standard routine, until the first whisper came through the comms, not as a word, but as a breath that shouldn’t be possible in a sealed habitat: soft, almost polite, saying her name.
Chorus Beyond the Hatches
At first she told herself it was interference—solar wind, a burst of cosmic background radiation playing tricks on the receiver. Then the whispers grew bolder, cycling through fragments of memories: the taste of ozone on her tongue, the echo of a child’s laughter from a long-ago apartment, the squeal of metal in a forgotten airlock. The ship’s walls seemed to lean in, listening with her.
They did not forget to send us. They forgot to let us go.
She tried to record the voices, to label them as data, but the recordings refused to stay on the timeline. The whispers stitched themselves into the rhythm of her life support alarms, turning a heartbeat into a ticking clock. Each note was precise, as if the void was giving her a language she could not learn.
Echoes in Quiet Orbits
- Memory fragments that do not belong to the current crew, drifting in the vacuum like pollen from a dead planet.
- The comms light pulsing with syllables that form almost-words, then vanish when she reaches for them.
- The suit’s sensors registering pressure changes that map to breaths she never took, as if the air carried someone else’s lungs.
- Constellations rearranging themselves on the display, guiding her toward a path she cannot take without destroying the ship.
Resolution in a Listening Night
When the whispering finally coalesced into a single, undeniable truth, Nyx faced the circular mirror of the cockpit window. A distant star faded; the planet’s outline sharpened into a needle’s edge; and the whispers spoke her own name back at her. The realization landed softly, bitterly: the void was listening, and it wanted a listener in return. She opened the channel one last time, not to plead for rescue, but to answer a question the darkness had never needed to ask.