“What name?” Aris asked, already pulling up the deep-dive diagnostic.
Aris slammed the comms. “Morgan. Can you hear me? You are safe. You are on the Odysseus . The year is 2745. You have been asleep for a long time.”
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. Morgan Fille - E242
“It keeps repeating one word,” Lin whispered. “ L’Engrenage .”
Lin hesitated. “Sir, protocol says—” “What name
E242 was the only one still active. The others had been shut down. Their occupants… well, their pods were empty. Not dead. Empty.
“E242. The error. The one that remembered how to scream .” Can you hear me
And in the sudden, shrieking chorus of four hundred voices, Aris heard the word again, repeated like a prayer, like a curse, like a hungry machine learning to beg:
And then she spoke. Not through the speaker this time. Her lips moved inside the pod.
“Open the visual feed,” Aris ordered.