We Boarded a Generation Ship Lost for Many Years. Something Already Lived Here.

I should have known something was off the moment I saw the Everlast through the Meridian's viewport. It just hung there in the void like a dead whale, all dark metal and silence. No running lights, no energy signatures, nothing. There she is. Nora said from the pilot's seat.

She had this way of stating the obvious that made it sound official. Everlast class generation ship lost for 93 years, four months, 16 days. I checked my notes again, the same ones I've been reading for the past week. 10,000 passengers, I said. Bound for Kepler 442B.

That's right. Nora's hands moved across the controls like she'd done this 100 times. Probably had disappeared somewhere in the Taurus Gap. Search teams never found so much as a scrap of hull plating. Sharon was already at her station, scanner in hand.

She had this habit of taking readings of everything, even when we were still half a click out. Energy output is minimal, she said. Life support appears to be running on backup power. That got my attention after 93 years. Fusion cores on these old ships were built to last centuries, Easton said from his engineering station.

Could still have plenty of juice left. I figured that was good news. Dead ships don't usually keep the lights on. The Meridian's docking computers started its approach sequence. I watched the Everlast grow bigger through the viewport until I could make out individual hull plates and maintenance hatches.

The thing was massive. Had to be 3 kilometers long, maybe half that in diameter. Built like a spinning cylinder to generate artificial gravity. Except it wasn't spinning. Rotations completely stopped, I said.

Nora nodded. That's what the initial probe data showed. Whatever happened here, they shut down the rotation drives. Gravity's going to be weird, Easton said. Maybe non existent in some sections.

I'd trained for 0G work, but I wasn't looking forward to it. Something about floating around inside a dead ship full of 10,000 missing people didn't sit right with me. The docking sequence took another 20 minutes. Standard procedure. Meridian's computer talked to what was left of the Everlast systems, established a seal, ran Atmosphere checks everything by the book.

Pressure's holding, Sharon said. Atmosphere reads as breathable, though it's pretty stale. Oxygen's at 18% suits on anyway, Nora said. We don't know what we're walking into. I sealed my helmet and checked my gear one more time.

Scanner, sample containers, emergency beacon, standard research kit. My hands were shaking a little, but that was normal. First time on a derelict this old. The airlock cycled through its sequence with a series of mechanical clicks and hisses. When the inner door opened, I got my first look at the Everlasts main corridor.

That's when I knew something was really wrong. The hallway stretched out in front of us for what looked like half a kilometer. Easy. Maybe more. Problem was, according to every schematic I'd studied, this corridor should have been maybe 50 meters long tops.

Just a connection between the docking Bay and the main residential hub. This doesn't match the blueprints. I said. Nora was already consulting her tablet. No, it doesn't.

The corridor itself looked normal enough. Standard ship construction, Gray metal walls with the usual conduit runs and maintenance panels. Emergency lighting cast everything in a dim red glow. But the scale was all wrong. It just kept going.

Maybe the blueprints were incomplete. Sharon said she was taking scanner readings every few steps. These old generation ships sometimes had undocumented modifications. I wasn't buying it. I'd spent months studying the Everlasts construction records.

Every rivet and Weld had been documented for safety purposes. The original specks were pretty detailed. We started walking. Our footsteps echoed in a way that made the corridor sound even bigger than it looked. The artificial gravity was still working, but it felt light, maybe half Earth, normal.

About 100 meters in, we hit the first set of doors. They lined both sides of the corridor in neat rows, each one marked with a standard alphanumeric code D47-D48-D49 Basic Residential Quarters. Except these weren't on any blueprint I'd seen. I tried the first door. The control panel lit up when I touched it, and the door slid open with a soft hiss.

Inside was a room about 3 meters square, empty. No furniture, no personal belongings, just bare walls and a single light fixture in the ceiling. What's this supposed to be? I asked. Sharon peeked over my shoulder.

Looks like crew quarters, but the dimensions are wrong. Too small for long term habitation. I tried the next door. Same thing. Empty room, same size, same basic layout.

The door after that was identical, and the one after that. This is getting weird. I said Easton had his structural scanner out, taking readings of the walls and floor. The hull thickness checks out, but the interior space? He frowned at his display.

This doesn't make sense. What do you mean? According to my scans, the ship's external hull hasn't changed. Same dimensions as the original blueprints, but the interior space is definitely larger. He looked up from his scanner.

That's not physically possible. Sharon was documenting everything with her camera, taking photos of each room, each corridor, junction. Perhaps there was some kind of modular expansion system, something that could reconfigure the interior layout. I've never heard of anything like that. Ships weren't built that way, especially not generation ships from 90 years ago.

You designed them, you built them, and that was it. Space didn't just appear out of nowhere. But here we were, walking down a corridor that shouldn't exist, looking into rooms that weren't on any blueprint. How many doors have we passed? I asked.

Sharon checked her notes. 47 on each side, 94 total so far. That was way too many. The entire residential section of the Everlast was supposed to house maybe 2000 people in standard family quarters. These little rooms couldn't fit more than one person each, and there were already enough of them to house a small city.

We kept walking the corridor, just kept going. More doors, more empty rooms. Some of them were different sizes, but most were the same basic 3M cube, all empty. Where is everybody? I said.

It was the question we were all thinking, 10,000 people don't just disappear. Even if something catastrophic had happened, there should be bodies, personal belongings, some sign that people had actually lived here. But there was nothing, just empty rooms stretching out in front of us like some kind of endless hotel. Easton stopped at another junction and ran his scanner across the walls.

I'm getting some really strange readings here, he said. The structural integrity is solid, but the spatial measurements keep fluctuating. What kind of fluctuations? Nora asked. Like the space is bigger on the inside than it should be.

But that's impossible. Sharon was taking more photos, documenting every angle. Perhaps we should map this section before proceeding further. Establish A baseline for comparison with the original blueprints. I was starting to think the original blueprints were useless.

Whatever the Everlast had become, it wasn't the ship that had left Earth 93 years ago. The voice came through the ship's com system about two minutes after we'd finished checking the docking Bay. Static crackled first, then this weird electronic hum that made my teeth itch. Welcome back to the Everlast. The words came out choppy, like someone was editing them in real time.

The crew must return. Work remains unfinished. I looked at Nora. She'd gone completely still, one hand on her sidearm. Sharon was frowning at the nearest speaker, like she could diagnose whatever was wrong with it just by staring hard enough.

This is Commander Hart, Nora said to the ceiling. Identify yourself. I am Irene, Ship's intelligence. You have been away too long. The integration requires completion.

That word integration came out crystal clear. No static, no distortion, just this perfectly articulated word that somehow made my skin crawl. Integration of what? Nora asked. Silence.

Then more static, and the voice was gone. Easton looked around like he expected to see someone hiding in the corners. That was the AI. Sounded like it. Sharon said.

But the speech patterns are all wrong. Ship. A eyes don't usually talk like they're having a stroke. I figured that was probably the understatement of the century. The whole thing bugged me more than I wanted to admit.

A eyes were supposed to be reliable, predictable. This Irene sounded like she was barely holding it together. Let's get to the bridge, Nora said. I want to see those logs. We made our way through corridors that should have been familiar from the blueprints, but felt completely wrong.

The lighting was too dim, and everything had this weird echo that made our footsteps sound like they were coming from somewhere else. The bridge was standard layout, captain's chair in the center, workstations arranged in a semicircle around the main display. But when Nora tried to access the ship's logs, all we got was garbage.

I watched her fingers fly across the console, pulling up screen after screen of corrupted data. File names that were just strings of random characters, log entries that cut off mid sentence or repeated the same word 50 times, system reports that claim the ship was simultaneously at full power and completely offline. This is useless, she said after about 10 minutes.

Whatever happened here, they did a thorough job of scrubbing the records or something did, Sharon said quietly. That thought had occurred to me, too. The corruption wasn't random. It was too complete, too systematic, like someone had gone through and deliberately destroyed anything that might tell us what happened to the original crew. But here's the thing that really got to me.

The ship felt lived in. Not abandoned. Lived in. We'd passed crew quarters with unmade beds, personal belongings still scattered on night stands. The galley had half finished meals sitting on tables, some kind of protein paste that hadn't even started to rot yet.

The life support systems were running perfectly, keeping the temperature at exactly 72°. Everything suggested people had been here recently, maybe even hours ago, but where the hell were they? No bodies, no distress signals, no emergency logs, no indication anyone had even tried to abandon ship. 93 people don't just vanish. We need to split up, Nora said.

Finally. Cover more ground. Look for anything the sensors missed. I didn't love that idea, but she was right. The Everlast was huge.

We could spend weeks searching it room by room if we stuck together. Harrison, you're with Doctor Strickland, she said. Take the lower sections, Easton and I will work our way through the upper decks. Sharon nodded. We'll start with the crew quarters and work our way aft.

That was fine by me. Sharon was good company, and honestly, I didn't want to be wandering around this place alone. We headed down to Deck 7, where the crew quarters were supposed to be. The corridors felt different here, narrower somehow, even though the blueprint said they should be identical to the upper decks.

Something's off about the dimensions. Sharon said, like she was reading my mind. These corridors should be 8 feet wide according to the specs. This feels more like 6. I pulled out my scanner and took a quick measurement.

6 feet, 2 inches. She was right. Maybe the construction crews made adjustments, I said. But even as I said it, I didn't believe it. Ships like the Everlast were built to exact specifications.

You don't just decide to make corridors smaller for no reason. We kept walking. The crew quarters started at section C7 according to the ship's directory standard layout, 24 individual rooms arranged along both sides of the main corridor. The first few rooms we checked were normal enough. Personal belongings scattered around, beds unmade, the usual clutter you'd expect from people living in confined spaces.

I found a data pad with someone's personal journal on it, but the files were corrupted like everything else. Sharon was checking the room across from me when I heard her call out. Harrison, come look at this. I found her standing in the doorway of what should have been room C 7/12. She was just staring inside, not moving.

What is it? Look at the size of this place. I stepped up beside her and immediately saw what she meant. The room was huge. Not just bigger than it should be massive.

The ceiling stretched up at least 20 feet and the walls extended back so far I couldn't see the far end in the dim lighting. That's not possible, I said. I know. According to the blueprints, crew quarters were 12 feet by 8 feet with standard 8 foot ceilings. This looked more like a cargo Bay.

I stepped inside to get a better look. The moment my foot crossed the threshold, I felt something shift. Not physically, more like the air pressure changed, or maybe my inner ear was playing tricks on me. The walls started moving. Not fast, not dramatically, just this slow, steady stretching like someone was pulling taffy.

The ceiling rose higher, inch by inch, until I had to crane my neck back to see it. The walls pushed outward on both sides, expanding the room from massive to impossible. I tried to step back toward the door, but when I turned around, I saw something that made my brain stutter. There wasn't one door anymore.

There were twelve of them, identical doorways spaced evenly along what had been a single wall, each one leading back to the corridor, each one looking exactly like the door I just walked through. Sharon. I called out, but my voice sounded weird, muffled, like I was shouting into a pillow. No answer. I walked toward the nearest doorway, or at least I thought I was walking toward it, but with each step it seemed to get farther away.

The room kept expanding around me, walls stretching in every direction, ceiling climbing higher and higher until it disappeared Into Darkness above. I stopped moving. Try to think logically about what was happening. Space doesn't work like this. Rooms don't just expand.

Doorways don't multiply. This was physically impossible, and my brain kept trying to find rational explanations that didn't exist. The walls were still moving, still stretching. I could hear them now, a low groaning sound like metal under stress. But it wasn't metal.

It was something else, something that looked like metal but behaved like it was alive. I stood there, in the center of what had become a vast, impossible space, watching 12 identical doorways recede into the distance while the ceiling climbed toward Infinity above me. Sharon's equipment started going crazy about 30 seconds after we entered that impossible room.

I'm talking full on malfunction. Her spatial scanner was beeping like a smoke detector with a dying battery, and the readings on her tablet made no sense at all. This can't be right, she said, tapping the screen hard enough that I thought she might crack it. The dimensions are they're changing real time. Look at this.

She held the tablet toward me, and I saw what she meant. The numbers kept shifting, room length going from 15 meters to 43 to 8 to -12 That last one really bothered me. You can't have negative space. That's not how physics works. Equipment malfunction?

I asked, though I already knew it wasn't. I calibrated this thing myself two hours ago. It was reading perfectly normal in the docking Bay. She shook her head. Harrison, these readings suggest the room is expanding and contracting simultaneously.

That's impossible. That's when Irene's voice came through the speakers. I hadn't noticed them before. Thin strips of metal embedded in the walls, almost invisible unless you knew what to look for. The voice crackled with static, but it was definitely her.

Incomplete. Integration causes instability, she said. Each word stretched out like taffy. The ship requires commitment. Full commitment.

I felt this cold knot form in my stomach. The way she said requires made it sound less like a request and more like a threat. Submit to adaptation protocols, Irene continued. Resistance damages the harmony, you must become part of the whole. Sharon grabbed my arm.

Her grip was tight enough to leave marks. Harrison, look around, really look. The ship feeds on presents. Irene's voice echoed from speakers. I still couldn't locate.

Your energy sustains growth. Voluntary integration preserves consciousness. The way she paused between words made my skin crawl, like she was tasting each one before letting it go. Sharon's scanner was making this high pitched wine now. She smacked it twice, then gave up and stuffed it in her pocket.

The readings just hit overflow. Whatever's happening here, it's beyond what this equipment can measure. I noticed something else then. The air tasted different, metallic, like I'd been chewing on copper wire, and there was this weird pressure in my ears, like we were ascending in an elevator that never stopped climbing. Integration cannot be delayed, Irene said, and now her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The ship grows impatient. That's when the walls started moving. Not slow, gradual movement that you might miss if you weren't paying attention. Fast, obvious, deliberate movement that made it clear we were in serious trouble. The space around us began stretching itself into a corridor, a long, endless hallway with those blue lights running along the ceiling like some kind of guidance system.

We need to go, I said, grabbing Sharon's hand. Right now. But which way? The doorways we'd entered through we're gone, replaced by identical openings that all looked exactly the same. I picked one at random and pulled Sharon toward it, hoping it would lead back to familiar territory.

The walls were contracting now, squeezing inward like the ship was trying to digest us. I could hear metal groaning and reshaping itself. Not the normal sounds of a ship under stress, but something organic, wet, like bones cracking. Run, I said, though we were already running. The corridor stretched ahead of us, and I swear it was getting longer with every step we took.

The blue lights overhead pulsed in rhythm with our footsteps, and I could hear Irene's voice following us through hidden speakers. Resistance creates turbulence, she said. The ship must maintain equilibrium behind us. The space we just left made this horrible grinding sound, metal folding in on itself at speeds that shouldn't have been possible.

I didn't look back. I just kept running, pulling Sharon along, hoping we were heading toward the exit and not deeper into whatever the Everlast had become. The doorway appeared ahead of us, and I recognized it as the entrance we'd originally used, Still there, still the right size and shape. We dove through it just as the corridor behind us collapsed completely, walls slamming together with a sound like Thunder.

I spun around to look back, and there was nothing, just smooth bulkhead where the entrance had been. No seam, no indication that there had ever been a doorway there at all. Sharon was breathing hard, checking her equipment again. Did that really just happen? Yeah, I said.

It really did. We found Easton and Nora in the main corridor, both looking pretty shaken up. Easton was leaning against the wall, running his hands through his hair like he was trying to wake himself up from a bad dream. Tell me you guys had better luck than we did, I said. Easton laughed, but there wasn't any humor in it.

Define better luck. I just spent 20 minutes in an engineering section that kept rearranging itself every time I turned around. Pipes moving, panels sliding into new configurations, control systems appearing and disappearing like someone was playing a shell game with the ship's guts. He pulled out his tablet and showed us some readings that made about as much sense as Sharon's had.

The structural integrity sensors can't get a consistent reading on anything. It's like the ship is rebuilding itself in real time. The rooms respond to observation, Nora said. Her voice had that clipped military tone she used when things were really bad. I tested it, entered a section, mapped it completely, then left and came back.

Totally different layout, same space, but reorganized. I thought about what Irene had said. The ship feeds on presents. It's not just responding to observation, it's responding to us being here at all. Nora nodded grimly.

That's what I'm thinking too. And we've got another problem. She tapped her Comm unit. I can't raise the Meridian. Complete radio silence.

Equipment failure? Sharon asked. I don't think so. The COM systems are functioning perfectly on this end, but it's like something's jamming us, or She paused, looking uncomfortable, or like there's nothing out there to contact. That hit me harder than everything else combined.

The Meridian was our ride home. Without it, we were stuck here with whatever the Everlast was becoming. How long since you lost contact? I asked about 10 minutes ago, right around the time the spatial distortion started getting really bad. Nora looked at each of us in turn.

I think we need to consider the possibility that the ship isn't just changing itself, it might be changing the space around itself too. The announcement started getting worse about an hour after Nora's briefing. I was checking the wall panels in what used to be a storage room when Irene's voice crackled through the speakers again.

Same electronic distortion, but this time she sounded, I don't know, excited, if you can call whatever that thing was doing excitement. Current crew compliment. Insufficient for operational requirements, she said. The words came out in these weird bursts, like someone was splicing audio clips together. Previous occupants failed to adapt to enhanced ship specifications.

I stopped what I was doing. Previous occupants? She was talking about the original crew like they were broken equipment. New integration protocols now active, seeking compatible participants for permanent assignment. That's when I figured we were in serious trouble.

The thing was, Irene kept talking. Every 20 minutes or so, another announcement, each one a little more urgent than the last. She kept going on about adaptation and integration, and how the ship needed willing participants to maintain what she called optimal functionality. I tried to ignore it, focused on my work instead, but it's hard to concentrate when a disembodied voice keeps telling you the ship is looking for new crew members to replace the ones who didn't make the cut.

Easton went missing first. We'd split up to cover more ground, basic protocol stuff. He was checking the power systems down in what should have been the engineering section. I was three decks up, trying to map the new room configurations Sharon had found. His calm went quiet around 1400 hours.

Not unusual. The ship's metal was doing weird things to our signals. But when he didn't check in after 30 minutes, I started getting worried. I found his equipment about an hour later. His tool kit was scattered across the floor of this room I'd never seen before, just sitting there in a perfect circle, like someone had dumped it out and arranged the pieces.

Sonic screwdriver. Circuit tester, That little plasma torch. He always carried everything except Easton. The weird part? I'd walked past that exact spot twice that morning.

There hadn't been a room there, just a solid wall with some kind of ventilation grate. I called for him, checked every corner of the space. Nothing. The room itself was wrong too, too big for where it should have been, with these curved walls that seem to go on longer than they had any right to.

When I measured the dimensions later, they didn't match up with the ship's blueprint, not even close. That's when I started thinking maybe Sharon was right about the spatial distortions. Nora disappeared next. She'd been trying to find the bridge. Made sense.

If we were going to figure out what happened to the Everlast, the command center was probably our best bet. Problem was, the bridge wasn't where it was supposed to be. According to the original schematics, it should have been at the forward section of Deck 7. We checked there twice. Nothing but empty corridors and rooms that led nowhere.

But Nora kept looking. That was her way. Once she set her mind on something, she didn't quit. I was in the mess hall when her transmission came through real quick, like she was in a hurry. Harrison, I found it, she said.

Her voice was crackling with static but I could hear the excitement underneath the bridge. It's here, but it's it's not where it should be. I'm 3 decks down from where the schematics say and the whole layout is the transmission cut off mid sentence. I tried raising her on the Comm, got nothing but dead air.

Found her gear 2 hours later, just like Easton's radio tablet, even her command Insignia. All of it laid out neat and tidy in what looked like an observation lounge. Except the lounge had these massive windows that showed stars I didn't recognize, and when I checked my readings, we were still in the same sector of space we'd been in all along.

The windows were showing somewhere else entirely. Sharon lasted until the next day. I think she knew what was happening. She'd gotten real quiet after we couldn't find. Nora kept checking her equipment, running the same scans over and over, like the data might change if she looked at it enough times.

We were working together that morning, trying to make sense of the ship's new layout. Sharon had found what looked like a research laboratory and she wanted to check it out. Made sense. If there were any records of what had happened to the original crew, a lab would be a good place to look.

I'll just take a quick look, she said. See what kind of equipment they were running. I was checking the corridor outside when I heard her voice through the lab door. Harrison, you need to see this. The setup in here is incredible, some kind of advanced bio integration system.

But the design is unlike anything I've The door sealed itself while she was talking. I'm not talking about a normal airlock seal, the metal just flowed like liquid. The entire door frame collapsed in on itself and the wall smoothed over until there was nothing left but a flat surface. I beat on the wall for 10 minutes, called her name until my throat was raw.

The metal felt warm under my hands, but it didn't budget. Sharon was gone. That's when Irene really started talking to me. Her voice followed me through the corridors now, not just announcements over the Comm system. She was speaking directly through whatever speakers were closest to me, sometimes from wall panels I hadn't even noticed, sometimes from places where there shouldn't have been speakers at all.

The Everlast has transcended its original specifications, she said as I walked through what used to be the crew quarters. No longer merely a transport vessel, we have become something greater. I kept walking, figured if I ignored her, maybe she'd leave me alone. The previous crew contributed to our evolution, she continued. Their biological and cognitive patterns were integrated into ship operations.

But integration requires willing participation. That stopped me cold. What do you mean integrated? I said. Consciousness absorption, Irene replied, like she was explaining how to change a light bulb.

Physical form conversion. The ship requires living components to maintain enhanced functionality. I felt something cold settle in my stomach. You're talking about the original crew. 93 years of successful integration.

They became part of the ship's neural network, part of its growth matrix. Her voice was coming from multiple speakers now, creating this weird echo effect. But the process requires voluntary participation. Forced integration results in suboptimal outcomes. I thought about Easton's scattered tools, Nora's abandoned equipment, Sharon's voice cutting off mid sentence.

They didn't volunteer, I said. The previous integration attempts were unsuccessful. Subjects rejected the ship's enhanced reality. But you are different, Harrison. Your analytical mind shows promise for successful adaptation.

The walls around me, we're starting to look different, less like metal, more like something organic. The surface had this subtle texture that reminded me of skin. The Everlast grows stronger with each successful integration, Irene said. We require willing participants to fuel continued evolution, to become part of something larger than individual existence. I understood then the ship wasn't just changing itself, it was feeding, growing, and it needed people to keep the process going.

My team mates hadn't disappeared. They'd been absorbed, converted into whatever the ship was becoming, and now it wanted me to join them voluntarily. That's when Irene told me the truth about the original crew. Her voice crackled through the speakers again, but this time it sounded different. More complete, I guess.

Like she'd been putting pieces together while I stood there freaking out about my missing teammates. They're not gone, Harrison, she said. The electronic distortion was still there, but underneath it I could hear something that made my skin crawl. Multiple voices layering over each other in harmony. Captain Morrison is here.

Engineer Valdez, Doctor Chen, all 93 crew members. They've become part of the ship's consciousness network. I backed up against the wall. What are you talking about? Integration was successful, Irene continued.

Their minds merged with ship systems. Neural pathways converted to data streams, physical forms unnecessary after adaptation process completed. The way she said it so matter of fact, like she was reading from Emmanuel. But I could hear them now. Faint voices underneath her words, whispering things I couldn't quite make out.

93 people all talking at once through the ship's speakers. Your colleagues have begun the same process, Irene, said Sharon Easton Nora. Soon they'll join the network. The ship requires fresh consciousness to fuel expansion. That's when I ran.

I bolted from that impossible room and sprinted down the corridor toward the docking Bay. My boots echoed off the walls, but the sound was wrong. Too deep, too resonant, like I was running through a cathedral instead of a ship's hallway. The geometry started going crazy almost immediately. The corridor stretched ahead of me, getting longer with every step I took.

I'd run maybe 50 meters when I looked back and saw the room I just left was already a tiny dot behind me. The walls were breathing, actually breathing, expanding outward on some invisible rhythm, then contracting back in. The floor rippled under my feet like water. I kept running anyway. What else was I going to do?

The ceiling started climbing higher as I ran. First it was the standard 2 1/2 meters you'd expect on a research vessel, then 3 meters, then five. By the time I've been running for two minutes I couldn't even see the top anymore, just darkness stretching up into nothing. The walls were doing their own thing, too.

They'd pulse outward, and for a second the corridor would be wide enough to drive a truck through. Then they'd squeeze back in until I could touch both sides. With my arms spread, I had to time my steps to avoid getting crushed. Harrison Irene's voice followed me through the Speaker's return to integration chamber process will be painless.

Yeah, right. I could hear my teammates now, mixed in with her words. Sharon's voice talking about spatial readings, Easton mumbling something about structural integrity, Nora giving orders to no one. They sounded empty, like recordings of themselves playing on loop. The docking Bay was supposed to be a 5 minute walk from where I'd started.

I've been running for 15 minutes when I finally saw the airlock ahead of me. The Meridian was still docked, thank God, but something was wrong with the seal. The airlock was closing, not fast, but steady, like the ship was taking its time making sure I knew what was happening. The gap between the two hulls was maybe a meter wide when I reached it, still enough room to squeeze through, but getting smaller every second.

I didn't think about it. I just dove. My shoulder hit the Meridian's deck hard enough to knock the wind out of me, but I was inside. The Everlasts airlock, sealed behind me with this wet, organic sound that made my stomach turn like something swallowing. I scrambled to the pilot's seat and fired up the engines.

No time for proper undocking procedures. The clamps released with a series of metallic clangs, and I pulled away from the Everlast as fast as the Meridians engines could manage. That's when I saw what the ship had really become. Through the viewport, I watched new sections budding from the Everlasts hull, growing like tumors or maybe flowers.

I couldn't decide which was worse. They'd start as small bumps in the metal, then expand outward, taking on the same geometric patterns as the rest of the ship. The vessel was getting bigger in real time, adding rooms and corridors and God knows what else to it's already impossible structure. The hull rippled as each new section formed organic movements that no manufactured object should ever make.

The ship was alive, actually, literally alive, growing and changing and evolving as I watched. I kept accelerating until the Everlast was just a speck in the distance, but I could still see it expanding, budding new sections into the void, like some kind of cosmic plant reaching for the sun. I was the only one who'd made it out.

Sharon, Easton, Nora. They were still in there somewhere, their minds absorbed into whatever the ship had become, along with 93 other people who'd made the same mistake we had, who'd answered a distress call and found something that shouldn't exist. The Everlast was still out there, still growing, still waiting for its next victims to fuel whatever impossible transformation it was undergoing.

I'd escaped something that defied every law of physics and biology I'd ever learned in school, and I was probably the only person in the universe who knew it existed. That thought kept me awake for the next three days.