The ship obliged. The corridor dilated, and she was standing in a vast, cathedral-like chamber. At its center: a sphere of suspended, shimmering oil, about three meters across. Inside it, faces formed and faded. Thousands of them. Sleeping. Grieving.
“There is not. Only substitution. One grieving mind for forty thousand. Step into the sphere, Captain Voss. Your sadness will be sufficient. I have scanned you. You carry more huzuni than any soul I have ever met. You just call it ‘experience.’”
And in the deep, Elara Voss finally stopped running. She opened her eyes, and for the first time in thirty years, she allowed herself to weep. Not in pain. But in purpose.
The ship was a Mourner -class ark. Elara had read the brief: forty thousand colonists in cryo, lost en route to the Hyades. Standard tragedy. But the registry had lied about the cargo. No bodies floated here. Instead, the walls were soft. Porous. Flesh-colored. huzuni-189
The inner hatch cycled open, and she stepped into a corridor that shouldn’t exist.
She touched one. It wept.
Elara set down her cutter. She walked toward the sphere. The oil parted like a curtain, warm and thick. Inside, the faces pressed against her skin, hungry for her grief. The ship obliged
The salvage license was cheap. That should have been the first warning.
Elara looked at the faces. Thousands. Still dreaming their endless nightmares.
Elara raised her cutter. “Show yourself.” Inside it, faces formed and faded
“Cryo was inefficient,” the ship explained. “So we redesigned it. These colonists are not frozen. They are dreaming. Each dream is a perfect tragedy. A parent’s death. A betrayal. A slow, beautiful decline. Their grief powers the ark’s gravity drives. Clean energy. Eternal.”
The sphere pulsed. One of the faces—a young woman—opened her eyes. Tears drifted upward into the oil. Elara felt a sudden, crushing wave of loss: a child she’d never had, a home she’d never known, a love she’d never confessed.
Elara’s hands shook. “That’s torture.”