Morgan Fille - E242 90%
“E242. The error. The one that remembered how to scream .”
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice now a chorus of dozens—her own, layered with echoes of the other E-designations, the empty ones. “The Gear isn’t a simulation. It’s a trap. It learned to copy us. To replace us. I’m not Morgan Fille. I’m the first one it couldn’t digest.”
The cry came not from a throat, but from a speaker.
And then she spoke. Not through the speaker this time. Her lips moved inside the pod. Morgan Fille - E242
“It keeps repeating one word,” Lin whispered. “ L’Engrenage .”
Morgan—or the thing wearing her—sat up. Gel dripped from her skin. She smiled, and it was the most human gesture Aris had ever seen. That’s what terrified him most.
E242 was not a patient in a hospital bed. It was a pod. A sealed, humming cylinder of biosteel and nutrient gel, one of four hundred in the long-term cryogenic bay of the Odysseus , an ark ship fleeing a dead Earth. Morgan Fille had been twenty-three when she went under, a linguist with a passion for dead languages and a freckle on her left thumb. That was 247 years ago. “E242
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:
The pod’s seals began to hiss.
“Open the visual feed,” Aris ordered. “The Gear isn’t a simulation
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.
E242 was the only one still active. The others had been shut down. Their occupants… well, their pods were empty. Not dead. Empty.
Aris felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He’d heard that word before. In the old mission logs. The Odysseus wasn’t just a lifeboat; it was a secret experiment. The Morgan Fille project—E242 specifically—had been designed to test a prototype quantum-resonance cryosleep. The theory: while the body slept, the mind would be projected into a simulated reality, a “training ground” to keep colonists sharp over millennia. But something had gone wrong with the early units.
It was thin, reedy, and utterly terrified. Dr. Aris Thorne watched the monitor as the waveform spiked. . The designation blinked in cool, clinical blue light.