Something was wrong with the Kepler Station.
Elena noticed it first in the corridors. The walls—standard aluminum composite, utilitarian gray, utterly forgettable—seemed closer together than they had yesterday. She measured them mentally as she walked, counting her steps, and found that the corridor to the mess hall took seventeen paces now where it had taken sixteen before.
One pace. Nothing. A rounding error in human perception.
But Elena didn't round errors. She collected them.
"You've been in the lab for nine hours," Yuki said when Elena entered the mess. The geologist was picking at a protein bar, her eyes fixed on a tablet showing seismic data from the southern pole. "Reeves is thinking about pulling you out."
"I'm fine," Elena said. She poured herself coffee—black, bitter, the way they all drank it now—and sat across from Yuki. "The samples are stable. I'm making progress."
"Progress toward what?"
Elena hesitated. She hadn't told anyone about the experience in the lab. The layers of fear, the sense of judgment, the terrible weight of whatever the archive was trying to communicate. She hadn't found words for it yet, not in any language that would make sense to the others.
"Toward understanding what we're dealing with," she said carefully. "They're not biological. They're not technological. They're... mnemic. Memory structures. Something stored fear here, a long time ago."
Yuki set down her tablet. "Fear?"
"Emotional impressions. The crystals are resonant with... experience." Elena sipped her coffee. It tasted wrong, metallic, but everything tasted metallic on the station. "I think they were built to store the memories of civilizations. Their fears, specifically. The things that defined them."
"That's..." Yuki trailed off, searching for the word. "That's insane."
"Yes."
"Why would anyone build something like that?"
Elena looked at her. At all of them, really—the six humans on this station, each carrying their own fears, their own nightmares, their own private darknesses that they had brought 120 light-years from home.
"To judge them," she said quietly. "To preserve them. To decide if they were worth remembering."
Yuki stared at her for a long moment. Then she stood up, gathered her tablet, and left without finishing her protein bar.
Elena sat alone in the mess hall, drinking metallic coffee and counting the steps she would need to take to get back to the lab.
Fifteen paces. The corridor had shrunk again.
She didn't sleep that night. She lay in her quarters—cramped, coffin-like, the standard accommodation for deep-space stations where every cubic meter cost a fortune to launch—and listened to the station breathe.
It wasn't supposed to breathe. The Kepler Station was machinery: pumps and vents and recyclers, all humming their mechanical songs in the dark. But Elena had learned to hear patterns in mechanical noise, the way she learned to hear patterns in language, and she knew that the station's rhythm had changed.
The air recyclers were working harder. The CO2 scrubbers were cycling faster. Something was consuming more oxygen than the six of them should have needed.
Or something was making them consume more.
Elena got up, pulled on her station jumpsuit, and went to check the atmospheric monitors. The corridors were definitely smaller now. She counted carefully, methodically, and found that the distance from her quarters to the hub had decreased by four paces since she had arrived eighteen months ago.
Four paces. Not much.
Unless you were counting.
The hub was empty at 0300 station time. Elena pulled up the atmospheric logs and found what she expected: elevated CO2, slightly depleted oxygen, a humidity spike that didn't correlate with any of the station's systems. The life support was working perfectly.
But something else was breathing in the walls.
She traced the readings to their source: sector seven, the same sector where the alarm had malfunctioned forty-two hours ago. The sector closest to the sample lab where the crystals waited in their containment cases.
Elena stood in the empty hub and felt the station's breath around her—in and out, in and out, a rhythm that matched the pulse of the crystals three decks below.
"You're imagining things," she whispered to herself.
But she didn't believe it. She had felt the archive's weight, its patience, its terrible curiosity. She knew—knew in the same way she knew the crystals were resonant with fear—that the archive wasn't content to stay in the containment lab.
It was expanding. Learning. Growing into the spaces around it.
The station was just the first structure it would consume.
Elena pulled up the station's blueprints on the main screen, tracing the lines of bulkheads and corridors and life support ducts. The Kepler Station had been designed to be modular, expandable, adaptable to whatever they found on Kepler-442b.
No one had designed it for this.
She was still staring at the blueprints when Marcus Reeves found her.
"Elena." He looked worse than he had yesterday—stubble darkening his jaw, eyes hollow with exhaustion. "We need to talk."
"About the station?"
"About you." He pulled up a chair, close enough that she could smell the stale coffee on his breath, the sweat that hadn't been washed off in too long. "Yuki says you're talking about judgment. Preservation. Things that don't make sense."
"They make sense to me."
"Elena." He caught her hand, and she was startled to find that his was shaking. "I've seen the atmospheric readings. I've seen the spatial anomaly reports. Something is happening to this station, and I need to know if it's connected to what you're doing in that lab."
She looked at him. At this man who had commanded the Kepler mission for eighteen months, who had kept six personalities functioning in a tin can floating above an alien world, who had never asked for more than she could give until now.
"It's connected," she said.
"How?"
"The archive isn't just crystals and mineral deposits. It's... aware. Not intelligent, not the way we think of intelligence. But aware. It knows we're here. It's studying us."
"Studying us how?"
Elena pulled her hand free and gestured at the blueprints, at the station's slowly shrinking corridors, at the atmospheric readings that showed something breathing in the walls.
"It's learning our fears," she said. "The way we learned the fears of whatever came before. It's... preparing to judge us."
Reeves was silent for a long moment. Then he stood up, moved to the atmospheric monitor, and began pulling up logs she hadn't seen—logs from the past forty-eight hours, showing patterns she hadn't noticed.
"The CO2 spikes," he said, his voice flat, clinical, the way he got when he was trying not to panic. "They correlate with your lab sessions. Every time you handle the samples, the station's atmosphere changes."
"I'm not—"
"I know you're not doing it intentionally." He turned to look at her, and she saw something in his eyes that she hadn't seen before. Not fear. Wonder. The same wonder she had felt, once, before the recognition set in. "But you're connected to it, Elena. Whatever you felt in that lab, whatever you experienced when you touched those crystals—it's affecting you. And through you, it's affecting all of us."
She wanted to argue. To explain that she was being careful, that she was following protocols, that she wasn't the problem.
But she remembered the way the crystal had pulsed when she touched the observation glass. The way it had recognized her. The way it had begun, in some way she didn't understand, to judge.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
Reeves looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached out and touched the screen, tracing the lines of the station's blueprints, the slowly shrinking corridors, the breath that wasn't theirs.
"I want you to translate it," he said. "Whatever it's trying to tell us. Whatever judgment it's preparing. I want you to tell me before it decides we're not worth preserving."
Elena nodded. She understood now. The archive wasn't just waiting for her to translate the fears of past civilizations.
It was waiting for her to translate humanity's fear.
To give it shape. To give it words. To make it real enough to judge.
And she would do it. Because she was the translator. Because she had touched the crystal and felt its weight and known, in that moment, that some translations were inevitable.
Some stories had to be told, even if they ended in judgment.
Even if they ended in silence.
Even if they ended with the station breathing around them, slowly, patiently, learning what it meant to be human by consuming the fear that defined them.
End of Chapter 4