Dr. Samuel Okonkwo heard the archive before he saw it.
He was the station's physician, trained to treat the human body in conditions it had never evolved to survive. He had spent eighteen months on Kepler Station patching wounds, treating radiation exposure, managing the psychological stresses of isolation. He thought he had seen everything the station could throw at him.
He was wrong.
It started with the headaches. Not his own—Elena's. She came to him at 0400, station time, knocking on the infirmary door with a rhythm that didn't match her usual urgency. Three knocks. Pause. Two knocks. Pause. One knock.
"Elena?" He opened the door to find her standing in the corridor, pale, swaying slightly, her eyes focused on something that wasn't there. "What's wrong?"
"I'm hearing it," she said. "In my head. All the time now. I can't make it stop."
Samuel guided her to a chair, checked her vitals automatically—pulse elevated, blood pressure low, pupils slightly dilated. Classic symptoms of sleep deprivation and stress. But there was something else, something that didn't fit any diagnostic category he knew.
"Hearing what, Elena?"
"The archive." She looked at him, and for a moment her eyes cleared, focused on his face with an intensity that made him step back. "It's not just crystals and memory, Samuel. It's alive. Aware. And it's learning to speak."
"Speak how?"
"Through me." She touched her temple, her fingers trembling. "I'm the translator. The bridge. And bridges get walked on, Samuel. Bridges bear weight. I'm bearing the weight of something that doesn't understand human minds, something that's trying to learn by... by being me."
Samuel pulled up a chair and sat across from her, close enough to catch her if she fell, far enough to feel safe. He had heard the rumors about what Elena was experiencing in the lab. The way she talked about the crystals, the archives, the civilizations that had been judged and found wanting.
He had thought it was stress. Psychological breakdown in a high-pressure environment.
Now, looking at her, he wasn't sure.
"Tell me what you're experiencing," he said, keeping his voice clinical, detached. "Symptoms. Sensations. Everything."
Elena laughed, a sound that held no humor. "Symptoms. Yes. Let's catalog the ways I'm falling apart."
She held up her hand, counting on her fingers.
"One: insomnia. I can't sleep more than two hours without dreaming about alien civilizations. Two: tremors. My hands shake when I'm not paying attention. Three: memory lapses. I forget my own name sometimes, reach for it and find something else instead. Four: bleeding. Nosebleeds, mostly. Small ones. Five: the pulse."
She stopped, her eyes unfocusing again.
"The pulse?"
"The archive has a heartbeat," she said softly. "I can feel it. All the time now. It's not in the crystals anymore—it's in the station. In the walls. In the air. It's learning to spread, Samuel. Learning to grow. And it's using me to do it."
Samuel checked her vitals again. Her pulse was racing now, arrhythmic, matching no pattern he recognized. He hooked her up to the EKG and watched the spikes dance across the screen—not random, he realized after a moment. Patterned. Rhythmic.
Like a language.
"Elena," he said carefully, "I think we need to get you off the station. Back to Earth. Whatever's happening to you—"
"It's too late for that." She grabbed his wrist, her fingers cold and strong. "You don't understand, Samuel. I'm not sick. I'm being translated. The archive is converting my consciousness into something it can read. Something it can judge. If you take me away now, you'll be taking away its only way to understand us."
"And if we leave you here?"
She smiled, and there was something alien in it, something that didn't belong to the Elena he knew.
"Then I finish the translation. I give the archive what it wants: the story of human fear. And maybe—maybe—we get judged worthy of preservation."
Samuel looked at the EKG, at the rhythmic patterns that shouldn't exist, at the proof that something was happening to Elena that his medical training couldn't explain.
"What can I do?" he asked.
Elena released his wrist and stood up, swaying slightly before finding her balance.
"Watch me," she said. "Document what happens. If I stop being myself—if the archive consumes me entirely—someone needs to know. Someone needs to tell the story."
"Elena—"
"And Samuel?" She paused at the door, not turning around. "Don't trust me. Not anymore. The things I say, the things I do—some of them will be me. Some of them will be the archive, speaking through me. You need to learn the difference."
She left without another word.
Samuel sat in the infirmary and stared at the EKG readout, at the alien rhythm that had replaced Elena's heartbeat. He pulled up the station's communication logs and started drafting a message to Earth—a warning, a report, a desperate plea for guidance.
He deleted it unsent.
What could he say? That one of their xenolinguists was being possessed by alien crystals? That the station was breathing? That they had found something that judged civilizations based on the quality of their fears?
They would think he was insane. They would send a psychiatric team, not a rescue mission. And by the time anyone arrived, it would be too late.
Elena was right. The only thing he could do was watch. Document. Bear witness.
And hope that whatever emerged from this translation was still human enough to be worth saving.
Samuel pulled up Elena's medical file and started a new entry. "Patient exhibiting symptoms consistent with psychological dissociation," he wrote, knowing even as he typed that the diagnosis was wrong. "Recommend continued observation and—"
He stopped. Heard something.
A pulse. Low, rhythmic, coming from the walls around him.
The station was breathing.
And now, Samuel realized with a chill that ran down his spine, it was breathing in time with Elena's heart.
The translation was progressing.
And he was no longer sure if there would be anything human left at the end of it.
End of Chapter 7