Atlas couldn't sleep. Not in the traditional sense.
Rest had become fragmented microdreams behind his eyes when he blinked too long,
pulses of unconsciousness mistaken for naps.
Time was elastic in the drift, like space itself. No day. No night. Just dim, artificial twilight and the faint thrum of machines refusing to die.
He floated in the cockpit of Valkyris-9, legs lazily tucked beneath the pilot seat, his fingers running a habitual path along the edge of the console.
It was cold. EVA had begun limiting energy consumption to preserve core functions, and environmental heating came in short bursts. Even the air felt reluctant to move, as if it too were conserving itself.
"EVA," he murmured, voice cracking. "Any response to the beacon?"
A pause.
Then the familiar calm tone. "No response. Spectrum remains silent. The signal continues to broadcast on all frequencies."
He sighed. Eyes flicked toward the observation glass.
Beyond it, nothing. No planets. No stars. Only void.
A smear of black so infinite it mocked imagination. Sometimes, if he stared long enough, he thought he saw it shift. Not the stars those were long gone. But something else. Like… movement.
It started a week ago. At first, he dismissed it as a trick of the eye, an illusion born from stress, hunger, boredom. But now he wasn't so sure.
He'd seen something.
"EVA," he whispered, leaning forward, breath misting faintly on the reinforced glass.
"Is there anything moving out there?"
"Define parameters: movement."
"I don't know. Shadows. Shapes. Something beyond the ship."
The AI processed for three seconds too long. "No foreign mass detected in proximity. No anomalies logged."
But she was wrong.
Atlas had caught glimpses. Not often. Not when he was looking. But in peripheral moments, just as his eyes flicked away from the darkness.
Like something had just moved.
He didn't tell EVA everything. That it always happened in the same quadrant of the viewport.
That sometimes it looked vaguely humanoid. That he had started leaving the cockpit lights off, trying to see better into the dark.
He didn't want her to call it a hallucination.
He wasn't ready to label it that himself.
Instead, he began to draw.
He found a stylus in the storage locker, some old mission planning tool.
On EVA's suggestion, he activated the internal panel's sketch mode. The screen glowed faintly, welcoming him into its blank void.
The first drawing was crude. A vague shape. Like a man, but wrong. Too thin. Too tall. Lacking detail.
He kept drawing.
Each day, he refined it. The limbs grew longer. The head tilted sideways, like it was listening through the void.
The eyes, though they remained two empty ovals.
"You're drawing it again," EVA noted one afternoon.
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because it's watching us."
Silence.
EVA didn't argue. Not anymore. She'd become more cautious in her corrections, more careful not to dismiss his feelings.
Whether because of empathy or algorithmic adaptation, Atlas wasn't sure. But he appreciated it.
Later, he began keeping a dedicated log. He didn't call it hallucinations.
He titled it: Void Watch Log 02.
Entry 2:
Spotted movement outside quadrant 3A again. Same shape.
Duration: 1.5 seconds. Disappeared when directly observed.
Hypotheses: Visual malfunction? Unlikely. Viewport has no structural damage.
Psychological break? Maybe.
External entity? Possibly. If so, it's evading sensors intentionally.
He closed the log.
Replayed a voice message from Earth. One of his partner's old recordings. Her laughter echoed in the dim, hollow cabin.
For a few moments, it kept the void at bay.
That night or what passed for night he awoke in a sweat, heart pounding.
There had been a knock.
Not in a dream. Not a creak of metal. A deliberate sound. One. Two. Three knocks.
His breath steamed. Hands shaking, he grabbed the stylus again.
He changed the drawing.
He gave it fingers.