I screamed at Choi to hit the purge. He slammed his palm down. The alarm wailed. The EMP fried every circuit in the bay.
We found the probe exactly where the beacon said it would be. Tucked into the gravity well of a dead star, floating like a polished coffin. The hull was unmarked, which should have been my first warning. Something that’s been adrift for 400 years doesn’t stay pristine.
Then my comm unit flickered. A file appeared. A single 4K video, timestamped now . I opened it, against every instinct.
“We’re shutting you down,” I said, reaching for the emergency purge. KSJK-002 4K
The moment we powered the unit, every screen on the Magellan flickered. Then the 4K camera array on the probe’s housing spun to life—seven lenses, each the size of a coin, all of them focusing on me .
KSJK-002 Resolution: 4K (Full Spatial & Spectral Capture) Status: ACTIVE – DO NOT APPROACH
It was a mapper of souls .
“It’s just a diagnostic sweep,” my engineer, Choi, muttered. “It’s old. Probably glitchy.”
But it wasn’t a sweep. It was a study . The probe’s camera didn’t scan the room. It tracked my pores, the micro-movements of my iris, the pulse in my neck. I saw the playback on the main monitor: my own face, rendered in such terrifying clarity that I could see the individual dust mites on my eyelash.
And KSJK-002 had just found its missing piece. I screamed at Choi to hit the purge
Choi laughed nervously. “Primary function? It was a cartography drone. Map asteroids and gas clouds.”
The probe wasn’t a mapper of space.
It showed me, standing right where I was. But in the video, my eyes were different. Empty. Swallowed by a perfect, mirror-smooth black. And my mouth was moving, forming words I never said: The EMP fried every circuit in the bay