Morgan Fille - E242 -

The pod’s seals began to hiss.

“You have 242 of us on board,” she said, stepping out. Her bare feet left no wet prints. “But you only ever woke up one.”

“What name?” Aris asked, already pulling up the deep-dive diagnostic. Morgan Fille - E242

The cry came not from a throat, but from a speaker.

The Gear.

“It knows I’m awake.”

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. The pod’s seals began to hiss

“Protocol didn’t predict a screaming pod after two and a half centuries. Open it.”

“Open the visual feed,” Aris ordered. “But you only ever woke up one