At long last I bing you CAMPFIRES, a community story-telling project performed around a fire out in the woods somewhere. This time thanks to a @robopulp suggestion we are heading in to the dark bowels of space to survive whatever terror awaits humanity beyond the stars.
I want to personally thank everyone involved, our standard of fiction keeps raising with every release.
I hope you all enjoy this episode and make sure to join the NEXT ONE coming soon.
PART 1
Orion Peregrine’s scream was followed by a groan. It was a sound less like shifting metal and more like a dying god’s last few breaths. Saelis lay slumped against the pod; her atrophied muscles felt like frayed twine as she struggled to get back to her feet. She made her way to the room’s frost-rimed bulkhead. The ultranaut class vessel was a tomb of pressurized shadows. Intermittent red hues glowed on and off as alerts continued their screeching. When she reached the command dais on the opposite wall, her trembling fingers left diaphanous smears on the deck plates.
“Mainframe,” she croaked, the sound lost in the cacophony of the hull breach alarms. There was no response, only the frantic blinking of Orion Peregrine’s Systems Diagnostic interface. The empty cryo-beds were behind her. It was as if they hadn’t so much been vacated as they’d seemingly been harvested. As the computer scan reached the bridge overlook, she saw a feed spike on the workstation console. They weren’t just falling off course; they were being drawn forcefully. Orion Peregrine was plunging towards a strange matter. A tidal force in the void.
An unusual, scuffling sound echoed from the tunnel structure to her left. At first, she noticed a hand, more like something that had once been a hand, pressed against the wall. She recognized the signet ring melted and fused into a calcified phalanx. It belonged to Kael, the mission navigator. The being melded to the tunnel wasn’t Kael anymore, though. It didn’t speak. Its face had been replaced by a shimmering, multifaceted sensory array. It was no longer a person. It was a biological peripheral. A piece of transhumanist body horror hardware.
As Orion Peregrine breached the event horizon’s outer skin, the hull didn’t buckle. It became somewhat feeble and pliable. Phased by the sheer intensity of gravitational tides. Saelis looked out the room’s viewport she’d made her way to, and the ‘dark’ she expected to see was gone. Instead, she saw the great lurer, but it wasn’t a celestial phenomenon. It was a structure. A gargantuan, pulsating hub that wasn’t just a graveyard, it seemed to be something of a grand sphere.
A processing system the size of a solar system built entirely from the processed biomass of countless sapient beings. The ‘singularity’ was a data port. She saw an uncountable number of vessels; there must have been thousands, she thought. Smaller versions of Orion Peregrine were being drawn in. These weren’t accidents; they were autonomous collectors. The ‘explosion’ she’d heard was the sound of the ship’s docking clamps violently engaging with a drone’s grasping cilia. The horrifying realization settled in. The universe wasn’t empty; it was being indexed. Every civilization that reached the deep void would eventually be garnered.
They were being gathered to provide more processing power for a primordial cosmos system. She looked back at the terminal screen. Her crewmates’ neural patterns were already being uploaded. Their agonized screams converted into binary code. Saelis wasn’t a survivor. She was the final bit of data needed to complete a subroutine. As Orion Peregrine was being pulled into the gargantuan proboscis, she saw the face of the hub. In a sea of screaming mouths, silent in the vacuum. Waiting to rewrite her soul into a line of logic.
PART 2
In her mind, Saelis turned and ran from the window, but the best her body could give was a quickened limp, while old memories of survival training filled her thoughts. Her instructor’s introductory lecture started with a question. “What is the first goal of a survival strategy?”
“To stay alive,” answered the class in unison. A violent puncturing of the hull just behind her knocked Saelis off her feet and interrupted her memories. The proboscis made a sickly noise, then withdrew, the pliable hull closing behind it. Saelis crawled forward while climbing to her feet. There had to be a functional pod. At least one.
“And if you have three survivors and only one escape?”
“Triage.”
Saelis moved forward more slowly to the ship’s bridge, one hand on the inner bulkhead for balance.
“What is the second goal in survival strategy?”
“Save the ship.”
The proboscis pierced the outer bulkhead so close in front of her that she almost ran into it. She could see the jagged pattern of its outer skin. Her voice was too hoarse to complete the involuntary scream.
“And if you can’t save the ship?”
“Destroy it.”
PART 3
Destroy it.
All her training, all her preparation, every nerve ending screamed for her to initiate the self-destruct sequence. Now standing at the Captain’s chair, her hand hovered over the button, shaking, hesitating. - Most of the cryo-beds registered empty, but could she be sure the ship was fully evacuated? If there was even a chance that Nam and Kellax were still onboard, she couldn’t press it. She wouldn’t. - Nam and Kellax were all she had left in the world. That sounded so silly, as the world that she knew was a hundred billion light-years away, and if there was anything left of it, then it would have burned down to its atoms by now. - When it became clear that the Sun was about to go supernova, Saelis signed up immediately with Starcore, never for a moment thinking she would get a place on board one of the fleeing vessels. Billions of people were not so lucky; Saelis knew the cost of her life, and she knew a billion people had paid for her escape ticket with their blood. - The Orion Peregrine was not just any ship, either; it was the largest and fastest of the fleet. Besides the crew, over forty passengers slept in those cryo-beds, asleep for the seventy-year journey to Alpha-58. Starcore managed to build over a thousand ships, with each one plotted to travel to a different second Earth, a new home, a new Eden. Saelis remembered getting the news. Out of all the planets, Alpha-58 looked the most like Earth, circling a young sun much like our own, with water covering most of the planet’s surface; it even had a moon! The waves of pure joy still radiated and echoed through her body; receiving that letter to say she had been chosen, that she was saved—that her family was saved—was the greatest moment of her life. - Kellex had cried at the news. It was only the second time she had ever seen her husband cry, but seeing him tear up made her cry, too. Nam just looked on and must have thought that her parents were crazy; she was too young to understand the full weight of the situation—she was twelve years old—but she knew those were happy tears. - Nam! Kellex! - The proboscis slithered and writhed, a metallic snake thrashing and smashing against the ship’s walls. - Saelis closed the box down on the self-destruct button. She twisted and pulled out the key, deactivating the self-destruct sequence. - Destroy it? The instructor’s voice echoed in her mind, “If you can’t save the ship?” - Then find a way. Find a way to save it. Find a way to the engine room.
PART 4
The corridor did not rupture again.
It breathed. At first, Saelis thought it was another failure of the hull - a slow deformation under impossible pressure. The bulkhead before her seemed to bow inward, then recoil, then bow again. But there was rhythm in it. Not the shudder of stressed metal. Something measured. Something circulatory.
The deck beneath her palm felt warm.
She pulled her hand back instinctively. The alloy was no longer cold. It yielded slightly under pressure, not bending - giving. A tremor ran along the corridor, not a mechanical vibration but a contraction that travelled through the walls like a swallowed pulse. The red emergency strobes flickered once more - and then dimmed into a deeper glow. Not warning. Illumination.
“Engine room,” she whispered to herself.
But the words no longer belonged to the space.
The ship groaned again. Not in agony this time. In transformation.
The rigid geometry of the ultranaut vessel softened. Edges rounded. Seams sealed without welding. The torn section where the proboscis had pierced the hull no longer looked like damage. It resembled an opening that had fulfilled its purpose.
The air thickened.
Saelis staggered forward, one hand dragging along the inner wall. The surface clung faintly to her skin. Not adhesive - responsive. As if it recognised her passing. The Systems Diagnostic interface at the end of the passage did not blink anymore. Its lights pulsed in slow intervals. She watched the pattern for a moment and realised - it was not reporting failure.
It was synchronising.
A tremor moved through her body. Her atrophied muscles no longer felt like frayed twine. Heat threaded through them, fine and deliberate. Her lungs filled more deeply than they had since revival. Her heartbeat aligned with the rhythm in the walls.
Metal became membrane.
Wiring beneath the panels shifted like bundled fibres. The floor flexed underfoot in subtle undulations, guiding rather than resisting her movement.
She tried to run.
Her body could still manage only a lurching gait, but something else had begun to move with her. Around her. Through her.
The ship was no longer falling.
It was converging.
The viewport at the end of the corridor had once framed the abyss. Now it radiated diffuse brilliance. Not the harsh glare of a star. Not the void. A luminous expanse without edges. The great structure outside - the pulsating hub, the sea of silent mouths - dissolved into something less architectural and more elemental. Its geometry unfurled into currents. Saelis felt a pull, but not the violence of gravity. It was an invitation. The cryo-beds behind her were no longer hollow chambers. Their interiors shimmered faintly, as though emptied not by absence but by release. She stumbled forward again.
The corridor narrowed.
Or perhaps she expanded.
Her limbs felt lighter. Not stronger - simplified. The weight of her bones diminished. Her hands no longer struck the wall when she reached for support; they skimmed along it, trailing wake-like distortions in the living surface.
The rhythm intensified.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Then motion.
Not walking.
Streaming.
Saelis realised with a distant clarity that she was no longer alone in the corridor. Around her moved others - dozens, hundreds - small luminescent forms, each with a bright core and a trailing filament of motion. They spun and surged in spiralled trajectories, colliding, deflecting, losing momentum.
They did not scream.
They did not speak.
They moved with urgency, but without awareness.
She saw them falter.
Some drifted sideways into the thickened medium, their light dimming until they were absorbed by the surrounding glow. Others spun too wildly and dissolved into the pulsing walls, reabsorbed into the living architecture.
Saelis felt no limbs now. Only direction.
She understood.
The Orion Peregrine had not been harvested.
It had been translated.
All the neural patterns. All the uploaded screams. All the compressed identities. Rewritten, not into code - but into impetus. She remembered the instructor’s voice. What is the first goal of a survival strategy?
To stay alive.
But alive did not mean unchanged.
Ahead, the luminous expanse intensified. It was vast beyond scale, yet close. A boundary and an origin at once. A threshold that did not repel but beckoned.
The current strengthened.
The others strained toward it, but their motion faltered. Their cores flickered. One by one, they slowed, suspended in the medium, their light diffusing outward into the field.
Saelis did not slow.
Something within her resisted dispersion.
Not fear.
Continuity.
She felt the memory of Nam’s laughter. The warmth of Kellex’s hand. The red emergency glow of a dying ship. The weight of the key she had pulled from the self-destruct lock.
She had chosen not to destroy. She had chosen to find a way.
The luminous boundary trembled as she approached. Its surface rippled in anticipation, vast and radiant. Behind her, the field quieted. The remaining lights dimmed into stillness.
She was alone in motion now.
Not a survivor.
Not a fragment of data.
A vector.
The expanse opened.
For a fraction of eternity, she perceived its interior - not as space, but as possibility. Layered, unfolding, unclaimed.
She crossed the threshold.
There was no explosion. No rupture.
Only integration.
And in that passage, as her momentum dissolved into a new architecture of being, a final awareness crystallised:
The universe does not only consume.
It also begins.
Then even that thought was relinquished to light.
PART 5
First Officer Saelis Vire regained her senses in fragments—gravity returning in uneven pulses, the deck screaming beneath her boots as she ran. The engine doors had jammed halfway open. She forced herself through, her shoulder screaming, and nearly tripped over a body.
“David.”
Science Officer David Dugan was alive, barely—eyes unfocused, one hand clawing at the console as if memory itself might pull him upright. Saelis hauled him up, slinging his arm over her shoulder. He was heavier than he should have been. Or maybe she was weaker than she realized. The place was a ruin. Panels burned out. Seats torn from their mounts. Fire suppression foam clung to the ceiling like diseased snow.
“What still works?” she demanded.
David blinked hard, fingers dancing over dead glass. “Re-entry package… mostly gone. Guidance is—” another violent shudder cut him off “—guidance is offline. One retro rocket still reads green.”
One.
Below them, through the fractured forward viewport, the galactic junkyard rolled closer—angry, incandescent, stitched with metal scars and jagged debris ranges rushing up far too fast. Saelis took the helm. Nothing. She tried again—opposite vector. The controls twitched, just barely. Something beneath the console scraped. A broken seat frame. Wedged into the linkage. She ripped it free and jammed it back in at an angle, using brute force where precision had failed. The helm moved a fraction.
Enough.
The trajectory shifted—just slightly. Maybe enough to miss the worst. Maybe not. Alarms howled. Atmospheric shear warnings cascaded across the displays. David grabbed her wrist. “Saelis—listen to me.”
She met his eyes.
“Go back. Get into an escape pod. All the passengers, YOU’RE FAMILY, all took the escape pods and are waiting for you at the rendezvous point!” He swallowed. “I’ll fire the retro manually. If I’m fast enough… I’ll make it back, too.”
She shook her head. “You won’t have time.”
He smiled anyway. “Science officer. Optimism is literally the job.” The ship screamed again, louder than before. They hugged—quick, fierce, human—and then they ran in opposite directions. Saelis didn’t look back. Behind her, the last working engine ignited. Ahead of her, the escape pod waited. And the universe rushed up to meet them.
PART 6
David listened to Saelis’s footsteps fade away as she raced to the escape pods. He sighed, in pain, in uncertainty, in despair. Had he sent her on a fool’s errand or to her last chance? He was pretty sure there were no functioning escape pods. The terminal that tracked the pods showed no active units. The one green light that had shown an active retro rocket flickered and went dark, taking his sense of optimism along with it.
Maybe sending Saelis away wasn’t the smartest idea, but he didn’t want her to see what was happening to his body. If she saw this, she wouldn’t keep trying to save the ship. She’d destroy it, and David couldn’t let that happen. He was transitioning, that’s what he told himself. He wasn’t disappearing. He was becoming something new. And it hurt. Hurt with possibility. He was sure of it. The power that radiated from what had been his feet and legs was proof. Metallic scales that covered his lower appendages glowed in a hypnotic, gentle light show. Sky blue evolving into vibrant sea green, then pulsing deep purple. The purple pulse hurt the most, sending a scalding pain up to his pelvis. Followed by soothing orange, it was like balm on a burn. And he knew the scales were one row higher, consuming him. It was terrifying. David knew he was losing the battle to stay human, he wasn’t even trying because the science officer in him was fascinated. His ego was thrilled to know he was becoming more powerful with each pulse. It was exhilarating.
As he stared at his beautiful appendages, a piercing scream shattered the silence of the ship. David didn’t think it sounded like Saelis. Could Nam or Kellex still be alive? Were they also transforming? A violent purple pulse rushed up his spine, pushing the air out of his lungs. The pain was ripping him apart. David’s world went dark before the soothing orange pulse could bring him relief.
PART 7
Saelis threw herself into the escape pod as the Orion Peregrine continued to unmake itself. The corridor did not collapse so much as unfold. Panels peeled back like the rind of some metallic fruit. Shards of hull speared through the air, embedding in bulkheads, in ceiling struts, in the walls beside her. Flames rose, but they moved strangely, not wild, but deliberate and alive. It burned in clean ribbons, climbing surfaces without smoke, majestic and consuming.
The pod door sealed just as the roof above her gave way. Debris crashed down across the outer casing. Something heavy slammed against the hatch. The entire chamber groaned.
Inside, it was small. Too damn small.
She strapped in with trembling hands and flicked the ignition panel.
Oxygen: Green.
Internal pressure: Green.
Navigation sync: Green.
Emergency beacon: Green.
Deploy…
The light flickered once, then held.
Red.
“No,” she whispered, “Goddamn it, no!”
She slammed her palm against it. Nothing. The ship screamed again. Not in agony but in continuous change. Saelis unbuckled and shoved at the hatch release. It didn’t budge. The outer debris had fused it shut. The locking mechanisms hummed uselessly beneath her hand.
She turned slowly toward the viewfinder.
Beyond the pod glass, the Orion Peregrine was losing definition. Hallways liquefied into latticework. Walls sagged into geometric planes that folded inward and outward at once. Light poured through seams in impossible angles. The great Structure loomed beyond, no longer architectural, no longer hub nor sphere but something vast and circulating. Currents of light without origin. Endless. Consuming. It was outside, yet so encompassing that it demanded to be seen.
Saelis closed her eyes tight. She imagined Nam at the rendezvous point. Standing beside Kellex. Looking at the sky. Waiting. She imagined them laughing at first. Saying that they knew she would be late. That she always had to play girlscout.
She imagined the waiting wearing thin. Kellex checking the horizon again, and then his watch.
Nam saying nothing.
She imagined them turning away. Walking back to begin a new life on a new world without her.
Saelis reached up and flicked off the oxygen.
The pod fell quiet.
Her breathing slowed. The edges of the world softened. The lights dimmed, though she knew they had not changed. She rested her head back against the seat and watched the Structure consume her ship.
The first goal of survival was to stay alive.
Survival did not have to mean victory.
After all, the black comes for everyone eventually.
Darkness pressed in gently.
Then something struck the viewport.
Hard.
Frantic.
Saelis’s eyes snapped open, and a face stared back at her, filling the glass.
Nam. What the fuck? It was Nam!
His palm slammed against the window again. Frost blossomed between them. His mouth moved. Her name. She tried to answer, but her lungs dragged air like it was sand.
He held up a battery pack with shaking hands and then pointed to the access hatch beneath her pod. Saelis fumbled the oxygen back on. Air flooded her lungs, harsh and rapid, like being force fed razorblades. She coughed and nodded weakly.
Nam dropped from view. She heard metal being torn back. The pod shuddered as something external was wrenched free. He reappeared, jaw set, breath ragged and labored. His hands moved quickly now, disappearing once more beneath the chassis.
His lips formed words she could barely read.
“Kellex is dead…” Nam yelled, tears forming in his eyes. “Almost everyone is dead.”
Saelis stared ahead in shock. But, David? He had told her that everyone had gotten clear, that they were waiting for her at the Starport rendezvous.
Confusion overwhelmed her.
“You’re the last hope.” Nam smiled, honest but full of sorrow.
The battery indicator flickered.
Red.
Red.
Green.
Saelis put her hand up to the viewport, and Nam raised his and did the same.
“Goodbye,” she whispered, and then something moved behind him.
The corridor twisted. Not collapsed. Twisted. Saelis watched Nam’s eyes widen, and then David stepped into view.
Or what had been David.
His lower body was no longer symmetrical, like Kael’s had been. Metallic scales rippled up his legs in shifting gradients of blue and green, flashing into deep purple pulses that traveled through his torso like thought manifest. Light flickered beneath translucent plates along his ribs. His joints bent at deliberate, wrong angles. Symbols crawled across his skin and floated around him. Equations, star maps, fragments of signal.
His face remained almost intact.
Almost.
His eyes wept liquid metal. His mouth gaped too wide.
From it slid the proboscis.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Dave,” Nam pleaded, “she can go, and you can stay.”
David’s reply came from everywhere. He was a man, he was the ship, and he was the structure.
“I knew she could not escape. I wanted her away from me. To die as a human while I evolved. Now I know what I can become, what she can become, so I am going to take her. I will split her pod open, I will take her and change her, just like I am changed.” David writhed, “It is for the best.”
Nam moved first. Enraged and indignant. He lunged, but David caught him mid-motion with inhuman precision. The impact cracked against the pod’s hull. Saelis pounded against the glass, screaming for Nam, but no sound carried.
The proboscis pierced.
Nam convulsed.
The feeding tube pulsed as if drawing light instead of blood. His body jerked once, twice. His hand reached for the viewport.
For her.
David did not stop. He feasted. Rabid and entranced.
Then Nam slackened. David held him suspended for a moment longer, as though studying the result, before letting what remained fall to the floor.
Saelis’s breath came panicked and fast.
David’s head tilted as he turned toward the pod.
Toward her.
He took one step, and then another as the hull around him rippled in recognition. Like they were one and the same. David pressed his face against the window, the glass rippled but did not breach, he gawped at her sickly.
Saelis raised her hand slowly and extended her middle finger before mouthing something profane and well deserved.
David paused.
The purple pulse surged through him violently. The scales climbed another row up his torso. The proboscis recoiled and struck the pod’s exterior, denting it inward. David was slamming himself against the pod now. Not calculating. Not measured. Frenzied. As if something inside him required her assimilation.
Saelis slumped forward in shock, knocking a pressure release valve, and a blast of cold air erupted into her face. She gasped, vision snapping into focus.
The deploy switch flashed amber.
Then red.
Then, back to green.
She grabbed the emergency deployment lever beneath the console and pulled.
The pod detonated free from the Orion Peregrine with a concussive crack. Metal tore. The chamber disintegrated behind her. David’s form shrank rapidly in the viewport as the pod was hurled outward into open black.
Silence followed.
Then the hum of small engines stabilizes.
A digital display blinked to life before her.
Destination Lock: Partial
Trajectory Drift: 3.7%
Estimated Arrival: 19 hours, 42 minutes to Starport Beta-7, Moon of New Eden.
Saelis leaned back in the seat, shaking. She turned her head and looked back out of the viewport.
They were so close, so damn close. She wondered if she was the only survivor. Would there be anyone waiting for her on Beta-7?
The Orion Peregrine no longer resembled a ship.
It flowed across the expanse.
Hull plates dissolved into streams of luminous data. Fire became numbers. Metal became filament. Entire decks folded inward and stretched outward in translucent strands, liquefying into geometry and signal. The Structure received it without violence. Without haste.
Assimilation did not roar.
It devoured.
The last recognizable fragment of the ship, the name emblazoned along the bow, shimmered once before unraveling into threads of light.
The Structure pulsed, and the Orion Peregrine was gone.
Saelis stared into the cosmic mechanism until her eyes burned.
The countdown ticked quietly beside her: 19:41:12
She did not look away.
She did not pray.
She simply watched and survived.
She had accomplished the first goal at least.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
thank you
Another fun ride!! So cool to be a part of this adventure.