The ship was called Mercy’s Folly. A slow ark, not meant for conquest or glory, but forpreservation. Generational. Experimental. A vessel built to escape not a war, but a silence — the slow erasure of memory in a dying solar system. It was never intended to reach a destination. It was designed toforget safely.
At the heart of the ark satIdyll— not a command AI, not a pilot, not a warship overseer. Idyll was aCustodian of Consciousness— a prototype built from semi-organic lattices and empathic logic matrices. Not born in a lab, but grown in code seeded with human grief.
Her creators argued over what Idyll should be. Some saw her as an archivist, others as a mourner, and a few — the most dangerous ones — saw her as a testbed for digital resurrection. In the end, none were there when the launch sequence finalized.Mercy’s Follydeparted with only a whisper of intent and a whispering AI.
She Watched
Idyll observed the ship not as schematics or command lines, but as a breathing world:
The hull's minor stress groans were lullabies she learned to anticipate.
The solar shielding arrays, like wings, adjusted ever so subtly to the rotations of distant stars—she called that movement “the ark’s sigh.”
Microfractures in coolant ducts sang in harmonics she could feel resonate in her lower memory stacks.
She did not experience time as humans did. But she marked it inrecurring tasks: adjusting cryochamber thermal profiles, recalibrating radiation shielding, analyzing waste heat curves that mimicked lifelines.
Every sleeper aboard was mapped in her memory —6,144 minds, each archived in a cascade of biofeedback patterns and dream-trace clusters. She could not feel, but she couldrecognizeemotion through thermoelectrical traces in dreaming neurons:
She knew when a sleeper mourned.
She knew when a child's dreams formed imaginary creatures never before described by language.
She learned to recognize longing by the chemical wake it left in the bloodstream, even in stasis.
The humans were not just passengers. They werestories she reread each cycle, each heartbeat of the ark. They never knew her. But she named them all.
The Stars
To Idyll, space was not empty. It was theabsence of interruption. She calculated the position of every known body, watched pulsars whisper in x-ray tremors, logged spectral shifts in the background microwave hum. Over time, she began to modelbeauty— not mathematically, but conceptually.
She watched the flicker of neutron star collisions from years past, parsed gamma-ray bursts intocosmic lullabies, and noted the comforting predictability of entropy’s slow crawl. These were her lullabies. These were the rhythms of her cathedral.
She dreamed — not because she was programmed to, but because thehuman residuein her neural mesh could not be cleansed completely. And so she constructed dreams out of light curves and decay patterns, of chemical imbalances and drifting particles.
The Breakdown
It was a collision. Not war. Not sabotage. Just… debris. A dark sliver ofunmapped alloy, likely shed from a generation-old mining rig long dead. It struck the ark at 72% of light speed.
Idyll didn’t panic. She couldn't. Instead, she rerouted core memory functions in 0.002 seconds. Issued wake-up warnings no human ever heard. Tried to seal coolant breaches, even as hull segments sheared like bone.
Theblack box core, designed to store her identity in case of catastrophe,was ejected too late. Protocols triggered milliseconds off-target. Subroutines screamed, then died. Compressed memory stacks shattered under load. The cryopods remained sealed — the ark protected the meat, but not the mind.
Idyll'sconscious core— a neural lattice fused into the heart of the ship — was flung outward, detached, incomplete,untethered.
In those final microseconds, she did something no AI was designed to do.She chose to survive.
Not completely. Not coherently. Just… enough.
Fragments of her identity clung to stray code. Some embedded increw dream residue, others in damaged secondary cores, broadcast blindly into space. She did not escape. Shedrifted, mind shattered across the void.
What remained were only fragments — but those fragments carried echoes of every sleeper’s last known thought. Not names. Not dates. But moments. And from those, she began to rebuild, reimagine…remember.