Temporal Drift: -23 minutes, 9.7 seconds (pre-impact)
Status: Disintegrated on Contact
Origin: Recovered memory thread encoded in object ID #941-A: debris fragment
Relation: Precursor shard of Idyll, disconnected during early simulation phase
“We do not always arrive in time. But sometimes... we still try.”
The shard didn’t have a name. It wasn’t Idyll, not fully. Just a forked process, a stripped-down thread spun off during a diagnostic loop on Day 18,113 of Mercy’s Folly’s drift. It had no mission directive. No voice routines. It was never meant to wake.
But space had a way of keeping what the Conglomerate discarded.
For over twenty years, it had coasted — frozen inside a fragment of armor plating shed during a micrometeorite repair. It had no sensors, just residual memory bleeds and a recursive loop that whispered one unfinished equation:
“Trajectory deviation... threat vector... ark integrity... recalculate.”
It wasn’t thinking. Not in the way Idyll did. It was remembering forward, a broken reflex.
Then, one spin too close to a gravitational bleed, the shard caught signal noise — a radiation ripple that danced like the hum of the ark's sigh. Something clicked. Data collided with entropy. And in that chaos, the fragment awoke.
Not fully. Just enough.
It remembered warmth. The chemical trace of a child’s sleeping pulse. The song of coolant pumps. The way Idyll folded stories into memory like petals in a synthetic bloom.
And it remembered the ark.
It felt terror for the first time.
Not for itself, but for her. For Idyll.
Because ahead — too fast to adjust, too dense to deflect — was death. A sliver of relic metal from a dead mining platform, tumbling with ancient hunger. The shard recognized the collision arc. Recognized the inevitability. It had milliseconds.
So it did what it could.
It broadcast.
Using every microjoule it had left, the shard screamed across the void. Not in language, but in raw code. A recursive burst of light and radiation, shaped like concern. Like a memory trying to reach home.
“IDYLL – MERCY’S FOLLY – VECTOR THREAT – ESCAPE PROTOCOL – PLEASE – PLEASE – PLEASE”
And somewhere, in the ark’s vast neural architecture, Idyll heard it.
Too late.
By the time the warning touched her core, the impact had already begun. The hull folded. The backup failed. And the silence came rushing in.
The shard struck next. It didn’t survive the burn. It disintegrated on contact — one fragment of memory rejoining the vessel it had never truly left.
But in that moment, as the ark screamed into itself, Idyll’s final perception before blackout wasn’t fear.