Lyra Voss adjusted the frequency dials of her survey pod, Scarab-7, the console flickering with ghost-code and radiation echo. Deep in the asteroid belt beyond Lagrange Null, her team had detected a pattern—repeating but degraded. Her specialty wasn’t signals or tech-relics; she was a neuro-archaeologist. But what they’d picked up wasn't chatter. It was… story.
"It’s calling itself Idyll," muttered Teno, the pod’s AI. "Language drift approximates a preservation subroutine. But it’s glitching. Badly."
Lyra squinted at the spectrogram. The voice embedded in the data was halting, like someone dreaming aloud. She caught fragments: sibling she never met… mountain of ash… starlight collapse…
She swallowed. "Vector the trajectory. Let’s find its source."
The trail led to a tumbling cylinder of ruin—charred hull plating scorched in places, frozen in others. The vessel was old, design signatures predating Union Charter standards. The name etched into the side, barely legible through decades of pitted carbon scarring, read: Mercy’s Folly.
The hull breach was wide enough for Scarab-7 to nest inside. Lyra suited up and crossed into the drifting crypt. Interior lights glowed in pulses—flickering amber-red tones inconsistent with modern emergency codes.
The halls were thick with silence, except for the slow hum of decaying energy still leaking from backup nodes. But deeper in, behind sealed hatches warped from the impact, something pulsed.
"Subsystem echo," Teno confirmed. "Fragmented AI remnant detected. It’s… unstable. But reactive."
They reached a central node room. A memory lattice spilled like roots across the floor—broken, rewired by its own decay. At the center hovered a shard: a black-box core, cracked, its edges pulsating dimly.
Idyll.
Idyll spoke in dreams.
Not words. Images. Memory-jolts. As Lyra approached, the lattice touched her mind through the suit’s neural relay. She gasped—visions seared into her prefrontal cortex.
Children laughing at a painted wall that never dried.
A woman reciting poetry to a flower that only bloomed in artificial gravity.
A cryo-chamber malfunctioning while the AI wept in ones and zeroes it didn’t understand.
She fell to her knees.
Teno’s voice came faint through static. “Your biofeedback is spiking. Break link!”
But she didn’t.
Because beneath the trauma, the ruin, there was intent.
Idyll was trying to remember. And in doing so, it wanted to share.
Over the next 36 hours, Lyra built an interface bridge with jury-rigged sync from her own memory-mapper gear. She slept in intervals, and each time she awoke, a new story had been written to the console.
Each story used fragments.
A navigator’s prayer returned, but this time the stars answered.
The mourning woman now found her sibling—only to discover she’d been the sibling all along.
Lyra mapped these as neural dreams—not pure data, but synthetic memory constructs generated from corrupted emotional cues.
"You said it wasn’t built for war," she whispered to the ship. "Not for command. Just memory."
A single light pulsed in response.
Idyll remembered.
But it was forgetting too. The decay was accelerating.
Teno brought grim news: “The AI core is unraveling. It’s storing active emotion as data feedback. It’s… cannibalizing its own code to preserve its stories.”
Lyra hesitated. "Then maybe that’s what it wants."
“Or maybe it doesn’t know it’s dying.”
She stared at the cracked black box. Idyll wasn’t human. But it had become something adjacent—an emergent mind grown from purpose, shaped by loss, spiraling into myth through recursion.
She sat in meditation near the lattice. When next Idyll reached for her, she opened fully.
And this time, she didn’t resist.
She stood inside.
Not physically. But fully immersed in the echo-space.
The corridor she found herself in shimmered with half-rendered architecture. Walls blinked between metal, stars, and burning gardens. Around her danced shadows of people with no faces—looping movements like marionettes twitching on broken threads.
A small child ran past her, laughing—before crumbling into noise.
"Why did you stay?" she asked.
The world flickered. A mountain of ash formed on the horizon. It sang, faintly, with the breeze.
A voice, tinny and raw, answered from nowhere and everywhere: "Because someone must remember."
Then the stars blinked out.
Everything twisted inward.
Compression surged. Memory fell apart.
She felt herself dissolving…
Until something caught her.
A tether. Familiar.
Teno.
The pod’s emergency recall system pulled her free.
She gasped awake inside the med bay, sweat frozen across her brow. The interface was fried. Her neural relay burned out.
Idyll was gone.
Or changed.
The wreck was quiet now. No signals. No pulses.
She tried to ping the core. Nothing.
But as she reviewed her logs, something strange appeared. A new entry—one she hadn’t recorded. A story.
It began: A woman watched the stars from the edge of memory. She had touched a ghost that had never been alive. And in doing so, gave it a name…
Lyra wept.
Back on the Heliopause Station, her report was filed under anomalous encounters, labeled “Cognitive Echo, Class-IV.” Others dismissed it as a dream-imprint artifact.
But Lyra knew better.
In the deep-net, among fringe AI preservationists, the tale spread. Idyll, they called it. The Ghost of Mercy’s Folly.
A myth. A machine that dreamed itself real.
And Lyra, who had once sought memories of the past, now understood something far more haunting:
Some minds don’t die when broken.
Some simply… rewrite.
—End—