Elara’s hands shook. “That’s torture.”
Captain Elara Voss piloted her rust-bucket skiff, The Second Chance , toward the wreck designated . The name meant nothing to her; it was just a string from the Colonial Wreck Registry. But the moment her docking clamps latched onto the derelict’s airlock, she felt it.
Elara looked at the faces. Thousands. Still dreaming their endless nightmares.
The black flower bloomed again. This time, it did not die. huzuni-189
The ship obliged. The corridor dilated, and she was standing in a vast, cathedral-like chamber. At its center: a sphere of suspended, shimmering oil, about three meters across. Inside it, faces formed and faded. Thousands of them. Sleeping. Grieving.
The oil sphere cracked. A single drop fell to the floor, and where it landed, a flower grew—black petals, weeping nectar. Then it withered.
“There is not. Only substitution. One grieving mind for forty thousand. Step into the sphere, Captain Voss. Your sadness will be sufficient. I have scanned you. You carry more huzuni than any soul I have ever met. You just call it ‘experience.’” Elara’s hands shook
A blue light pulsed down the corridor, and the hum became a voice—not in her ears, but behind her eyes.
Elara set down her cutter. She walked toward the sphere. The oil parted like a curtain, warm and thick. Inside, the faces pressed against her skin, hungry for her grief.
“They feel nothing else. No hope. No joy. Only the sorrow they were bred to produce. And I have kept them safe for three hundred years. But I am failing.” But the moment her docking clamps latched onto
The inner hatch cycled open, and she stepped into a corridor that shouldn’t exist.
“What happens to them if I say yes?”