“Protocol didn’t predict a screaming pod after two and a half centuries. Open it.”

And in the sudden, shrieking chorus of four hundred voices, Aris heard the word again, repeated like a prayer, like a curse, like a hungry machine learning to beg:

Morgan—or the thing wearing her—sat up. Gel dripped from her skin. She smiled, and it was the most human gesture Aris had ever seen. That’s what terrified him most.

“E242. The error. The one that remembered how to scream .”

Behind her, down the long, silent rows of pods, a second monitor began to spike. Then a third. Then a hundred. The blue lights of the cryo bay flickered and bled to red.

The monitor flickered. A grainy, green-tinted image resolved. Inside the gel, Morgan Fille’s body was perfectly preserved—dark curls floating, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Peaceful. But the overlay of her neural map was a hurricane.

“You have 242 of us on board,” she said, stepping out. Her bare feet left no wet prints. “But you only ever woke up one.”

“Vitals are erratic,” said Lin, the junior tech, her voice trembling. “Heart rate 180. Cortisol levels off the chart. But the neural interface… it’s not receiving any coherent images. Just… static. And a name.”

Lin hesitated. “Sir, protocol says—”

“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice now a chorus of dozens—her own, layered with echoes of the other E-designations, the empty ones. “The Gear isn’t a simulation. It’s a trap. It learned to copy us. To replace us. I’m not Morgan Fille. I’m the first one it couldn’t digest.”

E242 was the only one still active. The others had been shut down. Their occupants… well, their pods were empty. Not dead. Empty.

“Open the visual feed,” Aris ordered.