The first time we caught the signal, we thought it was ghost chatter-reflections off old comm buoys or some gravity-warped echo. But when it repeated five times, with the exact same degradation pattern, protocol kicked in.

I was on systems rotation aboard *The Winterlight*, half-asleep and still nursing a pressure headache from a rough docking job the day before. Tass, our pilot, called it in first. 'Got something pinging us from the dark. Dead center, ten degrees above port. It's... repeating.'

I rubbed at my temple and patched into the signal line. Static. Then: a voice. Fragmented, digital, male. '...Jacaranda...request...code red...bio-containment... breach...'

The words chilled me, not because of what they said, but because of how familiar the voice felt. Like I’d heard it before-maybe in a dream. Or a nightmare.

*The USC Jacaranda* had gone dark almost seven years ago. Officially declared lost. The name had come up once before, in another log… my brother's last transmission.

Protocol said we had to investigate. Salvage crews don’t get the luxury of fear. We geared up.

*The Jacaranda* drifted just outside the pull of a black hole, a place where time started bending and radio signals warped like glass in fire. Her lights flickered sporadically. Docking was rough-automated ports weren’t responding. We had to burn manual thrusters and clamp with an override. By the time we crossed the airlock, gravity was sporadic and the lights were dimmed to emergency red.

The place smelled like ionized air and silence. No sign of the crew. Just empty halls, flickering HUDs, and the occasional stutter of a backup system trying to kick on.

I linked into the mainframe from a panel in the med bay. Systems were partially fried, memory fragmented, but one thing stood out. A repeating internal message looped on a subchannel: 'DO NOT LET IT REMEMBER YOU.'

I backed away from the console, heart stuttering. Tass called in over comms-he found blood smears near cryo. No bodies. Just impressions. Drag marks.

And then, the lights flickered again. For a split second, I saw a figure at the end of the corridor. Human silhouette. Head tilted sideways. Watching.

But when the lights steadied, it was gone.

Back on *The Winterlight*, I tried to tell myself it was stress. Memory ghosts. But as I laid in my bunk, I swore I heard that same warped voice again, faint through the vents:

'Calla... you came back...'

And I knew. This wasn’t salvage. It was bait.

Continue reading (Chapter-2) » The Jacaranda isn’t haunted by ghosts—it’s rewriting them.