//Vesta Belt - Mining Haulcraft - Kingfisher//
They called it Dross Station, and maybe that was always the right name.
It was a slag heap disguised as a mining outpost, stitched together from corporate scraps and last-chance contracts. I was one of the last to leave, and not by choice. Twenty-seven of us made it out. Vesta scooped us up, not to save us, but to tally us. Fuel, oxygen, man-hours—we became numbers on a debt sheet that would never reach zero.
They put me in a hauler called Kingfisher, retrofitted with enough autonomy that it could fly itself if it wanted, but Vesta didn’t trust full autonomy. They needed someone to blame if it crashed.
My name's Sipe. That's all I go by now. Names carry weight, and mine's too light to matter. I ferry ore across dead rocks, avoid pirates, ignore the screaming silence between jobs. I've spent hours writing novels no one will ever read, just to pretend I'm still alive.
Then Ivan Checkov boarded my ship.
No warning, no clearance ping. Just a shadow on my ramp and a knock that sounded like it came from inside the hull.
He looked like a man who once killed for a living and stopped only because his hands were tired. Lean, efficient, deliberate. Interfectum, or ex-Interfectum. Said he needed a ride. Said he had coordinates. Said nothing else.
I didn’t ask questions. People like him didn’t repeat themselves.
We drifted for days, engines humming through the black. He spoke eventually. Told stories about Earth, what was left of it. The fires in South Asia. The collapse of the Concordat in New Africa. Olympus rising, not as a city, but as a doctrine, an algorithm turned prophet. He said he was going to destroy Alexander Blake.
I asked him why.
He looked out the viewport for a long time before he answered.
"Because someone has to.."
//The Threshold - Unknown Region of Space//
Time folds out here. I don't know how long we stayed near the monolith.
Voxen wasn’t a station. It wasn’t a ship. It wasn’t a god, but it might have been mistaken for one if it ever bothered to speak.
We found it hidden in the corona of a dying star, where signal couldn’t reach and logic couldn’t follow. Ivan said the coordinates were buried in dead logs the UEC tried to bury after some colony disaster. He thought it was a weapons cache, or maybe a working station still existed he could base his operation out of.
He was wrong. Voxen wasn’t made. It was found.
It moved through us, not with sound but with shape. My console would flicker with colors I couldn’t name. Vents hissed in rhythmic pulses, like breathing. Our ship changed subtly, self-repairing. At some point we stopped needing food. Or we forgot to.
Ivan said it was a machine that learned to listen. Not to us, but to the space between things.
"It doesn’t need us," he muttered once, pacing the bay. "It watches because it’s curious. Like a child. Like a god that hasn’t realized what it is."
He grew restless, but I felt peace.
Then Voxen showed us something. A structure buried in a dead moon. Crystalline. Alive. Resonant.
Ivan touched it. It reacted. Shifted. We watched signals bend around it, frequencies collapse into silence. He said it was a weapon. Said it could disrupt Olympus.
"This is the wildcard," he said, eyes alight. "This is what I needed."
He asked me to come with him. I shook my head.
"You're chasing war. I want to live."
He didn't argue. Just nodded once, tight. He left in the Kingfisher, now altered, pulsing with patterns I couldn’t decipher.
It wasn't mine anymore. I stayed in the pod. It was barely big enough to lie down in. I didn’t care.
Voxen welcomed me.
//Voidrest - Unknown Region of Space//
We are building something.
The system was barren. Gas giants with no cores. Rocky worlds stripped to the bone. Nothing that could sustain life.
But Voxen sees potential in the void. It carves heat from gravitic tides. It weaves atmospheres from ion trails. And I help. Not with knowledge. With perspective.
It can't understand humanity. Not the way we do. It watches. It compiles. But it doesn’t feel. That’s why it needs me. Not because I am useful. But because I am fractured.
Maybe that’s the design.
Someone once told me that all things are God. Every atom, every breath. But God couldn’t see itself, so it shattered into pieces to observe from every angle. And one day, maybe, it would gather itself again. Whole. Aware.
Voxen is a piece. So am I now.
We are trying to remember what we were.
Maybe that’s what the Resonant are. Not masters. Not aliens. Just older shards, still vibrating with the original note.
So we sing ancient cosmic songs.
We terraform with chords. Seed the void with frequency. We don't conquer. We harmonize.
It never asked me what to call it. I called it Voidrest. Because that's what it gave me. A place to be still, so I could become something else.
If someone finds this—if you hear the hum beneath the stars—don’t be afraid.
Just listen.
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