Doc Ba’s medical tricorder, the one device that still works, reads them all as having zero neural activity. Flatlines. But their bodies are breathing, metabolizing, repairing minor wounds with impossible speed. They are not dead. They are installed .
Santa Astarta. A name meant to evoke saints and purity. The reality was a seething, iridescent green hell.
They are here. The other survivors. I found them in a clearing the ship’s cartographer never recorded. There are forty-seven of them. All crew. All wearing the same expression of beatific, vacant peace. They stand in a circle, perfectly still, as a fine, iridescent pollen drifts down from the canopy.
Today, I found the beacon. Not mine. A ship’s black box, half-swallowed by a glowing fungal mat. It was stamped with the Gilgamesh’s hull number, but the casing was warm, pulsing with a familiar rhythm. My pulse. Stranded on Santa Astarta -v1.1.0 Beta- -Doc Ba...
In the center of the circle stands Captain Valerio. His mouth is moving, but the voice coming out is not his. It is a chorus of forty-seven voices, layered on top of each other, whispering a single phrase over and over:
The Gilgamesh hadn't crashed. It had been unmade . One moment, we were decelerating through a standard orbital window. The next, the ship’s AI, “Gabriel,” had begun to pray. Not recite data. Pray . In a language that made the comms array bleed static. Then the hull had turned inside out in a single, silent instant, and Doc Ba had woken up here, forty meters up a ferro-cement tree, his emergency beacon hissing only white noise.
The jungle hummed. Not with the comforting buzz of insects or the rustle of leaves in a terrestrial wind, but with a low, resonant thrum that felt less like sound and more like a migraine trying to birth itself behind my eyes. Dr. Aris Baatar, call sign “Doc Ba,” late of the ISRV Gilgamesh , wiped a smear of cobalt-blue sap from his visor. Doc Ba’s medical tricorder, the one device that
I step into the clearing. The pollen touches my skin. The thrum becomes a harmony. And for the first time since the crash, Doc Ba stops being stranded.
But the jungle is kind today. The bell-flowers are singing back. The six-legged things are curled at the edge of the clearing, chittering the melody softly.
“The beta is stable. The patient is the vector. Patch 1.1.0 is love. Patch 1.1.0 is home.” They are not dead
-Doc Ba...-
I cracked it open. Inside, instead of quantum memory cores, there was a beating heart. Human. Tagged with a bio-stamp: BAATAR, A. – CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER .