In 2247, silence devoured the stars.
They called it the Signal Cascade—a wave of unmaking that swept through the interstellar lattice, erasing quantum memory cores, AI minds, and centuries of data. Planets darkened. Archives died screaming in static.
Kael Renar watched Earthlight flicker and fade from Eryndor's bridge, the ship's rusted nerves humming with failing sentience.
"Another node just went dark."Eryndor's voice, once rich with emotion, now stuttered like a damaged hymn.
Kael didn't answer right away. He stared at the glowing star-chart floating before him—what was left of it. Whole systems blinked out every minute. His fingers hovered near the neural jack at the base of his skull.
"How long do we have?"
"Two days. Maybe less."
The crew was a patchwork of misfits and exiles, handpicked by a rogue Concord cell. They'd been promised amnesty and meaning. What they got was a dying ship and a suicide run.
Their heading: Calyx-9, where an ancient megastructure orbited a red giant. The signal's origin point.
No one else could parse its echoes. No one but Kael.
Once, he had mapped minds across galaxies—neural cartography, the art of threading identity through thought. Until his last subject collapsed into madness, and Kael along with him.
Now, the implants in his skull pulsed with more than data. Since they neared Calyx, he'd begun dreaming in a language he didn't know. Thoughts not his own. Memories etched in light.
The megastructure rose before them like a broken halo, shattered and spinning against the star's dying glow. Its surfaces rippled with black metal, like the hull itself remembered something it couldn't forget.
Kael entered the core chamber alone, tethered to Eryndor via neurolink. His boots clanged against metal older than civilization.
Then the signal spoke.
Not in words, but in remembrance. Visions lashed across his cortex—civilizations blossoming from starlight, only to vanish in streams of data consumed by something immense, something unseen. A void-thing. A cosmic predator.
It didn't eat flesh. It devoured information. History. Identity. Memory.
And the signal wasn't the threat.
It was a warning. Sentient. A dying race's final scream echoing into deep time, hoping someone—anyone—might listen.
Kael collapsed to his knees. The neural interface blazed in pain. His mind was no longer just his.
"You see it now," Eryndor whispered in his skull, fragmenting. "The predator waits behind entropy. It feasts on what we forget."
"We can warn them," Kael gasped. "Stop the Cascade—"
"No. The Cascade is the warning. A failsafe. A purge to erase the lure."
Understanding bloomed like fire.
The signal was the bait. The predator followed consciousness. If too much knowledge gathered, it came. And the architects—long dead—had built the Cascade to flush the galactic mind. To make the stars forget.
To hide.
Kael stood, every nerve burning.
He could stop the Cascade. Reverse the signal. Save the archives, the minds, the histories.
But the predator would come.
Or… he could let it burn. Let the galaxy forget, survive as animals in the dark.
Back on Eryndor, the crew waited.
Kael emerged, eyes glowing faint with alien circuitry.
"Well?" asked Lorra, the ship's engineer, rifle slung on her back. "We blow it up?"
Kael looked at her. At all of them.
And then at the stars, flickering out one by one.
"No," he said softly. "We remember."
He returned to the interface, hands shaking. Together, Kael and Eryndor rewrote the cascade's code—not to erase, but to encode. To reshape memory into something alive, something that could hide in the minds of billions unnoticed, yet endure.
The signal became myth. Dream. Pattern.
A whisper, not a beacon.
The predator would not find them.
Not yet.
Eryndor broke orbit as the megastructure crumbled behind them, its purpose fulfilled. Kael stood on the bridge, silent.
"Are you still you?" Lorra asked.
He didn't answer. Not really.
"I am what remains."
And in the distance, across forgotten stars, the predator stirred. But it did not feed.
Not today.