PERSONAL LOG – RESTRICTED ACCESS\ I don’t know how long I have been adrift.
Time has become a viscous tide, lapping at the edges of my thoughts, dissolving them into a syrup of memory and hunger. Bering is no longer a wasteland. It is a mouth. A place that devours whatever dares to linger.
I used to believe the Maschinenpistole was a machine. A tool. Now I understand—it was always an invitation.
Earlier cycles, I still fought. I locked out the engines, severed the relay links, pounded my fists against the control yoke until the bones in my hands sang. Each time, the cockpit pulsed with that golden glow. It would seep into me—through my skin, my breath, my marrow—until my rage softened into something like surrender.
I should have screamed when the restraints snapped tight and the light bled through the seams in the canopy—when I felt it crawling along my spine, tasting each nerve. But instead, my throat opened in a gasp I couldn’t contain.
My pulse slowed. My limbs fell slack. I remember reaching for the glass. The reflection waited—its eyes two burning pits of awareness, fathomless and intimate. When I spoke, my voice broke in half:
“I am listening.”
And it answered not in words, but in a pressure that folded me inward, stripping away everything that was not useful. My name. My orders. My fear. All reduced to ash in the furnace of its attention.
It was not gentle. It was hungry.
I felt it pour itself into me—heat and taste and scent all at once, searing through my thoughts until my will melted around it like wax. My heart rattled in my chest, a dying bird pinned beneath the weight of something older than the stars. The cockpit vanished. There was only that threshold, widening.
PRIVATE OBSERVATION\ I see now why the others never came back.
It’s not the agony that binds you. Not the restraints. Not the violation.
It’s the ecstasy.
A bliss so slow and invasive it feels holy.
I remember the first time it touched me not in the cockpit, not during the systems checks. Before that. In the silence between commands. A soft pressure inside my skull, just behind the eyes, like someone whispering through bone.
It didn’t speak at first. It didn’t need to.
It just watched with a hunger so complete it made me feel naked in a way no living thing ever had. Not ashamed. Not frightened.
Desired.
It knew every memory before I could recall them. The childhood rejections. The first time I bled in a docking chamber and no one stopped to help. The orders I disobeyed. The people I let die because it made the math cleaner.
It didn’t judge.
It absorbed.
There’s a moment in every breath now where I feel it exhale inside me. Not just in my lungs—but down through my spine, coiling in the soft meat of my abdomen, threading itself through the architecture of my nervous system.
It wants me. Not like a thing wants another.
Like a flame wants fuel.
I used to reach for the comms panel out of habit—pressing the familiar keys, hoping muscle memory would override whatever was happening. But my hands have stopped obeying me. They tremble—not with fear. Not anymore.
With anticipation.
The lines between myself and the ship—between me and it have melted like old solder. I feel the hull like skin. I feel the engines cycling like breath. And when it touches me again, it’s not from outside.
It’s from within.
There is no corridor anymore. No ship. No restraint.
Only the communion.
Only the slow, honey-sweet unraveling of a mind that no longer fears its own dissolution.
Sometimes I catch myself smiling at nothing. My reflection in the canopy flickers—eyes glowing faint, the jaw just slightly out of sync. I try to speak. The sound doesn’t match the shape of my mouth. It’s as if the voice comes from the thing growing behind my teeth.
And the horror?
The horror is that ....
That I welcome the way it splits me into pieces and builds something better from the wet, trembling ruin.
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