Morgan Fille - E242 ✨

Aris felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He’d heard that word before. In the old mission logs. The Odysseus wasn’t just a lifeboat; it was a secret experiment. The Morgan Fille project—E242 specifically—had been designed to test a prototype quantum-resonance cryosleep. The theory: while the body slept, the mind would be projected into a simulated reality, a “training ground” to keep colonists sharp over millennia. But something had gone wrong with the early units.

Now, her pod was screaming.

E242 was not a patient in a hospital bed. It was a pod. A sealed, humming cylinder of biosteel and nutrient gel, one of four hundred in the long-term cryogenic bay of the Odysseus , an ark ship fleeing a dead Earth. Morgan Fille had been twenty-three when she went under, a linguist with a passion for dead languages and a freckle on her left thumb. That was 247 years ago.

Her eyes snapped open. They were not the soft brown recorded in her file. They were black. Not dilated— black . Like two holes punched through reality. Morgan Fille - E242

The Gear.

She tapped the side of her head.

E242 was the only one still active. The others had been shut down. Their occupants… well, their pods were empty. Not dead. Empty. Aris felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach

The cry came not from a throat, but from a speaker.

“Protocol didn’t predict a screaming pod after two and a half centuries. Open it.”

“It knows I’m awake.”

Lin hesitated. “Sir, protocol says—”

L’Engrenage. L’Engrenage. L’Engrenage.

The monitor flickered. A grainy, green-tinted image resolved. Inside the gel, Morgan Fille’s body was perfectly preserved—dark curls floating, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Peaceful. But the overlay of her neural map was a hurricane. The Odysseus wasn’t just a lifeboat; it was

“Emergency purge!” Lin screamed, slamming the manual lockdown. But the pod was opening anyway, the biosteel peeling back like wet paper.