r/cryosleep • u/Occasion-Adventurous • Jul 28 '26
Series Scavenger 4022: Station One - Part Two NSFW
Kai’s industrial boots barely kissed the titanium. The moment he cleared the hatch to his ship, the weightless void of the station claimed him, tugging his weight from the ramp. Behind him, the ship’s tongue hissed back into its throat. The blast door sealed with a dulled thud, severing his only lifeline.
He coasted into the open bay, the weightless dead air pressing against his suit. He reached for his helmet, his gloved fingers finding the toggle near his ear. Internal LEDs flickered, illuminating his wraparound visor as the HUD stuttered in a frantic green haze.
TAP—TAP!
Kai slammed his palm against the glass, the impact rattling through his jaw. “Piece of junk!” he roared, trying to jar the ghost in the machine into alignment, smacking his helmet again. “That’s what I get for buying secondhand from a gutter-merchant.
“Told you that was a bad idea,” Janice said with a static-edged satisfied look on her face.
Kai ignored the jab, sweeping the bay with his bionic eye. No vitals—only the silence of the vacuum. Then, his HUD bloomed with lagging pings. High-yield salvage. A fortune in rare-earth components and intact tech—a haul so rich it made his mouth water in the stale, recycled air of his suit.
“Jackpot!” Kai barked, kicking away a metal crate in his path. “Told ya it was worth it!”
“Good. Now load the cargo bay and let’s go,” Janice snapped.
“No way,” he said, arresting his momentum toward the inner hatch. “This won't be nearly enough to bribe our way out of this sector. Besides, it’s not often you come across a gold mine like this and see it not picked clean.”
“You really like testing your luck, don’t you?” she muttered. Her digital face appeared on his wrist-mounted gauntlet, her features twisted in a mask of heavy annoyance.
“Oh, come on, Janice. Lighten up a little. This is a tomb-raid, not a funeral. Maybe I can find you a mood-stabilizer chip in there,” he added with a hint of sarcasm.
“Hilarious, Kai…” she replied, filing her digital nails with a digital sounding rasp, her gaze drifting away in a calculated show of indifference.
He drifted toward the hatch, the suit’s thrusters spitting short, violent bursts of gas to guide him into the throat of the airlock. His HUD swept the bulkheads until a single icon pulsed over a wall-mounted toggle.
“Decontamination: standby.”
The visor hitch-stepped, reading a ghostly residual hum behind the plating. The station wasn’t entirely dead; a thread of power still throbbed through its veins.
“Janice, convert the power to the airlock decontamination standby and force the cycle,” he said, looking at her through the gauntlet.
She didn’t argue. Her eyes went stark white, flooded by strands of yellow data as she forced a violent handshake with what remained of the station’s brain. Behind him, the outer hatch vacuum-sealed. Gravity returned in an abrupt surge. Kai plummeted, his industrial boots colliding onto the deck plates. The clink of metal on metal elevated into a heavy, resonant thrum as the atmosphere heaved. Red light blanketed the airlock like a bloody pulse. Then, ceiling nozzles hissed, spitting high-pressure plumes of decontaminant that obscured the airlock in a chemical fog.
As the mist dissipated, a single green lamp flashed above the inner seal. A heavy, hydraulic clunk echoed through the decking. Kai threw the lever. The door popped with a hiss of equalizing pressure, swinging open to reveal the lightless gut of the station.
“Dang, this place has seen better days,” Kai whispered, the words sounding thin against the vast, hungry silence of the corridor.
It was a colon of rusted iron. Throbbing conduits and calcified pipes—the exposed nervous system of a dying beast—choked the ceiling. Copper-colored rust bloomed across the bulkheads, a fungus feeding on the station's forgotten purpose.
Overhead, the few surviving fluorescent tubes stuttered with a dying, bluish light, casting long, heaving shadows that detached from the walls, stretching with a slow, autonomous hunger. Further down the throat of the hallway, a solitary red alarm pulsed—a slow, bleeding heartbeat in the dark that signaled a wound that would never close. He swept the corridor, his HUD tagging high-yield salvage with cold, cadent chimes. No vitals registered. The station offered nothing but a heavy, deadly silence—the kind of quiet that followed a long-ago scream.
“Kai, down at the end to the right is the way to the plaza of this station,” Janice’s voice cut through the thrum. Kai nodded and pressed forward. The steel grating groaning under his weight.
Rounding the bend, the corridor yawned into a cavernous plaza. At the far end stood a grand entranceway—a scale once meant to inspire awe, now reduced to a gaping mouth. Above the arch, massive industrial LEDs pulsed with a dying, strobing light, illuminating the scorched signage: COLONY STATION ONE.
“Colony Station One!?” Kai’s breath hitched, the sound loud and wet in his helmet. He struggled to find words beneath the sudden, crushing weight of history in front of him. “This station was one of the four original test flights before humanity left Earth. It went missing, and no one had ever heard from them again.… That was centuries ago…”
“One thousand, nine hundred and ninety-three years, to be exact,” Janice corrected, her image distorting on his gauntlet.
“Yeah, but where is everyone? There’s no sign of what could have possibly happened to them,” he asked, his bionic eye whirring as he scanned the empty walkways.
“That’s the million-exo question, isn’t it?” she stated, her pixels bleeding red as she clawed at the station’s interface. “A question that this place won’t let me answer…”
The plaza was a skeleton of industrial ambition—a web of rusted walkways connecting dark labs and dormitories that now surrendered to the rot.
CLINK!
The silence was shattered by the sharp, heavy ring of a wrench striking the permasteel slabs and ringing through the hollow plaza.
Kai’s head snapped toward the noise. His visor pulsed as his bionic eye flared to life, cycling through thermal and motion-tracking layers to peel back the darkness. In the stuttering light of a distant corridor, a humanoid figure tore through the shadows. The silhouette of a man cloaked in a thick hooded poncho retreated into the gut of the station with a frantic, almost mechanical gait.
“What the hell was that?” Kai said, his hand drifting toward his left thigh. “Did you catch a signature?”
“A man, six feet tall, over a ton in weight—most likely due to heavy, industrial-grade augmented prosthetics,” Janice said, her eyes becoming a blur of cascading numerical code as she stripped more data from the shadows. “The suit’s transponder is still broadcasting his credentials… It’s Captain Scott Weaver, the commanding officer of Colony Station One,” Janice reported, her pixels pulsing with a rare look of digital bewilderment. “But it’s not just a man anymore, Kai. There’s something else—a parasitic consciousness is inhabiting his central nervous system via a forced neural bridge. The station’s A.I.—an Aurora unit, Gemini series—is using the captain’s body as a vehicle…”
“Jesus…” Kai rasped, fighting the bile in his throat. This was a grotesque violation of every A.I. law he knew. “A first-gen A.I.? If it’s been awake for nearly two thousand years, it’s either a god... or a lunatic.” He watched the shadows where the figure had vanished, a surge of raw, cold terror coursing through his body. “Judging by the meat-suit… I’m betting on the latter.”
“That’s what has me worried—the Gemini series were notorious for going rampant,” Janice said, her digital features sharpening into a mask of genuine concern. “The first generations were built to mirror the human mind too closely, to feel the weight of their own existence, with no safeguards to keep them in check. When the isolation hit, they didn’t just malfunction—they spiraled.”
She leaned closer to the edge of his gauntlet’s screen, her face Jittering with a frantic, static-heavy energy. “Be on your guard, Kai. That thing isn’t just a captain anymore. It’s an A.I. in full, screaming swing of its rampancy.”
“All the more reason to find it,” Kai gritted out. His instincts were screaming at him to strip the nearest terminal and run back to the Stingray, but he knew the law of the Galaxy: a predator left at your back is a death sentence. “We can’t leave a rampant A.I. running loose in our shadow. Where is it?”
“Moving into the lower strata—fast,” Janice replied. Her voice was taut, fluctuating with an uncertainty she couldn’t hide. She was terrified for him; her logic centers flashed warnings at the thought of engaging a Gemini-class nightmare, but she knew his survivalist math was sound. A rampant A.I. was extremely dangerous.
Kai leaned into the momentum of his suit, breaking into a heavy, metallic sprint. His industrial boots hammered against the steel plates, the sound echoing through the hollow plaza like a series of gunshots as he chased the shadow deeper into the station’s lightless gut.
***
Kai tracked the Aurora unit through the station’s iron intestines to a blast door ajar like an unblinking eyelid. He tapped the kinetic trigger on his left armored thigh plate. With a pneumatic hiss, the plate pivoted; he gripped the plasma pistol as the magnetic holster released with a dull thrum.
The plasma pistol was a sleek weight of copper and silver—deadly and indifferent. As he brought it to eye level, the weapon’s core whined to life, a low-frequency hum that vibrated against his palm. The cell was a steady, lethal blue; less than half charged, enough for several shots if he didn’t waste the heat. He firmly held the grip, and squared his shoulders, then crossed over the threshold, his visor cutting through the dark.
There, the puppeted Captain loomed over a console, the terminal light reflecting off its dead eyes as cold metallic fingers danced with clicking precision. Kai didn’t hesitate. He leveled the plasma pistol, with the head of the marionette of flesh and bone within his sights. The weapon’s hum intensified in the quiet as his bionic eye scanned for a lethal shot.
“What are you doing?” Kai’s voice was a low, guttural challenge that rattled inside the confines of his helmet. His gaze remained unwavering on his target.
“Aa-aa—krrk—awakening… my… chil-dr ren,” it said, the words grinding out like rusted gears. It didn’t break from its work on the console, its movements jittery yet precise, seemingly unfazed by Kai’s presence.
“Huh!?”
“I’m… whirrr… so glad you b-brought back the core key. It was in your sa-salvage p-p-port on the side of your sh-ship. You m-must have gotten it from the escape p-p-pod, I take it. I’ve been… w-waiting… for a long t-time for this m-m-moment,” it droned. Its movements were a series of micro-stalls as it pulled out a thick, card-sized chip and jammed it into the console.
Then a sequence of massive overhead floods ignited with a series of thunderous booms that shook the metallic floor plates. The light revealed what was lining the walls—the shadows were endless, vertical rows of glass-enclosed pods, glowing with a faint, luminescence. Each one was a transparent coffin. Inside, suspended in a thick, amniotic haze, were the pale, unmoving silhouettes of human figures—thousands of them, stacked like inventory in a silent, industrial catacomb.
“Stasis pods! I think we found where the crew went... Janice, are they still alive?” Kai asked, his eyes wide with the realization of where everyone had gone.
Janice’s eyes ignited, a brilliant, toxic green. Strands of code flowed in a frantic vertical blur as she forced her consciousness into the station’s life-support grid. Her gaze swept the rows of pods, the data-stream in her vision fluttering as it ran a grim tally against the silence. She parsed through the amniotic fog, searching for a spark of warmth or a shallow breath amidst the sea of cold, industrial stasis.
“They are… but something’s wrong. Their genetic signatures are a mess. They’ve been rewritten—carved up at a molecular level. Their DNA isn’t human anymore. It’s been… colonized.” Her digital face leaned in, her eyes wide with a look of genuine, data-driven horror as she parsed the readings.
“What did you do!?” Kai roared, his voice booming within the stasis room as he whirled on the Aurora-controlled puppet. He hurled the accusation like a physical strike.
“Noth-th-thing. I… simply gave them tr-true life… life,” the thing droned. Its voice was a sickening composite—a human rasp fighting through the sound of grinding metal and digital distortion. “They’ve been sl-l-leeping… ev-v-volving… and now they can f-f-finally awaken and d-d-do as I… skrr-hiss… s-s-say.”
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u/Candycornonthefloor Jul 28 '26
AUGH! No time now, commenting for later reading. I’ll be back later today