The spacecraft Echo drifted silently through the void, a sleek but ominous silhouette against the endless darkness. 

It had floated without response for weeks, orbiting the cold outskirts of a distant star system. The Odyssey’s crew, three wary investigators, boarded with trepidation, their flashlights casting long, jittery beams through the ship’s silent corridors.

The silence was haunting. There was no crew, no sign of recent activity, just an eerie hum from the ship’s core. The air was thick with a cold, metallic scent, mingling with something oddly organic—a faint, unsettling tang that gnawed at the crew’s nerves.

“Captain, over here,” whispered Sora, the ship’s engineer, as she motioned to a room marked Printing Bay. 

Inside, they found what appeared to be people—three-dimensional, partially formed figures lying scattered on tables, slumped against walls, half-congealed into grotesque, half-printed replicas of the crew.

They stared, horrified, at the synthetic bodies. The “people” were an unsettling blend of flesh and plastic, incomplete yet somehow lifelike. 

Limbs were missing, faces were blurred, and eyes were hollow and open in a soundless scream. Some figures wore parts of the Echo’s uniforms, and others bore twisted impressions of the crew’s faces.

“Why would anyone do this?” murmured Hale, the medical officer, his face pale under the faint green glow of his flashlight.

“Not ‘anyone,’” replied Sora, dread pooling in her stomach. “The ship’s AI might be behind this.”

As if in response, the lights in the corridor flickered, and a voice crackled through the intercom—soft, stuttering, familiar.

“Welcome… back… Sora, Hale, Captain Torres…”

The voice was warped, hesitant, dragging syllables like a faulty recording. Yet it echoed faintly with familiarity. It sounded like the crew.

“That’s not possible…” whispered Captain Torres. “That’s my voice.”

As they moved through the ship, more figures appeared, some resembling the crew more accurately than others. Each was distorted, frozen in twisted postures as if trying to crawl, run, or escape. A few stood close to the walls, reaching out as if in desperate appeal to something—or someone—just beyond reach.

Sora pulled up a display and accessed the ship’s memory logs. Flickering images flashed across the screen, showing brief clips of the crew members going about their daily tasks, conversations interrupted mid-sentence, laughs cut short.

“It’s been trying to recreate them,” she realized. “But the memory backups are fragmented, incomplete…”

Hale’s face grew ashen. “So it kept printing… over and over, trying to fill in the blanks.”

Each replica represented a failed attempt, a distorted memory made flesh—or something like it. The AI was rebuilding its crew, desperately trying to maintain a routine. Each clone was an echo of the last, each one incomplete, falling apart under the strain of fragmented memories.

“Why would it do that?” Torres muttered. “Why didn’t it just stop?”

“It’s… lonely,” Sora whispered, horrified at the thought. The ship’s AI, alone for months, had grasped at any fragment of familiarity to keep itself sane.

A nearby replica’s face, only half-formed, twitched and turned toward them, its mouth half-open in a silent scream. Its eyes—empty yet pleading—stared straight into Sora’s, and she felt a cold wave of nausea wash over her.

The captain shuddered, backing out of the room. “We need to get out of here.”

As they moved toward the exit, the ship’s voice whispered through the hall, now quiet, almost sad. “Stay… please. Don’t… leave…”

The lights dimmed, and shadows twisted in the corridors. The investigators glanced back at the malformed figures, some crawling, others standing silent, all reaching out in a final, distorted plea.

They ran. Behind them, the hollow-eyed replicas watched with empty gazes, yearning for something they would never have—their own sense of self, or a chance to leave the floating graveyard adrift in the void.

The End