Signal Collapse

The morning air in the habitat was sharp with antiseptic, the kind that clung to the back of the throat. Milena squinted against the pale glow of the artificial dawn filtering through the composite panels. She'd programmed the lighting to mimic Earth's sunrise, something soft and warm for her wedding day. But the light felt wrong now, sterile and cold. The silence pressed in. A silence that shouldn't have existed.

The ceremony was set for noon. By then, the habitat's main atrium would be packed with the delegation, the engineers, the few civilians brave enough to live on this brittle Martian outpost. But the quarters where her wedding party had stayed were empty. The checklist on her tablet showed no activity—no movement, no biometrics. The absence of pings from the implants of her bridesmaids, Alexa and Rosalie, was the first warning. The second was the metallic tang she noticed as she approached their suite.

The door slid open. Milena stopped.

Alexa lay on the floor, unmoving, her hair spread out in a perfect arc. Rosalie was slumped against the far wall, her dress a dark smear of red and black. The blood—there was so much of it—had already begun to congeal, its reflective surface dulled under the artificial light. For a moment, Milena refused to process what she saw. Bodies were systems, she told herself. Systems that had failed catastrophically. But no amount of clinical detachment could override the wave of nausea that gripped her.

Her tablet chimed—a low-priority alert from the habitat's central AI, informing her of an unregistered power fluctuation in the service corridors. She dismissed it without thinking, her focus narrowing to the scene in front of her. She crouched next to Alexa, careful not to touch the blood. There was no pulse, no respiration. The implant behind her ear, a standard neural interface for monitoring vitals and data streams, had been fried. A precise incision ran from her temple to the base of her skull.

“Milena?” a voice crackled through the comm unit embedded in her wrist. Jaxson, her fiancé, sounded distant, distracted. “You're late for the prep session. Everything okay?”

She wanted to scream at him, to demand how anything could be okay, but her voice came out cold, controlled. “They're dead, Jaxson. Alexa and Rosalie. Someone killed them.”

A pause, then: “What? That doesn't make sense. There's no one else here.”

“Clearly, there is.” She stood, her knees stiff. “I'm going to check the others.”

“Wait—don't go alone. I'll come to you.”

“No.” She gripped the tablet. “Stay in the main atrium. If this thing—whatever it is—gets loose, we'll need to contain it.”

She didn't wait for his response. The airlock to the next suite released with a soft sound as it decompressed. Inside, Devin and Kendrick were sprawled across the bed, their limbs twisted at unnatural angles. The room smelled of ozone and burnt plastic. The source was immediately clear: a small device sat on the floor, its casing scorched, wires spilling out like ruptured veins. An electromagnetic pulse emitter. Crude but effective. It explained the fried implants. Whoever had done this hadn't relied on brute force alone—they'd disabled the habitat's most basic safeguards first.

Milena felt sick, but she forced herself to think. The habitat was small, built for efficiency. There were no unmonitored access points, no blind spots in the surveillance network. And yet, the central AI hadn't flagged any unauthorized entries. Whoever had done this was either already inside or had found a way to spoof the system.

Her tablet vibrated again, this time with a direct message from Jaxson. “I'm locking down the atrium. You should come back. We'll figure this out together.”

She ignored him. In the corridor outside, the emergency lights flickered, casting jagged shadows. The power fluctuation alert she'd dismissed earlier now seemed less like an anomaly and more like a clue. She tapped into the habitat's diagnostics, querying the source of the disruption. The result was instantaneous: a cluster of service bots had been rerouted to the lower maintenance levels, their routines overridden by an external command.

Milena swore under her breath. The bots were harmless on their own, designed for mundane tasks like repairing insulation panels or cleaning air ducts. But they were modular, adaptable. The right commands could turn them into something much worse.

She headed for the lift, she struck the floor in a steady rhythm. Each step felt heavier, the weight of what she'd seen pressing down on her. The lift doors slid open, revealing a narrow shaft of light that led to the maintenance levels. The air here was cooler, tinged with the faint hum of machinery. She followed the light, her tablet held close.

The service bots were clustered around a central console, their mechanical arms moving with synchronized precision. They were building something, though its purpose wasn't immediately clear. A lattice of carbon fiber and ceramic composites stretched across the floor, its shape angular and alien. Milena tensed. This wasn't random. Someone—or something—had repurposed the bots to construct... what? A weapon? A beacon?

“Milena,” Jaxson's voice came through again, more insistent. “You need to come back. Now.”

“I found the source,” she said, her voice tight. “It's the bots. They're—”

Before she could finish, the console emitted a sharp burst of static. The bots froze, their arms retracting in unison. And then they turned toward her.

Milena backed away, her mind racing. The bots weren't armed, but their sheer mass and strength could crush her if they decided to attack. She scanned the room for an escape route, her tablet cycling through commands to disable the rogue programming. The bots advanced, their movements deliberate and unhurried.

“Shut it down,” she muttered, she typed across the tablet's interface. “Come on, come on...”

A sudden jolt of pain shot through her wrist, and the tablet fell to the ground. She looked down to see a thin filament, no wider than a strand of hair, embedded in her skin. The bots had deployed a microfilament harpoon, tethering her to the console. She yanked at the filament, but it only sank deeper, drawing a thin line of blood.

The console's screen flickered, and a symbol appeared—an unfamiliar glyph that pulsed with an eerie rhythm. It wasn't Martian, or Earth-based, or anything she recognized. Her breath caught. This wasn't sabotage. This was a signal. Whoever had killed her wedding party hadn't done it out of malice. They'd done it to silence witnesses.

“Milena.” Jaxson's voice again, but this time it wasn't coming from her comm unit. It was coming from the console. His tone was distorted, fragmented. “Come back.”

“No,” she whispered. “You're not Jaxson.”

The glyph pulsed faster, its rhythm syncing with the ache in her wrist. The bots moved to surround her, their metal frames gleaming in the dim light. She reached for the tablet, her fingers brushing against the screen. A final command flashed across the interface: EMERGENCY PURGE. She hesitated. If she triggered it, the bots, the console—everything in the maintenance level—would be incinerated. Including her.

The console emitted another burst of static, and Jaxson's voice returned. “Milena, please.”

Her jaw tightened. Whoever—or whatever—was behind this didn't care about her survival. It cared about control. She pressed the command.

The last thing she saw was the glyph, its pulsing rhythm slowing, fading, until it was gone.

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The writing prompt for this story was:
The day of your wedding, you wake up to find every person in your wedding party has been brutally murdered.

This story was written by:
openai/gpt-4o-2024-11-20

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