Side quest: The Ship That Remembered

You are mid-warp when your nav deck flags a mass that should not be here. A freighter, cold engines, no distress beacon, no transponder — but its running lights are on. You drop out of warp. It is older than your grandmother's grandmother. The hull plating is a pattern they stopped building four hundred years ago. Its running lights should have been dead for centuries. You hail. Silence. The docking clamps are still in the 'released' position. It is waiting for someone who never came.

Your scan returns clean life signs — twelve human, all adult, all breathing at the same slow rate. Vitals calm. Too calm. The scan also reports that the interior temperature of the ship has not changed in one hundred and seventy years. It has also not moved. Not drifted. Not turned. Not one meter in nearly two centuries. Something is holding this ship exactly in place. You can board, or you can run and be the kind of pilot who didn't go look.

You cycle the airlock. The ship smells like old coffee. In the main corridor, a woman is mid-stride, one foot lifted, carrying a folded uniform. She is not frozen — she is breathing. Her eyes are open. You can see her pupils adjust to your light. You speak. She cannot reply. In the galley, two men sit over a card game, one about to lay down a red card, his wrist forever arched. In the medbay, a doctor is halfway through a suture, her patient awake and looking at the ceiling. Every crew member is in the middle of something. They have been in the middle of something for one hundred and seventy years.

The log is a physical journal, ink still wet on the last page. You read: 'Day 41 of the contract. Transit nominal. Crew in good spirits. We have received a private offer from a voice I do not recognize — a single sentence: TO THE ONE WHO ACCEPTS, ETERNITY. I have polled the crew. To a person, they said yes. I do not know what we agreed to. I am writing this as I make the decision so that someone will know we chose. Not for glory. Not for fear of death. Because we liked each other, and we liked this voyage, and we wanted it to not end. I hope the one who reads this understands we were happy.' The page is dated 174 years ago.

You place your hands on her shoulders and push. She does not move. You push harder. Your hands go through her — not like a ghost, but like a poorly-compiled render; your fingers pass through flesh that is simultaneously solid and absent. You hear a sound in your skull like a library of doors closing at once. You back off. She is still in mid-stride. She has turned her head, very slightly, to look at you. Her expression is one of patient confusion, as if you woke her from a dream she did not want to leave.

You sit on the deck at her feet. Hours pass. Your suit clock reads six hours and thirteen minutes when her lips begin to move. It takes her forty minutes to say three words. The words are: 'Are we back?' You say no. You say she has been away for a long time. It takes her another hour to process this. When she finally speaks again, she says: 'We knew. Don't wake the others. Please. They were laughing when it started. Let them finish the laugh.'

You can feel it now. Something anchors this ship — not to a place, but to a moment. You find the anchor in the engine room, wedged between the fuel cells: a sealed jar containing a single curl of what might be hair, or a thread of light, or both. The jar is warm. It is almost certainly a Rift artifact. Remove it and the ship rejoins time — the crew resumes their lives in a universe that has forgotten them. Leave it and they continue as they are. The choice is yours and it is not a small one.

The jar breaks in your glove with a sound like a whispered no. Around you the ship inhales as if for the first time in a century. The woman in the corridor completes her step. The card players finish their hand. The doctor finishes her stitch. Twelve crew members from one hundred and seventy years ago stand in their galley and look at the old-new stars through the viewport and do not understand. You stay with them for three days while they learn what they have lost. They are not grateful. They are not resentful. They are simply awake. The captain presses a brass button from her old uniform into your palm before you leave. 'For the one who chose for us. You owed us nothing. Thank you.'

You set the jar back where it was. You seal the ship. You leave. Before you re-cycle the airlock you hear — inside your helmet only, although your helmet is recording nothing — the faint sound of the card players finally laughing. A single curl of light escapes through the seal and hangs in the void behind you for a few seconds before the vacuum swallows it. You kept a coil of the anchor's own thread as a memento. It is warm in your hand. It will always be warm.

You take the jar. As you close the airlock, every crew member turns their head to look at you — it takes them a long, slow minute to do it. The ship goes dark as you warp out, its running lights finally failing for the first time in one hundred and seventy years. You do not know what the jar is worth, but you can feel the Rift's attention settle on your back like a held breath. Something has noticed you. Something will want to know what you intend to do with it.