Lena and Max wake alone on a silent space station, with the safety systems dead and the crew gone. Then the corridor door starts to open.
Lena came awake to a glare so white it felt surgical. For one disorienting second she didn’t know where she was, only that the air tasted of metal and the light stabbed behind her eyes. Then the shape of the wake-up pod, the curved ceiling, the narrow band of starfield beyond the observation strip came back to her.
Seventh Orbital.
Her pulse kicked hard. Yesterday had ended with laughter, cheap celebratory synth-drink, and the final assessment for their Mars-bound training track. A kind of graduation, if graduation happened under recycled air and artificial gravity. Now the pod beside hers was open too, and Max was inside it, blinking like he’d been dropped into someone else’s life.
"Lena," he said, voice rough with sleep. "Tell me this is part of the program."
She didn’t answer. The room was wrong. Too quiet. No footfalls in the corridor. No low murmur from the crew bunks. No voice from the station AI. Even the soft background thrum she’d learned to sleep with was gone, as if someone had reached inside the station and switched off its heart.
Lena crossed to the wall console and touched the screen. Nothing. She tried the backup panel, then the emergency stack beneath it. Still nothing. Communications offline. Ventilation offline. Safety systems offline. The status lights that should have been green were dead black, like burned-out eyes.
Max swung his legs out of the pod and stared at the readouts over her shoulder. "That’s not a glitch."
"No," Lena said, and hated how steady her own voice sounded. "Forty people don’t just vanish because a simulation started."
He moved to the local terminal, punched in his access code, and waited. For a heartbeat the display remained blank. Then a message appeared in stark red letters:
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
PRIORITY: ALPHA.
PROTOCOL 47.
Max frowned. "I’ve never seen Protocol 47."
"Neither have I."
He looked at her now, fully awake. "So what does it mean?"
Lena was about to say she didn’t know when something heavy scraped along the corridor outside. Not a voice. Not a footstep. A metallic drag, slow and deliberate, closing in on their module.
The overhead panel flickered once.
Then the door to the corridor began to slide open.