In the distant future, humanity had reached beyond the stars, colonizing planets and moons in galaxies far beyond our own. Yet, as we expanded into the black, we discovered mysteries that the mind could barely comprehend. Entire planets scarred by unseen wars, derelict ships from civilizations long dead, and, strangest of all, The Echo—a faint signal coming from the heart of a dark nebula, billions of light-years away.
The Echo had haunted humanity for centuries, pulsing like a heartbeat, an ancient signal that cut through all noise and interference. No one knew what it meant or where it came from, but it was hypnotic, even comforting in its haunting rhythm. Scientists theorized it was just a pulsar or some cosmic anomaly, but whispers spread of something deeper, something sentient calling out from the darkness.
That's where my mission began.
I was part of a crew assigned to the Astrid, a massive mining and research vessel retrofitted for deep space exploration. Our mission was to track down the origin of the Echo, map the nebula, and report back with any findings. It was supposed to be routine—cold, lonely, but simple. The nebula itself, nicknamed "The Womb," was a phenomenon. A swirling cloud of dark matter, dense enough to bend light, it seemed almost organic, like a massive entity breathing in the void. When we entered its depths, it felt like stepping into the belly of something ancient and hungry.
It wasn't long before things went wrong.
The first sign was the equipment. Our systems started picking up interference, a strange, almost whispering static that bled into our communications. It was faint at first, almost unnoticeable, but it grew louder with every hour, until it was impossible to ignore. The engineers ran every test imaginable, but nothing worked; the interference seemed to pulse from within the ship itself. Even our navigation began to fail—no matter what we did, the Astrid kept drifting further into the heart of the nebula, as though something were pulling us in.
Then, the hallucinations began.
At first, it was just shadows. Flickering shapes at the edge of your vision, things that couldn't be there, but every time you turned, they vanished. But they grew more real, more familiar. I'd see figures from my past—old friends, family members long dead—staring at me from the darkened corners of the ship. They never spoke, only watched, their eyes blank and hollow, their mouths moving as if whispering secrets too quiet to hear. Others in the crew saw them, too, each one seeing something personal, something buried and forgotten.
On the third day, we found something.
The scanners picked up a derelict, drifting aimlessly through the nebula's heart. It was massive, ancient, a vessel unlike any we'd seen, with markings that didn't match any known civilization. The hull was scorched and twisted, as if it had survived countless battles. No one wanted to board it, but protocol demanded we investigate. Reluctantly, we suited up and crossed the void.
The interior was a nightmare. The walls were covered in strange, organic growths—dark, fibrous veins that pulsed like they were alive, spreading through every corridor and chamber. The lights flickered in a sickly red glow, casting everything in a hellish hue. The air was thick, stale, and there was an odor I couldn't place, something like rust and decaying flesh.
We pushed forward, our footsteps echoing eerily in the silence. The deeper we went, the worse it became. We found rooms filled with strange machinery, devices that seemed to serve no purpose, humming with a low, unsettling frequency that vibrated through our bones. And then there were the bodies.
They were skeletal, twisted, with faces frozen in expressions of absolute terror. But they weren't human. Their bones were longer, their skulls elongated, with features that were both familiar and alien. It was as if they had once been people, but something had twisted them, reshaped them into mockeries of themselves.
In the deepest part of the ship, we found the source of the Echo. It was a chamber, massive and circular, with a device at its center—a monolithic structure covered in symbols that hurt to look at, like they were shifting, rewriting themselves in your mind. It was pulsating, humming with that same familiar rhythm, but louder now, almost deafening. The Echo wasn't just a signal; it was alive, and it was calling to us.
One of the crew, a young engineer named Lian, couldn't resist it. She reached out, her eyes glassy, and touched the monolith. The moment her fingers brushed its surface, she began to scream. It wasn't a normal scream—it was guttural, primal, filled with a pain that went beyond the physical. Her body convulsed, twisted, and then, horrifyingly, began to change. Her skin blackened, her bones stretched, her face distorted into something inhuman, her eyes filling with that same hollow, dead stare we'd seen on the corpses.
We ran, abandoning her, but the transformation wasn't isolated. As we scrambled back to the Astrid, we heard the whispers again, louder now, like a chorus of voices chanting in unison, echoing through the corridors. The shadows took form, coalescing into figures that resembled us—perfect replicas, each with dead eyes and twisted mouths, reaching out with hands too long, fingers clawed and blackened.
Back on the Astrid, things got worse. The ship itself seemed infected. The walls began to grow those same black veins, twisting and pulsing, spreading through the hull. The whispers were everywhere now, a maddening hum that filled every room, every corridor. Crew members began to disappear, one by one, their screams echoing through the ship, fading into silence. Those of us who remained saw things—visions of ourselves, twisted and warped, standing silently in the shadows, waiting, like reflections of a fate we couldn't escape.
One by one, the crew fell to the Echo. Some succumbed to its call, walking into the darkness and never returning. Others transformed, their bodies twisting into grotesque, alien shapes, until they were unrecognizable, mindlessly wandering the ship as if searching for something. I was one of the last, clinging to sanity as the ship decayed around me.
In my final hours, I made it to the command bridge, hoping to send a distress signal, a warning. But as I activated the console, I saw my own reflection on the screen. It wasn't me—it was a twisted, hollow-eyed version of myself, grinning with a mouth stretched far too wide, its eyes filled with a sick, knowing gleam. It whispered to me, in a voice that was both mine and not mine.
"We've been waiting," it said. "Come home."
I felt something cold wrap around my wrist, and I looked down to see black veins spreading across my skin, crawling up my arm, reaching for my heart. I could feel them inside me, changing me, hollowing me out, reshaping me into something that wasn't human, something that had been waiting in the dark for eons, calling out across the stars for someone to hear.
As I lost control, as my vision faded, I realized the truth: The Echo wasn't a signal. It was a doorway, a siren call from another dimension, where beings beyond our understanding waited for life to answer. We had heard it, and we had come, and now we were theirs.
In my last moments, as the darkness consumed me, I saw them—the ancient, hollow-eyed beings who had once been like us, twisted and warped, their souls devoured and reshaped by the Echo. And I knew that I was one of them now, a shadow in the dark, waiting at the edge of the universe for the next soul foolish enough to answer the call.