The Lights Beyond Corridor 17

Lira kept her breath shallow as she floated through the resinous dark of the atrium, sensor mesh pressed tight to her scalp. Above her, the interlocking rings of Theda Array whispered in perpetual motion—alien architecture stretched beyond comprehension, cycling like an inorganic brain around its cold heart. Here, in this vastness sculpted by beings long vanished, human habitation was both a marvel and a wound.

She was not supposed to be here alone. Not after what happened to Elian. But absence has a texture in places like these, and hers was thick with purpose.

It was almost midnight, by station time—a meaningless metric when there were no stars to mark it. Lira’s interface blinked. Incoming message. No sender ID, just an animated burst of color: balloons bobbing in digital wind. Below them floated a note:

“Happy birthday, Li. Sorry I missed you last year.”

She stared at it. A gift card. There was no signature, but she knew the animation—Elian had used it every year since they arrived at Theda. It was set for instant delivery; he’d always been late with gifts until he discovered this trick: no matter how far apart they drifted on the Array’s shifting decks, he could still send something that arrived exactly on time.

Except Elian had been dead for ten months.

Her hands trembled as she redeemed the code—impulse overriding logic—unlocking a million trivial choices in the station’s marketplace: food rations flavored with synthesized nostalgia, memory chips promising fleeting euphoria, obsolete trinkets from Earth’s endless exodus. She considered buying herself some comfort—a mug that warmed itself or an old novel—but closed the interface instead. Someone wanted her to see this. Someone who knew about Elian’s habits.

She drifted through Corridor 17, past doors that opened only to authorized biometrics. The surveillance lens above the intersection blinked red—a warning? Or simply another system glitching under years of neglect? Lira pressed on.

A cluster of maintenance drones shivered across her path; their jointed arms clicked nervously in their sockets, echoing like chattering teeth down metal arteries. She remembered Elian telling her how to sneak past them—humans always left ghost trails in security logs; machines could be bribed to forget.

In her pocket was another relic: a faded locket containing their last photograph together, taken before everything changed. Before he uncovered something in Theda’s forbidden sublevels and sent her that final message—a cryptic apology she still replayed every night in her bunk.

Another ping on her comms. This time, it was Neshka—the quartermaster who’d once been Elian’s friend. Her tone was clipped: “You’re supposed to be off-duty.”

“I need to ask you something,” Lira replied quietly.

Neshka hesitated; Lira heard background noise—the low thrum of power converters and someone laughing far away.

“Did you send me anything tonight?” Lira asked.

A pause too long.

“No,” Neshka said finally. “But I saw your brother’s file re-opened in Archive last week.”

“By who?”

The comms crackled; someone else tried to patch in, but Neshka cut them off. “Don’t go down any further tonight,” she said softly. “And… check your inbox tomorrow morning.”

Lira floated motionless for a moment after the channel died. In Theda Array, secrets didn’t stay buried—they pulsed beneath everything like slow poison.

Hours later, unable to sleep, she logged into Archive using Elian’s old codes (kept alive by a favor called in long ago). His case file was untouched except for one recent addition: a single transaction log showing an eGift card sent from his account at precisely 23:59 station time—the minute before his death had been logged by security AI.

That wasn’t possible unless someone had altered the records or was using his credentials posthumously.

She checked the sender metadata: encrypted routing through six abandoned sub-nodes in Engineering Deck D—an area sealed off since the accident that killed him.

Lira felt cold drift into her bones. Revenge was supposed to be simple: find who killed her brother and make them answer for it. But here in Theda’s bone-deep corridors—where memory, grief and technology tangled together—she realized nothing would be simple again.

As she prepared for another descent into Engineering Deck D—a place where human flesh and alien mechanism met in unreadable ways—she loaded one last message into her own queue: another eGift card, same bright balloons animation, scheduled for delivery a year from now.

“Happy birthday, Elian,” she typed with shaking fingers. “I haven’t forgotten.”

Because even in places where time lost its meaning and revenge threatened to consume what little hope remained, small gestures still mattered—a reminder that somewhere within this cold megastructure, love persisted beyond loss.