Salt in the Memory Banks

The siren’s wail was so constant now that Ren hardly noticed it, except in the way it had begun to sound like breathing—a ragged inhale, a metallic exhale. The old submarine, Orpheus-7, groaned beneath the weight of a sea so ancient that sunlight was only a myth here. Somewhere above them, tectonic plates ground together, but down here, nothing moved except them and whatever else haunted these drowned corridors.

Ren hunched over the auxiliary terminal in Crew Bay 3, the glow painting his face sickly green. He watched as diagnostics spat out bad news: oxygen low, hull pressure rising beyond tolerance. The captain was long dead. The rest of the crew—the ones who still answered when called—were shadows huddled in corners.

He glanced at the old holotab floating beside him. It still worked, mostly. On nights like this, when the fear pressed too hard against his ribs, Ren would pull up familiar things from his old life: recordings of rain on glass; grainy vids from the city above; or sometimes—his favorite—the blocky world he’d built on an endless digital plain.

Tonight he found himself staring at his profile page. There it was: 1720 coins shining gold beside his name. He’d received them months ago—a gift from his little brother before launch. “To buy yourself new worlds,” Theo had joked, “when you get tired of this one.”

He could almost hear Theo’s voice if he tried hard enough.

“Ren?”

It was Lira, her voice thin through the intercom, ragged from sleeplessness or fear—it was hard to tell which these days.

“I’m here,” he said.

“There’s something in Compartment D. Movement again.”

Ren closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the terminal. Something had been moving through the vent shafts for three days now—too big for a rat, too clever for faulty machinery. They all pretended not to know what it was.

“I’ll check it,” he said eventually.

He pocketed the holotab but paused before shutting it off. The icon for the Marketplace blinked: ‘New Adventure Worlds Available.’ For a second—a heartbeat—he considered cashing in his coins for a new map pack: something with sunlit fields and birdsong coded into every pixel. Instead, he turned off the screen and forced himself to stand up.

---

The corridor to Compartment D smelled of rust and salt and something deeper—something like loss. Lira met him at the junction; her hands trembled as she handed over a battered plasma cutter.

“What if it’s inside already?” she whispered.

Ren shrugged. "Then we hope it’s looking for someone else."

They moved together down the narrow hall, boots sticking slightly on damp metal plates. Shadows pooled at each intersection; somewhere overhead, water dripped in a slow rhythm that reminded Ren of clockwork hearts.

Near Compartment D they stopped. The door’s viewport was cracked—on the other side was only darkness.

“Let’s do this,” Ren said.

The door hissed open; stale air rushed past them. They found only silence inside—until Ren’s holotab pinged softly from his pocket. He cursed under his breath.

Lira looked at him with tired eyes. “You’re still playing that game?”

Ren smiled weakly. “Sometimes I think it’s all I have left.” He pulled out the tab again—another notification: someone from home had sent him coordinates for an underwater temple map pack. It would cost exactly 1720 coins to unlock—his last stash.

For a moment Ren felt suspended between two worlds: one where darkness hunted him through flooded steel corridors; another where he could build shelter stone by stone, even as storms howled outside pixelated windows.

He bought the map without thinking.

---

When they returned to Crew Bay 3 empty-handed (the thing hadn’t shown itself), Ren found himself alone with his thoughts as Lira drifted off to sleep beside a humming generator core.

He opened the underwater temple map on his holotab and explored for hours by flashlight light—the only glow now that backup power flickered on its last dregs. He constructed impossible labyrinths beneath impossible seas; he walked glass tunnels lined with glowing coral; he built rooms full of light where nothing could touch him unless he allowed it.

In those moments, autonomy was real—a thing you could hold onto even as control slipped away everywhere else.

---

A scraping noise jerked him back to reality—the real kind, cold and wet and heavy with threat. In seconds he shut off his holotab, heart pounding so loud he almost missed Lira waking beside him.

“It’s here,” she whispered.

They grabbed what they could—tools, tablets—and ran for Engineering as alarms shrieked overhead. The thing in the dark followed: not quite human anymore but once part of their crew; not quite beast but no longer bound by biology or reason or mercy.

Cornered in Engineering with hissing pipes and sparking wires overhead, Ren clutched his holotab like a talisman.

Lira laughed bitterly through tears. “Can you build us an escape route in there?”

He looked at her—a shivering smile tugging at his lips despite everything—and replied: “Maybe not here…but somewhere.”

He pulled up a schematic on-screen—a blueprint of their submarine rebuilt as sanctuary instead of tomb—and offered her one controller port so she could help shape their digital refuge while chaos reigned outside their steel cocoon.

Together—for just long enough—they found freedom in a world where every block obeyed their will; every monster could be banished; every door could be locked tight against whatever waited outside.

Somewhere between those sips of borrowed peace and desperate hope, they remembered who they were before salt crept into their memory banks—and maybe that was enough.