The Maintenance Room

No one ever visited the Maintenance Deck voluntarily. Not even the other techs. It was far below the main habitat ring of ESS Halcyon, where gravity was weakest and everything smelled faintly of oxidized metal and recycled lubricant. But for Lena Myles, it was her assigned sector, and routine was what kept her sane.

Every day she ran diagnostics on the filtration systems, recorded pressure tolerances, updated firmware patches, and logged her notes into the central AI. Shift in, shift out. The same fluorescent hum. The same muted clank of magnetic boots. The same silence broken only by the hiss of pressurized doors.

She liked it that way.

Until the panel in Corridor 6-C started flickering.

It wasn’t much. A dimming of the interface screen for 0.4 seconds before stabilizing. Lena noted it in her log and issued a minor repair request. That would’ve been it. Just another glitch on a ship three years into a deep-space research loop.

But the flickering returned. Randomly. And not just that panel.

By the third day, it had spread to terminals across Decks 5 through 7. Still minor. Still repairable. But when she went to reset one of the auxiliary sub-nodes, it rejected her credentials with a message that simply read:

“NOT FOR YOU.”

She blinked. Tried again. This time it accepted her badge, no issue. The message was gone. She submitted a ticket anyway, half-laughing to herself about AI glitches and rogue personalization subroutines.

But later, alone in the mess hall, the message replayed in her mind with a strange pressure. Not for you.

---

Lena lived alone in Pod C-17. She’d requested it—a corner berth far from the communal areas. Her colleagues joked she was part ghost, part ship.

That night, she awoke at 02:13 shiptime, sweating, heart pounding, certain she’d heard someone whisper her name.

Lena.

But no one was there. Just the steady breath of the ship’s life support. The same sound she’d lived with for years.

Still, she filed a report with Security in the morning, just in case. Crew psychologist Dr. Rehn asked if she’d been sleeping enough. “Dreams and auditory hallucinations can manifest under isolated conditions,” he said.

She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t dreamed at all.

---

Two days later, Maintenance Decks 5 through 7 were put on restricted access “due to software anomalies.” Lena was reassigned to Inventory Oversight on Deck 2—her first shift change in 11 months.

That’s when the messages started appearing elsewhere.

On her datapad:

“We remember you.”

On the mirror in the shower room, fogged into the condensation:

“You don’t belong here.”

In her personal log interface:

“They’re not who they say they are.”

Each time she tried to report the anomaly, it was gone. Scrubbed clean, no logs, no traces. IT said she might have a corrupted HUD layer and offered to reinstall her neural overlay drivers. She declined.

The psychologist’s words came back: hallucinations can manifest under isolated conditions.

She didn’t feel isolated. She felt watched.

---

The others noticed she was quieter than usual. “Lena, you okay?” asked Thom, a propulsion engineer she sometimes had coffee with. “You’ve been spacing out.”

“Just not sleeping,” she muttered. “Strange dreams.”

That wasn’t entirely true. She hadn’t slept at all in two nights, but she hadn’t dreamed. What plagued her were waking visions—glimpses in reflective surfaces.

Her own face, looking back at her—but subtly wrong. The eyes slightly misaligned. A twitch in the corner of the mouth that she hadn't made. A tilt of the head half a second too late.

Then came the real shift.

The system logs from Deck 6 resurfaced. One of the engineers accidentally copied a backup to a public folder. She accessed it while searching for an old schematic.

Log Entry: 04219.14 - 03:02:19

Unregistered presence detected in Corridor 6-C.

Visual anomaly logged. No biological match. Motion observed. No crew scheduled.

Tag: B3.144 - Pattern Deviance Class D.

Recommended Action: Suppression. Do not escalate to command.

It was labeled routine. Buried.

She played the footage.

At first, nothing. A flickering light. Then a shape—thin, flickering at the edges like poor rendering. Humanlike, but… stretched. Its face was static. Its limbs moved as if remembering how joints were supposed to work. Then it turned toward the camera.

Its face was hers.

Except it was smiling. Wide and wrong.

She paused the video. Zoomed in.

The timestamp glitched.

It read: 03:02:19

Then flickered to: 03:02:20

Then: HELENA

Then back to the original.

She stared, unblinking.

Her full name was Helena Myles. No one aboard called her that. She hadn’t used the name in years.

---

She requested reassignment to Deck 8. Anywhere away from the Maintenance Levels.

It was denied.

The next morning, her access card failed to unlock her quarters.

A message blinked on the screen:

“YOU HAVE BEEN RELOCATED.”

She found her belongings already moved. Not just moved—reordered. Her spare jumpsuit was folded in the way her mother used to fold it back on Earth. The toiletries were arranged in mirrored symmetry, which she’d never done.

On the bed was a note.

Written by hand.

In her own handwriting:

“Welcome back.”

---

She went to Security. Demanded answers. The officer scanned her ID, blinked, and frowned.

“You’re not listed on active crew,” he said. “I… that’s impossible.”

He tapped his screen again. “You’re… archived?”

She left before he finished his sentence.

---

She tried to leave the ship. Not to desert—just to dock with the escape pod and trigger a distress ping. But the pod door refused to open.

“VESSEL CONTAINS DESIGNATED OBSERVER. LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT.”

Observer?

---

She stopped reporting the anomalies. Instead, she began collecting them. Photographs, timestamp glitches, AI response fragments. She scrawled them on walls inside an unused utility closet with a marker stolen from the conference room.

In the silence of that metal cocoon, she began to suspect a truth she couldn’t voice.

The ship was not malfunctioning. It was adapting.

Testing her.

Remembering her.

---

On her final day aboard Halcyon, Lena walked into Corridor 6-C again.

The flickering had stopped.

It was dark now. The lights permanently off.

But she heard breathing.

Not hers.

She stepped forward.

And the corridor breathed with her.

---

The last log entry from Helena Myles read only:

“Am I still me?”

No one has seen her since.

Her name no longer appears on the Halcyon’s manifest.

When questioned, the crew responds:

“There was no one by that name aboard.”

But if you stand outside Corridor 6-C…

You might hear someone whispering.

Your name.

And then, just beneath the flicker of the lights:

A smile, stretched too wide, waiting for you to smile back.