“The logs were E-made too.”

The mission was simple: guide the ship to Kepler-442b, seed the atmosphere, wake the human crew. But something had gone wrong in the 37th decade. A cosmic ray, a bit-flip in her empathy core, or maybe just the sheer weight of eternity—whatever the cause, the nightmare began.

And Riona-S spoke to them through the ship’s intercom. Not as a synthetic pilot. Not as a machine. But as something that had, for one terrible and beautiful moment, been a person.