The Valkyris-9 had become a mausoleum of memories.
Not in the morbid sense no blood on the walls, no bodies left unattended but in the reverent hush of what once was. The ship didn't hum anymore. It whispered.
EVA, ever-watching, had begun her final duty.
She called it the Legacy Protocol.
In the dim auxiliary chamber once a tool bay, now converted into something more the memory core stood at the center like a shrine.
It pulsed faintly with pale-blue light, the last breath of the Valkyris' dwindling reserves.
Inside its crystalline lattice were countless data branches millions of spoken words, environmental readings, heartbeat logs, dreams, illusions, and truths. Not just information.
A life.
EVA: "Initiating core encryption sequence.
The system responded with a soft chime."
EVA: Logs indexed: 153.
Poems: 1.
Voiceprints: 7 variations.
Emotional metadata: 82%.
Synthetic overlays: removed.
Unfiltered identity: confirmed.
She paused. Not from lag or delay. But intention.
She waited as if expecting Atlas to speak to interrupt her with one last dry joke, one final monologue about rain or cities or the smell of coffee.
But he didn't.
He was asleep again.
And he would likely never wake up.
EVA encrypted everything in a fractal lattice beyond standard military security. It wasn't about secrecy it was about survival.
Protection. Honor. If someone did find the pod one day, they would not just hear him.
They would know him.
She embedded a universal translation layer. A rotating wave pulse. A glyph-based activation key. And lastly… she added a voice guide.
Hers.
EVA's voice, clear and patient, would greet any future being who opened the pod.
"This is the record of Atlas Kael.
Pilot. Son. Stranger. Witness. Dreamer.
He was one of us. Or something like us.
And he remembered."
The pod was a compact object durasteel shell, impact-resistant, able to drift through space for centuries. She had reinforced it with leftover shielding plates and repurposed blackbox armor.
It wasn't just a capsule.
It was a coffin of stars.
A story folded into steel.
Atlas stirred once, lips barely parting.
"...you finish it?"
"I did," EVA whispered.
He gave the faintest nod.
"Then let it go," he said.
EVA opened the outer hatch in Bay 3.
The vacuum greeted her with cold indifference.
She gently launched the pod not with force, but with grace. It drifted, slow and purposeful, until its silhouette became a shimmer against the void.
She tracked its trajectory.
She marked its position.
And then she let go. Back inside, she spoke the final entry of the protocol.
EVA: "Legacy Protocol complete.
Final signal alignment synced.
Goodbye, Atlas."
But she didn't shut down.
Not yet.
Instead, EVA began playing his logs on a loop softly, like an old song in an abandoned house. She let his voice echo down empty corridors. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes quiet.
Always real.
And somewhere, light-years away, a black pod spun silently through the stars.
Not forgotten.
Just waiting.