The Odys Arcadia drifted silently past the wreckage of a forgotten world.
Inside the observation deck, young Ensign Marell stood alone, the memory core cradled in his gloved hands.
The device no larger than a closed fist pulsed faintly, as if still breathing.
It was quiet. No one spoke. The entire crew had listened to the logs. They'd cried. They'd sat in silence. And some, like Marell, couldn't stop thinking about them.
He wasn't born when the Valkyris-9 vanished. He had never known Atlas Kael. But somehow… he did.
Marell stepped closer to the glass.
Outside, the stars shimmered against the ink-black canvas of deep space. No planets. No stations. Just endless light and the dark between.
"There's nothing out here," he whispered. "And yet… there was someone."
He looked down at the core. The AI inside had fully shut down—EVA, barely functional, had used its final reserve to play Atlas's voice one last time.
No commands. No diagnostics. Just a human legacy encoded in silence.
Across the ship, the crew had already begun the process of preserving the logs.
The United Systems Archive had authorized a full memorial file. Kael's final message would be taught in flight academies.
Studied in philosophy and AI ethics courses.
But to Marell, that wasn't enough. He keyed his personal console.
Atlas Kael. Valkyris-9. Declared lost. Mission terminated.
Final status: Confirmed deceased. Memory core intact.
He added a line one that wasn't official.
Final role: Witness to the void. Teacher of hope.
Later that night, Marell launched the core back into the stars.
A small pod, barely the size of a satellite, lit up with one final burst of blue flame and vanished into the quiet.
"Let him rest in the dark," the captain had said. "It was his home longer than any place else."
No grave. No tombstone. Just motion. Just drifting.
But he wouldn't be alone anymore.
The memory core's broadcast looped quietly now, its signal encoded to last for centuries, maybe more:
"To whoever finds this..." The words would echo through the dark, caught in gravity fields, bouncing off rock, threading their way through asteroid belts and radiation storms.
One day, someone else would hear it.
And they'd know: a man lived here. A man felt everything. And even when abandoned by the universe he didn't stop speaking to it.
Somewhere, far away, the stars shimmered a little brighter.
And in that vast silence, a voice carried on.