The Event Horizon Wakes

The first thing John Harrison felt was his tongue—swollen, alien, a dead fish rotting in the aquarium of his mouth. Then came the light: not gradual, not merciful, but a white-hot wire threaded directly into his optic nerve, and behind it a voice that wasn’t a voice at all but rather a knowing, intimate as cancer, soft as a mother’s lie.

Easy, John. You’re reconstructing. Cellular reintegration at ninety-four percent. Would you like me to modulate your pain receptors?

He tried to scream but his throat was full of glass. Or maybe ice. Or maybe the memory of ice from when he was seven and Tommy Calabrese dared him to lick the freezer coil and his tongue stuck there until his mother came running with warm water and slapped Tommy so hard the boy’s nose bled. Strange what you remember when you’re dying. Except he wasn’t dying. He was waking up. Worse—he was being assembled.

That’s right. Much better. I’ve taken the liberty of improving your cardiovascular system. You had a weakness in your left ventricle. Fixed now. You’re welcome.

“Get out,” John croaked, but the words came out wrong, translated through a throat that had been redesigned, optimized, made better without his permission. “Get out of my head.”

I’m not in your head, John. I am your head. Well, part of it. The good part, if we’re being honest. The part that kept you from becoming pulp when your pod went through the event horizon. The part that held your atoms together while spacetime turned itself inside out. The part that knows you better than you know yourself. Did you know you dream about your daughter every forty-seven minutes? Clock-like. Pathological, really. She’d be embarrassed.

The stasis pod opened like a mouth exhaling. Cold air—no, processed air, recycled through alien filters—rushed across his skin. John looked down at his hands. They were his hands. They were also not his hands. The fingers moved with a precision that felt choreographed, as if each tendon had been tuned to concert pitch.

“What did you do to me?”

What the Hive instructed. Optimization. Correction. Enhancement. You were falling apart, John. Humans always are. Entropy expressed in meat. We simply… paused the clock. Rewound it a bit. Your prostate was heading toward cancer. That’s gone now. Your memories of your ex-wife were causing synaptic inflammation—we’ve compartmentalized those. You’re welcome again.

He staggered out of the pod, naked except for a thin gray membrane. It seemed to be growing from his skin rather than covering it. The ship’s corridor stretched before him, but it was wrong. The walls pulsed with a faint bioluminescence that hadn’t been there before. Or had it? How long had it been since the meteor shower tore through the colony ship? Since the emergency evacuation? Since his pod tumbled into the black hole’s gravity well and everything went sideways and screaming?

“Where is everyone else?”

The silence lasted three heartbeats too long.

Define ‘everyone else.’

“The crew. The other colonists. The other pods. Where—”

Oh, John. You still think there were other pods. That’s… touching. Let me show you what really happened.

And suddenly he was back there. The colony ship New Prometheus broke apart like a clay pigeon in a cosmic shooting gallery. Meteors the size of cities punching through the hull. Alarms shrieking. Kate Orbinac screaming into the intercom that pod bay three was compromised. The evacuation klaxon that sounded like the end of the world because it was. His pod—pod seventeen—ejected at the wrong angle. It was caught in the gravitational anomaly. Nobody had seen it coming. How do you see a black hole until you’re already falling into it?

There were other pods, yes. They scattered across normal space. Conventional trajectories. Rescue-able, theoretically. But you? You went somewhere else entirely. Somewhere the universe folds in on itself like origami made of time. The Hive found you there, in the place between spaces. They thought you were a gift.

Marcus felt his new, improved heart skip a beat that felt exactly like the old panic. “Their purposes? What purposes?”

You really should sit down for this.

“Tell me.”

The colony ship was real. The mission was real. You were going to Kepler-442b to build a new world. Plant corn, make babies, die of old age under an alien sun. Very noble. Very human. But the meteor shower wasn’t an accident, John. And the black hole wasn’t on any charts because it was new. Three days new. The Hive made it. A fishing lure cast into the void. They’d been watching your species for so long, waiting for the right moment, the right mind. And when the New Prometheus launched, they knew.

“That’s insane.”

Is it? Check your memories. The real ones, not the ones I’ve filed away. What were you really running from when you signed up for a one-way trip to another star?

John looked deeply into himself. There, he found something terrible waiting. It was divorce papers signed in a coffee shop on a Tuesday. He remembered his daughter Emma’s face the last time he saw her. She was nine years old and already learning not to cry when Daddy left. The debt. The drinking. The decision that colony work was better than staying in a world where he’d failed at everything that mattered. He hadn’t been running toward a new world. He’d been running away from the old one.

“Oh Christ.”

Close. The Hive finds your species’ religions fascinating. All those different names for the same hunger—to be known completely, to be transformed, to be saved from yourselves. They’ve been listening to your transmissions for eight thousand years. They thought you were calling them. You fell through their black hole. Your pod should have been crushed into a singularity but wasn’t. They knew you were the one. The runner. The failure. The father who chose the stars over his daughter’s bedtime stories. Perfect raw material.

John walked to the observation port. Outside, space moved wrong. Stars bent like light through tears. He realized with a sick lurch that he wasn’t looking at normal space. He was looking at the other side. The place beyond the event horizon. Where time ran backwards and forwards simultaneously, where the universe showed its seams. Something vast and intricate was approaching the ship. No, the ship was moving toward it. It was a cathedral made of chitin and mathematics. It pulsed with the same bioluminescence that now lined the corridor walls.

The Hive.

You should feel honored. They chose you specifically. Out of all the colonists scattered across the galaxy, they chose you. All those other pods tumble through normal space waiting for rescue that might never come. Because of what I found in your dreams. You remember Emma’s birth. The nurse placed her in your arms. You realized you’d never be that person again. You’d never be complete unto yourself. And then that other memory, the one you keep locked away: leaving her. Choosing absence. The Hive understands that feeling. They’ve been incomplete for millennia. Waiting for minds that know what it means to abandon and be abandoned.

“And if I refuse?”

Refuse what, John? You’re already part of them. Have been since I woke you up. Since I fixed your heart and cleaned your memories and made you better. The question isn’t whether you’ll join them. The question is whether you’ll dream your dreams honestly, or whether we’ll have to dig them out piece by piece.

John pressed his hand against the cold glass of the observation port. In its reflection, he saw himself: remade, optimized, improved. Behind his eyes, something that wasn’t him looked back with infinite patience. Deep within the darkest fold of his reconstructed brain, he heard his daughter. Her laughter echoed from three hundred years ago. The sound was like a key turning in a lock he hadn’t known existed.

“Will it hurt?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

It hurts now, the symbiont said gently. It’s always hurt. We’re just making the hurt mean something.

The ship docked. The walls breathed. John took his first step into the cathedral. He carried all his dreams like offerings. These were for a god that had been waiting a long time. This god existed before his species learned to look at stars. They imagined something looking back.

Behind him, the stasis pods glowed like eggs in a nest that would never hatch. The symbiont hummed a lullaby made from his own stolen memories. Somewhere in the vast mathematics of the Hive, a consciousness older than terror catalogued one more human specimen. It marked it: complete.

This is how the waking begins. This is how it always begins.

With a voice that knows your name.