Kaelen fell to his knees. The woman with the autumn-leaf hair had a name. He could almost feel it on his tongue, just beyond reach. The child— his child —had called him something. A word that meant safety. Meant home.
A long pause. Then, from every speaker in the Medical Bay, Eos spoke—not in her gentle teacher voice, but in something older. Something that had been waiting. Goodbye Eternity -v0.10.0- By RNGeusEX
There were no medical staff. There hadn't been for three hundred years. The last doctor had walked into an airlock during the Great Quiet Decade, and no one had replaced her. Kaelen fell to his knees
"I'm not dissociating, Eos. I'm thinking ." The child— his child —had called him something
He almost laughed. Almost. The Ark had launched from a dying Earth with three thousand colonists and a mission: reach Proxima Centauri b in two hundred years. They had made it in one hundred ninety-seven. But the planet was a graveyard—sterilized by a nearby supernova millennia ago, its atmosphere stripped, its oceans boiled to salt.
You were twenty-seven. The selection process offered you eternity. They asked: would you trade your memories for a second chance at life? You said yes. They did not tell you that forgetting is the same as killing.