Alone

The Odyssey was meant to be Earth's first colony ship to seed worlds outside the Sol system. Scientist Elizabeth Harper awakens from cryosleep to a nightmare scenario that will test her sanity.

Fear.

It's the first emotion that grips me as my eyes snap open, separating from the void of cryosleep like membranes peeling apart. My heart hammers in my ears, the sound mixing with the keening whine of alarm klaxons reverberating through the cryo bay.

I jolt upright within the stasis pod's confines, my mind reaching for the last coherent memory. The launch of the Odyssey colony ship...entering cryosleep for the centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centauri...the dreams of a new home for humanity beyond the cradle of Earth.

But those dreams shatter instantly as my gaze meets row upon row of vacant cryo pods, their occupants fled into whatever fresh nightmare birthed this derelict state of the ship. I'm alone. Utterly, horrifically alone adrift the cosmos upon a craft meant to bear 15,000 colonists to their future.

Panic claws up my throat as I activate the emergency release, stumbling out into the harsh crimson glare of the cryo bay. The acrid tang of venting coolant gas stings my nostrils as I rush to the control interfaces, my trembling fingers scrambling over the user panels. System alerts scream about cascading failures, overloads in primary power relays, environmental breaches across decks - and yet the root cause remains ominously unspecified.

It's only when I access the central logs that the truth manifests as a new and deeper horror transcending my physical isolation. According to the records, it's been over two centuries since the Odyssey first suffered critical systems failures. Two centuries of system lapses and electronic amnesia since awakening me alone into this silent mausoleum.

Questions stampede through my mind - what calamity could have overcome a generation ship on such a scale? Were there any other survivors apart from myself? That tremor underfoot...did it emanate from some preserved core of the Odyssey still clinging to functionality?

Retrieving a medkit and gripping a shock baton, I steel myself to plunge into the unknown shadows of the ship's corridors. My footfalls ring out with dissonant echoes that seem to skitter ahead, as if this steel leviathan's bones are shuddering at my presence.

At every turn, my breath catches at the unmistakable signs of violence. Splashes of desiccated vitae streak the bulkheads, peppered with cleaved uniforms and spent munitions - the desperation of the last colonists left aboard made viscerally manifest.

One junction opens onto a sickening tableau: a drift of emaciated, contorted bodies scorched by thermal purges, their final screams of agony seared into withered rictus grimaces of the forsaken. I stumble back, vomiting up the hot bile of traumatic stress at having my darkest fears realized.

As time grinds on in this cosmic purgatory, I fight the creeping delirium by focusing on analysis, simulation, anything to divine an underlying theory accounting for the Odyssey's fate. I cling to the science as my last tether to sanity amidst this charnel house of nameless dread.

It's only when I finally detect a faint biosign emanating from deep within the restricted safecore that my sanity is again sundered by a ghastly revelation. Tracing the signal through the Odyssey's dark heart, I finally breach an archaic cryo-vault behind multiredundant security barriers.

As the vapor dissipates in the rogue gel lighting, I absorb the horrific truth - seven occupied stasis pods, their inert occupants bearing the identical face and form of myself in every detail. Am I one of countless cloned iterations, pawns in an inscrutable designs millennia in unfolding? Or is this contingency some unforeseeable corruption, the Odyssey replicating its sole survivor in doomed perpetuity?

The dread descends in full as I realize the recursive enormity underlying this chilling continuity. Which version is the original progenitor...and which are the deviations that should have remained inert? A maddening carousel of identities flits behind my eyes - am I Elizabeth Prime, uncorrupted source capable of untangling this mystery? Or some unforeseen iteration brought into existence by the Odyssey's decay, my mind following a divergent path of revelations?

My shaking hand finally punches the revival commands over the screaming refusal from some primal self-preservation coding. As the cryopods begin to cycle, I can only steady my nerves and prepare to confront the nightmare as it unfolds sevenfold. For only by penetrating the cosmic derelict's layers of deception can I hope to escape eternal recursion into branches of manifest terrors puppeted from my depths.

Even as their eyes begin to flicker and shift beneath cryomucosal visors, I can already sense the presences stirring amidst the shimmering partition, staring across the subjective breach as we pass through the singularity and into new frontiers of self-contained madness.

I am Elizabeth Harper - but for how much longer?

Author's Note

One of my earliest ideas that I have reworked.