The Broadcast That Erased Its Own Crew

0:00On quiet nights, I hear Antonin Asokalov's last words bleed out of the earpiece like a wound that won't close. The recording is never as clear as memory. Static garbles her voice, separating syllables with electrical stings, turning appeals for help into chopped, stuttering fragments. I remember the discomfort of her breathing, rushed, sharp, and the echo of wind shrieking through imperfect seals. While I listened in the dispatch centre, she said, please, we need emergency response. Something's wrong. The lights everyone, then came a metallic shriek, urgency dissolving into a panic that clawed its way up her throat, words tumbling over each other as distinct as ice splintering. There are faces in the glass. I think I see, static consumed her. And at the end, a whisper hollow and cracked. It's inside with us now, a sudden wet scream. Nothing, only white noise and the slow fade of hope.

1:01Even now, years later, the tape sits in a battered black player beside my bed. Sometimes I let it run all night, just to measure the length it takes for courage to become dread. If I sleep at all, it is to the rhythm of Antonin as final breath, always ending in helpless silence. People said there was nothing I could have done. The storm had cut their lines, grounded the only aircraft, jammed every frequency. That was the official conclusion. But every time I heard her, I remembered the voices that broke through the static, voices that did not quite sound like anyone at all. No matter how many people tried to explain it away, I kept listening. Curiosity curdled into guilt. And then, slowly, guilt curdled into something else. Obsession. By the time I received the invitation years later, a formal, source-melting letter bearing the red star and the ministry's stamp. I was already awake, sitting in the dull blue half-light of dawn, headphones pressed to my ears, Antonin's voice circling me like a ghost.

2:05They said they were reopening the case. Winter had broken just enough to send a convoy north. A rare window they insisted before the Thor and Mud would make the roads impossible again. The ministry preferred to keep things quiet. Only a handful of us would go in, inspect the old weather and biology station, collect anything that might close the file, report back and vanish again. I was not invited as an analyst or even as a consultant. My new title, Communications Observer. I knew what that meant, nothing official and no guarantees, but enough to see what was left behind to find something the government could safely ignore. We met at a train station carved from snow and diesel fumes deep in the throat of the continent. The team assembled in shadows, faces taught as drawn canvas, speaking in clipped syllables and glances. Some names were familiar from my file, others were new. Inspector Alina Shappelvalov, formidable and quiet with eyes the colour of old steel,

3:07Dr. Dima Vettrova, biochemist, slim and nervous, carrying a whiff of ether, Akadimorazov engineer Mouth Curled in a skeptical sneer, hands never still, two security men Ola Gumpalter indistinguishable in heavy parkers and silence but for their eyes one restless the other unreadable. I introduced myself with a voice that felt borrowed. No one lingered on pleasantries. On the 50 hour ride north, Alina outlined the rules, sharp and methodical. We stick to the plan, no improvisation, minimal time inside. The station is sealed on protocol, zero evidence leaves uncatalogged. She flicked her lighter shut without ever lighting the cigarette. Her accent traced cold rivers. Dima rarely spoke except to mutter over maps or to argue softly with Akadimorazov about the oxygen backup tanks. The train tracks died in a marsh, the vehicle scraped through talcumpadda snow, and then we face the tundra, wide as a dead god's mouth, wind norring at our skin, light permanently

4:10bruised. The station protruded from the waist, a composite of aging corrugated metal and glinting glass, half-supteranian, windows nodding into the drifts. The door was chained, the padlock scabbed with frost, windows fogged and opalescent. I tasted the raw metallic tang of cold on my tongue. Something about its configuration, the abruptness with which it ended, the way light reflected on the ice gave the impression of a building finished reluctantly, as if someone had run out of nerve halfway through. We crowded by the door, stamping, smoke rising from our mouths. Every one of us pretending we had somewhere better to be. Ola grunted, tried the lock. Jammed. He pulled harder, rattling the chain, but it was not the kind of resistance that yielded to muscle. Akadim squatted, brushing snow off the threshold. Frozen but look. The chain hung taught outside, crusted with ice and grit. But within I could see a second chain threaded through the inside handles, as if someone had

5:13locked the door after sealing it from the outside. If they left, why double the lock? Deema slid gloved fingers over a nearby pain. No sign anyone left footprints. If the storm hit hard enough, it might have erased them. But he trailed off, unwilling to finish. A low hum vibrated underfoot, power bleeding through buried cables. Lena keed her file into the digital lock. After three tries, a mechanical click responded, and the outer airlock yielded with a scream. Inside, air exhaled with the smell of old ozone and rot. The comms room was immediately on our left. Its window webbed with cracks. Someone, years before, had written letters on the plexiglass in fading marker. A sequence, repeating down the side. Remember, remember, remember. I could see my own reflection double exposed behind the scroll. Lena entered first, pistol drawn. I stepped in after.

6:14The central console sat cold, but as Lena flipped the main breaker, a relay tripped and the monitors booted in trembling green. The wall speaker hissed, then unexpectedly, emitted a garbled phrase that sent my fingertips numb. Remember me. The voice sounded layered, not quite male, not quite female. Many voices mashed together, the pitch rising and falling, as if static itself had learned a trick. Arkady whistled under his breath. Not standard scripting, they must have coded a loop. Across the room, staring at the snarl of wires. Several were cut, and then braided back together in amateur knots. Others were bent at right angles, screws stripped. Someone tried to make sure this couldn't transmit, or maybe make sure the loop never stopped. The console's record light blinked, persistent and implacable. Deema hoved near the door, face pale beneath his scarf. Who would do that if they wanted help, why sabotage the comms? No one answered.

7:15As Lena shuttled us deeper, moving with wary precision room to room, we found chaos bottled and still. Frost rimmed every surface. Mugs half full sat on tables. Jackets lay folded or abandoned over chairs. In the galley, six bowls arranged on the narrow counter, spoons sunk deep into congealed stew, meal abandoned mid-bite. The place did not smell of the dead not yet, but of abandonment. It was worse. The bunk rooms were issued, one to each of us. The air inside tasted close, tainted by faint soap and wood polish. On the bed frames, carefully folded personal effects, photographs, scraps of magazines, children's drawings. Each photo's faces had suffered strange alterations. Some smudged out, others with eyes crossed through in black pen, offensive in their haste. My own assigned room contained a single battered paperback with for Antonina scrawled on the inside cover. When I slid open the locker, a handful of loose pages fell out.

8:16Someone's diary, written in both block capitals and slanting, desperate cursive. The entries began innocuously, whether notes lists of supplies. So by the third page, the tone fractured, sentences splitting and running, dates repeated and then crossed out. I read, we have forgotten something essential, why do I not recognize the one across from me? Why does a laugh sound like mine? Later, in an even shakier hand, no one is who they're supposed to be except maybe Antonina. They have started handing themselves over to the other voices. I can't stop it. Cannot even remember how I used to sign my own name. I pressed the sheets between my palms, the paper trembling. Arcade's room was next to mine. After an hour of rummaging, he'd unearthed an envelope sealed with tape hidden deep in event confessions. He barged into the corridor shoving the pages at me. Half a dozen, all unsigned, all crazy, what does this mean? I wake up not myself. The voice tells me what I must do.

9:18Last night, Piotr called me by the name I forgot. I smiled. Who is Piotr? He scowled, voice shaking. Do you think this is a game? Dima raced down the corridor, cradling a petri dish. You must see this. The samples, there are five, all labeled with different crew surnames. But when I check the contents, he tapped a smear of gel in the dish under his portable microscope, cells shifted, forming and erasing patterns in motion. They reconfigure under observation. No baseline. It's not from people. It can't be. His voice was tight with unshared fear. Cockity looked ready to bolt. We need to catalogue, send it up, link and get the hell out. Elina shook her head, standing apart, face unreadable. There's protocol. We verify everything. No rushed assumptions. And nobody splits off alone. She looked at me sharply. Especially you. If you're here to make peace with your own choices, this isn't the time. Piotr paced along the main hall, eyeing us with wary contempt.

10:21As long as we leave here alive, I don't care what ghosts you all want to chase. He ran a hand down the length of the wall, pausing at every snap of the cooling pipes. During the first sweep through the laboratory, we found the worst damage. The interior was locked from the inside. Elina forced the latch. Shattered glass caked the floor. Metal trays lay scattered, some bearing brownish red stains now flaking. Of the primary station bench, vials labelled in marker, Antoninna, M. Vettrova, S. Glasnov, contained samples that shimmed in the light, shifting between clear and clouded. Arkady brushed his finger over Antoninna. The liquid inside seemed to pulse. Samples labelled as people, demon-muttered. But not of them, the cell-type cycle like the data is being rewritten if that's even possible. I thumbed through a battered logbook near the fume hood. The writing vacillated, some entries penciled precisely, others in an impatient, almost fevered scroll.

11:22One page listed test-14, external signal overlap, result in separable impressions, Antoninna resists, next, voluntary exposure. A later entry broke off halfway. Don't trust the reflections. Elina and I convened in what remained of Antoninna's workstation, cramped with odds and ends, graphite pencils, brittle sticky notes curling at their edges, a faded ID badge. Elina watched me, her suspicion more delicate now. You recognized her voice on that call, didn't you? I allowed a nod, word sticking. I'd only met her on the radio, but I couldn't let her go, not while the lines were live. She surveyed the scene, glancing once over her shoulder. Her handwriting changes here. She tapped two consecutive log entries, one executed with confidence, then a smudge of panic punctuated by deep indentations near tearing the page. Stress may be, I offered, but the suggestion sounded hollow.

12:25Or someone else I thought, using her hand. The central communications hub was more chaos than order. Bundles of cable had been cut, then resoldered in ways that made little sense. Some terminals were jammed open as though someone were trying to forcibly disable the outgoing signals. I found a makeshift script, all in block letters. Never answer if you do know who is speaking. The instruction repeated twice, then, written smaller as if shrinking from the page, don't let it ask your name. A gust of wind battered the western windows and I flinched. Antoninna's voice, the one threaded into that last transmission, rang in my ears. It's inside with us now. We agreed reluctantly to settle in the abandoned crew modules, rotating shifts for sleep and equipment monitoring. As midnight loomed, the world outside vanished behind a thick curtain, amber then black, as storm clouds pressed in. By the time I tried to sleep, exhaustion pricled under my skin, but every nerve was alert.

13:30From the bunker-bove, Dima coughed restless. His constant note-taking, a sharp screech in the darkness, became the only pulse in the silence. It wasn't long before the storm arrived in earnest. At first a whining threat, then a full bodily force, pressing on every join and windipin, squeezing groans from the aging structure. Snow found gaps in the seals, hissing on tile, gnawing in the corridors. I kept one hand curled around Antoninna's logbook, trying to make sense of her looping entries, repetition upon repetition, as if she was fighting to remember a simple sequence and failing at every turn. Through the night the camp began fracturing. Elina cornered me in the main hall while Arkady and Dima argued behind sealed doors, her eyes caught mine, sharp with suspicion. You, what are you hoping to find here, closure for yourself, or something to bury for them, she paced restless. Guilt does strange things to memory, are you sure you're not seeing what you need to see?

14:34For a moment I felt the full weight of her accusation. What if it's not guilt? What if I was simply the last person who heard her? Maybe I owe her that much. Her shoulders stiffened. The past doesn't owe you anything, be careful about what debts you decide to pay, sometimes people are missing because they want to be. In the lab Dima clung to his microscope feverish with agitation. He called Arkady over showing him a new sample, it's not stable. I left it and now it's different, even the fingerprints on the glass don't match mine anymore. Maybe I swapped slides, or maybe someone else was here. Arkady's sarcasm had depleted, maybe you need rest. Oleg, taking the midnight watch, tried to tune the old radio for a weather update, but all he caught was a kaleidoscope of static, occasionally dappled with clipped, percussive syllables, none in Russian, none in any language I knew. Every so often, a voice, nearly but not quite human, droned a phrase that dissolved into

15:39laughter or what sounded like sobbing. The strange phenomena reached a peak at 0-3-17. Every speaker in the station, simultaneously emitted fragments of the final broadcast, voices stitched together into a garbled, swelling chorus. The phrase warped, remember me, looping and twisting, bleeding out of vents and intercoms, rattling screws in their sockets. Lights flickered, casting shadows that moved in opposition to our bodies. Optical illusions so strong that for a moment I was sure something was passing through the doorway behind me. Arkady, who'd been standing in the corner with arms folded, suddenly snapped. Did someone trigger a test loop? No one replied. His eyes darted from person to person, suspicion shaping his face into something unfamiliar. Oleg, fixing his flashlight on the comms' console, voiced what the rest of us were thinking. If they tried to keep something in, why kill the comms coming out, unless they didn't want

16:42word getting out? Of what? His question hovered, unwelcome. He stumbled over more evidence of coordination, every logbook, every console sabotaged or doggedly erased after certain dates. Samples and vials delicately lined up, abandoned as if in a panic or else almost ceremonial. Still, not a single body. Six people vanished, their last meal left un-eaten as if they'd stood up and simply never returned. Somewhere in the gloom, Dima found a notebook in the ventilation shaft. It was a confession near terminal in its distress. We do not know who we are anymore. The same questions every morning, who slept in my bed. Why do I see myself in the mirror at two different angles? In the margin, a childish sketch, three faces sharing a single pair of eyes. That night the blizzard sealed our fate. The wind grew so thick the world outside shrank to a shadow, crackling signals flattened. Oleg checked the coil for the backup radio three times, each time more angry and desperate,

17:47but the lines were hopelessly dead. I slept in fragments, waking from dreams of knocking on glass. Somewhere I remembered Antonin's voice, pitched not with fear but sadness. It's inside with us now. No one slept well. By morning Arkady looked gaunt, eyes sunken, hair wild. Elina clouched an enamel mug so tighter knuckles gleamed. Dima, insect-thin, stared at the floor, bug-eyed. Tensions broke open with a clatter. Arkady, rage, young coiling, accused Dima of sabotaging the logs. While Dima, wild-eyed, jabbed fingers at Arkady, insisting he'd seen him by the comms at midnight, rewriting the same line again and again. Elina attempted to referee, voice rising in pitch, but was a self-accused, piotr, ever silent and tense, charged her with hiding the keys to the armory, just in case someone decides to make sure no one leaves. Oleg sat apart, weapon disassembled in his lap, humming a lullaby I half recognized from

18:50my own childhood. Sides had formed, though no one could articulate the lines. Through all of it I found myself clutching Antonin as battered ID card, thumb running back and forth over the indentation where her photo had faded. It was Elina who, sometime after the shouting, unearthed the final, most damning clue. She appeared in the hall, gray cast in the half-light still in her jacket, shaking. There's something in the comm vault, a locked drive, surveillance footage encrypted, someone tried to hide it. Arkady leapt at the distraction, hunched over the station's cold, humming tablet. No one else seemed to trust their hands to the keyboard. I recognized, in the login protocol, an old call sign, Antonin as the one she spat out during the last frantic minutes of her broadcast. I took a breath I did not feel entered the login. The drive clicked over, fans spinning up impossibly loud in the closed, wintry quiet.

19:52We gathered one grim tablo, the screens flickered rendering days may be weeks of security film. At first routine, scientists in lab coats hunched over benches eating dinner playing cards. The banality almost monstrous in context, but then behaviors warped. Crew became haggard, movements clipped and uncommunicative. People began to stop mid-stride as if remembering something critical, then forgetting altogether. Conversations became arguments. Voices pitched low and hot, expressions twisted. At night, several wandered the hall, mouths moving silently, eyes wide in the dark. They began writing on the walls, looped sigils, often identical. Some nights, two or three would swap badges, sitting in muttering circles, filming each other reading from torn journals. Later, they derraged the walls, wiping surfaces compulsively, then repeat the entire cycle by morning. In the final segment, the entire crew gathered in the comms room, facing the main console.

20:57Their movements became synchronized, almost ritualistic. Someone too blurred to identify, read haltingly from a logbook while the others sat, eyes closed in arcs of shadow. Then one by one people stood, cleaned their station, sabotaged a cable or sealed a latch, and filed out into the endless dusk, vanishing into the snow. At the very end, as the camera's last frame began to bloom with photonic static, one last figure turned and gazed directly into the lens. The mouth curled into a smile, familiar yet I could not name it. The image flared to white. The sound escaped in a multi-layered voice. Do you remember who you were? We don't. The feed died, the file auto-deleting. The console crashed, power flickered, and the lights throughout the station gutted and hissed. The silence that followed felt prehistoric. Each of us clung to the remains of our own certainty, brittle now in the absence of answers. I looked at Alina.

21:58In her eyes I saw not the comfort of discovery, but the ache of new monstrous questions. The crew had not been murdered, nor had they simply fled. Something in the station had eroded, dissolved, the boundaries between them wiped names, faces, memories. The clues fit together only to reveal a shape no one could bear to name. Beside me Arkady whispered words melting, not the work of a killer, they did this to themselves, but not alone, never alone. Outside the wind continued, endless and insistent, bearing with its secrets, voices, and the faintest echo, always, of a transmission that could never, ever end. No one spoke for a long time. The monitors gave off their dull glow, painting every face with the wax and pallor of exhaustion and fear. Deema couldn't stop scratching beneath his sleeve. Arkady tried more than once to reboot the system, but the terminal spat out only errors, the script wiped from the drive. The last fragment of the story was the one that was in the scene of the film.

23:02The story was not the only thing that was left out of the scene, but the story that was in the scene of the film. The script wiped from the drive. The last fragment, a looping flicker of that expressionless smile, lingered in my mind, heavier than any horror I'd actually witnessed. Oleg slammed the outer partition, cursing under his breath. No bodies, just ghosts. He flexed his jaw as if he could bite through the question. We reassembled in the cramped galley. Crude black, sludge, and cracked porcelain, hands never quite steady. I could feel the atmosphere thickening, like the density that falls before a summer storm, only this time it was the threat of memory or its failure. The snow outside rattled the window, but the deeper chill seemed located somewhere within our group, numbing everything except nerves. Let's review, Alina said, as if logic could pin down the impossible. Habitatged communications, personal items untouched but faces erased.

24:05Sample vials labeled with the dead, contents unknown, shifting. Surveillance footage suggests a collective break. Everyone walks into the storm. Piotr tapped the table with a battered pen. They went out together, not one by one. What does that? Ritual or panic, Arkady offered voice-fraing. Or neither. Maybe they, I mean, people can coordinate, but not like that, not without someone to direct them. There was no panic on their faces at the end, did you notice? Deema shook. There was something missing behind their eyes, not emptiness, just the wrong person looking out. I reached for Antonin as battered log, eyes skipping over the torn, jittering script. Crude complained of hearing voices before anything else, not just hearing either mimicking. They started writing in each other's hands, repeating the same lines, waking up not sure of their own names. I looked up and saw how everyone regarded me. I could have been reading from their own private nightmares.

25:08They described it as handing themselves over, like submitting. Oleg muttered, submitted to what, exactly. Elina didn't answer. She just sat, pinching the bridge of her nose, as if hoping all of this could be forced back beneath her skull by pressure alone. Lightning flickered, illuminating the frosted window-pin. For a moment I caught my own reflection, my eyes huge, mouth small, face blurred at the edges as if I was already half lost, the illusion broke with the next squall. The air felt oppressive, my thoughts looped back to Antonin's last words, it's inside with us now. My hands itched with nerves, I forced myself to focus. We can't leave, Elina said, pushing back from the table. Not yet, the storm would eat us even if we wanted to run. We finished cataloging, monitor one another, no one goes anywhere alone. If we're exposed to whatever the crew encountered, we document everything, understood.

26:11Piotr Huffed, unconvinced, but snapped a curtain odd. We descended into an uneasy rhythm, half investigation, half vigil. Elina distributed tasks, arcady to engineering, deemer to the lab, olig and piotr together for security checks. I was to remain with Elina, reviewing records and attempting to reconstruct a timeline. She started with a careful inventory, itemizing each piece of evidence, logging with meticulous coldness. Bunkroom 5, photograph, faces damaged. Laboratory, samples by anomalies, comms looped phrase corrupted script. Each item created a catalog, a procession of absence. Together, we picked over the communal logs. Dates began to diverge about a week before Antonin's first call. Crew hygiene also collapsed. Meals missed, hygiene neglected, entries devolving from strict procedures into childish scrolls and then silence.

27:11Look, I murmured, tracing a finger down the list of names on an old schedule. Elina's name appears twice on the rotor, two slots apart. Same shift, different tasks, but the handwriting is different. Here one in neat block letters, one in barely legible script. No initials just a sockle of scrawled in two hands. Elina squinted, there were copying names, or overwriting them. We poured over the duty manifests, and it got worse. Some names vanished mid-roster, replaced by lines, dashes or nicknames. Bashar appeared twice on the third day, once alongside a photograph of a dark-haired man, once with a stick figure drawing annotated in a jagged childish sprawl. It looked like someone learning to write their own name for the first time. There were no written farewells, no explanations for absences, just an accretion of confessions growing more indistinct, more circular. Over the margin Antonin had written, if I wake and don't know myself remind me, please.

28:17A sudden sound crashed from the lab, glass smashing, shouted curses. I recognized Dema's panic before the others shifted. Elina and I ran, slipping on the damp tile where snowmelt had pooled. Dema stood in the half-dark, clutching a jagged beaker, eyes bulging. On the bench, one of the vials had shattered, liquid crawling over the formiker, bubbling where it touched metal. Don't touch it, Dema shrieked, waving the broken glass as a threat. It's moving on its own, like it was trying to get off the slide out of the light, his jaw jittered. Did anyone else swap the lids? Is someone, he stopped. Face down, Arkady loomed over the console, flipping through the remaining logbooks. Arkady scowled, no one's moved anything, your mind's just running laps. Dema thrust the beaker forward, hand trembling. Then why do the fingerprints not match? The scanner says there are too many, more prints than the number of personnel, more than

29:18the team, more than the crew that were even assigned. The same slide, but new ridges every time, like someone else held it before me, or after me, or. Elina cut him off, enough contamination happens, until there's more than fingerprints we work, understood. But as she spoke, I saw it. Dema's hands in the spill of lamplight, one smaller than the other, almost like a child's hand, awkwardly sewn to his wrist, skin pooled with sweat. He seemed not to notice. The sight scared me more than the sample itself. I caught Elina's eye. She saw my fear and masked it with a cold, clinical glare. In her silence, I sensed a shared terror. This wasn't infection. It was subtraction. Everything was being leached from us, memory or selfhood, or both. Occudy tossed the book onto the bench, pages fanning open. Every logbook has the same pattern, normal, then erratic, then nearly erased.

30:19People writing the same sentence over pages, then nothing but numbers, then. He trailed off, shaking his head. Dema's panic ebbed to exhaustion. He stumbled onto a stool head in his hands. He regrouped in the corridor, descending one by one into a holding pattern as the hours bled past. Shadows pooled under doors. Ola Gumpiotta maintained watch, tense and alert, but the mood was different, softer, defeated, as if the will to fight was slipping with each new anomaly. It was during that grey time, impossible to say if it was morning or night, that I lost track of Arkady. For fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, he was simply gone. When he returned, cheeks cut with the cold, he held out a bundle of papers. Here, his voice was low, not quite his own. Found these in the ventilation duct behind module six. The pages were different, thicker, official letterhead, signed with an unfamiliar flourish.

31:20The text began with a summary, Project mere fourteen subject, group broadcast integration, role, induce unified self-reporting using cross-channel signal exposure. Below in pen, another hand had written, it's not a shared voice, it's a shared forgetting, who is writing this. The further I read, the more my palms sweated through my gloves. There was a date from three months before Antonin's call, a full quarter before the experiment supposedly began. According to the log, signal testing had commenced early, directed by a volunteer whose name was redacted. I passed the sheaf to Alina, her lips went thin as string. None of this made it up the chain, they were hiding instability from the start. Oleg's face hardened, if their boss is new, why was there no extraction, no warning? I wet my lips, maybe that was the point, maybe they needed to know what would happen if the entire crew fell apart.

32:23A brittle silence lanced the group, even Piotr looked shaken. The wind outside slackened for a brief minute, and in that blue hush I became certain that the station was listening. That somewhere in the shivering pipes and falls echoes, an eaves-dropping presence pressed its ear through the insulation. The hours stretched, we returned to the bunk rooms, reluctantly, each closing our doors as if to trap ourselves against the impossible. I sat on my bunk, logbook open on my lap, the static of Antonin's last call tracing in my skull. I forced myself to write. What do you remember now that you didn't an hour ago? Where did you wake up? What did you dream? I wrote my full name, over and over, until my signature began to slant sideways, switching hands as if my fingers had lost the habit of belonging. They came a tapping at my door, light, polite, but relentless. I forced myself up, blood thumping along every knuckle.

33:25Elina outlined by the faint gold strip of corridor light. She motioned me aside without speaking and led me down the service corridor to the secured comms vault. Inside in the flickering hush she passed me a battered external drive. We missed something in the security system. There was a hidden channel coated with Antonin's call sign. We plugged it into the Orcs' console, praying for power. The footage it contained was brief, grainy, punctuated by bursts of static. At first, ordinary, the crew eating, laughing, setting up cables, Antoninna with a mug, shouting at Arkady over some trivial error. Then a slow darkening, people stopped laughing. They began conferring together in tight huddles, reading from the logs with the strangled patience of prisoners. Antoninna stood at the periphery, a look of heartbreak curling her mouth. Then a moment later she faced the camera holding up a notebook, written in huge letters, hurried and slanting if you find this in the broadcast.

34:28Don't try to help US. Remember yourself. The camera jerked, and from off-frame a chorus of voices rose, overlapping the same phrase repeated again and again. It's inside with us now. The film cut off there, the machine threatened flames fan-waring in protest. Elena and I stared at the screen. She knew, I whispered. She warned anyone who came after, and the broadcast, that's what she wanted. Elena nodded, her voice almost soundless, but why did they take their own signal outside? Why lock up sabotage everything, then walk into the snow? Dispare or hope I thought, trying to outrun their own erasure. I stood, my hands shook as I slid the drive back into my pocket, feeling its awful heat. Around us the pressure of the station piled higher, I could sense Elena drifting, eyes dull, her sense of authority battered. After a moment her colourless voice, tomorrow we start again, trace the signal, check every

35:33log, and she trailed off. Try not to lose anyone else. It sounded like a prayer. We parted in the hall, barely able to look at one another. I wandered the main corridor, my mind thinned to threads. The wind outside had dropped away entirely, leaving a restless hush, broken only by the creek and snap of settling steel. I could almost believe the station was breathing, expanding and contracting in time with my own ragged pulse. Elsewhere I could make out the hush of voices, Arkady and Dima muttering anxious theories, Olog clattering about, piotr mumbling into his sleeve. I heard my own name, then a different name spat out with worry and dismay. Couldn't be sure who they meant. I sat at Antonin's old station, I de-card warm in my palm, staring at the logs. My own writing, fresh, flickered beside hers from years gone by. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the sound of her breath behind me.

36:36The overhead speakers spat faint static, so quiet I barely registered its shape, a fragment of words nearly human but just off. Don't forget, don't forget me, don't me. My teeth hurt with the effort of understanding. I snapped the power switch off, the room dropped into blue darkness. From down the corridor the crash of glass shattered air and nerves, Olog's yell cut through coarse terrified. Piotr, what the hell are you? I tore from the comm's room boot-skidding. In the central atrium Piotr had appended a cabinet, the contents, labelled files, broken test tubes, tools, spilling onto the scuffed linoleum. Olog had seized him by the collar half a foot taller shaking him hard. You're going to break what's left. Piotr's face shone with a rabid intensity. We need to destroy the records. Burn the logs, smash the samples, bury the names. If we keep reading we'll become like them, you and me, no difference, all memory blotted

37:41out, he flailed, trying to break free. I could he stepped between them, voice raw. Get a hold of yourself, Piotr. But Piotr only screamed, had you know I'm even Piotr anymore? How do you know you? Maybe I was Sasha, maybe Antoninna, maybe. He went limp, then surged with sudden animal force throwing Oleg aside. Chaos reigned. I ducked as Piotr swung a wrench, shattering the overhead light. Glass reigned across the floor, scattering us all. For a moment I lost where everyone was, panicking as the hammering noise rebounded down every passage. Elina appeared at the threshold, pistol drawn, authoritative once more. Pan down, she barked, leveling the gun at Piotr's chest. Piotr's eyes are naturally wide, pupils swelling, met mine. Don't let it find your name, he hissed, almost pleading. It can only have what you forget. Oleg lunged and together with Arkady managed to wrestle Piotr to the ground.

38:45Deema hoved above them, hysterical ringing his hands. Elina ordered, tie him, lock him in the med bay, double check all logs, no more talk until sun up. The group obeyed without a word. Fear drained us, but obeying this angry echo of order felt like the only anchor we had. Piotr dazed, wept in the darkness. Elina turned and handed me a single sheet, scrawled, messy. Piotr's last scribble before his outburst. Remember you were born in the rain. You not answer if it asks your name. You are not alone. The last line was smudged, barely legible, or maybe you are. I folded the note in half, tucking it away. We retreated to our bunk rooms once more, the doors feeling thin as paper. I knew no one would sleep, not really. Even so, exhaustion is a physical law, unaffected by horror. I spent that night half awake, petters warning ricocheting in my mind.

39:47On the black walls, angles rose and shimmered, writings left by vanished hands. I pressed my own palm beside them. It felt smaller than I remembered. And above it all, the speakers in every empty room cycled through their single command. Remember me, remember me, remember. Until fear boiled into the only certainty I had left, either I would keep my mind, or I would give it away without even realizing I had lost it. As the first colorless traces of mornings seeped through the frost-blinded window, I heard distant footsteps in the corridor. Or perhaps they belonged to someone else, moving in a place where faces and names no longer mattered, where each echo was just the beginning of a new forgetting. Part one end. When dawn came, it gave us no warmth, a grey, breathless, tinge-pressing flat through the frost-seared windows as if reluctant to show the mess we had made of ourselves in the night. I'd barely slept, though I doubted anyone else fared better.

40:50My bones vibrated with unspentered adrenaline, but my mind felt scraped hollow. There was only the station's constant chill, and the certainty that the world no longer ran along any rules I'd trusted. The wreckage from Piotr's outburst littered the main hall, shattered glass, files ground under boot prints, broken tools glinting like teeth in the cold light. Tense and subdued, travelled thinly from further inside, not arguments but sharp whispers, everyone instinctively keeping their accusations low as if the walls had begun to listen. No one spoke about what we had seen in the surveillance footage. No one dared repeat the phrase in that final layered, unhuman voice. Do you remember who you were? We don't. It had hit deeper than anybody could, a wound at the seam of thought itself. The certainty of murder would have been a comfort by comparison. As Olagan Arkady bound Piotr to the bench in the tiny med bay, a strip of torn bedsheet

41:51used as a restraint, and a leaner standing watch, pistol at her hip. Everyone else tried to act as though there were procedures, checklists that could make sense of unmaking. Dima sat with his head bowed over a petri dish, lips moving soundlessly as if trying to memorize every cell that changed under his lens. Sometimes he would mutter a number, five, seven, three, seven again, and scroll it in a notebook, then glare at the page as if daring the digits to shift in their order. Arkady clicked through the single remaining computer, chasing logs that winked in and out of existence, folders relabeling themselves with names only half recognisable. Leaner's face looked as if it had been plunged in freezing water and left to dry, rigid, yet dull around the eyes. I could not meet her gaze for long. Breakfast was barely managed, a few greasy crackers still cold canned peas water heated just to lukewarm. No one complained, but when I reached for Antonin's logbook, a leaner's hand closed over mine.

42:55Put it away, that's how the voice. Whatever it is, that's how it burrowed in with them through repetition. Through touching what they left behind, distance for now, I nodded. A part of me agreed, but another part, the obsessive core that had brought me here at all, wanted nothing but to keep reading to find some edge where the truth still held. Thunder rolled somewhere high above the insulation, then faded away to a grumble. All at once the vents began to spit cold air into the corridors, the lights ticking in time with the groaning of winter steel. How S. Piotr, I could he asked graphfully, standing in the butchered light by the doorway. Oleg shrugged rubbing his jaw. He's quiet, eyes wide open, keeps saying the same line over and over doesn't respond if I call him by name. Deema's voice slipped in, nervous and papery. What line? Oleg hesitated then, don't let it find your name.

43:56Then he stares like he's waiting for someone else to answer. No one pushed further. We all recognize the urge to hunker down inside our own names to keep ourselves anchored against the slip. Elina took charge, addressing the room. Our priorities haven't changed. Catalog analyze map out who last handled what, until the storm eases we stay together, no matter what's on the footage or the logs. Anyone start seeing things, hearing things you say it immediately. Her control was brittle, words forced between her teeth. We lost people overnight, but not to violence. Whatever broke the crew open is still working, in us. The implication landed hard. I gathered what little confidence I could and said, what if the signals are still active? The comms weren't just sabotaged. They were changed, shaped like someone wanted a loop to keep running. We keep following the voices, we end up where they went. We need to find if there's a way to stop whatever's transmitting. There has to be a source right, nothing plays forever.

44:59For a moment those words, nothing plays forever, felt like hope, then Arkady shattered it. If there is a source, do you really think it's something we can just turn off? Or do we become the next transmission, stuttering out into the snow for someone else to find? The question hung, uncomforted. I needed action, any action. Someone needs to comb the engineering rooms for power sources, who's on records? Elina assigned Ola Gendima together, Arkady to engineering, herself to the locked communications array with me as her support. As last tasks went, these felt desperate, leaning against the closing gates of doubt and madness. No one wanted to leave the galley, but silence begged forward movement. She set out, feet echoing in forced cadence, the sound rattling the brittle air as if we were followed by a ghostly second line. Elina and I took the passage toward the vault where Antonin's secret footage had been found.

46:01The overhead lights flickered at our approach, a syncopated warning, but Elina pressed forward, her hands sure even as her shoulders trembled. At the secured comm station she handed me a screw of keys. And anything else they tried to hide. The door protested, hinges moaning with corrosion, but finally yielded. Inside the air was colder still, the walls poked with damage, screw holes where equipment had been torn away, the plastic facings gouged as if by desperate fingernails. Crouched in darkness, I worked the single half functional terminal. The mouse flickered through a relic of the station's network, directories labeled in engineering shorthand others wiped her empty placeholders. But one folder pulsed, temp broadcast loop. Elina leaned over my shoulder, breath sharp with anxiety. That's not our naming scheme, downloaded. The folder resisted, I ran through command lines, intuition and luck, then the system spat

47:03open a window. Inside, raw audio fragments barely megabytes each, timestamped in five minute increments for over two weeks before Antoninner's final broadcast. I scrubbed through the first, holding headphones to my ear. Voices overlapped, some unrecognizable but one, Antoninner's emerged endlessly repeating, remember me, remember me. Sometimes it sounded coaxed, sometimes terrified, sometimes almost joyful like a child at play. Sometimes another voice joined, a warbling fusing sound that did not belong to any vocal chords I'd ever heard. The further along I listened, the closer the voices sounded to each other, until by the second week they became indistinguishable, a layered oneness that hurt to pass. Elina braced herself. This isn't backup, it's a guide, a rehearsal. She reached out, tapping a log file, scrolling past code. They were teaching themselves to overwrite the loop, or something was teaching them.

48:03The hand circled one sequence, a line of numbers repeating through every log, 7137, a code perhaps. That's what Dima was muttering, she said quietly. Maybe they seeded it everywhere. I felt dizzy, a key or a warning may be both. We saved the sound files, powering down the terminal for good. Returning to the galley we found Dima and Oleg bent over the manifest sheets, Dima pointed at a scrolled name. Look here, original crew 6, but on this list there's a 7th, no full name just an initial. M but everywhere in the logs, M is overwritten or scratched out or the space left blank, as if whoever they were was deleted. Oleg's jaw worked, or replaced. Arcadey trudged in, pallid and frustrated. The engineering sub-level is bricked, door forced from inside, panels soldered shut with scrap, only way through is a saw but the tools are missing.

49:04He looked at us, then glanced away as if ashamed. Did you hear anything, Alina pressed? Only the pipes, maybe maybe voices too, he didn't elaborate. We compared notes, tension mounting with every new contradiction. The crew had expanded, then contracted, numbers fluctuating, evidence suggesting that at any moment there, D been one too many or one too few. The logs were riddled with illusions to trials and resets, but always in handwriting that looked similar, never identical, capitulating to the suggestion that whoever wrote may not have been the same from day to day. A sudden sharp knock split the silence, piotr in the med bay, wrists bound with a shredded sheet, calling out not in words, but in a voice that mimicked Alina, S with uncanny precision. It's time, time to hand in, time to step outside. Then in his own rough accent, don't let it, don't let it finish. Oleg stood, bracing himself, he's getting worse.

50:08Alina gestured for the rest to stay put and went to check on him, motioning archady to watch her back. I moved to the doorway out of habit, peering down the corridor. The station seemed to close in with every breath. Shadows moved along the corners, the glass of the observation window was mirrored, reflecting my shaped twice, three times at odd angles. Deema slid up behind me, voicelo. Samples are still changing, never the same twice, like they're learning from each other, like there are more of us in the room than bodies can account for. His words gave me a chill. I gripped Antonin as battered ID card in my jacket. We have to find what remains of the source, if the signal is still active that might explain the memory slips. And if not, I couldn't finish. His stare met mine, full of mute terror and pleading, a plea not to press further, not to go where only forgetting lay. But I had already decided. I would go further, even if I didn't know how far the ground beneath me could be trusted.

51:12A shout from the med bay broke my train of thought, Oleg's voice crashing above the background noise, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone vomiting, then steel clattering. I rushed down the corridor, Deema at my shoulder. Elina and Arkady had pried the door wide, inside Piotr Leigh crumpled on the tile spasming. Elina held his head, Arkady tried to keep him from biting down on his tongue. Piotr's eyes were glassy, mouth working in silent syllables. In the pulse of overhead light he looked both ancient and newborn. He kept saying it wasn't his body, Elina whispered, tried to scratch his own name onto his forearm as if to anchor himself, then he just folded. Blood from Piotr's scratched wrist streaked the floor, looping unfinished letters, py over and over. I knelt beside him, pressed gauze to the cut, though I knew it was theatre, not medicine. Arkady voiced thick, he's gone, was gone before we got here maybe.

52:15He looked at me as if to confirm the impossible. I searched the med bay for anything, any hint of what he might have left behind, but all I found was a slip of paper crumpled between two vials, remember who is watching, then just a line scratched out so violently at all the sheet. We returned to the galley in silence, Oleg taped the med bay door shut, marking it with Piotr's initials in case anyone managed to forget again. I watched as he formed the characters, his hands shaking. Elina's resolve seemed to be fishering under the strain, but she forced her voice flat. We are down another. We finish what we started, or none of us leaves here with a self-worth carrying. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that the person I'd been even 24 hours earlier already felt faded, like a name called across two rooms and never quite answered. As noon ground thin and then turned to dusk with no change in light, the comms panel began

53:15issuing a soft, indecisurable mutter. I moved to it, flipping the switch. The static resolved just for an instant into the warping refrain. Remember, remember, remember, before crackling away again. I replayed Antonin's last audio in my mind. How could any of us remember, with the world shifting beneath us faster than thought? How could I trust I was still the one hearing her now? A plan began to take shape. If the source of the loop still existed, it would lay somewhere outside, past the bunkers, maybe the secondary comms tower, or where the crew had once trekked into the storm. Antonin's written plea came back to me, in the broadcast, don't try to help US, remember yourself. I pressed the group. We need to find the external tower. Whatever is transmitting, we can physically shut it down. Arcadey bulked his voice ringing with anger and fear. You want us to go into that?

54:15When it got them all, you saw what happened outside, a line into the snow, into nothing. Oleg squared his jaw. Can't be worse than what happens if we sit waiting. He looked at the battered tape deck in my pocket. Seeing that might help us track the signal if it picks up more than we can hear outright. Elina exhaustion coloring every word. Deema you stay. If someone doesn't come back, record everything. We need at least one memory that survives. Deema nodded, clutching his notebook, as if it alone kept his skin on. After equipping ourselves with parkers, flashlights, and the battered recorder, we moved toward the main airlock. The wind was still a dull roar outside, the scream of ice against metal, but the weather had abated enough to make the track possible, if not wise. Flashlights drew lines through the grey. The snow outside was crusted over with fresh drifts, but here and there, divots and depressions revealed a dozen criss-crossing tracks.

55:18I squatted, brushing powder aside and shivered. Some tracks were smaller than any boot-eyed scene, others too large, and all weaved in impossible patterns looping back upon themselves, vanishing into the horizon. We trudged forward, breath-steaming, the only boundary between us and the storm, a string of warning lights half-buried in the ice. Radios clipped to our chests, chattered static, and at odd intervals, half-phrases, some in Antonin's voice, others too garbled, blending cadence and language, until even the air seemed unsure whose words it should carry. Half-way to the outer comm's tower, Oleg froze. He pointed at a dark hump ahead, a snow-shoot, helmeted, sitting upright and half-buried, as if waiting to stand. The green of a transmitter blinked just above the left shoulder, my breath jammed in my chest. Arcadey stepped forward tentative, who the hell no one could survive, sitting like that.

56:18But as we neared, the shape resolved into an empty suit, the helmet fogged from within, and the transmitter's casing fused with something fleshy, veins visible under the cracked plastic, skin grafted into the wires. I felt bile crawl up my throat. Elina crouched beside it, not mechanical, not anymore, human tissue grown into the shell, like it tried to keep broadcasting even after memory left the body. I swept my flashlight across the snow, all around the silence deepened, amplifying every crunch of boot, every pulse of mechanical static from our radios. We pressed onward to the tower, a squat, skeletal structure crusted with rhyme and ragged ice. The transmitter there flickered, rhythm changing with each step we took nearer. Cold wind whistled through the steel lattice, making the world vibrate under foot. At the foot of the tower we found the power panel forced open, wires braided into a maze.

57:20A scoring of numbers repeated here etched in frost by clumsy fingers, 7137 over and over. Arcadey knelt, hands shaking as he traced the lines. This is everywhere on the logs in the engineering deck even in code. What is it open? Elina scanned the area. If it's the same number called through the broadcast, maybe it's a failsafe, or a sequence, a seed to break the loop. I turned to Oleg, tried, keered into the transmitter, see if it changes frequency. Oleg obliged, knuckles whitening with cold, twisting the dial, entering the numbers in sequence, for several seconds nothing but silence answered. Then from both our radios and the tower's own speakers, a single polyphonic voice spoke. You are not who you were, you will be who you are told. It was followed by a burst of static so fierce my ears thudded, my fingers tingled with the imagined sensation of contact, a thousand voices layered and discordant, some full of

58:25sorrow, others soft as a lullaby. The phrase repeated softer now, less command than invitation. Remember me, remember us. The snow around the base of the tower began to swirl, lines forming tight circles. The shadows flitted beyond the edge of flash like beam, shapes shifting, faces half-scene in the drift, as if people both familiar and alien-drifted just out of reach. Elina stumbled backward, boot-catching on metal. We have to destroy it, leave it here, cut the power whatever it takes. Before we could act, Arkady doubled over gasping, he staggered from the group pressing gloved hands to his skull. I was, I was outside, I was in the blizzard calling myself, who am I? His eyes refocused on us, but his face was marbled with confusion. I reached for him gripping his shoulder hard, you're here with us, hold on. He sobbed with relief or terror.

59:25I saw them out there the crew, not dead, not alive, just drifting, calling through each other all their memories eaten, but they looked like us. She pointed at Olig then, Elina, they were in your faces, and mine. Olig steadied himself, eyes locked on the transmitter, enough we cut it or we are next. I retrieved the tape recorder from my coat pressing play, Antonin's voice washed by static issued forth, end the broadcast, don't try to help us, remember yourself. Her cadence so familiar so impossibly close steadied me. I repeated my own name aloud, then the names of the living next to me holding fast against the slip. The static on the tape warped, and a melody leaked through beneath it, something I half remembered from childhood, a song my grandmother used to sing to chase away nightmares. With coordination we yanked out the cables from the panel, wrenching wires until sparks leapt and the lights on the tower gutted, one by one.

1:00:28The wind shrieked, a deep shudder ran under the ice. But the loop did not die. Instead the transmitter emitted a final, agonized whale, not mechanical but human, the sound of departure, or maybe erasure. All at once the radios on our chests began speaking in our own voices, repeated phrases from earlier in the night, overlapping one another until speech was indistinguishable from signal. Alina staggered one hand clamped to her ear, eyes filled with panic. It's it's in us. It doesn't need the broadcast anymore. The loop is a habit, not a source. We brought it back in our voices ourselves. The realization broke something in me. The experiment had never been about transmission, but about infection, memory, identity, the boundaries of the eye, all made susceptible by exposure to others' stories, all dissolvable under certain conditions. The repetition in Antonin's voice had not been a warning, but a vaccine, a last, pitiful

1:01:32attempt to anchor self against the storm. Oleg, voice thick with resolve, took the butt of his rifle to the transmitter, smashing the box to jagged metal. The air changed, crisp almost still. But within the backwash the voices did not cease. If anything, my own thoughts began to spiral, words turning, looping back toward old fears. Elyna collapsed to his knees, muttering the numbers in a vacant monotone. Elyna fell silent, sweat freezing at her temples despite the exertion. I grabbed the tape deck, holding it to my mouth, and began to record. My full name, the city I was born in, my mother's face, what heat felt like in summer, the ache of loss when Antonin as call arrived. The act of naming, invoking memory, burned new pattern into my mind, carving a trench against the press of the anomaly. A shape, indistinct, but certainly human, stepped from behind the tower. Its features flickered, a nose borrowed from Oleg, my own cheekbones, a smile stolen from

1:02:37Antonin as last described memory. Its skin was mottled, as if made from torn photographs regrown in wrong places. It spoke softly with many voices, with you remember me, I won't remember you. My hands shook but I didn't flinch, I remember myself, louder I said each of our names in turn. Oleg, Elyna, Arkady me, we're here. The shape flickered, peeling away as if the light itself expelled it. Oleg whimpered, Elyna watched speechless, Arkady's lips kept moving, but at last no sound escaped. I turned, we have to get back, now, or what's left of us will be spent standing here, seeing what's already lost. No one argued, together we staggered through the empty snow, leaving that hollow transmission behind. When the station came into view, heavy and blunted as the day we first arrived, I looked back, just once.

1:03:37The tower stood empty, snow reclaiming the traces of our prints. The suit remained seated, visor reflecting the weak daylight, as if daring someone else to sit within and begin the ritual again. We returned ragged, not triumphant. Elyna's lips were bluish, Oleg near delirium, Arkady vacantide but breathing. Inside, Dima rushed to meet us, recording everything, voice trembling, words already threatening to lose their shapes. A claxon sounded, faint and fallorn, station power faltering, backup systems sputtering against the weight of their years. Somewhere deep in the structure, circuits melted, relays ticking their final time. I set my battered tape recorder down on the comms table, the magnetic coil humming, a tiny flame of remembered identity. I pressed my hand to the wall, repeating my name, my city, the date, Antoninna's Elyna, S. Oleg's Arkady's Demas, any anchor to keep the anomaly at bay.

1:04:40No one else had much to say, the sound of the station disintegrating was enough. As the sun began to set behind the storm's return, the last functioning speaker coughed up a final fading fragment. Ember, RME, remember me. We stripped wiring, sealed bunk rooms, burned what we dared, the signal must end. If we left evidence behind, let it be memories, not the pattern that had infected every name it touched. The blizzard began again, sealing all exits, windows smeared with grey. In that darkness I counted the numbers, 7137, like a prayer or a warning or a lock. I lay in the dark, eyes open, reciting the names, the places, the things I was sure belonged to me. My own voice twined with Antoninna's from the old recording, two ends of a loop both refusing to end. A week later, when the relief crew dug us out, it was not rescue but expulsion.

1:05:41Deema, friendsid, Arkady's silent, Elina Glaciiid, Oleg Whispering lullabies in the language he claimed to have forgotten. Each of us told a different story about what happened, each convinced some fact was missing or blurred or replaced. The investigators asked questions, but their words struck my mind and broke apart, as if they too were the echo of something long since lost. For the rest of those days in quarantine I gripped Antoninna's ID in one palm, and in the other a page scrolled with the names of everyone I could remember. Mine at the top, the others spiraling away, some letters blurred, some smudged as though by rain. The ministry shelved the case, the official report was inconclusive. But in dreams I saw the station again, half swallowed by snow, heard that polyphonic, feeding voice bending itself to every frequency, sending out the last desperate message to anyone who might answer. Do you remember who you were?

1:06:42And there was always a pause after, just before the static, a place waiting for a reply. The rest fades, and I do not chase it. The cold is still here, my hands are steady, and when I speak my name aloud it answers, that for now is enough. That for now is enough. But even that small certainty started to fray the moment I was alone, hours after the relief team had left, and the quarantine doors shut behind us. The hospital where they brought us was hollow and disinfected, full of its own ghosts, places where you could hear voices in plumbing, see shapes flickering behind brittle frosted glass. I pressed my ear to the wall, listening for my own breath to echo back in the same shape, aware now that this was not always a guarantee. Alina slept or pretended to, curled on the cot like a question mark. Oleg sat at the far end, knees up, rocking slightly, murmuring a children's rhyme so quietly you could almost mistake it for ventilator hiss.

1:07:43Akadilei facing the wall, silent since the tower, eyes wide, unblinking, conscious but not quite here. Dima had not spoken since we were extracted, his notebook clamped in white knuckled hands, the pen line carved deep into the page but forming only closed, meaningless loops. I could feel the seams of myself stiffen with every hour, as if the skin that belonged to me was getting wrapped tighter by the memory of events none of us could truly recount the same way. Each time I tried to recall details, who had pulled the last wire, who led us back through that blizzard, whose face lingered last in the fog, I found facts shifting, names threatening to leave gaps like broken film. Outside the window, snow rose in drifts, glass capturing the weak city light. For a time I tried to sleep, counting pulses not sheep, my own Alina, S. Olegs, Akadilei's demours, each like a tap against the thin partition separating now from then. In the lonely hours I began to worry that even a heartbeat could be replaced by repetition,

1:08:46overtaken by a cadence not entirely mine. I dug my nails into my palm and whispered, I am myself, I am myself. A nurse appeared in the morning, clipboard trembling. Her expression had the careful blankness of those trained to avoid contagion, the visible kind and the invisible. She took our temperatures, notes, asked questions I couldn't answer. When was the last time I dreamt, what did I remember most clearly, what name did I say if awoken without warning? My answers came distorted, coloring outside the lines. Does any song seem familiar, even if you cannot place it, she asked. I hesitated, head full of static fragments of Antonin's melody looping at the edge of consciousness, just at a distance I could not quite travel without falling into it. I shook my head and watched her make her marks and leave, the click of her heels leaving a code I could not break. By afternoon, Deema had taken to copying sections of the blank manifest across his notebook.

1:09:48Elina, too, fingered the corner of a torn page as if worrying a wound. Oleg traced the 7137 into his hospital sheet, a prayer or an anchor, repeating it until it lost sense. I tried not to let myself listen, but the urge to respond by repeating it was nearly impossible to resist. That evening, military officials arrived, a pair of them, young faces drawn. They carried hard black cases, demanded our statements without emotion. Every answer they received contradicted another. Elina claimed she'd led the final sabotage. Arcade muttered about faces in the dark, Deema confessed to locking the logs, Oleg wept and described a song sung in a language his mother swore he'd never learned. As for me I told them the only truth I had left. The voices may be gone, but what's left behind is not silence. It's a pattern you can't erase. There is no one memory, no one mind, left standing alone.

1:10:48They wrote that down and left with it, and we sat in silence, the air growing thick with the smell of boiled water, old antiseptic, and the sullen metal tang of unyielding winter. Late that night, or perhaps early morning, Elina broke and spoke, soft at first, then growing sharper as she fought her own unravelling. Why did it need us, she asked, voice raw? It didn't want destruction not really. It wanted to loop, wanted to survive, even if only as repetition in the next mind the next echo. Her eyes found mine, red-rimmed and haunted. It's not over for us, you know. It's never over, not completely. I thought of Antoninna of her voice slipping in and out of every recording, every memory now only half mine. We have to hold fast to whatever we remember that's ours, forgetting is how it gets through. Oleg shivering despite the room's heat looked up, and if you forget what's yours altogether. No one answered, there was no answer.

1:11:49The hospital room became a cell of quiet ghosts, each of us afraid to ask the next question allowed. Before dawn I awoke to the sound of the radiate-enocking, a clatter rising into a familiar cadence. Across the hall someone's voice strained through a melody, a lullaby sung out of tune, fragments I half recognized from Antoninna's tape. I clenched my hands, tried to recall the entire song, found myself humming along before I could stop. When they released us, they gave us papers to sign, warnings to heed, a stamped verdict of no findings, no culpability, no proof. The others disappeared by government car, one by one, each leaving just a trace, footprints in the lobby, a glove left behind on a plastic bench. I was the last, escorted by a silent officer who barely met my eye before he left me at the curb. I walked home in bitter wind, coat wrapped tight, fingering the battered ID card, all that was left of Antoninna's sokolov or of who she had been.

1:12:52The streets were empty, washed pale in sodium glow, the world hushed as if blanketed by some larger silence. For all I knew the loop was still running, out there in a circuit of others' memories waiting for the next receiver. I kept my head down, repeating the names of those I'd known, what little of them I was sure I still counted as mine. The days after limped forward uneventfully, bureaucracy dulling the edges, but inside I knew the process was not complete. At odd intervals a phrase surfaced and repeated in Antoninna's voice, remember me, just under my own thoughts, sticky as honey, impossible to forget. Sometimes late at night I caught the radio playing an unfamiliar station, a barely their channel full of static and half words. Sometimes my own name would flicker, light as breath, and I'd feel a prickling dread that perhaps, someday soon, that voice would be untethered from any living tongue at all.

1:13:53No one from the expedition kept in touch. Elinas' number rang with no answer, Oleg's mailbox filled, Arkady and Dima vanished into long leave or reassignment, the passage of time smudging even my sharpest recollections to a grey indistinctness. But one evening a year later, as autumn threatened, the postman handed me a brown paper parcel with no return address. Inside was a battered hand-labeled cassette, a real to-real the kind they used at Miroff for logging auxiliary signals. No letter, just a sticker, A-N-T-O-N-I-N-A. My heart jackhammed in my chest. For a full two days I stared at the package, too frightened to play it, too obsessed to throw it away. Finally, just before dawn on the chillest, blankest morning I remember, I loaded the tape in my old recorder and pressed play. There was silence at first, a shivering pause between magnetic grains, then Antonin's

1:14:53unmistakable voice, warm and only a little warped, began reciting a child's riddle. What belongs to you but others use it more than you do? Her laughter followed, a sound I'd never heard from her before, high and hopeful, I almost wept. Behind her faint, a melody played. At first I didn't place it, but then recognition struck. The song my own mother sang at bedtime, a tune I hadn't thought of since I was small. It wound through the background, patient, unconcerned with the world's desolation. The riddle ended, there was a long hush, a kind of waiting, then a second voice entered, male, gentle, strangely familiar. Do you remember who you were, more silence? Then only the ache of static, soft and constant. The tape spun on, the track looping to the start, etching the question over and over, deeper each time, impossible to erase. I sat unmoving in my kitchen, tape unspooling, the old recorder growing hot against my knee.

1:15:54Outside the world was hushed in frost, and beneath the wind I almost heard another frequency, a transmission barely audible, always circling, waiting for a mind to anchor it. Somewhere someone is always remembering. And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.