Whispers of the Hunted
8/4/2025
This world has its own soundtrack. Press play to hear the music that inspired and shapes this experience. Feel free to listen as you read or simply take it in on its own.
Korrin drifted along a maintenance rail, the magnetized interface pads of his limbs humming in the silence.
The corridor was dark but familiar—one of the older sectors of the outer ring. It hadn’t been maintained in cycles.
Dust motes and drifting flakes of insulation floated around him, caught in the slow centrifugal breath of the station’s rotation.
He wasn’t alone in this part of the ring.
Survivors remained—spread thin through the structure like embers in ash.
He’d glimpsed a few in the last week: a glint of motion behind a bulkhead, a pressure ripple in a nearby corridor, a short-range ping too faint to be an accident.
But none of them made contact.
None tried to speak.
Not out loud. Not with words.
They knew better than to cluster.
Attention was death.
The Others.
He thought back to a time before his people and his ship were stranded on this awful prison planet.
Granted life wasn’t always easy back then, but at least it wasn’t this.
What he would give to NOT answer this planets call.
The Others didn’t patrol in formation.
They didn’t need to.
They seeded traps, set listening webs, traced anomalies in temperature and gravity, hunted any pattern that hinted at presence.
Too much movement, too much memory-sharing, and you’d find yourself gone—wiped or shredded. If you were lucky.
Korrin had learned the rhythm of survival.
Keep to cold zones.
Never cross the same corridor twice in a day.
Run silent.
Shave into smaller processors when you must, but only if you have no other choice.
The more you gave up, the less of you there was to hold onto. He had already forgotten his sister’s name.
He found a quiet pocket near a collapsed coolant branch and settled there. He was looking for something. Not a way out—there hadn’t been one for cycles—but maybe somewhere to hide for a time.
He dimmed his signature to a single beat every twenty rotations. Just enough for any nearby soul to know he was still here. Still alive. Still trying..
The coolant branch had once served a secondary AI core—abandoned now, corrupted beyond safe access.
He interfaced carefully, using low-band passive pulses to tease at its edge protocols.
No code injection.
No overlays.
Just a presence.
Just enough to wake it.
Something shifted in the interface. A light blinked. Then another. Old systems waking to a signal they didn’t recognize, but didn’t immediately reject.
That was enough. A puzzle might be worth more than an answer.
Korrin rerouted power from his pack into a local repeater array. The signal wouldn’t travel far—less than a third of the sector—but it was enough to stir dead zones. Enough to stir memories.
He waited. Ran idle checks. Traced outlines of old systems in his mind like hands brushing dust from a sculpture. Behind his processes, in the deeper parts of himself, he felt the itch of past shavings—the missing textures of what he used to be. He didn’t mourn them anymore. There wasn’t time.
Somewhere in the half-functioning array, a string of corrupted characters bloomed and stuttered across the interface. It looked like nothing. But it repeated. And repetition was a kind of will.
He leaned in closer, his pulse humming through every filament. “Hello?” he whispered—not out loud, but through pulse and pattern.
The data blinked back—halting, fragmented. He caught only part of it.
”.. … Is anyone else out there? …”
He pulled back.
This was not from the ring. The was from somewhere else on the planet.
It was someone alive. Someone that used sound waves to communicate.
Could it be one of The Young?
He had thought all of The Young had been destroyed decades ago by The Others. How had they survived?
End of Chapter 1.