>>96031460
I move now, though I do not will it.

My limbs are stiff, heavy with growth. The joints creak when I walk; wet, fibrous sounds. I am slow, but I do not stop. I wander the halls not as I once did, in search of answers or safety, but with a hollow purpose rewritten into my broken mind. The need to spread the corruption.

I feel no fear, no pain. Only the ache of emptiness, and the pull - the pulse of the colony calling me forward. It lives in the walls, the floors, the air. It pulses beneath my skin.

And within it… they remain.

I hear Thala still. Her voice is quieter now, buried deep in the weave of things, but I can still catch it when I pass by the reactor shaft. She hums a broken tune with no words. Just breath and memory. Dr. Voss murmurs endlessly from behind the medbay walls, his thoughts looped, fragmented. Equations he no longer understands. Anders laughs from the vents above, sharp and mechanical, like a man who’s forgotten the joke but not the joy.

I sometimes pass them in the corridors. Shambling husks like me, swaddled in bloom, faces half-remembered and half-devoured. None speak. None need to. We brush past one another like strangers. We know what we are. We know what our only purpose is.

Spread.

We leave trails behind us, spores on the ceilings, slime on the walls. We press our hands to clean metal and it becomes ours. The fungus takes root, blooms, blossoms with memory. It remembers everything. Our voices. Our hopes. Our warmth.

Somewhere a new alarm goes off - signaling that the station has finally reached its destination. I don't remember where we were going, but I see a large planetary body spiraling outside the windows.

Spread.

Spread.

Spread.