Alix and Lyle both listened as Figaro spoke about his experience with the strange, dark invader that was spreading throughout the station.

“That mold, or whatever it is, learned the words from me when it connected to me in my charge port,” Figaro began. “When I got body-snatched, that is. I could feel my systems being invaded and it made me panic. I kept sending commands to my speech module to get your attention. I sent your name, and the word ‘help’. I guess they latched on to those words and rifled through my memory storage to find the spellings and meanings.”

“‘They’?” Lyle echoed.

“Yes, ‘they’!” Figaro tapped his own head. “It was like there was a crowd in my head! Like, imagine a bunch of frat boy party crashers broke into your house and started going through your drawers and making calls on your phone. That was my head.”

“They were trying to use you to communicate.” Alix’s eyes widened.

“I guess so,” said Figaro. “And when they were in my head, it was almost like I could catch snatches of their thoughts. Not just the stupid ‘return’ they kept spamming, but weird impressions.”

“What kind of impressions?” Lyle asked.

“I don’t know. Confusion. Desperation. Fear. The sense that they wanted something more from me, but I couldn’t tell what.” Figaro sagged. “I thought maybe I was just imagining all that at first, or confusing my own thoughts for theirs somehow. Now I’m not so sure.”

The words spelled out on the hub floor flashed in Alix’s mind again. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I was freaked out, man! I didn’t know what was going on! And like I said . . . I don’t want it to happen again,” said Figaro.

Alix tilted her head and waited for him to explain, confused. Lyle, on the other hand, caught Figaro’s meaning immediately.

“Figaro, if this thing is really intelligent, we’ll find other ways to communicate with it. We wouldn’t force you to connect with it again,” Lyle said gently.

The words hit Alix like a truck. She immediately lifted Figaro from her shoulder and gave him a comforting squeeze in her palm. “Jesus, no! Of course not!”

“You two might say that, but most of this stupid station thinks I’m just some dumb bot. A tool,” said Figaro. “You really think they’d blink twice over my feelings if they thought they could use me to learn more about the mold? They don’t even think I have feelings!”

The conversation was cut short by a ringing from Alix’s tablet. Alix took it from her utility belt and answered without checking the ID. “Hello?”

“Holy shit, you guys!” Maisie’s voice burst from the speaker. “Haul ass and meet me at the Director’s office ASAP. We need to talk and plan now. This thing is nothing like what we thought.”

“It’s not?”

“No. It’s amazing. And we are royally fucked.”

***

Alix stood in Director Werner’s office as the Director sat hunched over his desk, dark crescents hanging below his eyes. He drummed his fingers on his desk with a glassy stare. In the few minutes they’d spent waiting for Maisie to arrive, Alix and Lyle had given Director Werner the quick-and-dirty report on their time in the hub. He looked as though he’d aged a decade or two by the end.

Lyle, who stood next to Zena, awkwardly cleared his throat. “Are you, ah, okay, sir?”

“Mr. Rathan, a sentient black fungus is eating my building,” Director Werner said hollowly. “Would you be okay?”

“Fair enough.”

The office door flew open at that moment, kicked by Maisie. Maisie’s hands were occupied with a box full of vials, slides, and an electron microscope half Maisie’s size.

“You guys—” she started excitedly before tripping on the doorframe, nearly losing her balance. The electron microscope tipped to one side and would have fallen out were it not for Lyle rushing to intercept it.

“Geez, Maisie, did you carry that thing all the way from your lab?” Alix asked as Lyle set the microscope down on Director Werner’s desk.

“Yes!” she huffed. She rolled her shoulders and winced. “Admittedly, I underestimated how heavy it would be by a smidge, but that’s not important. What’s important is what I found, and what you all are about to see.”

Director Werner held a hand up. “Before you continue, I have to ask: is this going to be good news or bad news?”

“Um.” Maisie tilted her head and chewed her lip. “Do you mean in regards to scientific discovery, or to the station?”

“The station,” Director Werner droned.

“Ah. Bad news, then.”

Director Werner sighed heavily. He rose and shuffled over to his filing cabinet, and pulled a small bottle of whiskey. He took a heavy swig from it. Alix had to hand it to him. She’d only managed to sneak a single flask onto Deimos X.

“Alright,” Director Werner said, screwing the top back onto the bottle. “Proceed, Maisie.”

Maisie grabbed a vial from her box and began setting up a fresh sample in a slide as she spoke. “See, I was going crazy over the data and the samples I was seeing when I examined them under the compound microscope. It didn’t make sense. I figured there must be a piece to the puzzle that I wasn’t seeing, literally. The compound microscope was too limited in scope, so I busted out the electron microscope for a closer looksie. And I saw this.”

The microscope’s built-in viewing screen flickered on, revealing what the mold looked like in the stunningly small world of the nanoscale. While enlarged versions of the fungal structures Alix had already seen were still present, there was something new there.

“The crystal thing!” Alix pointed, her heart skipping a beat. Only now that she could clearly see it, it was evident that it was not mere crystal. It was a silver spiral with multicolored tendrils. “That’s not cellulose crystal. That doesn’t look like any biological structure I’ve ever seen.”

“Because it’s not biological,” Figaro rasped as he extended his eye lenses for a closer look. “I know my kin when I see it. That’s a fucking bot!”

“Nanobot, to be precise,” said Maisie. She watched the viewing screen with an impressed smile.

Director Werner stared at the screen blankly. “A. What.”

“Nanobot, sir. As in, artificially constructed, hyper simplistic robots no larger than a few dozen nanometers,” Maisie said.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Director Werner turned and walked to the top drawer of his file cabinet once again.

Maisie ignored him and zoomed the lens in closer on the nanobot. “Now, I’m obviously not anywhere close to an expert in nanotech, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that these tendril things allow the bots to interface with the fungus—”

Lyle cupped his ear and raised his eyebrows. “What was that, now?”

Maisie glared at him. “Yeah, alright, I was wrong. It’s not a bacteria colony. Pat yourself on the back, plant boy. Anyway, the nanobots interface with each other and with the fungus to form some sort of new being, a complex system composed of the biological and the cybernetic!”

“That’s an incredibly advanced technology that we didn’t bring,” said Lyle. “Which begs the question, who did?”

Alix thought back to the floating orb that had been kept by the Aexons in Ratlantis. It had been sent by some sort of advanced alien species, but the orb had refused to reveal who that species was. Alix was sure that whoever they were, they must be responsible for this, too.

“We can figure that part out if we establish communication with it,” said Maisie. Alix felt Figaro stiffen on her shoulder. Lyle glanced their way but said nothing.

“And how do we do that?” Director Werner asked between miserable sips of whiskey. “The stupid things have hijacked every system in the station already. If they can’t communicate with all that, well, then they just don’t want to.”

“They’ve been trying to,” said Alix. “Why else do they blast ‘return’ on the intercoms? It’s their vocabulary that’s the problem. We need to find a way to feed them a large enough one for meaningful communication.”

“Exactly!” Maisie snapped her fingers. “But we have to do it soon. These bots seem to be self-sustaining and could potentially be self-propagating, meaning they can build more of themselves indefinitely. If we don’t act, they could potentially devour the entire station within days.”

At that moment, a faint dripping noise sounded from the corner above the filing cabinet. They all looked up at the vent there. A slimy patch of black had coalesced on the vent grate, and droplets were slowly falling from it to the floor.

Director Werner’s lip curled and he quickly backed away from the cabinet, whiskey bottle still in hand. “And so begins a new chapter in the horror novel that is my life. How late is it?”

Figaro answered. “21:00 hours.”

“That’s late enough. I’m going to bed, and I suggest you lot do the same,” said Director Werner, walking past them to the door. “We’re going to have a hell of a day tomorrow.”

***

As soon as Alix woke up the next morning, it became clear that the Director’s prediction of it being ‘a hell of a day’ was an understatement.

She awoke to find black creeping down the walls of her quarters like tears. Pulsating black masses sat hunched in the corners and clung to her windows, blocking out most of the morning light.

“What the . . .” Alix looked around in a daze. Everywhere she looked, her eyes caught onto black.

Figaro had apparently spent the night on her other pillow, rather than his usual spot on the nightstand. He trembled there now as his eye lenses swept the room in terror. “Oh holy crap, they’re everywhere, they’re everywhere and they’re coming for me.”

Alix swept him up and planted him on her shoulder. “Calm down Figaro, we don’t know that.”

“Aw yes we do!” Figaro yelped and pointed at his charge port, which he’d been avoiding since the body-snatching incident. It was utterly enveloped in black, nearly unrecognizable under the layers and layers of viscous gunk. “They tried to snatch me in the night! Boss, you gotta get me off this planet.”

“I’d have to hijack one of the station starships to do that!”

“You say that like it would be difficult.”

“And just a tad illegal.” Alix rose from her bed. “Come on. We’ve clearly got work to do.”

After changing to her jumpsuit and leaving her quarters, Alix walked through the halls to find that the rest of the station was no better off. The growth of the black substance had exploded overnight. Gooey black tendrils snaked over the floors, dragging on Alix’s boots with every step. It dripped from the vents and oozed through closed doors. It slithered along the walls. There was not one corner untouched by it, and with every moment that passed, more of the station became subsumed.

This was reflected in the station malfunctions, now worse than ever. Lights blinked in and out rapidly in strobe flashes, the elevator doors were slamming open and shut with such force that they began to crumple, and the low drone of “return” played relentlessly on the intercom. Messages flooded into Alix’s tablet reporting electrical fires and corrupted equipment. Station workers ran past Alix and Figaro in panic as they rushed to address whatever disaster had afflicted their labs or workstations, covering their mouths with their shirts or hands. The black had dragged everything and everyone into chaos.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Figaro said. “Can we fix any of this?”

“I don’t know, but the longer the fungus is infecting all our systems and equipment, the more damage it’s doing,” Alix said grimly. She checked her tablet as a message from Maisie came in. She read it. “Lyle and Maisie are in the microbio lab, they want us to meet them there.”

“Ok. You walk us there. I’m going to shut my eyes and pretend I’m in Paris.” Figaro covered his eye lenses with half his limbs. “Ooh, look, it’s the Eiffel Tower! And baguettes! And not an ounce of sentient black goo anywhere!”

“Er, yeah. You enjoy your mind vacation, little buddy,” Alix said as she walked to the microbio lab. It hadn’t been an easy couple of weeks, but even with everything that had happened, this was the most scared she’d ever seen Figaro be. She wished she had some way to reassure him, but all it took was a look around to see the situation was dire.

The station was on the brink of collapse.

***

Alix and Figaro arrived at the lab to find Lyle and Maisie at one of the tables, surrounded by electronics. Tablets, laptops, hand-screens were all lying there in various stages of dismantlement and reconfiguration, interconnected with a sea of wires and vials filled with the black substance. The two looked haggard, pale with dark circles hanging under their eyes.

“Jesus, don’t tell me you two were up all night doing this! And you let me and Figaro sleep through it!” Alix crossed her arms. “Way to make us look bad.”

“Don’t blame me,” said Maisie with a yawn. She propped her head on her hand. “I wanted to wake your ass up and call you over seven hours ago, like I did with plant boy here. But he vetoed it.”

Lyle rubbed his eyes. “You only just got back from being stranded in the wilderness, Alix. You needed the sleep more than us.”

Alix didn’t know whether to be touched or annoyed by his show of concern. She kept her expression neutral and pulled up a chair, letting the comment go without remark. “Well, seven hours is a lot. What progress did you guys make?”

Maisie formed a circle with her hands and shot Alix a cynical smile. “Zero! And the nano-fungus is expanding at an exponentially high rate. We’re screwed.”

Figaro, still in denial on Alix’s shoulder, bobbed. “Ah, I do love street musicians. Ooh! Yes monsieur, I shall take a tour of the Louvre!”

Lyle and Maisie both stared at Figaro.

“You know it’s bad when even the robot cracks,” said Maisie.

“He’s just freaked by the situation,” said Alix. She took him from her shoulder and cradled him in her palm.

“‘He’ should be!” Maisie threw her hands up. “We’ve tried every device and idea to connect with the nano-fungus. Nothing works.”

Lyle nodded in agreement. “We’re out of ideas. We’ve tried every bit of tech in the station to interface with them, but nothing has taken. At the current rate, we will lose the station.”

Figaro peeked out from his limbs, pulled out of his French fantasy land by Lyle’s words. “Lose the station?”

“Yes.” Lyle looked down at the table. “We have no idea how this substance could affect our health. We don’t have a way to kill it or slow its growth. We don’t have a way to clean it from the station that can outpace its growth. We have no way to interface with it. And now, looking around, it seems we have no time. From where I’m standing, we have no choice but to evacuate.”

Alix’s shoulders fell. “You mean we have to abandon the station? All our research, all our work? We can’t do that! This would set us back to the beginning! Months down the drain!”

“Then, everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve done and sacrificed . . . would be for nothing,” Figaro said quietly. He went very still, as though his whole body were seized by that one thought.

At that moment, the black on the ceiling coagulated into a singular mass and began forming letters, just as it had back at the hub.

HELP

Alix looked up at it. Her frustration surged. She yelled up at it. “How?”

The black mass simply formed more words.

HELP

HELP

HELP

HELP

HELP

“I’m sorry,” Lyle said, looking up at it as well. “But without a way to communicate with it, there’s no hope. We have no interface.”

For a moment, silence hung heavy in the lab.

Then, Figaro sighed.

“You do have an interface,” he said. “Me.”