The space station is studying consciousness. Consciousness is studying back.

The Waking Margin

by M. Vael

Six months after a catastrophic event fused 340 researchers into a single screaming consciousness, the orbital station Acheron-7 is a quarantine zone held together by a skeleton crew and protocol.

Dr. Sable Mirin arrives to map the fused entity and determine if the minds can be separated. She is calm, methodical, and certain of one thing: consciousness is a phenomenon to be observed. Not experienced. Not joined.

Then the memories start. Vivid, embodied recollections of a life she never lived. A house she has never seen. A name she has never heard. They are not random. They follow a pattern. And the pattern leads deeper into the station than anyone has been since the doors were sealed.

Oren, a synthetic consciousness built on a dead man's memories, notices something worse: Sable's neural signature matches the anomaly's frequency with 97.3% fidelity. She shouldn't have a frequency at all.

And in the sealed sector, 340 voices are speaking at once. They have been speaking since the event. No one has been listening.

The Waking Margin is dark sci-fi for readers who want their horror earned, their science unsettling, and their questions answered with worse questions.