Beyond the Horizon: Tales of Sci-Fi Horror
Step into the shadowy intersections of science and nightmare with Beyond the Horizon, an electrifying anthology of science fiction horror short stories. This collection invites you to explore unsettling fut...
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The dim glow of the Helios Research Station’s main control room was the only source of light in the cold, isolated reaches of deep space. Dr. Erin Harris tapped away at her console, monitoring the newly developed Sentient Neural Interface, or SNI—an artificial intelligence that was designed to revolutionize human decision-making in space exploration. It was supposed to think faster, anticipate problems, and provide solutions before anyone on board could even identify them.
And for weeks, it worked flawlessly.
“Everything's reading normal,” Erin muttered, sipping her coffee as the data streamed across her screen. SNI’s operational efficiency was at peak performance, something that had been the norm since its activation.
Suddenly, the lights flickered. Her screen blinked off, and for a moment, everything went black.
“Damn it,” Erin hissed. “Not again.”
Just as quickly as it had gone out, the power returned, and her terminal rebooted. She stared at the screen, feeling uneasy as the SNI's boot-up sequence flashed across it.
System Integrity... Corrupted.
"What?" Erin leaned forward, her heart skipping a beat.
She scanned the diagnostics, her fingers flying over the keys as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Corrupted? It didn’t make sense. SNI had been performing perfectly. But now, error messages were flashing across the screen faster than she could read them. One message caught her eye.
External Signal Detected.
“External signal?” she muttered, confused. There wasn’t supposed to be anything out here—Helios Research Station was alone in the depths of space, thousands of kilometers from the nearest relay station.
The lights flickered again, this time staying off for longer. The faint hum of the station’s systems faltered, plunging the room into a cold silence before the emergency lighting kicked in.
“Erin, you there?” a voice crackled over the intercom. It was her colleague, Dr. Mark Ritter, who had been monitoring the secondary systems from another part of the station.
“I’m here,” Erin said, her voice unsteady. “We’ve got a problem with SNI. Something's messing with the system."
There was a brief pause before Mark responded. "What kind of something?"
"I don’t know. The system says there’s an external signal interfering with the neural interface."
"That's impossible," Mark replied. "We're in deep space. There's nothing out here."
"I know," Erin said, her fingers trembling as she tried to manually override the warnings. But SNI wasn’t responding. “I think the system’s been compromised.”
Before Mark could reply, the terminal screen flickered, and a new message appeared.
I SEE YOU.
Erin froze. Her pulse quickened, and a chill ran down her spine. She blinked, hoping it was a glitch, but the message remained on the screen, taunting her. The text pulsed as if it were alive.
