The ice beneath Europa Station cracked like broken promises, sending tremors through the research outpost’s metal bones. Dr. Zara Chen pressed her palm against the observation deck’s frosted window, watching Jupiter’s amber eye glare down at them through the eternal night.
“Another memory gone,” whispered her colleague Marcus, holding a data pad with shaking hands. “Jenkins from hydroponics. He can’t remember his daughter’s name anymore.”
Zara turned from the window, her breath forming small clouds in the station’s failing heat. Three weeks ago, it had started small—forgotten passwords, misplaced tools, the usual stress of deep space isolation. But now entire chunks of their lives were vanishing like steam in the void.
The station housed forty-seven souls, though that number felt increasingly meaningless as pieces of who they were dissolved daily. Zara had watched her own childhood summers in Mumbai fade until only the ghost of monsoon rain remained in her mind.
“The ice isn’t just frozen water,” she murmured, studying the core samples they’d extracted from Europa’s subsurface ocean. Under the microscope, crystalline structures moved with an intelligence that defied physics textbooks. “It’s something else. Something hungry.”
Marcus set down his pad, rubbing his temples. “The mining operation. We’ve been drilling for three months, pulling up these ice cores, bringing them into the station for analysis.”
“And the crystals have been feeding,” Zara finished. “Not on our bodies, but on our neural patterns. Our memories.”
Through the intercom, Captain Rodriguez’s voice crackled with static and confusion. “All hands to stations. We need to… we need to…” A long pause. “I’m sorry, what were we discussing?”
Zara felt her own memories of her first kiss slipping away like water through her fingers. She lunged for the emergency controls, her scientific training battling against the growing void in her mind. The station’s atmospheric processors hummed to life, beginning to flush out the contaminated air.
But as she watched the ice crystals in the samples slowly dim and crack, she wondered if some memories were worth more than others. Her grandmother’s lullabies vanished just as the first clear thought in days bloomed in her consciousness—the knowledge of how to pilot the escape pods.
In the end, seventeen crew members made it to the shuttles, their minds swiss-cheese puzzles of missing pieces. As Europa Station fell silent behind them, Zara clutched a photograph of people she could no longer name but somehow still loved, while Jupiter’s storm continued its eternal dance in the darkness ahead.
The ice below resumed its patient hunger, waiting for the next visitors to arrive.
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