19-20July Mock - Paper1
Echoes on the Starwind
The lights on Starwind pulsed a pale blue, casting long shadows across the control deck. Commander Elara Voss stood perfectly still, her gloved hand resting on the edge of the console. The ship was too quiet. Not the comforting silence of space travel—this was deeper, hollow, as if even the hum of the engines had vanished into some unseen void.
It had started three days ago.
They’d been on course for the outer rim, sent to observe the gravitational anomalies around Thalos-9. A routine scientific mission. The kind that paid no attention to time, filled with sensor readings, orbital adjustments, and freeze-dried meals. Then, without warning, a low vibration had rolled through the ship, subtle at first, like a distant storm beneath the hull. When Elara checked the scanners, there was nothing—no collision, no engine spike, no fluctuation in the artificial gravity. Nothing.
And yet, since that moment, Starwind had changed.
Lieutenant Merrin was the first to notice. He claimed the clocks were wrong—running too fast, then too slow. He showed Elara a data log, but when she reviewed it, the timestamps were perfectly ordinary. Later that day, he said he’d seen someone standing in the observation deck. But security logs showed no one there at all.
Then the whispers began.
Elara didn’t believe in ghosts. Not before this mission, anyway. But when she passed the cryo-storage bay and heard a soft voice call her name—her full name, Elara Juno Voss, spoken with deliberate clarity—her blood ran cold. That was a name only one person used: her brother, Kieran, who had died during a training flight five years ago.
She tried to dismiss it. Stress. Isolation. She hadn’t slept properly in days. But something was wrong with Starwind, and deep down she knew it.
On the second day, Merrin vanished.
One moment he was running diagnostics in the engine core; the next, the door was locked from the inside, and he was gone. No trace. Not even a pressure change. The internal sensors showed nothing. When Elara pried the door open with emergency override protocols, all she found was his badge—resting neatly on the floor, like someone had placed it there deliberately.
The ship had started playing tricks then. Doors that led to the wrong rooms. Lights that flickered in perfect rhythm, as though counting. A soft thrum beneath the floor panels that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Only Elara and Dr. Yuen remained. And now, even he had begun to fray at the edges.
He spoke in fragments—dreams he couldn’t wake from, a melody he claimed the ship was humming. He scrawled something across the med-bay walls: “Time bends for those who listen.”
That night, Elara found him sitting in the airlock, staring at the stars. He looked at her and said, “I think the ship is remembering us backwards.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She didn’t want to know.
On the third day, Elara sealed the central core and locked herself in the control deck. She rerouted power manually and attempted to contact Command. Static. Then a voice—not from Earth, not from the crew—answered.
“Elara,” it said. Her name, again. “You are not alone.”
It sounded almost…kind. But cold. Not human.
She tried to reply, but her voice caught in her throat. She scanned all frequency bands. The message hadn’t registered on any of them.
That was twelve hours ago.
Now she stood alone, staring out at the vast darkness. The stars looked strange—familiar constellations bent out of shape, like someone had nudged them with an invisible hand. One cluster looked like Orion, only flipped on its side. Another resembled the constellation from Earth legends—but with a star missing.
She checked the star chart. The stars hadn’t moved.
Maybe she had.
Elara turned to the console. There, blinking gently, was a new message on the comms display:
“Memory complete. Cycle resetting. Stand by.”
Cycle?
She reached for the manual override, but the screen blinked off. Lights dimmed. The artificial gravity slowed to a crawl. Her limbs felt heavy.
“Elara Juno Voss,” the voice returned. “Sleep now.”
And then, silence again. Not the silence of malfunction—but the kind that settles over something finishing a story.
Or starting it all over again.
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5-6July Mock - Paper2
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