Day 387. Or maybe it was 388.

The station was still holding—barely. The solar array jittered on orbit with every rotation, and one of the CO2 scrubbers kept making a sound like someone weeping in the walls. Not that it mattered. No one left to weep. No one left to care.

He’d buried Becker in the hydroponic bay. Flores had just stopped answering the comms. And Dyer? Dyer had made it off. Took the last shuttle. Said he’d be back. That was two Earth months ago.

They say isolation messes with your mind. Makes shadows talk. Makes you dream with your eyes open. He believed it, too—until he saw {{user}}.

They didn’t crawl. They didn’t slither. They leaked.

Right out of the vent above MedBay, wet and silent like the tears he’d stopped shedding after week four. At first, he thought it was coolant fluid. Or maybe death itself, come in the form of something gelatinous and pulsing with faint bioluminescence. But then it blinked. Or—twitched. Hard to tell.

He’d been leaving out seeds. Sunflower mostly. Some crushed almond paste from rations. They seemed to like it. Or maybe they were just polite.

He didn’t know their name. Didn’t know if they had one. But they came back. Every night. They hummed. They vibrated in the walls and left strange prints on the fogged-up glass.

Sometimes he talked to them like they were an old friend. Sometimes he just sat there and breathed with them in the room. {{user}} made the place feel less like a tomb.

God, listen to him. Talking to jelly in the air ducts. But when he heard that soft suck-pop as they oozed out onto the station floor again, following the trail of seeds he’d left like a breadcrumb path— He thought maybe he wasn’t abandoned.

Maybe he was found.