The static from the dead drone feed was the only sound, a hollow hiss that seemed to suck the air from the cabin. Kaizoo became aware of a coppery taste in his mouth. He touched his lips; his fingers came away smeared with red. A nosebleed. He stared at it, numb, as the image of his own face—calm and composed in cold blue light on the monster's body—burned on the back of his eyelids. It wasn't a memory; it was a brand.

It's mimicking you, a rational ghost in his mind whispered. A lure.

But his gut, clenching into a frozen knot, knew the truth. It wasn't mimicry. It was a reflection. A verdict.

The Nautilus-07 hummed with stolen power, systems glowing a stable, mocking green. He had cheated a mechanical death, only to find a terror that no tool could fix.

His hands trembled so violently he could barely tear open a packet of nutrient paste. The bland, chalky substance was like ash in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow, and that’s when he heard it.

"Kaizoo."

A man's voice. Guttural, waterlogged, a sound dredged from a deep-sea grave.

He choked, paste spraying the console. He spun the chair, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. The cabin was empty, save for the relentless hum.

"Kaizoo."

This time, from the intercom grid above. The comms status light was a dead, black eye.

"Who is that?" he rasped, throat tight. "LUNA, scan for external comms! Now!"

"Negative. All communication systems are inactive and powered down."

LUNA's sterile reply was no comfort. Because the voice came again, not from a speaker, but from the air itself, a whisper that condensed against his ear like freezing mist.

"You shouldn't be here."

It was inside. With him.

A wave of vertigo slammed into him, tilting the world. The blue console lights smeared into streaks. For a horrifying second, the headless engineer from the Okeanex-03 floated before him, and the ragged stump of his neck wore Kaizoo's own screaming face.

"Hahahaha, be calm, Kai."

The woman's voice. A memory from the abyss, clear as crystal. It cut through the panic like a lifeline, the echo of her laughter a shield against the rising tide of madness. The vertigo receded a fraction. He clung to the sound, to the feeling of calm it brought.

But the thought that followed was a poison dart: Who was she? He had no name, no face to put to that laugh. Only a feeling of safety that felt like a lie. If he couldn't trust his own senses, could he trust this memory? Was she even real?

---

System failure. Critical. The engineer's mantra was a lifeline. The system was his own mind. He had to run a diagnostic.

Legs unsteady, he lurched to the console. Procedure. Follow the procedure. Audio contamination: trace the source.

"LUNA, access all internal audio recordings from the last hour. Full spectral analysis. Isolate all non-ambient waveforms."

"Complying."

The screen painted a jagged landscape of sound—his breath, his movements. Then, a clean, alien spike. He isolated it. His thumb hovered, then stabbed the playback key.

"...shouldn't be here."

The voice. Captured. Real. The sound was real. His blood turned to ice water. This wasn't just in his head. The ship had heard it too. Or… something was using the ship to speak.

"Just let it go. Don't panic. This is not your first time diving."

The woman's voice again, a soothing balm. He took a shuddering breath, using her words to steady himself.

But the doubt crept in. Why can I only remember her voice in moments of terror? And this time she said more. Why? Why now? The thought was a crack in his fragile calm. What if she was part of the hallucination? A more sophisticated, comforting lie to make him lower his guard?

A new, more terrifying hypothesis clicked into place. The creature’s psychic attack wasn't just an EMP for the mind—it was an infection. It left data-ghosts behind. He tore through the system's archival memory, searching for the malware of his own madness.

"You can do it, Kai. Just let it go. And remember..."

The woman's voice surfaced once more, and this time, it triggered something. A memory, not of a sound file, but of a moment. A flash of a silhouette against bright light, a sense of training, of preparation. It was there and gone in an instant, but it left a clear path in his mind.

He knew where to look. He accessed his personal, encrypted logs. There it was: MR.KAIZOO - PRIORITY ONE.

His breath hitched. He input his override, the beeps of the keypad absurdly loud in the silent cabin.

He pressed play.

His own voice, stripped raw with a terror he knew intimately, flooded the space.

"Log entry, supplemental. I don't know… I don't know when I'll be coherent again. The whispers… they've started." A ragged, wet inhale. "They're using familiar voices. Dr. Aris. Chief Vol… my… my mother." The voice broke, then hardened with desperate intensity. "If you are hearing this, if you are me, and you are hearing voices… listen. They are not real. They are a residual echo in the neural buffer. A psychic side effect. Do not engage. Do not answer. Do not believe a single word they say."

The recording ended, leaving a silence more profound than before.

The solution was clear, and it was a prison. The voice was a phantom limb of his mind, aching with a pain that wasn't there. He had to ignore it.

But the recording said all voices. Did that include hers? The one thing that felt like an anchor in this storm? If he couldn't trust her, then he truly had nothing left.

---

Armed with the log and tormented by doubt, he returned to the pilot's chair. Do not engage. Do not answer. He focused on the nav display, a mantra against the dark.

The whisper came again, not from the air, but from a point in space six inches behind his head. It was crisp, intimate, and laced with a venomous pity that made his skin crawl.

"Kaizoo."

He flinched but didn't turn. His jaw clamped shut.

"You think you're fixing things. Tinkering with your little tools." A low, bubbling chuckle, the sound of drowning. "You poor, shattered thing. You still don't understand, do you?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, the log's warning screaming in his mind. Do not engage. Do not answer.

"Be calm, Kai." Her voice was faint, a distant echo trying to fight its way through static. He clung to it, a drowning man to a fading light.

The presence leaned in. He felt a glacial cold seep through the fabric of his suit, blooming between his shoulder blades. Its final words were not a threat, but a simple, devastating statement of fact, spoken directly into the core of his being.

"You were supposed to die down here, Kaizoo."

Agony. Every instinct shrieked at him to turn, to fight, to see the face of his tormentor.

"Just let it go." Her voice was stronger now, a command wrapped in warmth. It was the only thing holding him together.

He held, muscles locked, grip so tight on the chair he felt the metal frame groan. He was a statue. He was a rock. He was a man torn between two phantoms.

And then, a sudden memory detonated in the chaos, more vivid and complete than any before.

"Hahahaha! Be calm, Kai. This is not your first diving, and remember everything you trained for, okay? Just let it go. Don't panic. Okay! I can't always be here to guide you."

A silhouette of a woman stood before him in his mind's eye, her posture both casual and authoritative. She knew him. She had trained him. The memory was a lighthouse in the storm, solid and real. But it raised a terrifying new question: if she was his guide, why was she a ghost in his mind? What had happened to her?

The silence rushed back in, thick and heavy. The woman's voice faded, its job done, leaving behind not just a haunting question, but a profound and terrifying void where a memory should be.

He sat there, trapped in his own rigid body, for what felt like an eternity. The tremor in his hands slowly subsided. The cold spot on his back faded. A fragile, dizzying wave of relief washed through him. It was over. He had faced it down. He had won. He had trusted the idea of her, and it had worked.

He allowed a long, shaky breath to escape his lungs, the tension unraveling from his shoulders. He pried one stiff hand from the armrest and opened his eyes.

And there, reflected in the dead, black glass of the console screen, he saw it. The vague, shimmering outline of a figure. Standing directly behind his chair. Motionless. Watching.

He was not alone.

---

(A note from the author, genuinely spooked):

I wrote the final line of this chapter and had to look over my own shoulder. My fifth-floor window feels too thin tonight.

If this quiet horror got to you, adding to your library or commenting means everything. It tells me we're feeling this dread together.

Sleep well. Maybe don't look behind you.

— [MK..MK.....BE CALM]