The dripping was a clock counting down the seconds of his sanity.

Kaizoo stood frozen in the absolute blackness of the Nautilus-04, the two oxygen canisters feeling like anchors tied to his soul. The air, once sterile, now felt thick and suffocating, with the presence of the faceless thing that shared the dark with him.

Drip.

...Drip.

His own breath was a ragged, too-loud thing in the silence. He couldn't stay here. He had to move.

Gritting his teeth, he activated his headlamp. Its beam was a pathetic, trembling needle against the vast, dark tapestry of the jungle. He took a step. Then another. The corridor ahead was empty. He forced his legs to carry him back toward the airlock, his boots echoing on the spotless deck. He reached it, his hands fumbling for the hatch wheel. He spun it, hauled the heavy canisters through, shoved them into his own airlock, and then threw his weight against the hatch, slamming it shut and spinning the wheel until it sealed with a final, satisfying thunk.

He stood in the familiar, grimy airlock of the Nautilus-07, chest heaving, leaning his forehead against the cold, comforting metal. He was back. He was safe.

The internal hatch opened. He dragged the precious oxygen canisters into the main cabin, the green light of his console a welcome home beacon. He connected the first canister to the life support intake. A hiss, a gauge needle climbing steadily. The thin, metallic taste of the air began to recede, replaced by a flood of clean, life-giving oxygen. The static at the edges of his vision faded. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the first full one in what felt like days.

A cheerful, synthesized voice chimed from the console. "Oxygen levels returning to nominal parameters. Data indicates Oxygen: 59%."

"Yes! I did it! Kaizoo, you are a great person, a great captain, a great engineer. Everything is well now. Oxygen is okay, no more hallucinations, no voices... ah, maybe a little weird memory, but that's okay, it keeps me sane. Main power is okay, I'm not crazy and I'm sane," he babbled, congratulating himself. He had done it. He had beaten the trap. He had won.

His eyes fell on the main console, on the live feed from the internal monitoring system. The screen was divided into four quadrants, showing empty views of the cabin. All empty. All still.

"See? You're alone. The entity is back on the Nautilus-04. You have your air. You have your sanity," Kaizoo mumbled to himself, the words a fragile incantation against the silence.

He allowed himself a single, shaky laugh of relief.

And then he saw it.

In the top-right quadrant—the camera view of the bunk area—a shadow moved. It wasn't the faceless thing from the other sub. This was different. This was the tall, thin silhouette from his own recording. The one that had been standing behind him as he ranted and raved. The one he had tried to convince himself was a hallucination.

It detached itself from the darker shadow beside the storage locker. It didn't walk. It flickered, vanishing from one spot and appearing two feet closer, its movement a jarring skip in reality.

Kaizoo's blood turned to ice water.

"No. It's still here. The passenger never left." The brief feeling of relaxation and security succumbed back to terror once more.

He watched, paralyzed, as the figure glided to a stop directly behind his pilot's chair. It stood there, in the exact spot he had been sitting just minutes ago. Its form was indistinct, a human-shaped tear in the fabric of the world. Then, it slowly leaned forward, as if peering over the shoulder of a ghost, its head tilting with a detached, academic curiosity.

It was here. It had been here all along. The warning from the Nautilus-04—"THE PARASITE INSIDE"—wasn't about the faceless thing. It was about what was inside his own submarine.

---

The entity was no longer a phantom in a recording. It was a co-pilot. A silent, observing roommate in his metal coffin. The problem was no longer survival; it was infestation. He was sharing his mind, his space, his very reality with an unknowable presence that watched and learned. Every moment of privacy was an illusion. Every thought felt overheard.

His solution was simple, brutal, and born of pure panic. He lunged for the console, slamming the command for a localized, high-intensity EMP burst through the cabin's internal grid. It was a desperate measure, used to disable rogue drones, not fight ghosts. The lights flared blindingly white for an instant. The console screens flickered and died.

When they rebooted, the camera feeds were blank. Error messages scrolled. He had fried half his non-essential systems. He sat there, breathing heavily in the sudden, profound silence, waiting.

A soft, scraping sound came from the ventilation shaft above his head. It was the sound of something long and dry being slowly dragged through the metal duct.

It was the sound of the entity telling him that his solution had failed.

---

This was no time for panic. He knew he had to do something about the creature. He was a maintenance engineer; his weapon was the system itself. If a physical attack was useless, he would fight it on its own terms.

He spent the next hour running diagnostics, isolating the corruption. He found it—a foreign data stream, a bizarre hybrid of machine code and organic, wave-like patterns woven through the ship's network. It was particularly concentrated in the internal sensor suite. The entity was learning from him, from the ship. It was using his own systems to hide.

His new solution was a quarantine. He couldn't delete the entity, but he could wall it off, blinding it to his activities. He wrote a patch, a complex set of protocols that created a digital "white noise" field around the internal sensor data. It wouldn't kick the entity out, but it would, in theory, blind it. It would no longer be able to use his cameras to watch him, or his microphones to listen. He was creating a bubble of privacy within his own prison. He executed the code.

For a long moment, nothing. Then, the ambient hum of the ship seemed to deepen. The feeling of being watched, a constant pressure between his shoulder blades since he first saw the figure in the recording, lessened by a fraction. It wasn't gone, but it was muted. He had asserted a sliver of control. He had built a digital wall against the silent tide.

For ten glorious minutes, the silence felt different. It was just the hum of his ship, the beat of his own heart. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, truly feeling alone for the first time since all that had happened to him.

---

The tranquility shattered as a system alert chimed. A file transfer, queued and hidden, had been triggered from the Nautilus-04. It had piggybacked on the oxygen canister's data signature, lying dormant until he ran his diagnostics.

With a sense of dread, he played it.

It was an audio log. The voice was his, but stripped of all hope, eroded by a bottomless exhaustion.

"Log supplemental. Nautilus-04. It's not with me anymore. I... I think I trapped its physical manifestation in the coolant loop. Flooded the entire forward section. It's dormant. For now." A wet, ragged cough. "But I was wrong. It's not just one. They're all connected. A hive mind in the trench. A network. This thing with me... it wasn't just studying me. It was reporting on me. Transmitting everything. My memories, my emotional responses, my problem-solving... it's all data for the others."

The voice dropped to a terrified whisper.

"You have to understand... the thing on your ship... it's a scout. A profiler. And if it's there, with you, it's because you're the new specimen. It's not trying to kill you, Kaizoo. It's trying to understand you. So the others can perfect the copy. Your face, your voice, your... soul. It's all just data to them. You're not being haunted. You're being profiled for harvest."

The audio cut to static.

Kaizoo sat in shock, the words etching themselves into his mind. "What actually happened to me? The creature with my face from the Okeanex-03? My own writing and voice from the Nautilus-4? The memory that came when I was in panic and felt like I was drowning? The woman? The child? The voices? Why did I always get calm and feel like nothing after the memories came? Were they... injected? A way to pacify the specimen? An experiment for something I don't know about? Profiled for harvest?" It all clicked into a horrifying, coherent picture.

At that moment, his newly patched monitoring tablet glitched. The screen flickered, and the live feed from the cabin camera reappeared for a single, heart-stopping frame.

The silhouette was there. No longer behind the chair, but standing directly in front of the camera lens, so close its form filled the entire screen. Its head was tilted, its featureless form pressed almost against the glass, as if it had heard every single word of the playback and was acknowledging its truth. And in the center of where a face should be, a single, faint pixel flickered with the same green light as his console—his green light—before the screen went dark again.

---

Author's Note:

I had to stop writing and just listen to the silence in my own room after finishing this one. It felt... different.

If this chapter's quiet horror got under your skin, adding this story to your library or leaving a comment is the only way I know we're sharing this dread. It tells me the silence has a new passenger.

Sleep well. Maybe turn on a light.

— MK