Sleep No More
In which the mystery of an interstellar Flying Dutchman is finally resolved
There’s a line that separates the mundane and the marvelous, a hairline fracture where reality opens into mystery and closes again like a dream. Be careful where you tread, or you might stray from the world of the familiar to one of inescapable strangeness.
(Joshua Brown/Pexels)
Drifting in the darkness like an interstellar Flying Dutchman is a lost survey ship whose crew disappeared more than a century ago – all but for one, a long-dead man whose last recollections may hold the key to a mystery more terrifying than the cosmic depths themselves… a mystery whose depths reach all the way to The Boundary.
The Perseverance had been running dark for six hours before Chief Technician Nneka Osei-Bonsu finally looked up from her console. “I need you to sit down, sir.”
Captain Yavorsky had been pacing the less than extensive confines of the bridge, but his restless energy instantly became focused. He settled into the command chair and gave Osei-Bonsu a nod.
“The vessel is the Cú Chulainn,” she said. “Survey-class. Registered out of the Callisto yards, launched 2241. She was reported missing in 2244 with all hands — fourteen crew.” She pulled up the registration image on the wall screen. The ship in the archive photo was intact, its hull gleaming — quite different from the wreck Perseverence had probed with distance sensors. The ancient ship was carbon-scored and blasted from within, her hull pierced in multiple places. “She’s been drifting in this sector for a hundred and forty-three years,” Osei-Bonsu added.
“Cause of loss?” the captain asked.
“Only partly known at this time. I can tell you the how, but not the why.” She offered Yavorsky a tablet with the relevant information already transferred. “The hull shows seven distinct breach points. Six of them are consistent with weapons fire from inside the vessel. The seventh—” She paused. “The seventh was caused by the same weapon, but from outside.”
Yavorsky said nothing. Outside was the word that changed everything.
“Ten of the eleven crew are unaccounted for,” Osei-Bonsu continued. “No bodies, no biological remains like you’d expect if they were blown up or incinerated by the explosions inside the ship. Most likely, they were blown out of the ship when the breaches happened. The eleventh crew member — “ She brought up a new image: A figure slumped in the corner of what had once been the ship’s armory, freeze-dried by a century and a half of cold. “ — is still aboard. His name was Aleicester Moran. Able Spacer, first class. Twenty-six years old. From Galway.”
She let that sit for a moment. Twenty-six years old, from Galway, dead for a hundred and forty-three years in the dark.
“He was carrying a medchip,” she said. “Standard neural-sense recorder, the kind survey crews wore in that era for incident documentation. It’s still functional.” She looked at the captain steadily. “I was able to activate and access it remotely using the command frequencies of the time. I’ve reviewed its contents. What I’m about to show you is…” She hesitated for a split second. “Let’s just say your order for running dark was well judged.”
“Why? What did you find?” Yavorsky asked.
“It looks to me like Cú Chulainn came under alien attack,” Osei-Bonsu said, clearly parsing her words. “How we present our report might be a matter of some sensitivity given ongoing tensions with — ”
“The Jaddek?” Yavorsky interrupted.
“Yes, sir. For that reason, I’m going to recommend we file this under the Jaddek Protocols before we tell anyone else what we’ve found.”
Yavorsky’s expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes did. “Show me,” he said, and then led the way to the briefing room.
From the sense-recordings of Able Spacer Aleicester Moran:
The singing started on the fourth day out from Kepler Station.
Not singing, exactly. Alec couldn’t have said what it was. More like a feeling in the back of his teeth — a pressure, low and constant, that wasn’t quite sound and wasn’t quite not-sound. He noticed it the way one might notice a fleeting fugitive smell: There and then gone, and then there once again, teasing, flitting.
Alec mentioned it to Dakarai at mess. Dakarai was the Cú Chulainn‘s engineer, a big, quiet man from Nairobi who had strong opinions about coffee and very few opinions about anything else. He listened to Alec’s description and said, “Might be a subsonic resonance from the hydraulics on Deck C. I’ll have a look.”
He never did. Or, if he did, Alec didn’t hear about it. The survey mission occupied everybody’s attention. They were mapping the Kepler-442 system, dull work mostly, the kind that made eight weeks feel like eight months. Alec ran his instrument checks, wrote his log entries, ate his meals, and slept his eight hours. All the while, the not-quite-sound sat in the base of his skull like a stone in a shoe.
Alec lost his dreams around the same time. He’d always been a vivid dreamer — his mother used to say he had too much imagination for his own good, which she meant as a criticism and he’d always taken as a compliment. But now he woke each morning feeling scraped-out, hollow, as though sleep had taken something from him rather than renewing him. He had long been in the habit of lying in the dark for a few minutes before his alarm, trying to remember what he’d dreamed. He was always able to review his dreams before they evaporated; they were often complicated, like the plots to thrillers or comedies. Not now, though; he recalled nothing. The lack of dreams was mere forgetting. It felt like Absence. Something that had been there was suddenly there no longer.
By day twelve, Alec was tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. He felt off-balance, as though his fit in the world had shifted and he no longer meshed with his own life.
By day fifteen, he was starting to watch the others differently.
I don’t know what it is, he subvocalized one night, dictating to his medchip while lying in his bunk. Something’s not right with the crew. Or maybe with me, I can’t tell which. It’s like looking at familiar faces through dirty glass. Dakarai was watching me at breakfast this morning. Just watching. Didn’t say a word when I said good morning. Just watched.
Probably nothing, he added with a sigh. I’m tired, is all. It’s the hydraulics keeping me up.
He slept four hours that night. He dreamed nothing.
On the seventeenth day, Spacer First Class Brigid Ó’Néill came to Alec’s cabin after second watch and told him she needed to speak to him privately about Lieutenant Hoang.
Brigid was from Cork. She and Alec had a friendly rivalry going about which of them spoke more incomprehensibly from the viewpoint of the rest of the crew, a competition neither of them was particularly trying to win. He liked her. He trusted her.
Ó’Néill sat on the edge of his bunk and spoke in a low voice. “Hoang isn’t Hoang anymore.”
Alec waited.
“I don’t mean he’s acting strange. I mean, he isn’t him. Something’s wearing his face.”
Later — much later, in a context he couldn’t yet imagine — it would occur to Alec that this was the moment. Everything that followed was already contained here, in her words, in this fragment of time, the way a fire is already contained in the striking of the match. If he had said Brigid, I think we’re both very tired and we should go to the medic, the match might not have caught. But he was seventeen days without proper sleep, and the not-sound was in his teeth again, and when he looked at Ó’Néill’s face he found himself thinking, How do I know this is really Brigid?
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded slowly, and she nodded back, and after she left he lay in the dark. The stone in his skull pulsed with something that felt almost like recognition.
Something’s wrong on this ship, he told his medchip. Something’s come aboard, and I don’t think the others see it.
He jettisoned the first set of blast doors on day twenty.
He’d spent three days watching, cataloguing, building a picture in his mind that felt absolutely coherent and revealed itself in nightmarish fragments only later for what it was: A map of a world that didn’t exist, drawn with the obsessive precision of a mind that had lost its anchor. Alec was convinced by then that seven of the eleven crew had been replaced. He didn’t know how. He didn’t need to know how. The evidence was in the way they moved, the way they looked at him, the things they said that were slightly off in ways he couldn’t quite articulate but knew with absolute certainty.
The blast doors in the cargo bays could be jettisoned via emergency protocol — a safety measure in case of fire. He’d lured two of the things wearing his crewmates’ faces into Cargo Bay Three on the pretext of a sensor malfunction, sealed the bay, and blown the doors.
He watched through the porthole for a moment afterward. He felt nothing… not joy at his victory, not validation, not grief for comrades lost. IF he felt anything, it was fatigue, deep and numbing.
I’m just after dealing with two more of them, he told his medchip forty minutes later, after taking advantage of the chaos that had followed the blast doors’ ejection. He’d repeated the ruse two decks above, in Cargo Bay Five, dispatching two more of the infiltrators. His voice was calm and almost conversational as he dictated his notations to the medchip. They didn’t see it coming. The loss of the balst doors makes the ship less secure, but until I figure out who’s who… who is still us and who is them… we won’t be for repairing much. The intruders could sabotage critical systems under the guise of making repairs. I’ll seal off the affected sectiosn, and we won’t have to worry about the hull breachs.
He took a deep breath. He was feeling dizzy, but he had to soldier on.
Four down, he dictated. Four more to find.
He walked up the corridor to his next objectibve, and didn’t look back.
There were moments — scattered, fragmentary, like light through broken glass — when something tried to surface.
He was cleaning his weapon in the galley when he caught his reflection in the dark screen of the food dispenser. He looked at himself for a long moment. He looked terrible. His eyes were red-rimmed, too bright, set in hollows that hadn’t been there a month ago. His hands, he noticed distantly, were shaking.
Had he purged more of the intruders? Had he made any progress? How long ago was it that he’s sent another pair of enemies into the dark?
The resonance, he thought, and didn’t know why he thought it. It’s in the hull. It’s been in the hull since— since when? Since Kepler Station? Before?
He sat very still, two trains of thought clashing in his mind. He focused, trying to follow the thread of this new insight. If something was making the hull sing — below hearing, below feeling, almost below existing; and if that something was affecting his sleep… more to the point, his dreams… then possibly— possibly—
The thought dissolved. He couldn’t hold it. Some other part of his mind, louder and more insistent, pointed out that this was exactly what they would want him to think. Doubt was the weapon. If he started questioning himself, they’d won.
Alec picked up his weapon and went back to work.
Time became a blur once more. I think the ship might be affecting me in some way, he told his medchip that night. He wasn’t in his bunk; he was in a dark and greasy corner of the water reclamation area. There were cubbies and niches among the pipes and tanks and vats where a man could hide. They were looking for him, Alec knew; they were in a panic, knowing they had been found out. He’d killed a bunch of them when he rigged an improv explosive in the mess hall… yes, the mess hall; he recalled seeing his own haggard face in the dark screen of the food dispenser… the blast had sent four? Five? of the intruders into space when the galley’s induction array had detonated. Another hole int eh hull, another rent in the hide of his poor wounded ship…
The hull. There’s something in the hull, Alec thought. I can feel it. But I can’t think about it properly. I can’t—
He stopped.
No. No, I know what I know. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. I have to stay on task. Only a few more of them to find. I’m close to the end of it.
He slept two hours, his body wedged among pipes and monitors. He dreamed nothing.
He cornered the last of them in the ship’s medical bay.
He’d gone through the Cú Chulainn section by section, room by room, searching them out, driving them to where they would stand revealed. Now he had them, the last two of them, positioned for elimination. One of them looked like Ó’Néill. He knew it wasn’t her, and he didn’t let himself think about names. Names were for people. He was dealing with things that weren’t people, things that had taken his crewmates’ places and meant to do who knew what harm. He was the last line between them and Earth, and he wasn’t about to fail in his duty.
Alec stood in the doorway of the med bay with his weapon raised. The one who looked like Ó’Néill pressd itself to the bulkhead, hands raised. Beside it was the imposter who looked like Chief Tech Brody. They were doing a good job of imitating fear and panic. A very good job, indeed.
“Alec,” the one wearing Ó’Néill’s face said. “Alec, it’s me. It’s Brigid. Look at me.”
“I am looking at you,” he said. “And believe me, I see you.” He smiled coldly.
“Alec, listen to me. You haven’t slept. Right? You haven’t properly slept in three weeks. Something is happening to you.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“The hull— Alec, there’s something wrong with the hull. You said so yourself. I heard you say it. You told Dakarai there was something in the hull, a vibration — “
He didn’t fire. He didn’t know why he didn’t fire. Something in him was listening despite itself, holding the thread he’d dropped some unknown time ago, and for one vertiginous moment the world lurched. Not the ship, but his understanding of the ship; his understanding of everything. He saw Ó’Néill’s face not as a mask but as a face, frightened and real, and he saw the med bay not as a battlefield but as a room where his crewmates were backed against a wall in terror, and he felt—
He felt the stone in his skull pulse, slow and patient, and the world lurched back.
They know, he thought. They know I’m close. They’re trying to get inside my head.
He raised the weapon.
“Alec—”
He fired. Then, to make sure, he retrieved explosives from the armory and attached them to the hull, keeping a wary eye on the corpses all the while.
He was going to blow the demons out into the dark the way he’d done with their colleagues.
The ship was empty now. The intruders were gone. There was only him, now… and he didn’t feel like himself. Alec looked at his face in the mirror of the captain’s quarters, which he had ransacked looking for clues about the aliens’ origins and intentions. He’d found nothing incriminating; nothing out of the ordinary in any way. But the not-sound, the maddening soundless drone at the base of his skull, ground on and on.
Was he still himself?
Alec fixed on the idea with growing horror. His shipmates had not realized they were being taken over… but he could tell. For some reason, he could hear the hideous, silent voice of the aliens as they flooded his mind and eroded his true self. Not eroded… fossilized. Replaced, grain by grain. There would be an Alec at the end of this, but he would be one of them…
The armory had what he needed. Alec locked himself in and sat against the wall with his weapon across his knees, trying to think. He saw only one option now… one last task to accomplish if Earth was going to be safe. The others would have made the same decision he was making; how could he let them down? How could he shy away? It wasn’t even a question of honor, or of courage… it was loyalty, now. Devotion. Not to nation or planet or species, but to the men and women he had serve with, tolerated, loved and endured.
I have to finish it, Alec thought. There was no terror. His reluctance had been rooted in the thought that someone had to survive, someone had to explain and send warning. It was too late for that now. He should be sad, but he didn’t feel anything except a need for it to be over. He was so very, very tired…
Alec tried to record a final log but found he didn’t have words for it. Instead, he sat in the quiet and let his mind drift, and in that drifting state — too exhausted to maintain the fortress of certainty he’d built, too empty to keep the truth at bay — it came to him. That last rational scrap of himself he’d almost grasped… it was back. He could almost see it, the way one might see puzzle pieces drifting in null-g: The not-sound in his teeth. The hollow mornings, the scraped-out feeling and fatigue, the absence where his dreams had been.
They stole my dreams, he realized. And in the absence of dreaming… what did they tell us in medic training? I was never going to be a medic, I should have listened more carefully… Dreaming. REM sleep, something about… about dreaming and madness. REM deprivation is a form of torture,that’s what they said. Two weeks is enough to break most people. Not dreaming messes everything up, disorders the brain, creates paranoia and… and…
That’s what they did to me, he realized. The vibration in the hull. Subsonic, Dakarai had called it. Subsonic. Capable of disturbing sleep, eradicating dreams? Creating a slowly growing madness?
Alec froze within himself, a cold feeling if culpability washing over him. He hadn’t been special because of how he felt the aliens’ attack and knew it for what it was… he’s been special because he was more susceptible, because he was the one the aliens had been able to use, to turn into a tool for their own use. He was the intruder, and he always had been…
Oh, my God. Whatever is out there, they did this to us. They used some sort of coherent energy, something that acted on the hull’s metal like a sound wave… turning the ship itself into a weapon…
The fatigue was still there, still painful, but the soundless drone in his skull was gone. He wasn’t thinking clearly, but he could see it well enough to understand, and the understanding was worse than the fear had been. He had been the enemy. The others… they had been innocent, probably confused, unable to stop him…
Another soundless torment found him: The terrible quiet of a ship that had been full of people he knew. People from Galway. From Nairobi. From Cork.
I’m going to breach the hull, he told his medchip very quietly. I know it won’t undo it. Nothing will. But whatever’s out there that did this — I want there to be something on record. I want someone to find this ship someday and know not just that we died, but that we were killed. Something out there used us against each other. This was deliberate. This was a first strike.
Someone should know that we were here.
He raised his weapon and fired at the hull. A steady beam of coherent particles ate into the bulkhead, then breached the hull. The puncture was small – too small to permit something as big as a human body to pass through, but large enough that the armory was empty of air in seconds. Depressurization and suffocation were painful, but less painful than the knowledge of his own unwitting collaboration with whatever alien intelligence had plotted this atrocity.
Then came a moment of surrender. The pain receded. Aleicester Moran, twenty-six years old, from Galway, was very briefly and completely at peace.
Osei-Bonsu stopped the playback.
The briefing room was quiet for a while. Through the viewport the dark shape of Cú Chulainn drifted against the stars, patient and ruined, her hull dotted with wounds.
“Some sort of oscillating kinetic force beam,” Yavorsky said finally.
“Yes.” Osei-Bonsu pulled up a spectral analysis on the wall screen. “High-energy directional emission, probably from a vessel running at extreme sensor range. The beam induced a standing wave in the Cú Chulainn‘s hull — a subsonic resonance, twenty-two cycles per second, sustained. That frequency interferes specifically with theta-wave sleep. REM suppression becomes total within approximately ten to fourteen days of continuous exposure.” She paused. “It leaves no physical trace on biological tissue. An autopsy on any of the crew would have found nothing wrong.”
“Except they were blasted into space anyway,” Yavorsky murmured. “Except for the lone crew member who…” His words trailed off.
“Except that. Yes.”
Yavorsky looked at the drifting ship. “He figured it out in the end.”
“Pretty much,” Osei-Bonsu agreed. “But not until the aliens deactivated the beam. The effects of REM sleep deprivation prevent the kind of sustained analytical thinking that would let someone identify the cause of their… their disorientation. It’s—” She stopped, and when she spoke again her voice had something careful in it. “It’s elegant, Captain. As weapons go. I find that deeply unpleasant to say.”
He nodded slowly. “The Jaddek Protocols. You’re sure.”
“The beam signature matches the weapon profile that was deduced after the Battle of Proxima. Analysts at the time suggested that the beam frequency and intensity would have to have been field tested before Proxima, on something smaller.” She looked at the ship. “Something isolated and far from help, something that could be probed and experimented on over an extended period — something like a survey vessel in an uninhabited system where no one would come looking for a hundred and forty-three years.”
“So this was — “
“The first time, as far as we know,” Osei-Bonsu told him. “Cú Chulainn was probably the first human ship the Jaddek ever used this weapon on. Everything that came after — Proxima, the Kepler Corridor, the Seventeen Stations—” She stopped. “It started here. With eleven people who just wanted to map a system and go home.”
Yavorsky was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: “Make sure Moran’s name goes in the record. His full name.”
“Aleicester,” she said. “Yes. I will.”
The captain left the briefing room. Osei-Bonsu hung back for the moment it took to make notations on her tablet, then paused by the porthole. Cú Chulainn had caught the light of Kepler-442, now a distant sun, and for a moment she looked almost undamaged — almost like the gleaming ship in the archive photo, almost like something that had simply paused mid-journey and was waiting for its crew to return.
The light shifted. The moment passed.
Perseverance ran dark for another hour before turning for home.
Time and distance — two irreducible factors of the universe we live in. But a dead man’s madness and sacrifice persisted across both to serve as a footnote to cosmic history and the solution to a longstanding puzzle: The fate of Earth survey ship Cú Chulainn, a vessel that ventured far from home and found itself on the far side of The Boundary.
Written by Savel
Story by Kilian Melloy