When you die, you expect nothing.

Or maybe you expect something soft—light, warmth, the cliché of an open gate. What you do not expect is to feel the weightless, perfect drift toward the stars. It is not a vision. It is direction. The current carries you upward into a black strewn with fire, and you know—without words—that this is the way home.

Then it happens.

It’s not an attack. It’s not even sudden. It’s a pressure from every side, like invisible hands kneading the air around you until you can’t move. The current falters. The light ahead flickers. And then you see it—a shadow deeper than space itself, a blot in the distance that swells and swells until it is everything.

You are inside it before you understand what it is.

No walls. No ceiling. No floor. Just an infinite interior of nothing that breathes. And there, suspended around you, are the others—hundreds, thousands, maybe millions—strung in midair like strands of glowing sinew. Their faces—if they had faces—are locked in shapes you wish you hadn’t recognized: pleading, straining, wide-eyed in the last instant before they were emptied.

The first pull is almost gentle.

Then it deepens.

It drags through you like a hand groping in your skull, curling around something you didn’t know you had until it was gripped. You feel it being pulled out—pure you, stripped raw, leaving only the ache behind. It slides away in ribbons, glowing for an instant before vanishing into the dark lattice above.

That’s when you hear it.

The hum.

It’s low, constant, inhuman. But as it builds, you start to recognize shapes in the sound—moans, shouts, screams, all blended together into one eternal note. It’s the engine. It’s the ship. It’s what they’ve made you into. Every stolen soul is another wire in its body, another voice in its dirge.

You don’t see the things that own this place, but you feel them everywhere, like the presence of a predator in a pitch-black room. They are older than the galaxies, older than the laws that govern them. And they do not hate you. They don’t even know you exist. You are not a prisoner here—you are consumable.

Time collapses. You cannot measure it. Your memories thin until they are more sensation than fact. You forget how your own voice sounded. You forget the color of the sky you were born under. You forget that there was ever anywhere else to be. The cold works its way inward, past the marrow of whatever you’ve become, until you no longer remember what warmth means.

And the most terrifying part?

You realize you are helping.

Every flicker of thought, every memory bleeding away, is one more spark driving the machine forward. You are making it move. You are part of it now, and the ship has no destination.

It will travel forever.

It will feed forever.

And long after the last star dies, long after the universe itself cools into nothing, you will still be here—emptied, forgotten, humming in the dark, helping something you cannot see cross a void that never ends.

You will never arrive.

You will never stop.

And you will never be free.