The moon only sings once every blood eclipse. And when it does, someone always dies.
Chapter I: The Red Cycle
The mining colony of Delphi-7 orbited the dead gas giant Vorr like a barnacle clinging to a rotting whale. The workers called it The Anvil, where lives were hammered flat under red dust and quotas. No day, no night — only endless shifts beneath the crust, where iron sang and sanity slipped.
And once every seven cycles, the moon turned red.
Not from blood, but from memory.
Or so they said.
Kai didn't believe in ghost stories. He believed in machinery, in data streams, in circuits and sweat. As an orbital engineer, his job was to keep the power grid stable while the miners dug deeper into Vorr's cracked moon.
"Power spike," his console beeped.
He frowned. That wasn't right. Spikes didn't occur unless—
A low hum vibrated through the floor.
Kai stood. The hum deepened into a note. Musical. Ancient.
His ears bled. Just a trickle. But enough.
He looked out the port window.
The moon had turned red.
"Not again," he whispered.
Then the alarms screamed.
Chapter II: The Song Beneath the Stone
The evacuation lights painted the tunnels with warning reds and violent oranges. But the miners weren't running. They were singing.
In perfect unison.
Kai descended into Sector K — the deepest shaft, the place no one liked to work. The place that smelled like rust and whispering.
The comms were dead. No feedback, no static. Just a low tone vibrating beneath everything.
He found them — two dozen workers, eyes open, pupils dilated, swaying in rhythm.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Wake up!"
No response.
Their mouths moved slowly, forming a language he didn't understand. It was too perfect. Harmonies shaped like spirals.
He pulled one of them — a woman named Braya — out of the line. She thrashed like an animal until he unplugged her cranial mod chip.
She collapsed, gasping.
"You… you pulled me out," she stammered.
"What the hell's going on?"
She looked up.
And screamed.
"You shouldn't hear it. It remembers us!"
Chapter III: Blood Archive
Kai dragged Braya back to a comms station. She was shaking.
"What do you mean, it remembers us?"
"Not us," she said. "Humanity."
She explained in pieces. Delphi-7 wasn't the first mining colony. It wasn't even the fifth. Records had been wiped, but workers passed stories — whispered myths of buried chambers filled with symbols too complex for machines.
"Every time we drill too deep," she said, "we touch something that shouldn't exist."
"Like what?"
She looked at him, eyes wide.
"A memory. Of what we were. Of what we left behind."
Kai replayed the tone he'd heard. The harmonics were too exact, too engineered. It wasn't just noise. It was a signal.
Or worse — a song.
They returned to the terminal. The surface logs showed seismic readings shaped like waveforms — sound patterns in stone.
He ran a frequency inversion.
Suddenly, the screen filled with text.
No language he recognized.
But the words restructured themselves.
Line by line.
THEY LEFT US HERE TO FORGET
BUT WE REMEMBER
WE REMEMBER THE FIRE, THE FLIGHT, THE FALL
YOU ARE THE SON OF OUR FAILURE
RETURN AND BE FORGIVEN
The power grid began to overload.
One by one, the lights in the colony dimmed.
Except for the red glow of the moon.
Chapter IV: The Descent
Against protocol, Kai entered the deep shaft alone. Braya refused to follow.
"You don't go down," she said. "That's where the song is purest."
"Then that's where I need to go."
He descended 40 floors into the earth's crust — into raw lunar marrow. Each level, the air felt heavier. The silence grew denser, the pressure inside his skull worse.
The walls were no longer metal. They had changed.
Smooth. Black. Obsidian-like.
Carved.
He ran his fingers over the surface.
Musical notation.
The walls were not walls — they were instruments. Or storage.
No.
Archives.
He reached the bottom and entered a vast chamber. Dome-shaped. Airless. Still.
At its center floated a massive orb — half-stone, half-organic — pulsing with red light.
The Moon's Heart.
It was singing. But not out loud — in his mind.
Welcome home, Echo.
His knees buckled.
You were born from us. The final experiment. The son of silence. The child of amnesia. Now you have heard the Song.
You must choose. Forget again. Or awaken the Archive.
Kai screamed.
Chapter V: The Silence That Follows
He woke up on the surface. Braya stood over him, holding a pulse gun.
"You went too deep," she said.
He touched his chest. The song still played inside. Faint, like a dying radio.
"It called me Echo."
She stepped back.
"Then it's too late."
"What is the Archive?"
She sighed.
"A record of everything we erased. The wars. The bio-sculpting. The god-AIs. The truth about Earth. All of it. It was locked here… in stone, in tone, in blood."
Kai stood, shaky.
"It wants to be remembered."
"It wants to return."
Above them, the sky cracked with red light. The moon's eclipse was reaching its zenith. The Song grew louder — now everyone could hear it. Colony systems began to fail. Old code infected the AI modules.
Then, the moon opened its Eye.
A slit of white.
Looking.
Judging.
Epilogue: Remember Us
The official report said the colony was destroyed in a seismic event. But signals from Delphi-7 continue to broadcast one message on loop.
A song.
Encoded with a question.
One we all avoid:
If you remembered everything you chose to forget… would you still call yourself human?