Cindy Mdg -

Her optical implant flickered. For the first time, the maintenance readout overlay vanished, and she saw the wall beneath it: covered in hand-drawn stars, faded but deliberate. Someone had been here before her. Someone who had stopped fixing things and started drawing a way out.

She looked at her wristband. For 2,191 days, she had scrubbed, repaired, and repeated. She had never once tried to open the sealed blast door labeled "Sub-level Zero." cindy mdg

"Command, this is MDG," she said into the salt-crusted mic. "I have a ghost in the well." Her optical implant flickered