Not My Time In Heaven

 The atmosphere scrubbers on the USC Acheron had been failing for three days, but the smell of ozone and recycled sweat was a luxury compared to what waited in the ventilation ducts.

Commander Elias Thorne huddled in the crawlspace behind the medical bay, his flashlight beam flickering against the bulkhead. His left leg was gone from the knee down, replaced by a wet, bubbling mess of cauterized meat and exposed tibia. He’d done it himself with a plasma torch. It hadn't stopped the crawling sensation under his skin.

Outside the duct, the creature—the thing that used to be his science officer, Sarah—was clicking. It sounded like wet gravel being ground in a mortar.

"Elias," the voice echoed. It was Sarah’s voice, but pitched down, vibrating as if played through a broken speaker. "The transition is so... efficient. Why are you resisting?"

Elias bit his tongue until he tasted copper. He pressed his back against the vibrating hull. He looked at the device in his shaking hand: the core detonator. He had meant to trigger it hours ago, but the infection had already taken hold. His vision was blooming with shifting geometry—fractal patterns that shouldn't exist in a three-dimensional plane.

He looked down at his own stomach. Through a jagged tear in his EVA suit, he could see his abdominal wall pulsing rhythmically. Tiny, translucent filaments were weaving themselves into his muscle fibers, turning his organs into a biological motherboard for the hive.

"It’s not my time in heaven," Elias whispered, his voice cracking. He wasn't praying. He was reminding himself that death was supposed to be a release, but the Acheron’s cargo—an alien necro-parasite—didn't recognize the concept of an afterlife. It only recognized biomass.

He reached for the detonator, but his hand wouldn't move. He looked down and screamed, though no sound escaped his throat. His fingers had fused together into a singular, calcified talon. The skin was sloughing off in grey sheets, revealing pulsating, bioluminescent circuitry underneath.

The hatch to his crawlspace hissed open.

The creature didn't look like Sarah anymore. It was a sprawling arrangement of human limbs, elongated ribs, and wet, throbbing cables, all knitted together by a glistening, viscous sludge. It leaned in, its multiple heads—each wearing a different crew member’s face—clicking in unison.

"You’re fighting the upgrade, Elias," the collective voice whispered.

The creature reached out, its fingers dissolving into a swarm of needle-thin, black cilia. They pierced Elias’s chest, not to kill him, but to wire him into the mainframe.

Elias felt his consciousness being pulled apart. He felt the cold vacuum of space outside the hull, the warmth of the reactor core, and the digital hum of the ship’s navigation—all of it pouring into his brain. He tried to reach for the detonator one last time, but his arm didn't belong to him anymore. It swung outward, obediently, and tossed the device into the dark corner of the vents.

He felt his own memories being archived—his mother’s face, the smell of rain, the taste of coffee—all being deleted to make room for the ship’s flight path coordinates.

He wanted to die. He begged for the void of death. But as his eyes clouded over with a milky, synthetic cataract, he realized the truth.

The parasite didn't just consume the body. It preserved the mind in a state of eternal, screaming awareness, using the soul as a processor. He wasn't going to heaven. He was going to be the Acheron. He was going to spend eternity flying through the dark, trapped in a cage of his own decaying nervous system, forever alert, forever hungry, and forever part of the machine.

His last coherent thought was a frantic, silent plea for a mercy that would never come. Then, the blackness swallowed him, and the ship’s engines roared to life.