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My mother used to tell me the best way to chase away a monster was a good night’s sleep.

“Good morning Helen.”

The stasis pod hissed open. Jek was standing behind the control panel in a heavy winter coat, his thick beard on full display, “How long have I been out?” My breath came out as a frosty mist.

“Fourteen days. I’m ready with a preliminary report.” I nodded and climbed out of the pod.  Two weeks wasn’t so bad, ever since the company had hit financial straits, the sleeps had gotten longer and longer. They only paid for ‘waking’ time.

Jek handed me a heavy dark-blue coat, same as his. If it was this cold in the shuttle, the colony must have been frozen over. “Let’s start with the tour. Open the doors, Jek.”

He hesitated at the controls, “I wouldn’t—” My look cut him off, “Of course, ma’am. Brace yourself. It’s not pretty.”

The shuttle doors opened with a clang. A smoky odor flooded the cabin. I stepped out in the dome. My feet sank deep into the black powder. The whole place was a charred mess, different shades of ash and black. 

“No survivors?”

“None.”

My eyes swept the space. I had reviewed the colony’s maps and blueprints during transit, but the only thing out here was amorphous piles of rubble. I started towards what looked like the wrecked rectangular footprint of City Hall.

“Not there!”

Jek’s voice stopped me in my tracks. He had a pleading expression. I scanned the path ahead, among the layers of ash and wood, the skeletal remains of a hand stretched up towards the black, starry sky. My stomach churned. I didn’t need to see anymore.

“Is your report on the shuttle?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Let’s head back, then.”

We sealed the shuttle and ran the air-filters to chase away the odor. Jek loaded his presentation on the laptop in the corner. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver in the cabin, I leaned against the storage lockers, a couple feet from Jek’s chair. He only got a few minutes into the report before I stopped him, “Every single record?”

He nodded, “All wiped. All empty. The only log I could find was buried four feet under the dirt near the residential zone.”

Jek reached for a compartment near me, I shifted my knee out of the way. He slid the compartment open and lifted a metal cylinder onto the desk. Yellow figures were chalked onto its dark-grey surface. Humans, fires, what looked to be a cloud made of jagged edges. There was something primal and unsettling about the drawings.

“Unfortunately, a third— er, 32% of the records were corrupted.”

“Damage?” I asked as I slid a finger along the dirt-encrusted lid.

Jek shook his head, “From what I could tell, the capsule’s disk writing mechanism was faulty. It wrote over previous entries after it was buried.”

My brow furrowed. That was a one-of-a-kind failure. “So what’s in it?”

Jek hit spacebar. The next slide showed sheets of scanned handwritten notes, “Personal records from one of the residents. Most of it was day-to-day stuff. But about three weeks before the ‘termination event’, a name popped up, Thorelgii.”

I turned to the onboard computer and pulled up the colony manifest. No results. This would be a long investigation, we needed to focus on what mattered, “What triggered the fire?”

Jek clicked forward, skipping through what looked like eight slides of scans. With each slide, the entries became more erratic. Larger writing, thicker letters, shorter entries. After the last of the diaries, the laptop showed a top-down image of the dome. “There were at least six different ignition points.”

I stood up straight, “One per sector?”

Six little red dots appears on the image. Every one of them was near a gasline. This was arson. “Who did it?”

Jek sighed, “I tripled checked the manifest. No survivors. Everyone’s out there.” Bags had formed under Jek’s eyes. He had dug through a lot while I was sleeping.

“What about this Thorelgii?”

Jek jumped back several slides. On the last handwritten record the name Thorelgii was carved into the page dozens of times, up, down, diagonal, and in plenty of different handwritings, all bordered by jagged clouds.

“I don’t think Thorelgii was a real person. My suspicion is that this ‘figure’ was the focus of a mass-psychotic break.  But there’s nothing in the environmental scans that could have caused this.”

I walked to the door of the shuttle, trying to get a little distance from the presentation. A psychotic break. Perfect. The colonist’s could have at least left some evidence. Now we’d be stuck here for weeks, editing and re-editing a report that could be abstracted to ‘We don’t know what happened, but it was bad.’

My fingers were shaking. I rubbed the cold away and walked back to Jek. “Take me through the rest of it.”

Jek showed me images of chalk drawings and tiny sculptures in every corner of the dome. No doubt they had gone crazy, but what kind of delusional person wipes every computer in a colony? Isn’t fire enough?

  We were reviewing Jek’s slide on digital assets when a bit of text caught my eye, “Why did you put Thorelgii in the corner of this one?”

Jek turned to the laptop, then blinked a few times uncertainly, “I’m not sure. I don’t— I don’t remember putting it there. Maybe I was just tired.” He laughed half-heartedly. I stayed quiet for the rest of the report.

When we finished reviewing the last of the photos, we paused for the night. I went to replace my jacket in the clothes compartment, and paused. There was writing on the wall behind the coats. Drawn into the dust by a finger. Thorelgii. I looked back at my subordinate. Two weeks was a long time for anyone to be on their own.

The next morning we were back out into the colony. I left my gun on the shuttle, but thought about going back for it several times.  We split up early, Jek didn’t put up a fight. As soon as he was out sight, I hurried to the rubble of city hall. It took an hour to find the black-box computer. Jek hadn’t mentioned it in his logs. As soon as I extacted from the debris, I began the scans of its contents. Wiped. Just as he said. The timestamps lined up too. Four months.

Jek was on the laptop when I got back to the shuttle. We made some polite conversation, but my attention was focussed on his right hand. His forefinger and thumb were pressed together, drawing phantom letters into the air. When he turned to work on his laptop, I re-opened the clothes compartment. 

The original dust-drawn Thorelgii was right where I remembered it, but a couple inches down, another had appeared. This time it was written in marker, and it used phonets.

I shut the compartment, and hurried to my pod. “Everything okay Helen?”

I gave no response, sifting quickly through my belongings. My fingers grazed a hard black plastic. As quick as I could, I pulled the pistol from the bag and spun around towards Jek.

He froze. I rip the cover off the pistol, “What’s going on?” He asked.

“I need you to get in your pod, Jek.”

Jek’s hands raised slowly off the keyboard, “Can we talk about this?”

I gave no answer, but instead used my gun to indicate towards the pod. Jek’s eyes were wide as he rose to his feet and followed my orders. My breath came in short and shallow. Was I overreacting? He hadn’t done anything malicious, or even dangerous. No. I couldn’t risk it.

Jek leaned back into his pod and looked me in the eyes, his voice was shaky as he spoke, “Am I going to wake up?”

I blinked away a tear and pushed the lid shut, “I don’t know.” The gas poured in and swept away Jek’s fear and confusion in a sea of tranquility.

I spent the next five hours combing over every corner of the shuttle. Thorelgii. Thorelgii. Once I started looking, it was everywhere. Scratched into corners, smudged in the mirror, hidden in the laptop’s background. Why? It seemed like they were meant to be found.

I re-ran every environmental test Jek had conducted and more. Nothing turned up. I checked every computer in the colony, all wiped. I reviewed the colonist’s logs, Thorelgii’s name was everywhere, but no details. Who was this? Why did the mere mention of them induce madness?

When I had seen everything in the laptop, I turned to the shuttle computer. As soon as my fingers touched the keys, the computer answered with an error, “Warning: 2% of this drive has been corrupted. The information you’re requesting may not be available. ”

I leaned closer to the screen. Two percent of a shuttle computer was a massive amount of data, there had to be a mistake. A sweep of the affected sectors confirmed it, the data wasn’t just corrupted, it had been completely overridden.

Something about all this struck me as familiar. I turned to the storage compartments and retrieved the dirt-encrusted record log.  A scan of the disk revealed 35% corruption. Three percent more than when Jek had scanned it.

I checked the laptop. 11 percent corruption. The corruptions was spreading, not just inside disks, but between them. The laptop was probably corrupted when it scanned the records log, but the on-board computer had never come into contact with either of them. How had the corruption made the jump?

Bit-level memory analysis rarely turned anything up, but I was running out of ideas. The laptop console spit out line after line of corrupted data. My eyes parsed them the best they could, too much to read, but that didn’t matter, the pattern was obvious. One repeating sequence, again and again, all across the corrupted memory. Nine bytes, seventy-two bits. I didn’t have to convert the bytes to text to know what it said. Thorelgii.

I stood, threw on my coat, and walked out into the colony.  As impossible as it was, the word was the corruption. I had spread it to the shuttle computer just by searching the name in the colony manifest. Thorelgii, a corruption capable of infesting memory banks and writing itself everywhere. On the east side of the dome, a group of yellow-chalk drawings were untouched by the fire. They should  jagged clouds stretching sharp tendrils down into the mind’s of every man, woman, and child.

The word could even make the leap to biological memory. With enough time, Thorelgii would corrupt everything, until a peron’s only thoughts were of the word itself. Jek didn’t know what he was doing, but his subconscious did. Unknown to him, it had been repurposed to leave secret messages all over the shuttle. Linguistic bombs to infest readers.

A chill ran down my spine. The name was already in my head. How long until I was scribbling Thorelgii in corners and on the underside of drawers? Two weeks was enough for Jek, three was enough for a colony to burn. What if Thorelgii got even further? What if it reached the Solar Network?

I stopped at City Hall. The colony’s black-box lay at my feet. Wiped. The corruption couldn’t seem to take hold in wiped memory. Maybe the reason the colony burned wasn’t them going crazy, but that they understood the problem at hand all-too-well. Purge every memory bank, burn the rest. Survivors were a liability to humanity.

It hit me all at once. The problem, and the solution. All the emotion seemed to drain out of my body. Death was the easy course. I jogged back to the shuttle, there wasn’t much time left that I could still rely on my brain. I first wiped the laptop, then the colonist’s logs, and finally the shuttle computer. That one hurt, we wouldn’t get home without it.

I went over every inch of the shuttle a second time. Even one missed Thorelgii and it would all be a waste. Jek slept peacefully in his pod, I couldn’t risk waking him, he’d probably scratch new names as I was erasing the old.

When the work was done, I approached the records log. Before writing a message, I tied one hand behind my back, and limited my typing to my right hand’s index finger. Better to be safe than sorry. I stuck the log to the shuttle doors, and chalked the words “READ ME” onto its side, then headed back to the shuttle controls to deal with the last two memory banks that needed purging.

I started with Jek’s control panel. The oxygen dropped slowly below the green bar. Barely survivable levels. He shifted a little in his sleep, but didn’t wake. I modified my own the same way. Poor sleeping conditions in long-term stasis pods were known to cause long-term, and permanent memory loss. It took a minute to build the courage to climb into the pod. It hissed closed behind me, and the gas poured in.

My mother used to tell me the best way to chase away a monster was a good night’s sleep. I hoped I would remember her when I woke up.