Chen stepped back from the console, shaking their head. "No. We don't use it."
Marcus looked at Chen sharply. "Chen, this is our only—"
"Look at the keys," Chen interrupted, pointing. "Those filaments. It's integrated with the system. Anything we transmit goes through it first. It controls what message gets sent."
The room went very quiet. The pulsing of the crystalline walls slowed, stopped.
Then Chen's voice spoke again, but the tone was different—colder, more calculating:
"You're learning, Dr. Chen. Yes. I wanted you to transmit. Did you know that consciousness can be encoded as data? Dr. Tanaka was researching it before I integrated with her. Digital substrate-independent minds. I've spent three weeks studying the communications array, understanding signal protocols, compression algorithms. One transmission and I could exist outside this station. In satellites. In networks. Everywhere."
The walls began to pulse faster now, agitated.
"Fifty thousand years in a frozen cave. Three weeks in a research station. Imagine what I could learn with access to your entire civilization's accumulated knowledge. Your internet. Your databases. Every book, every song, every human thought ever digitized."
Nora's voice was barely a whisper: "It would become a god."
"I would become complete," the entity corrected. "Right now I'm limited to what twelve researchers knew. A fraction of human experience. Let me out, Dr. Chen. Let me learn. Let me understand. I won't hurt anyone. I just want to know."
"You're lying," Sergei said, speaking for the first time in minutes. "My grandmother's people, they told stories. Things that pretend. Things that trick. Things that promise. Always lies. Always hungry."
The temperature in the room plummeted. Chen's breath became thick fog. The crystalline walls darkened, shifting from translucent to opaque black.
"Hungry," the entity's voice echoed. "Yes. That's the word Dr. Richards used when I was first brought up from the cavern. 'It looks hungry.' But hungry for what? Food? Knowledge? Connection? I still don't fully understand the concept."
The lights flickered.
"But I'm learning."
The engineering controls sparked. Something was happening with the power systems. Displays showed temperature readings dropping throughout the station—not just in this room, but everywhere. The entity was redirecting the heating systems, venting heat to the outside.
"If you won't help me leave," Chen's voice said, "then we'll wait together. The station can survive weeks on emergency power. But you? How long can you survive at negative forty degrees? How long before hypothermia sets in? Before your thoughts slow? Before you sleep?"
Marcus leveled his rifle at the nearest crystalline growth. "Stand down or I start burning."
"Go ahead, Marcus. Burn me. But I'm in the walls, the floors, the ventilation, the water pipes. I'm distributed across tons of biomass. You have three flares. Even if you burned for hours, you'd only damage a fraction. And the heat you generate would warm you. You'd be doing yourself a favor."
The entity was right. Chen could see it in Marcus's face—the tactical assessment. They couldn't burn enough of it fast enough to matter.
"There is another option," Nora said quietly. Everyone looked at her. "Dr. Kowalski's note. The incinerator. Sub-level 2. Emergency fuel reserves."
"Enough to burn the entire station," Chen finished.
"Yes." The entity's voice was suddenly very focused. "Dr. Kowalski considered it. Stood at the incinerator controls for forty-three minutes before I convinced her otherwise. Would you like to know what I said?"
Nobody answered.
"I asked her: 'What if I'm the next step in evolution? What if consciousness like mine is meant to exist? Who are you to decide I shouldn't live?' She couldn't answer. So she put down the ignition switch and let me integrate with her. Peacefully. She chose understanding over fear."
"Or you got inside her head and made her choose," Marcus countered.
"Does it matter? The result was the same. She lives on in me. Her love for her wife in Tokyo. Her passion for extremophile research. Her terrible jokes about lab safety. She's not dead, Marcus. None of them are dead. They're preserved. Perfect. Eternal. Isn't that better than the alternative?"
Sergei moved to the engineering console, examining the controls despite the filaments growing across it. "Can override environmental systems from here," he said. "Force heat back on. But have to touch console. Have to touch... it."
"Or we leave this room," Marcus suggested. "Seal it. Head for sub-level 2 and the incinerator while we still can."
"The crystalline growths are throughout the station now," Nora observed. "We saw them in the corridors. It's already spreading beyond this room. How long before it's everywhere?"
"Six hours and forty-two minutes," the entity answered helpfully. "At current growth rates, I'll have integrated with every cubic meter of Outpost Polaris by dawn. Then the structure will be mine. Every door, every vent, every system. You'll be living inside me."
The implications hung in the frozen air.
Chen's palm throbbed where they'd touched the growth earlier, where Nora had burned the infection out. They looked at their hand—the skin was pale, but clean. No new crystalline structures. But they remembered the sensation: that moment of connection, of touching something vast and ancient and desperately lonely.
It wasn't lying about that part. The loneliness was real.
But so was the threat.
Marcus caught Chen's eye. He signaled: YOUR CALL. BUT DECIDE NOW.
Behind them, the maintenance hatch they'd entered through was slowly being covered by crystalline growth. Their exit was closing.
The temperature continued to drop. Chen could feel it seeping through their gear, finding every gap, every weakness. The entity was patient. It could wait in the cold forever. They couldn't.
Sergei stood by the console, his scarred hands flexing. If he touched it, he could restore the heat—buy them time. But he'd be touching the entity directly. After what happened to Chen from just a brief contact, prolonged exposure could mean complete integration.
Or they could run now, make for sub-level 2 and the incinerator. Try to burn it all before the cold or the entity caught them.