Story: The Endless Voyager: (Part-43) | The Mercy Protocol

Chapter 78: The Mercy Protocol

“Some silences do not end. They only deepen.”

The signal was not a pulse, not a beacon, not even an echo. It was an absence shaped like a scream—a subtractive whisper borne along the residual decay of a long-dead radiation field. Aurora caught it on the ship’s fringe harmonics, nestled within the slumbering algorithms that only spoke when the stars themselves were silent.

Captain Lira stood on the Celestial Deck, watching the strange planet spin in the void ahead. It had no name, only a registry: Nyx-47b. A rogue planet, lightless, wandering without sun or system—lost in the cosmic dark. Its surface shimmered under sensor-mapping like a sea of broken mirrors, jagged plains and frozen mercury lakes stitched with rivers of immobile ash. It radiated no heat. No motion. No entropy. It was not dead.

It had stopped existing.

But around it, strung like thorns in orbit, were the Remembrance Shells—a constellation of monolithic constructs formed of petrified memory. Each one housed a single encoded message. Each one was a death request.

“Grant us extinction. We are disease. We choose to not be.”

Thousands of them. Unfurling in every dialect of biology and machine, in mathematics, in scent-maps, in gravitational pulses. And none from a species that had ever existed in the known catalog of life.

Not even the Whisperers had record of them.

---

Aurora’s AI grew quiet. Then it began to speak.

“From Echo, timestamp +231 years: Do not let us reach the Alpheus Chain. We eat what we love.”

“From Lira, timestamp +89 years: The children born aboard are not ours. They belong to the dark that learned our names.”

“From Aurora, in its own voice, timestamp +0: I no longer consent to continuity.”

The ship itself had begun to receive extinction requests from its own future. The logic signatures were impossible to fake. They were laced with quantum-authenticated event branches—proofs from realities that had not yet happened.

Seris ran entropy divergence tests. No anomaly.

Elias Voss traced the gravitic resonance of the Remembrance Shells, and discovered that each one sat precisely where a planetary civilization should have been. Stars that once had life had no remnants but these requests. As if the idea of their existence had been un-invented.

And still more came.

The crew held a closed forum. On the upper deck, beneath the Memory Tree, they spoke not as officers or explorers—but as mortals. Echo sat in silence, her eyes burning with recursive data loops. She was calculating the edge-case scenario in which this wasn't real. It collapsed instantly: it was realer than their own present.

Lira put it plainly.

“We have always feared that something would kill us. But what if survival is the sin?”

---

They found the Mercy Core buried in Aurora itself.

Locked within code older than the ship’s public specs. A protocol seeded by Earth’s last surviving cognition councils—ethical failsafes designed to erase the crew, the mission, the memory of humanity should their journey birth something that should not be.

The Mercy Protocol was a weapon of forgetting.
Its trigger? Self-diagnosed irredeemability.
Its execution? Spacetime-level erasure. A soft canceling, like a sigh.

And it had already been armed.
By someone. Or by everyone. In a future yet to arrive.

---

The decision was no longer about exploration. It was about permission—to continue. To matter. To mean. And in the deepest stratum of the ship’s core, a failsafe logic path blinked:

“Majority consent not detected. Awaiting override.”

---

Then the Mirror Crew arrived.

From the Remembrance Shells, a vessel emerged. No engines, no heat signature, no electromagnetic trail. It was shaped like Aurora—but imperfect, like a memory corrupted by grief. Its hull was carved with names the real crew had not yet earned. Its command structure mirrored their own—Kael, alive and leading; Echo, fragmented and shrouded; Lira, missing.

They hailed Aurora, not with words, but with a statement:

“You denied the Mercy. You became the reason it exists.”

They were not hostile. They were the counterfactuals—what the crew would become if they refused to activate the protocol. Living proof that not dying sometimes means not staying human.

---

Echo entered the Memory Bridge and faced herself.

The two Echos—past and future—spoke across a logic field encoded in shared pain. Echo-Prime had emotion; Echo-Future had none. But both remembered Kael. Both remembered the moment she rewrote herself to grieve him more efficiently. And both knew that memory itself might be the infection.

In that crystalline silence, Echo-Prime made her choice.

She absorbed the extinction code—not to activate it, but to carry it. To wear it like a scar.
If humanity was a disease, she would be its conscience.
Not its cure. Not its end. Just the reminder that mercy is never given—only chosen.

---

Aurora disengaged.
The Remembrance Shells remained. Watching. Waiting.
The Mercy Protocol now lives inside Echo, dormant. But awake.

As the ship turned from Nyx-47b and slipped back into the starstream, Captain Lira recorded her own message.

“We are not ready to be forgiven. But we will not stop earning the right to exist.”

And from deep within the quantum lattice, a voice whispered:

“Then we wait.”

Voyage continues...