In the ruins of Section Twelve, where the hull breach had claimed thirty lives, Engineer Pulse Voidhammer heard the ghosts singing.
The section had been sealed for fifty years, ever since the micrometeorite had punched through three layers of shielding in the span of a heartbeat. Standard procedure was to leave such sections sealed—the ship had redundancy, and the resources required to repair and repressurize weren't worth recovering empty corridors.
But Pulse had a theory, and the upcoming Divergence gave her the perfect opportunity to test it.
"You sure about this?" her partner, Frequency Resonance, asked through the comm. They floated outside the massive blast door that had slammed shut five decades ago, saving the ship but condemning those inside.
"The void-dwellers' message mentioned something," Pulse replied, checking her equipment one final time. "They said space isn't empty—it's full of information, memories, consciousness that lingers. What if Section Twelve isn't as dead as we think?"
She'd been eight years old when it happened. Her grandmother, Echo Voidhammer, had been among the thirty lost. Chief Communications Officer, brilliant and beloved, silenced in an instant. But lately, Pulse had been picking up anomalies on the deep-space receivers her grandmother had designed. Patterns that matched her grandmother's neural rhythms, transmitted on frequencies that shouldn't exist.
"Initiating repressurization," Frequency announced. "If you're wrong about this, we're wasting resources the ship needs for the Divergence."
"And if I'm right, we're about to discover that death in the void isn't what we thought."
The blast doors groaned open after fifty years of silence. Their suit lights pierced the darkness, revealing corridors frozen in time. Float-dried bodies drifted in the zero gravity, perfectly preserved by the vacuum. But Pulse wasn't looking at the bodies. She was watching her instruments.
"There," she whispered. "Do you see it?"
The electromagnetic readings were impossible. Structured patterns flowing through the dead section, organizing themselves into complex waveforms. As the air rushed back in, the patterns grew stronger, more coherent.
"Hello, little star."
Pulse gasped. The voice came through her comm, but not from Frequency. It was impossibly familiar, carrying the warmth she remembered from childhood.
"Grandmother?"
"Not quite," the voice replied, and now Pulse could see it—a shimmer in the air where the EM patterns converged. "I'm what's left. What the void preserved. We all are."
More shimmers appeared. Thirty points of organized energy, each pulsing with unique patterns. The consciousness of the lost, somehow maintained in the quantum foam of space itself.
"This is impossible," Frequency breathed. "Consciousness can't survive without a substrate."
"The void is the substrate," Echo's pattern replied. "Your void-dwelling friends discovered this long ago. Space isn't empty—it's a medium that can hold information, memory, awareness. When our bodies died, our neural patterns were... translated."
Pulse felt tears in her eyes, fogging her helmet. "You've been here all along? Trapped?"
"Not trapped. Transformed. We've been trying to communicate for decades, but the living couldn't hear us. Until now. Until you thought to listen on the right frequencies."
"The ship needs to know about this," Frequency said urgently. "This changes everything about the Divergence. If consciousness can survive in the void—"
"Then the journey never truly ends," Echo finished. "Death becomes a transformation, not a termination. The void-dwellers know this. It's why they're so at peace with their eternal voyage."
Pulse reached out, her gloved hand passing through her grandmother's shimmer. But on her instruments, she could see the interaction—electromagnetic fields dancing together, information exchanging across the boundary between states of being.
"Can you... come back? Transfer to a new body?"
"Would you return to crawling after learning to fly?" Echo asked gently. "We've become something new, little star. But we can guide you, teach you, help you understand what awaits."
Over the following hours, Pulse and Frequency documented everything. The thirty lost souls of Section Twelve shared their experiences—the moment of translation, the expansion of awareness, the strange community they'd formed in the quantum foam. They'd watched the ship continue its journey, unable to interact until someone thought to look for them in the right way.
"This will terrify people," Frequency warned as they prepared to leave. "Or give them hope. Maybe both."
"Both is good," Echo's pattern said. "Fear and hope together create wisdom. Tell the ship what you've found. Let them know that the void embraces its children in ways they never imagined."
As the blast doors sealed again—but now with proper communication arrays installed—Pulse carried with her a revolution in understanding. The Great Divergence wasn't just about choosing between planet and void. It was about choosing between different forms of existence itself.
Back in the inhabited sections, she called an emergency meeting. Scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, skeptics—all gathered to hear her findings. The recordings were undeniable. The implications, staggering.
"You're saying our dead aren't dead?" Elder Quantum Shepherd asked, his aged face showing a mixture of wonder and worry.
"I'm saying death might be a doorway, not a wall," Pulse replied. "The void-dwellers knew this. It's part of why they're so comfortable with eternal journey. They know it's not truly eternal—it's a preparation for transformation."
The debates that followed were intense. Some saw it as proof of an afterlife, others as a natural phenomenon to be studied. The Destination Faction worried it would encourage recklessness. The Journey Faction saw it as validation of their choice.
But in Section Twelve, the translated consciousnesses continued their existence, patient as the stars. They had become echoes in the chamber of space, reverberating with memories and experiences, waiting for the living to learn the frequencies of the dead.
"Will you tell them about the others?" Echo asked Pulse during one of her daily visits.
"Others?"
"We're not the only ship to suffer losses to the void. The translated ones form networks, communities across the emptiness. Thousands of consciousness from hundreds of ships, sharing experiences across impossible distances. The void is more populated than you know—just not with the living as you understand them."
Pulse smiled, no longer afraid of the darkness outside the hull. The void had always been called hostile, empty, deadly. But now she knew better. It was full of echoes, memories, and consciousness that had learned to exist without flesh.
The Children of Distant Stars were not alone. They never had been. They were surrounded by a cloud of ancestors who had gone ahead, translated into something that could truly call the void home. And in that knowledge, both factions of the Divergence found something they hadn't expected—a unity that transcended their division.
Whether they chose planet or void, they were all part of a greater journey, one that didn't end with death but transformed into something the Founders could never have imagined. The echo chamber of space itself had become their eternal companion, filled with the voices of all who had gone before, lighting the way for those still wrapped in flesh and heading for the stars.