SECRET I

AN UNLIKELY END
The descent to Sublevel 3 feels wrong. The lower you go, the air thickens, humid, metallic, and faintly sweet, like decomposing fruit soaked in coolant. Emergency lights pulse in uneven rhythm, illuminating the curved steel walls in crimson flashes. When the doors slide open, the first thing the team notices is the tub. The oversized containment vessel, once filled with a pale suspension fluid, sits cracked and half-empty in the center of the room. Dark streaks of viscous ichor trail down its rim, pooling onto the grated floor where they continue to pulse faintly, as if alive. The sensors around it flicker in confused loops, bio-readouts spiking and collapsing, unable to decide whether the subject inside still lives. Ernie had been confined to that tub for weeks, his body too warped by the infection to stand upright. It had been his life-support, his prison, and his workspace. Now, it’s empty. Shattered containment canisters line the walls, their occupants gone or unrecognizable. The smell of circuits mixes with decay. In the far corner, something stirs. A silhouette — hunched, quivering, fused with strands of black resin that stretch from wall to wall like muscle tissue. When the lights flash again, the figure’s face comes into view: or what’s left of it. Bone showing through translucent flesh. A mouth split too wide. The left eye a pale orb of milky ichor. Yet even through the distortion, they see the remnant of his insignia, fused to the chest of the thing before them:

DR. E. MARLOWE – Lead Xenobiologist

The creature twitches, and a noise rattles from its throat, not a growl, not speech, but the glitching echo of recorded audio, fragments of Ernie’s old voice overlapping in static bursts:

“—containment… failing—no longer… me—”

It lurches once, spasms violently, and collapses, the ichor beneath it writhing before slowly stilling. At the far end of the chamber, a console hums to life. Its cracked screen flickers with the directory of Marlowe’s research logs. The folder titles scroll endlessly:

Opening the first file, the team hears Ernie’s digitized voice — detached, clinical and cracking near the end: