It's amazing how quiet these modern ships are. Pacing through the dark corridors and access ways the engines didn't even make a whisper. He wondered if that was just because there was a dampening field extended around them or had technology really come so far during his stasis that spaceflight no longer required noise? A light to his left dimmed gently, one of the corridor branches slowly fell into darkness. He shivered and carried on. "Not that way then..." he muttered through gritted teeth. The gel-suit chafed slightly at the armpits every time he moved, the high-friction surfaces that were good for keeping you steady in a stasis field were not so good when it came to walking through abandoned corridors.

He came to a T junction and slowly peered out, glancing left and right to make sure the way was clear. He had seen enough horror vids to know that if you woke up on an abandoned junker you didn't go making a whole song and dance about yourself in case something else had woken up with you. He shuddered and took a step forward, the annoying non-slip foot pads on his suit sticking slightly to the ground as he did. The silence was perfect, complete, overpowering, like the feeling of lying in a bed in a quiet country cottage after having spent three months sleeping in a room by a main road. He could hear the blood in his ears, every step was a cymbal's clash against the background, the gentle clicking of his mechanised right arm might as well have been Fred Astaire doing his most vivacious jig.

Turning right he padded on down another corridor. The ship had completely changed since he had gone into stasis, although that was normal. Hub controlled ships like the Axis were active and got bored easily, changing corridors and upgrading themselves was just a simple way to keep their enormous computing power entertained on these long dark-space missions. What was wrong though was the glaring absence of the four hundred and thirty one crew members, well four hundred and thirty not including himself, that should have been bustling around him.

"Shit" he muttered, the curse echoing down the corridor and back to him, the sound barely diminishing. He walked on, checking the corners as he went. Another corridor dimmed ahead and he turned right. He was doing his best to maintain a mental map in his head but the simple technology of the gel-suit had nothing for him to interface with rendering his neural trace completely useless. He was stuck on good old brain power, brain power that was threatening to severely let him down. Another corridor dimmed to his right and he kept walking. Was that getting more frequent? He kept on going, as silently as he could through the deserted halls.

A realisation slowly came to him as he padded on. Although he had been walking for... well he wasn't sure, he hadn't come across a single room. It had all been nothing but miles and miles of corridors. Not even a door at the end of one of the hallways, simply branches and junctions and stretches of featureless white walls and grey floors. He shook his head, not even the most anarchic or overly charismatic Hub would fill a ship with nothing but corridors. Would they? No that was completely unlikely, mostly because corridors were boring and Hubs hate being bored. He kept on moving.

When all is silence and the only features of your surroundings is the occasional left turn or right it's hard to tell how long you are doing something for, remove the use of the senses and it becomes difficult to gauge the passage of time. He tried counting seconds but was thrown off after a couple of thousand when a corridor he was about to head down began to dim. He moved off quickly, his mental map now nothing but a vague recollection of the last five or six turns he had made.

Coming to another T junction and experiencing deja-vu for the umpteenth time that day he glanced left then right and stumbled sharply backwards, suddenly shocked. His breathing was immediately deafening, his ears rushed with the sound of adrenaline filled blood as he struggled backwards, friction plates on the gel suit making him stick and jump in a jerky manner until he was flush with his back against the wall. It took him a while to regain his normal breathing, reigning his lungs in from a panicked panting to a stable in and out, the blood cooled in his ears slightly and he relaxed a bit against the wall. He didn't move though. He wasn't sure why he had been so frightened, he needn't have been, had he? He blinked and then blinked again, the feeling of his eyelids coming together strangely comforting against the ambient bright light of the corridors around him, though he dare not close his them for too long.

He slowly stood, trying to slide up the wall but having to push off as the suit caught again. After a brief pause to collect the last of his wits he peered around the corner again and felt his heart quicken, but he managed to stay looking, blinking perhaps a little more than usual. He took a step and then another step forward, approaching the anomaly in front of him. On the wall was something so simple he almost laughed at himself for being so frightened. Someone had cut a number into the wall in front of him. It wasn't neat, but it wasn't like it had been rushed. It was the best that a person could do with what looked like a pretty primitive cutting tool. He looked at it for a while, it was quite tidy. The reason it had shocked him of course was because by that stage anything that wasn't a corridor was completely bizarre and abnormal. The corridor behind him dimmed. The number clearly wasn't there by design, which felt almost exciting, finally there was a break in the uniformity of the endless corridors. This was not part of the ship design, this was not created by the Hub which meant it must have been created by a crew member. He smiled to himself and walked on, unsticking his feet from the floor and moving off.

331

The corridors continued but he moved with new vigour, someone else was around, someone was in the ship with him, he was no longer alone and pawing his way through the unknown, now he knew there was another person awake and he went looking for them. It was almost a hunt at this stage, he was suddenly feverish in his searching and he had to stop himself from running, had to work on keeping his breathing stable. The damn gel suit kept catching under his arm pits and at his thighs and he would stare down angrily at it as it made his limbs jerk and twitch with each movement. He flexed his mechanical arm a few times just in case, hearing the satisfying clicks and hisses as the powerful servos and gyroscopes moved the titanium and nanotube bone structure. He glanced around him to check the corners he had come to. A corridor dimmed so he moved forward, not wanting to spend too long near it he stepped more confidently towards a sharp left.

This time the number was less neat, it was scrawled in a more frustrated way, the sharpness of the tool leaving more ragged edges on the liquimetal walls. He raised a hand to it and gently stroked one finger round the ragged edge of the carved three. Dust trickled down to the floor, as though he was knocking off broken plaster. Liquimetal should have reformed over these scars though right? He shrugged and carried down the long corridor, reaching his hand out and going through the small door in his path.

263

That was a door. It had been so innocuous and normal looking compared to the slashed number on the wall that he hadn't even noticed it as he pushed through. He stopped, one hand on the simple white handle, the door half open and one foot halfway through the opening. He couldn't see around to the other side, but it was lit up at least. He paused there for a while, weighing up the situation and glanced back at the number again. Somewhere far behind he saw a light dim slowly and he sighed, turning back to the door he went through with not a small amount of mental fortitude required.

He realised he had shut his eyes as he went through in nervous anticipation and opened them as the door swung wide. His heart sank as he did so however. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting but it was certainly something more interesting than just a continuation of the corridor, but alas that was all it was. What the hell had the Hub been thinking placing a functionally useless door in the middle of a hallway? He glanced back behind but there had been no change, the corridor stretched back, two branches now dim behind him. He shook his head and walked on.

And walked

He came across three more numbers in his further travels; 211, 157 and 109, but no more doors. He did notice by now that the numbers were going down, descending but apparently with no discernible pattern that he could make out, and without the analytics of a proper function suit he couldn't rely on any network assistance either, besides he figured he had more complicated issues at that time anyway. He was now completely lost and had given up on trying to remember his turns all together and was now travelling on random whims, taking left turns and right turns whenever he felt like it, hoping to eventually find something else, something other than corridors and increasingly erratically carved numbers.

Turning a corner again, this time a left turn that he had taken because he thought that he had smelt a slight variation in the air which had more than likely been imagined the corridor immediately behind him fell dark. His heart dropped and he took two very quick steps forward, turning as he did. He squinted into the corridor and realised something with a confused pang. He wasn't sure why he was afraid of those dark corridors. Fear is a response to a stimulus which you know will produce an adverse response to your person. Yet there was nothing he could tell about the dimming corridor that should frighten him at all, and yet... and yet his heart was beating at his ribcage, his legs were aching to turn him and walk away and the adrenaline levels in his blood were rapidly fogging his ability to think critically, but he tried. He peered back at opening as the lights slowly faded, ignoring his body's chemical screaming to get him to run now, run from that darkness. He stared through it, stared into the space and watched as the light dimmed and dimmed and dimmed until the corridor was almost perfectly black and then his eyes widened as he realised... then suddenly he ran.

He ran faster than he had ever run before. Darting up corridors, taking lefts and rights, his gel suit making the fast actions almost unbearably uncomfortable as the friction plates stuck and caught on the floor and each other, but still he ran. Hard and fast he didn't care about direction, his footsteps slapped heavily on the floor, his breathing ringing loudly in his ears. He ran and the darkness followed him.

That was what he had realised. What he had thought had been the lights dimming, what he had thought of as an electrical malfunction or a simply energy saving measure was in fact something else all together, something far more terrifying. The lights hadn't been dimming, the light they had been emitting was being absorbed, instead of the light source becoming weaker he had seen that the light itself had been getting obstructed. He didn't know what that meant but combining it with the fear he inanely felt he wasn't going to hang around to find out.

He glanced back over his shoulder, corridors were dimming faster and faster behind him as he ran, he jerked left, right, it didn't matter. The darkness was following him. He ran and he ran, blindly bursting through doors he glimpsed another number, 87, as he ran but didn't stop to think of it. The darkness was all encompassing now, not simply lights going out but tendrils of shadow reaching towards him he wept as he run, pure fear boiling in his guts as he bolted on. 71, 53, 37 counting down, counting to his end he thought as he glimpsed the numbers now coming in faster patterns through tear misted eyes. 29, 17. He sobbed loudly but the darkness simply absorbed that too as it neared behind him. He felt it choking out the sound, his peripheral vision going dark as he willed his legs onwards, nothing but primal instinct to run, run, run keeping him going. 11, 7, 3.

He rounded a corner and saw a door up ahead, howling now in terror and sorrow, the sound whipped away from him even as it left his vocal chords, he dived through the door.

"Impressive". The voice was deep, though barely above a whisper it sounded as though thirty voices were speaking as one, layered on top of each other in a quiet cacophony. "I wonder though..." The room was bright, but it was a room not a corridor. He lay on the floor panting, not wanting to move as he his cheek pressed into the cold metal. He couldn't quite pinpoint where the voice was coming from around him but he was simply glad to be free of the darkness. "Much better this time much better, you're certainly improving." The voice was moving all the time, and slowly he pushed himself up to a sitting position to get a look at his surroundings. The room was white, without any distinct walls or ceilings, rather a high dome that rose from the metallic floor. He glanced around looking for the source of the voice. There was nothing. He blinked and turned around, checking behind himself for the door but that was gone too. Worried again now he stood and paced around, looking for any kind of blemish in the room.

"Hello?" He called, his voice hoarse from lack of use. No response. The domed room was completely featureless, perfectly white above and around him, with the reflective metal floor so perfect he could see himself clearly looking back in it. "Hello?" He tried again a bit louder now.

"No no no, that's no good, he's still missing the Primes" the voice spoke again, bouncing around the room with no fixed point. He tried to follow it but the domed roof reflected it to every part of the hemisphere he was in faster than his ears could follow. "The Primes don't matter, it's as though he's following them without noticing. Fascinating behaviour." A chill went down him, the voice was talking to itself not him.

"Hello? Where am I, can you get me out..." He cut off as suddenly the floor beneath him showed a plethora of images. All of him. It showed him walking through the corridors, stopping by the numbers, observing the darkness and running. It showed thousands of images, clips and audio of his footsteps all at once, creating a multiplex information beneath his feet.

"No no it's no good he needs to visibly understand the significance of the primes for this to work. We must understand their learning facilities" He began to get angry now, confusion and exhaustion boiling together he had had enough.

"Fucking listen! What is this? Who are you and where am I? Where is my crew?" The screens beneath his feet immediately flicked back to their reflective surface.

"Well would you look at that, it's responsive to a point. Can it hear us?"

"I can hear you, tell me what I want!" He screamed again.

"Fascinating, utterly fascinating. Hello in there Four Three One, try not to over exert yourself too much, you've done fantastically."

"Just tell me what is happening" he shouted, his own voice reflecting back and echoing around the room.

"Now now, stay calm Four Three One, you've been such a help, so close to success" the voice continued as if chiding a sulking child. "You're going to prove invaluable to our research, now prepare yourself." He looked down at the reflective surface, into his own face and suddenly screamed. He clutched at his mouth and eyes, at his nose and chin and screamed, scrabbling back trying to flee the image beneath him. An image which calmly walked after him. Its feet reflected his steps perfectly, but rather than flailing and screaming in terror it followed with a cold methodical purpose. "Four Three One you must stay calm" his reflection said to him as he reached the edge of the room and pressed himself against the curving walls, trying to shrink away from the now calmly smiling reflection beneath him. "Stay calm Four Three One, this will be over soon." He howled again and ran back to where he thought the door must have been but it was now just a smooth wall, his reflection watched on with that small smile and he couldn't come out of his panic. "Oh damn, why is it always at the final stage when they lose it?" His reflection said coolly as he scrabbled at the wall. "Ah well, Prime synapse test Four Three One failed, prepare Four Three Three" He screamed and tore at his gel suit but then stopped, terror once again filling him as he stared down into the metal beneath him. His reflection stared back calmly as he stood panting, the smile on his reflected face oddly lopsided. "Prime Synapses shutting down, logic gates closing, ready for reset" it said and dread filled him. Reflected above the light from the walls started to dim as a patch of darkness slowly spread out from the apex of the Dome. Fire in his guts roared as adrenaline flooded his system. He couldn't run, he couldn't escape, he stared wide eyed at the reflection, his other self smiling back at him. The darkness reached out, covering the walls, consuming light, sound, even the energy in the air began to deaden. He let out a small moan as from the centre of the darkness poured a pure black mass. He sank to his knees as the room slowly pitched over, light being drawn out from around him, the molecules in the air stilling and growing cold as he let the darkness envelop him. His reflection grinned and fell away to land at the top of a pile of four hundred and thirty identical copies of itself, all still, all grinning.

"Four Three Three online" it whispered.