In the year 2461, humanity stood on the threshold of the unknown. Interstellar travel was no longer a dream but a reality, and with it came the discovery of ancient alien ruins scattered across the stars—silent, ominous, and untouched for millennia. The most enigmatic of these relics lay on a barren planet orbiting a dying blue giant star, known only by its catalog number: XR-317.
It was here that the Odysseus, a long-range research vessel, made its fateful journey. Among the crew of elite scientists, xenolinguists, and explorers was a man named Marvin Korrin. He was no captain, no scientist of renown. Marvin was an engineer—quiet, diligent, overlooked. He kept the ship running, patched holes, adjusted filters, and rerouted power grids. He liked the silence of his work, the comfort of wires and circuits.
Marvin didn’t seek greatness. It found him anyway.
On the third rotation of their descent, the Odysseus detected an energy signature—low, steady, and impossibly ancient. Buried beneath the ice of a canyon was a monolithic structure, crystalline in nature, and unlike anything encountered before. The team dubbed it "The Core." It pulsed with a frequency that caused interference in all equipment, as if humming to a rhythm older than time.
They couldn’t decipher it. Instruments failed. Data scrambled. But the pulse continued—soft, slow, patient.
Then, inexplicably, Marvin began to dream.
He saw lights in patterns that made no sense. He heard sounds with no source. He awoke drenched in sweat, his mind echoing with alien whispers. At first he dismissed it as stress, maybe an undiagnosed condition reacting to the electromagnetic field.
But the dreams grew stronger. Clearer. Images of a sprawling city of light and glass, curved towers reaching into a lavender sky, and beings of silver skin with voices like wind chimes. In every vision, The Core was there, at the city’s heart—alive, revered.
And always, the final image: the city empty, the Core dim, and Marvin standing alone.
On the twelfth day, he went to the canyon alone.
No one knows exactly what happened. The ship's logs recorded his exit, but the footage cuts out in a haze of static the moment he approached The Core. When the systems came back online a full twenty-seven hours later, Marvin was found back on the ship, lying in the central corridor, unharmed.
But something had changed.
His vitals were impossible. No pulse. No respiration. Yet he was alive—awake. His eyes shimmered with faint light, a pale indigo glow that never faded. He didn’t remember what had happened, only that he had “heard music inside the silence.”
Three days later, the Odysseus received a surge of energy from The Core. It overloaded the ship’s systems. Fire broke out. Power failed. The emergency protocols kicked in too late.
And then—nothing.
When Marvin awoke again, he was alone.
The Odysseus was dead, drifting in orbit. Every crew member had vanished. The logs were corrupted. The emergency beacons were ancient—degraded as if centuries had passed.
But Marvin hadn’t aged.
He tried everything: manual overrides, long-range transmissions, reentry procedures. All futile. He was marooned on a derelict ship, orbiting a forgotten world, with the hum of The Core resonating in his mind.
Then came the first time-slip.
One moment, Marvin was inspecting the hull. The next, he was standing on Earth—Earth as it had been a hundred years ago. Rain fell on his face, and he heard the distant roar of jet engines. A boy ran past him, laughing. Then, in a flash, he was back on the Odysseus, staring at his own reflection.
The pulses from The Core had bound him to something timeless. His body was tethered to reality, but his mind—or his spirit—was stretched across history like a thread in the cosmic loom.
He wandered.
From shipwrecks on forgotten moons to alien libraries buried beneath sulfuric skies. He saw the rise of new empires, and their fall. He watched humanity evolve—first with awe, then with melancholy. No one recognized him. No one remembered the Odysseus. The name Marvin Korrin became a ghost story, an echo passed among star-faring civilizations.
They called him “The Eternal Witness.” Some believed he was the last of an ancient race. Others whispered he was cursed, a punishment from the gods of the void.
Marvin never corrected them.
He no longer aged. He did not sleep. He did not hunger. He walked the edges of time, caught in the echo of The Core’s final song. It had imprinted something in him—perhaps a fragment of its dying consciousness, or the key to some cosmic library.
Wherever he went, strange things followed.
Lost ships found their paths again. Dying stars delayed their collapse. Sometimes, when Marvin placed his hand on cracked machines, they hummed back to life, whispering codes no one had programmed.
He became a legend, then a myth.
And still, through it all, he searched—not for a way to die, but for a way to matter. For a reason why he was chosen, why he, a nobody engineer, had been made eternal.
Centuries blurred into millennia. The galaxy shifted. The blue giant that had once warmed XR-317 went cold and collapsed. The Core was gone.
And Marvin remained.
In the final age of stars, when galaxies had begun to pull apart and the skies were mostly dark, he found himself standing once more on a cold plateau beneath a black sun. A whisper called him back—faint, like a memory long buried.
There, buried under a crust of crystal and dust, was another monolith. Smaller. Flickering.
He touched it.
In a surge of light and sound, memory returned—not just his, but the memory of the beings who had made The Core. They were architects of time, custodians of knowledge. Their world had perished not from war, but from silence—a loss of purpose so profound their own creations wept.
They had sought someone simple. Someone unburdened by ego or ambition. Someone who could carry their last message across the stars, across eternity.
Marvin.
The Core had chosen him not to fix anything, not to rule or to lead—but to remember. To be an echo of a civilization that had once reached into the stars and sang. His immortality was a monument not of stone, but of memory.
As the monolith faded into dust, Marvin closed his eyes and heard the music once more. Soft, infinite, like the hum of atoms.
He was not lost. He was a story.
A story that would outlast the stars.
