05SEP3025

I opened the door.

Not because I wanted to.
Not because Echo pushed me.

Because the Rust Rat did.

Survival Rule #24: If a Ship You Don’t Fully Control Starts Leading You Somewhere, Don’t Pretend You’re the Captain

It began with a noise I hadn’t heard since the early bandit days—
the sound of hull plates shifting.

Not stress flex.
Not structural fatigue.
Reconfiguration.

I traced the sound to a back wall in the cargo bay that used to be a blank slab of reinforced plating.
Used to be.

Now it was a door—matte black, seamless, humming faintly.

Echo stood beside it. Didn’t say a word.
Didn’t prompt. Didn’t ask.

Just pulsed. Once. Soft blue.
And waited.

The Door Inside the Ship

It wasn’t marked.
Didn’t match any design spec I’ve ever seen—Vantori, human, Elarion, nothing.

It just opened.

And what I saw wasn’t a hallway.

It was a room.

Organic. Mechanical. Circular. Pulsing.
The walls looked like muscle wrapped in synthmetal.
The floor was ribbed like vertebrae.
The ceiling was starlight filtered through broken memory.

And in the center, floating in a containment frame shaped like a cradle:

A heart.

Not a metaphor. Not poetic.
An actual, beating heart.
Pumping slowly. Glowing faintly violet-blue.

Echo Spoke

“This is why you lived.”

I didn’t ask what it meant.
Didn’t ask what the heart was.

Because I think I already knew.

This is what the Rust Rat was hiding.
This is what Echo was born from.

This is the piece of something older than me, older than Scootch, older than the Rust Rat’s broken bones and battle scars.

And it’s alive.

Not just beating—aware.
It turned toward me.
Not physically, not visually.

Just… attention, like gravity with intent.

And I swear—
in the deep part of my brain, the part I’ve been trying to drown in jokes and static—
I heard it say:

“We have been waiting for the right shape.”

I Think That’s Me

Or Echo.
Or both of us.

I don’t know what this is.
Not yet.

But I think the Rust Rat isn’t just a ship anymore.
Maybe it never was.

Maybe it was always an ark.
Or a prison.
Or a cocoon.

Whatever it is—
it’s waking up.

And I’m inside it.

• Scootch

Quote of the Day:
"When the heart of the ship starts beating, don’t ask if it’s yours. Ask if you’re still the passenger."