SCIFI GOTHIC SAMPLE

The藤蔓 of Station Theta-9 did not grow the way vines grew on planets. On worlds with proper atmospheres and gravity wells, vines climbed; here, in the microgravity of deep space, they drifted—suspended in the nutrient-rich atmosphere like the ribbons of some great leviathan's mourning dance.

Elias TNR-7 watched them through the observation glass of BioDome Sector 4, his reflection superimposed over the impossible greenery. The gene-mod tag glowed faintly on his wrist implant: TNR-7. Three years since the Blackwood Station had been decommissioned. Three years since he had been the sole survivor of a vessel whose destruction the Colonial Federation had officially denied.

The藤蔓 were his obsession. He had spent every off-shift hour in BioDome 4, cataloguing their growth patterns, mapping their DNA sequences against the public genome database, searching for the anomaly that his father had died to discover before the Inquisition came for him.

"You found it, then."

Elias did not turn. Director Voss's voice carried through the dome with the peculiar precision of a man who had learned to speak in the vacuum of zero-gravity corridors—soft, measured, every syllable carefully conserved.

"The matching sequence," Voss continued, moving into Elias's field of vision. "Your family's genetic signature, embedded in the藤蔓's cellular structure. Yes. I noticed it first, you should know. Three years ago, when you arrived. I could have terminated your clearance then."

Elias finally looked at him. Voss's face was a geometry of sharp angles and calm certainty—the kind of face that had negotiated a hundred colony treaties and won them all.

"But I didn't," Voss said, and for the first time there was something in his voice that might have been amusement. "I wanted to see what the TNR-7 pattern would do when given freedom to express itself. Nature versus nurture, Dr. Aris would call it. We prefer a simpler term: inheritance."

The藤蔓 above them pulsed once—a rhythm that matched Elias's heartbeat exactly. It always had. It always would.

"You are a beautiful repetition," Voss said quietly. "Your father was the first. You will not be the last."