Resonant Harvest

Eir Station rode its quiet orbit like a patient scanner, a ring of modules and tensioned struts that kept a thousand small lives away from planetary storms. The habitat's throat — a narrow cylinder of resonant converters and coil arrays — sang a low, polite hum that most people tuned out. Selena Voss never had. She had been listening to that hum for years, reading its harmonics the way other technicians read weather reports. The resonant converters were both the station's heartbeat and its accounting ledger: they translated patterned human activity into usable energy, folding together attention, rhythm, and affect into surge packets and steady draws that fed life support, comm-bands, and microthrusters. They had been a miracle until the first reports of forgetting began to appear in the community boards.

Jonah Kade's name had been on Selena's own shift roster for maintenance rounds that week. He worked two levels down in a light studio that smelled of solvent and polymer paints; his work was public instruction and private experiment, a string of small interactive exhibits meant to teach children how to see color relationships. His pieces relied on layered recollection — object, impression, context — which made the reports about him especially worrying. When she pushed open his studio door the smell hit her first: paint thinner, a faint citrus rinse from the communal sanitation system, the warm body odor of someone who'd slept badly. Jonah was at his desk, staring at a screen full of sketches. He was tapping a stylus without finishing any line.

"You okay?" Selena asked.

He blinked and smiled as if recalling he had been asked a question. "Yeah. Just… blinking. Lost my thread. Can't place the last motif."

It was the way he said it that made her set down her tool kit. Jonah had always been precise with his words. He reached for a reference file and came up blank. Then he laughed, a small, embarrassed sound, and tried the phrase again; there were gaps where a sentence should have been, blanks that opened like small mouthpieces in memory. Selena watched him flip through frames of his own work until he recognized none of them as if they belonged to someone else who had used his hands.

A maintenance visit that afternoon turned into a private audit. Selena ran a routine diagnostic on the nearest converter node, expecting banal noise — a drift here, a spline misalignment there. Instead she found timing anomalies that didn't belong in normal degradation: subtle windows where extraction rates jumped for a few seconds, then returned. Those jumps were synchronized, across different converters, with a precision that made her skin taut. She traced the timestamps to the station's shared ledger of operations and hit a sealed manifest entry that had no normal clearance trail. It was marked as system maintenance but bore the faint tag of a propulsion subroutine. The descriptor used clinical language: window, draw, correction. There was nothing to suggest malicious intent — only necessity — but Jonah's blank spots had a different tone than the usual memory slippage the medbay tried to counsel away. These were holes that had edges.