I wouldn’t have noticed the glittering cloud that emerged from the back room if it not for the reflected light. It was easier to track by the hum of its movement than by watching it. A very primal part of me took control over my curiosity, and I flattened myself low to the floor. The hum of the swarm—or whatever it was—moved across the room, overhead, and out the far door. I listened to it recede until I could no longer hear it at all.

The light in the far room was still on, even though it was silent now. A cockroach skittered past my nose.

If the bugs weren’t afraid anymore, I shouldn’t be, either. I pushed myself up, spent a few seconds deliberating with my good sense, and then the imp won out over caution and I walked into that room where the light was coming out.

The far room was a little office, confirming my suspicions that the room with the water had been a lab and not a kitchen. Most of the furniture had been destroyed, though not as systematically as in the rooms I’d passed through earlier. It was, mercifully, empty.

The source of the light was on the walls all around me. Electronic picture frames. How they were still working after all this time—ah, the autorepair. Had that humming swarm been the ship’s autorepair in action? It had been unnerving, if so. The insectoid hum, and the way the cockroaches had vanished as soon as it had appeared. Cockroaches were stupid bugs, surviving only by pure dumb instinct—and their supposed ability to withstand a nuclear bomb. But as soon as the autorepair had appeared, they’d fled. What scared a creature that couldn’t be killed?

I was letting my imagination get the better of me. Cockroaches were very stupid. Just because they’d led me to water didn’t mean I should read meaning into their movements like an oracle studying animal intestines. For all I knew, the ship’s autorepair had a pest control function.

I went over to the walls, lowering my flashlight so that I could see the photographs better. Age and decaying electronics had blurred some of them into static, and warped others until I was looking at weird repeating patterns that had maybe once been a coherent photograph but now showed nothing but dreamlike abstraction. But in some of them I could see what the photograph had been.

Family and friends covered the walls of this office. One man occurred over and over again, a tall man with very round, deep set eyes, like an owl’s. When he smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkled up and almost hid them. There was something vaguely familiar about him, like there had been about Mara Zhu, though I was certain I had never seen him before.

The man stood with his arm around a woman, his other arm around two little girls. The man stood side-by-side with a man who looked like him but a few years younger. The man stood on a beach overlooking the sea. The man stood in a lab coat in a crowd of other similarly-dressed people, all smiling with the sort of stiffness that came of the lengthy corralling that was necessary to take a group photo.