Midnight Archive: The Alien Fly

The antique brass door knob looked out of place while gleaming under M7 Station’s sterile lights, but it was an important relic on the Xenobiology Vault’s airlock.

Kevin Renner, a junior biologist fresh from Earth, couldn’t stop staring at it. The moon base, carved into lunar regolith, hummed with machinery, but that knob—salvaged from a failed Earth lab—felt like a warning. Dr. Ella Voss, the station’s lead scientist, had brought it from her old institute, where a biohazard killed twelve researchers. She called it a vow to succeed where they’d failed. Kevin called it arrogance.

He was cataloging ice core samples—strange looking flies frozen in with the ice—when a tremor shook the lab.

Technician Mia Lin frowned. “Seismic?” she asked, her enviro-suit creaking.

“Impossible,” Voss snapped, her silver hair tight in a bun. But her eyes betrayed fear.

The alarm came hours later: a biohazard alert from the vault. Security officer Lena Korsakov, with a stun baton in hand, demanded Voss open it. Inside, a cracked bioreactor oozed black-green fluid, pulsing like it was alive.

Theo Grant, the geologist, slumped in the shadows, his face transformed—compound eyes bulging, mandibles twitching.

The face of a fly.

Theo scuttled up the wall, vanishing into the vents. “Seal it!” Lena shouted. Kevin grabbed the brass knob, slamming the vault shut, but the skittering echoed beyond.

The crew—seven, the so-called M7—fractured under panic. Medic Candance Shaw quarantined the med bay, but analyst Jin Wei was already infected, his eyes shimmering like a fly.

Dax Patel, the engineer, fought to seal the vents, but the station’s systems glitched, as if the flies were rewiring them. Voss admitted the truth: the flies, found in lunar ice, were an alien archive, designed to rewrite human DNA. Her old lab, the Voss Institute, had tried to harness them, and the brass knob was a relic of that failure. She’d rebuilt the experiment on M7, believing she could control it.

She was wrong. Theo’s infection spawned a swarm—small, fly-like creatures with glinting eyes, pouring from the vents. They tore through Dax, then Candance, then Jin. Kevin, Lena, Mia, and Voss fled to a sublevel lab, accessed by Voss’s keycard.

Cryogenic tanks glowed with the same black-green fluid, birthing more alien fly creatures—humanoid, insectoid, monstrous.

“They’re evolving,” Voss whispered, awe in her voice.

“We must destroy the station,” Kevin said, clutching the keycard. “Or they reach Earth.” “There’s an escape pod,” Voss said. “We can warn them.”

They reached the pod as the swarm closed in, its hum-like a chorus of alien minds. The brass knob’s legacy burned in Kevin’s thoughts—a threshold crossed, a mistake repeated. The pod launched, M7 a fading speck against the moon’s gray waste.

In the pod, Voss’s eyes shimmered, compound facets forming. “I’m fine,” she lied, but a tear in her suit told the truth.

A stowaway vial, leaking the black-green fluid, had birthed a creature that scratched at Lena’s visor before Kevin crushed it. The fluid dried, but the threat lingered. The pod docked at an orbital station, Earth’s blue glow taunting them. Hazmat teams sealed Voss in a containment capsule, her fly-like face pressing against the glass, mandibles clicking.

Scanners cleared Kevin, Lena, and Mia, but a technician found a trace of the fluid in the escape pod’s debris—it was active, moving.

“We need to destroy it,” Lena said.

“Study it,” the technician countered, echoing Voss’s obsession. Kevin’s skin prickled, a faint shimmer beneath it. The brass door knob’s warning, ignored on M7, now haunted him. As the station’s vents hissed, a faint skittering echoed, and the face of a fly stared at him in his memory.

Containment was a lie, and the alien flies were already watching Earth. ##

The Midnight Archive crew recovered the brass door knob. It’s locked in a museum case, but at midnight, you can hear a faint buzzing of wings, “Are they the flies?”.

☞ The Midnight Archive warns: never unlock a door unless you’re certain of what's on the other side.

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