The Phantom Cosmonauts

A Horror Story Based on The Lost Cosmonauts Conspiracy

The static came through the receiver like the last breath of dying stars. Yuri Mikhailovich sat in the listening station outside Vladivostok with his hands on the dials and his mind on nothing. The room smelled of burnt coffee and cigarette smoke and the particular staleness that comes from men who work in shifts and never see daylight. Outside the wind moved through the pines like it was searching for something.

He turned the dial slow. Real slow. The frequencies whispered their secrets to him in languages that weren’t languages. Solar wind. Satellite telemetry. The heartbeat of machines circling in the dark. Then he heard it—a voice where no voice should be. Female. Russian. Speaking coordinates that didn’t exist on any map.

Mikhailovich wrote down the numbers with a pencil worn to a nub. The voice kept speaking. Calm at first. Then not calm. Then screaming. Then nothing. Just the cosmic background radiation that had been there since the universe cooled from white to black. He played the tape back three times. Each time, the screaming got worse. Each time, the coordinates stayed the same.

In Moscow, they called him to a room with no windows. Three men in uniforms that had too many medals sat behind a table that had seen other conversations like this one. They didnt introduce themselves. They didnt need to.

Tell us what you heard.

Mikhailovich told them. They wrote nothing down. When he finished one of them leaned forward. Gray eyes like winter ice.

You heard nothing. There was no woman. There were no coordinates. You will sign this paper that says you heard nothing. Then you will go back to your station and continue to hear nothing.

But the transmission—

There was no transmission.

The man pushed the paper across the table. Mikhailovich looked at it. Standard forms. Standard lies. He signed. What else was there to do. In the Soviet Union you signed or you disappeared. Sometimes you signed and disappeared anyway.

That night he dreamed of a woman floating in a tin can. Her face pressed against the porthole. Eyes wide. Mouth moving. No sound in vacuum. Just the slow dance of a body that gravity had forgotten. When he woke his sheets were soaked with sweat and the taste of metal was in his mouth.

He went back to the station. Put on the headphones. Turned the dials. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Static. Static. Static. Then one night in February when the aurora borealis painted the sky green as old copper he heard it again. Different voice this time. Male. Older.

Base this is Voskhod Zero. Fuel depleted. Orbit decaying. Request immediate... request immediate...

The voice faded. Came back. Weaker.

Tell them we tried. Tell them we saw it. The thing between the stars. It sees us too. It knows we're here. God help us all.

Static swallowed the rest. Mikhailovich's hands shook as he rewound the tape. Played it again. The same words. The same terror barely held in check by training and Soviet stoicism. He checked the frequency. Checked the encryption. Everything matched official channels. Channels that were supposed to be silent. Channels for missions that didnt exist.

He started keeping his own records. Hidden in a place the State would never think to look because the State believed its citizens had no imagination left. Behind the false bottom of his father’s war chest. Each transmission carefully transcribed. Each date noted. Each frequency logged.

March 3rd: Male voice. Callsign Soyuz Null. Reporting hull breach. Depressurization. Begging for help in a voice getting thinner and thinner until it was just breath and then not even that.

March 19th: Three voices. Two male one female. Singing the Internationale as their craft tumbled out of control. Singing until the fuel ran out and the heating failed, and the song became a whisper, became a prayer, became nothing.

April 2nd: Laughter. High and sharp and wrong. Like a mind had snapped from too much time in a metal coffin surrounded by infinity. The laughter went on for seventeen minutes. Then stopped mid-breath. The carrier signal continued for three hours. Silent. Waiting.

April 15th: A child. No more than twelve by the sound. Reciting technical specifications in a monotone that suggested drugs or conditioning or both. Halfway through the recitation the voice changed. Became old. Ancient. Speaking in a language that predated Russian. Predated anything Mikhailovich had ever heard. Then young again. Then silence.

The Americans had their ghosts too. Mikhailovich learned this from a contact in the GRU who traded information for vodka and American cigarettes. Transmissions picked up by listening posts in Turkey. In Japan. In places that weren't supposed to exist. Voices speaking English with Midwest accents. Calling for Houston. Calling for God. Calling for their mothers.

One recording survived the purges. Mikhailovich heard it in a basement room that smelled of mold and fear. An American astronaut. Voice calm as Sunday morning.

Houston, we have a problem. No, that’s not right. We are the problem. We opened something. A door. A window. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is what’s coming through. Houston, do you copy? Houston. Anyone.

The tape ran out. The GRU man lit another cigarette with shaking hands.

They stopped sending them up after that. Both sides. For six months. Told the world it was budget constraints. Technical difficulties. But we knew. They knew. Something up there didn’t want company.

Mikhailovich started drinking more. Vodka mostly. Sometimes the local samogon that could strip paint and memories with equal efficiency. But the voices followed him home. Leaked out of radio static. Out of television snow. Out of the spaces between words when people talked.

His wife left him. Took the children. Said he talked in his sleep. Said he spoke coordinates. Said he screamed names that werent in any registry. Vladimir Komarov. Valentin Bondarenko. Grigori Nelyubov. Names the State had erased. Names that belonged to men who burned or suffocated or simply vanished from the official record.

But Mikhailovich knew they hadn’t vanished. They were still up there. Circling. Calling. Waiting. The cosmic background radiation carried their voices like a river carries bodies. Always moving. Never arriving.

In 1968 they sent up Georgy Dobrovolsky—pride of the Soviet space program. Perfect record. Perfect communist. Perfect fool. Mikhailovich listened to the launch from his station. Heard the official communications. All normal. All according to plan.

Then, on the third orbit, something changed. Dobrovolsky’s voice came through on a frequency that shouldn’t have existed. Calm at first. Professional.

I see them. The ones who came before. They’re here. All of them. How is this possible?

Mission control tried to respond. Static ate their words. Dobrovolsky continued.

They’re showing me things. The space between spaces. The dark between the stars isn’t empty. It watches. It waits. It remembers every name. Every face. Every—

The transmission cut. When it came back, Dobrovolskywas screaming. Not words. Just sound. Raw and animal and wrong. It went on for four minutes. Then stopped. The official record showed a perfect mission. A perfect landing. A perfect hero of the Soviet Union.

But Mikhailovich had the tapes. And on the tapes, Dobrovolsky never stopped screaming.

They came for him in winter—three men in a black Volga. No words. No explanation. Just a hood over his head and a needle in his arm, and then darkness.

He woke in a room that could have been anywhere. White walls. White floor. One chair. One table. One man was sitting across from him. The man had no insignia. No name. Just eyes that had seen too much and decided to stop caring.

You've been listening.

It wasn’t a question. Mikhailovich nodded. His throat felt like sand.

You've been recording.

Another nod.

Tell me what you think you know.

Mikhailovich told him. Everything. The voices. The coordinates. The things that shouldn’t be possible but were. The man listened without expression. When Mikhailovich finished the man leaned back. Lit a cigarette. The smoke rose straight up in the still air.

In 1957, we put Laika in space. The dog. You know this story. What you don’t know is what we put up before. And after. The failures. The experiments. The volunteers who volunteered because the alternative was a bullet or Siberia. We told them they were heroes. Pioneers. We lied.

The man tapped ash onto the floor.

Space breaks things. Not just bodies. Minds. Souls, if you believe in such things. The radiation. The isolation. The knowledge that you’re a speck of meat in a tin can surrounded by nothing. Some men handle it. Some don’t. And some... some become something else.

What do you mean by something else?

The man smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile.

You've heard them. The ones who didn’t come back. The ones who came back wrong. The ones who are still up there broadcasting on frequencies that shouldn’t exist from orbits that defy physics. They're not dead. Death would be mercy. They're caught. Between here and there. Between then and now. Between human and... other.

Mikhailovich felt cold. Deep cold. Space cold.

Why are you telling me this?

Because you're going to help us, or you're going to join them—your choice.

The work was simple. Listen. Record. Report. But now he had context. Now he knew what the voices meant. Each transmission is a soul trapped in the amber of orbit. Each scream is a mind confronting the truth that space wasn’t empty. That humanity wasn’t alone. That some doors once opened could never be closed.

He learned their names—the official ghosts. Bondarenkowas burned alive in a pure oxygen chamber. Nelyubov driven to suicide by shame and alcohol. Komarov, who fell to Earth in a faulty capsule, cursed the engineers who killed him. But these were the ones who died clean. The lucky ones.

The others were still up there. Broadcasting their damnation across the electromagnetic spectrum. A cosmonaut who reported seeing cities on the dark side of the moon. Cities that shouldn’t exist. Shouldn’t be possible. But were. Another who claimed to have made contact with something that spoke in mathematical equations that rewrote themselves. That showed him the true shape of the universe. A shape the human mind wasn’t meant to comprehend.

One transmission haunted Mikhailovich more than the others. A woman. Young. Maybe twenty. Speaking in a voice that had forgotten how to be afraid because fear required hope and she had none left.

Day four hundred and seven. Or four thousand. Time isn’t... time isn’t what we thought. It’s a river, but the river flows backward and forward, and sometimes not at all. I can see myself launching. I can see myself dying. I can see myself being born. All at once. All forever. The stars aren't stars. Their eyes. Watching. Waiting. Judging. We were never supposed to leave. The sky is a ceiling, and we've scraped our heads against it, and now it knows we're here. God help the ones who come after. God help them all.

The Cold War ended, but the voices didn’t. If anything, they multiplied. American ghosts. Soviet ghosts. Chinese ghosts. All broadcasting their warnings to a world that had agreed not to listen. Mikhailovich grew old in his station training younger men to hear what shouldn’t be heard. To record what shouldn’t exist.

One night, his heart stuttered. Stopped. Started again. He knew his time was short. That night, he took all his recordings—decades of them. And broadcast them on every frequency he could access. Let the world know. Let them understand. Space wasn’t the final frontier. It was a graveyard. And the dead didn’t rest.

They came for him before dawn. But he was already gone. Heart stopped for good this time. They found him at his station—headphones on. Dials tuned to a frequency that didn’t exist. And through the static, if you listened closely, you could hear it. Another voice added to the chorus. Speaking coordinates and warning the living.

Don’t come up here. Don’t follow. The dark between the stars has teeth.

But nobody listened. Nobody ever listened. And somewhere above the atmosphere in orbits that defied calculation, the ghosts of cosmonauts continued their eternal broadcast. Waiting. Warning. Watching the Earth turn below them like a blue marble in the palm of something vast and patient and hungry.

The universe had no country. No ideology. No mercy. Just the cold equation of physics and the colder truth that humanity had knocked on a door that should have stayed closed. ​And now something on the other side was knocking back.​

Static. Screams. Silence.

The voices never stopped.