Chapter Text
PART ONE: Joe
07:00. Day 11,689.
Joe wakes to a familiar blue glow and the soft chime of his alarm. It rings twice before falling silent; he knows from experience that if he didn’t move for another two minutes it would chime again and send an automated message back to Earth. So he lingers only for a minute before hauling himself out of bed.
The ship is quiet. It’s always quiet, save for the hum of the machines that provide his air supply, clean and recirculate his water, keep the small corridors and rooms of the ship lit, and run the systems that let him receive and transmit communications to and from Earth, among others. Somewhere in the ship’s computer is a file that lists all of its systems, their location, and how to use them, but Joe’s not looked at it in a long, long time. It’s largely maintained remotely: he has his daily maintenance tasks to carry out, and that alone has served him well enough.
He washes first, in the ship’s little shower. The water is warm, but stays on for only a short while; he’s only allowed more every few days, so he can wash his hair properly. Breakfast is one of the pre-made meal packages they send him every two months, heated in the ship’s tiny galley. He eats standing up this morning, carrying the little metal tray over to the window after waiting the seven minutes for it to cool down enough to touch.
Below him is Earth, floating in an ocean of stars. The sun is just rising, lending it a kind of halo, which is a view he thinks he’s never gotten tired of. His favourite, though, is his view of the planet at night, when it’s lit by a web of man-made stars, stretching across countries and along coastlines, its cities glowing like tiny suns. Aside from the films and books he’s seen and read, sent to him every week or so, and the transmissions, it’s his only real indication that he isn’t the only person in the universe. Doesn’t alleviate the loneliness entirely, but it makes him feel just a little less isolated.
By 07:30 hours, he’s finished his breakfast and made his way to the ship’s laboratory. Half of it is dedicated to the experiments he maintains on behalf of Earth, his primary purpose for being here at all. The other half is medical equipment, though he’s never really had to use it. The first thing he does is draw a sample of his own blood and load it into the machine that will analyse it. He's not exactly sure of the meaning of all of the numbers and words that flick across the computer's screen too quickly for him to read in detail, though they don't look any different from yesterday's, or the day before's: someone back on Earth who does know what to do with it will receive it soon. That part isn't his job.
He's so used to it by now that he doesn't even blink at the slightly uncomfortable sensation of the needle sliding out of his arm. Briefly wonders when he started doing this, but he's been here almost his entire life. The memories have blurred together enough that one day is indistinguishable from the next.
He tends to the plants next, watering each one from a little tap that shuts off as soon as that plant has received the right amount. Always the same order, always the same amount. He runs his fingers over their leaves. Maybe he should name them.
At 08:00 hours, he makes his way to the main control room. From here, his schedule is open for almost four hours: the time stretches out in front of him.
He's exhausted his small collection of films and books, but he loads one of his favourites onto the monitor anyway. It's a good enough way to spend the time, even if he's seen it before. The next transmission is due tomorrow. He can wait until then.
He's got seven years left, after all.
The movie chatters on in the background, but Joe’s not really paying attention. He’s been daydreaming about what it will be like when he sets foot on Earth for the first time a lot, lately. The file on him in the computer’s systems says he was born in orbit, part of a program designed to study the long-term possibilities for human space travel. He doesn’t have a nationality listed, nor a date of birth: he’s thirty-three, or thereabouts, but that’s all he knows. His parents’ names are obscured from the file, and so is his surname.
He thinks about all the countries he’s seen in the movies they’ve sent him, which one he’d like to live in most. He wants to visit as many of them as he can. Maybe he’ll have to stay near wherever the base is on Earth, so they can observe the effects of forty years in orbit on him, but maybe they’ll let him travel.
At the very least, he won’t be alone. That’s the thought that keeps him from losing himself completely. There’s an end date to this isolation: he just has to make it there.
At 13:00 hours, he heats another meal package when the alarm on the computer chimes. At 13:15, he makes his way back to the laboratory. This time, he takes samples of the soil the plants grow in, and measures his blood pressure and heart rate, as well as a few other things. The results come back normal. They always come back normal, but he checks anyway.
At 13:45, he returns to the control room with his sketchbook in hand. He’s only got a few pages left; he’ll have to make them last if he can and put in a request for a new one.
At 18:27, he sets it aside and turns to the computer. The camera will be on soon, so he scribbles out a quick set of notes for what he wants to say. At 18:29, a red light blinks to warn him the transmission will begin soon; at 18:30, the computer chimes, and the camera turns on.
“Hi,” he says. His voice is hoarse. He clears his throat before beginning again. “This is Joe, transmitting from Orbiter 3. It’s” – he checks the computer’s clock – “day 11,689 of the experiment. Uh, all medical checks came back normal, plants show no abnormal growth or change, soil levels all fine. Drank about three bottles of water. No technical faults to report.” There’s never much to say during these reports, but they’re the closest thing he gets to talking to someone else. “Earth looks particularly beautiful today. And I’m running out of paper.” He holds his sketchbook up to the camera, smiles ruefully for whoever might be watching. The light beside the camera blinks to warn him he’s got about a minute left, so he adds, “I’d like an update on the arrival time for the next supply shipment, if possible. But that’s all I have to report. Transmission over.” And then, for good measure, “Bye.”
The computer chimes again, and Joe sighs. The response will be sent back to him in an hour, always typed, always impersonal.
At 19:00, he eats again. At 19:15, he returns to the control room, and at 19:30 the response comes through.
Day 11,689. Transmission time: 19:30 hours.
Medical report recorded. Agricultural report recorded. Request recorded and will be included in the next shipment of supplies.
It’s exactly what he expected, though the news that his request will be fulfilled is something. Joe sighs. In other circumstances, he might find it almost funny that the only times he actually has any kind of contact with Earth are the times he feels loneliest. There’s something about the way the messages are always so impersonally written that makes him wonder if maybe they hadn’t been written by a person at all.
Maybe they aren’t. But someone had made a note of his request for a sketchbook and responded to it: someone must be watching.
He hopes so, anyway. He doesn’t think he can bear the alternative.
At 07:07 hours two days later, the lights go out.
He’s in the middle of heating one of the packages when it happens. Not just the lights, either. The clock, and the machine that heats his food, and even the constant hum of the machines – it all stops, as if someone had flicked a switch and cut him off completely. The ship is dead silent, and dark. With the darkness comes the panic, wrapping icy fingers around his heart.
If the lights are out, and the machines have stopped – they are the only thing keeping him alive up here, and there is no way for him to call for help. Earth is still visible, as it always is, through the ship’s window, the only remaining source of light left to him. It has never felt so far away before.
Maybe someone had flicked a switch. Maybe he’d done something wrong, or maybe they’d decided to finish the experiment, and it had been simpler to simply pull the plug instead of spending the time and resources to bring him to Earth – maybe that had been their intention after all – he can’t remember who told him he would be able to return after forty years, can’t remember if he read that once in the experiment’s files or if he’d simply dreamt it and believed it out of sheer hope – maybe nobody is listening to him, maybe nobody has ever been listening to him and he has always been transmitting to a computer that has been generating the reports to keep him from suspecting anything – even if someone is listening, there is no way anyone will be able to reach him in time if the power doesn’t come back on –
Joe forces himself to breathe, and finds that he still can. He is not out of time yet, even if he cannot quite seem to get enough air into his lungs. There must be some way to get the power back.
The control room is deathly silent. But he finds an emergency torch on the wall, which works well enough, and he has lived on this ship for long enough that he doesn’t need the light to navigate. He’s certain there’s an emergency power supply somewhere.
The computer doesn’t respond. Not a single one of them do. There is no physical set of instructions for what to do if the power goes out – he was never trained on what to do if the power goes out. He hadn’t even imagined the possibility.
He doesn’t know how long he searches for. The clock is blank. But some amount of time later, as he’s still searching for some kind of emergency power, moving from the control room to the galley to the laboratory to his bedroom, the power comes back on. The machines whir back to life and resume their quiet hum. Light floods the corridors.
The clock on the wall blinks 07:19.
Twelve minutes. He lost power for twelve minutes.
Relief crashes over him like a wave, but he can’t quite make his hands stop shaking. He leans back against the wall and slides down slowly until he’s sitting on the floor, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his forehead on them. Breathes slowly, in and out.
He doesn’t move until an alarm chimes at him, reminding him that it’s his scheduled time to be in the laboratory as if nothing had happened. His hands are still trembling.
The alarm chimes again when he doesn’t move. Slowly, he manages to lift himself from the floor and makes his way to the control room instead.
Outside of his scheduled transmission time, there’s a button to immediately open a channel to Earth on the console. He’s never used it before, but he doesn’t hesitate to press it now. The light beside the camera blinks twice.
“Hi,” he says shakily, and takes a deep breath. “This is Joe, transmitting from – uh – Orbiter 3. I lost power for twelve minutes this morning. I don’t know if you already knew that, or– it doesn’t matter, I guess. Please, uh, please send instructions for locating the emergency power supply in case it happens again, or some kind of way to figure out what happened, or something , I don’t know.”
He can see himself reflected in the camera lens. Is anyone even watching?
“Just, uh. Anything would be good. So. Transmission over.”
He presses the button to end the transmission. There’s no reason for him to believe the response will come any faster this time, even if he can still feel his heart racing, so he might as well try to eat something. His schedule for the day is well and truly off-track anyway.
He thinks about trying to read or watch something but can’t quite manage to do it; he carries his tray with him into the control room and watches a blank screen while he eats. This is the only room on the ship that doesn’t have a window, which is almost comforting, right now. He doesn’t want to be reminded of how far away Earth is, not when his entire existence here feels so precarious.
He could almost laugh at himself. A single technical fault, and it’s thrown him this off-kilter.
At 08:22, the computer chimes. The response reads:
Day 11,691. Transmission sent: 07:22 hours.
The next supply shipment will arrive in four days. An engineer will be sent to Orbiter 3 to check for technical faults and carry out necessary maintenance on the ship. In case of further power failure, the emergency power supply controls can be found near the airlock. Further instructions to follow.
Remain calm.
It’s the last line, initially, that makes Joe pause and furrow his brow. There are often instructions in the transmissions sent to him, but none have ever been phrased directly to him that way, nor have they ever seemed to care about how he felt.
Then he rereads the second sentence, and forgets to breathe entirely.
Someone else is coming.
He doesn’t sleep much that night.
Doesn’t sleep much at all, over the next four days. He keeps waking up in the middle of what passes for night, convinced that the oxygen supply is failing, that he can’t breathe. It takes him a while to calm himself down, those times: once, he stumbles all the way to the emergency power controls before he realises that the lights are on, and he’s still breathing. Something about the incident has lodged itself deep in his brain, made it near impossible for him to continue on the way he has done for years. He can’t remember the power ever going out before, not even when he was younger, in the earlier years of the experiment. Those years have blurred together anyway: eleven thousand days in the same place with the same routine makes individual days and weeks and months bleed into each other, one indistinguishable from the next. He doesn’t even have a mirror: he has a faint idea of what he should look like, but he doesn’t know where it comes from.
He starts to miss his timings. Lets the alarm chime three times before he gets out of bed, which has a knock on effect on his schedule for the rest of the day, and starts alerting Earth, but he doesn’t care anymore. Wants them to know he’s still here, he’s still alive, even if all he can do is send them a periodic alert that says he’s behind schedule. I’m not a machine , he wants to scream, even if nobody would listen, I’m here, I’m alive, I don’t want to be alone anymore.
Every transmission over the next four days is perfectly normal. Clear, concise, impersonal. There’s not a single hint of whoever had told him to remain calm, nor do they ever mention the incident again. The engineer, too, isn’t mentioned until the day before their scheduled arrival, when the transmission reads:
Day 11,695.
Transport ship scheduled to arrive at 0900 hours. Engineer will remain on ship for three days to carry out necessary maintenance.
Joe’s spent the last four days thinking about the engineer’s arrival – the first person he’s seen since they sent him here, he assumes, though his memories of his early life here have always been a little fuzzy. He wonders what they will look like: young or old? Tall or short or somewhere in between? With long hair or short? Quiet or chatty? He turns the options over and over in his mind while he eats, while he carries out his experiments, before he falls asleep.
He hopes, more than anything else, that they will be kind.
There is nothing different about the day the engineer arrives.
He gets up when his alarm wakes him. Takes his time in the shower, because today is the day he is allocated more time than usual to wash his hair properly. Waters the plants, analyses a blood sample. Nothing is different, except that his heart rate keeps speeding up out of nowhere, his hands shakier than usual. He keeps looking at the clock as the minutes seem to pass both in the blink of an eye and excruciatingly slow at the same time.
At 08:45, Joe looks out the window, but none of them are at the right angle that he can see the transport ship approaching. He can’t seem to stop fidgeting, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. His only indication that the ship has arrived at all is a light tremor that runs through the ship as it docks and then a gentle chime from the pod’s airlock.
Joe forces himself to take a few deep, steadying breaths, and then walks slowly to the door. Shoves his hands in the pockets of his trousers to keep them from shaking.
The red light flashing above the door turns green, and a few seconds later the door slides open,
The man on the other side is wearing a space helmet, but as Joe watches he reaches up to take it off, running a hand through his hair. Then he catches sight of Joe and smiles, and a surge of familiarity punches Joe in the gut, makes him almost cry out in surprise: he knows this man, he’s certain of it, and yet he also knows he has been alone here his entire life.
“Hello, Joe,” the engineer says, and his voice is low and kind and gentle, and Joe knows him, he knows him, and yet he cannot possibly have met him before. His eyes are the color of seaglass. “I’m Nicky.”