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The inner ring of the station had a conference room and a small breakroom, an entire little office that Rockmist, being the only inhabitant and employee at the station, never used. The station was perhaps intended for a grander future, as a place where issues were debated and decisions made, rather than just a routing hub for cargo.
Right now Rockmist realized, with sickening irony, that it sounded like the office was being used for its purpose, unbeknownst to her. Listening at the conference room door, she heard voices, male and female: she identified two distinct pitches, though she could not make out what they were saying. Terror made her knees weak. There had not been any visitors to this space station - her space station - ever since it was built. The only exception were the delivery people that restocked her supplies once in a few months, but none of them ever came into the Inner Ring.
A wave of nausea came over her and Rockmist leaned sideways against the hallway wall. She feebly tried to recall if there were protocols and procedures in the station maintainer's manual on what to do upon discovering an unexpected intrusion. Most likely there weren't any. Still, her training demanded to always follow the appropriate procedure: all of them, including emergency instructions, were compiled on the basis of the experiences of all the station maintainers over a thousand years of Diaspora's existence.
She could not move to look up those instructions: fear enveloped her limbs in a sludge. Flattened against the wall, she tried to watch both left and right, in case more invaders were going to emerge from around the bend on either side. The radius of the Inner Ring was big enough that the corridor curve was gentle and Rockmist could see far enough. All seemed clear. At least she would not be caught unawares. Rockmist rallied her strength and pushed her Augmented Reality glasses from the top of her head onto her eyes, prepared to open the operating manual and search it. The menu that the glasses displayed in her field of vision was semi-transparently overlaid over the surroundings.
At that moment she heard something both unexpected and incredibly familiar. The man's and woman's voices were interrupted by a surge of string music, like in a movie or a television program.
Perhaps she was hearing a dialogue from a show, coming from the big screen in the conference room? There might not be any intruders.
It was easy enough to verify. On her armband she pressed a few keys, and her Augmented Reality glasses brought up a wall of video camera feeds, one for each room, corridor, hallway or cubbyhole of the space station. She focused her eyes on the feed from the Wave Bloom conference room, the one she was at right now. With two blinks she commanded her glasses to enlarge it.
The big screen on the conference room wall was indeed on and there were figures moving on it, but there was no one in the room. This was, however, only marginally better than discovering intruders in the station, because there was no explanation how the screen got turned on. Rockmist postponed the speculation for later; right now she had to assess the situation.
She opened the door and stepped into the room.
Rockmist wasn't sure if this room had ever been used since the time the station was built and she became its maintainer and sole inhabitant. It was a transitory cargo station, after all - hardly more than a giant warehouse. The historical camera feeds, all of them archived somewhere in digital storage, would probably pinpoint the moment the television got turned on. She was going to look at it later. At present she inspected the room, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
The show that was unfolding on the screen featured a dark-haired man and a woman with braids wrapped around her head, in the style Rockmist only knew from old movies. It was a style that was popular decades ago on the Beta station, one of the largest Diaspora stations with several thousands of residents. Both characters were young. They stood sideways to the viewer, facing each other. The woman's hands were clasped together. Their poses and facial expressions indicated a romantic melodrama. Rockmist surprised herself with this thought, as she could not have named any example of this genre that she had watched.
"Please, take these login credentials," said the young man, placing his arms around the woman and gazing at her with eyes that could melt stone.
"I cannot," she said, though she seemed to be weakening at his gaze. "I will be arrested for this, do you not realize that?"
"No one will find out. It's for a sacred cause. If you login into that repository, you will save all the stations, not just ours."
"How can I trust you? I don't even know your name," said the woman.
"That's precisely why you can trust me," said the man. "Until the time is right, no one will know my real name. Just like no one will hear of your heroic deed. You don't have to worry about it."
"Well, if you can assure me that no one will find out..." She tilted her braided head pensively. A close-up showed a demonstrative doubt condensing on her face, along with a dawning temptation.
"I do guarantee it," said the young man. He took her hand, placed something in her palm and closed her fingers around it.
Rockmist shivered from a deja-vu. It occurred to her that she heard the man's voice say that phrase before when lurking outside the conference room. Perhaps the television was playing a short clip on a loop? But why?
She could not stop to think about it because the picture changed. The screen went completely black. A string of white symbols traversed it from left to right. The first one looked like a URL; the second and third might have been a username and a password.
This significantly deviated from any soap opera scenario. It made no sense to show the fictional login credentials to the viewer.
Unless they were meant for the viewer. Her.
"Take it," the man's voice whispered offscreen.
Take it? Was that a plea to her, Rockmist? She blinked a few times, taking the picture of the screen with her AR glasses. Alright, she received the credentials, though she had no idea what kind of "repository" they were for. Then she leaped towards the screen and turned it off.