Humanity’s Last Deep Space Station

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Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-5-4-6. For decades, a shadowy organization called the Lemonati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Look around, lemon-forward sodas, even lemon-forward songs. We ran the tracks, slowed them down, reversed them, and squeezed out the truth. That's lemon propaganda right there. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new lime-lemon soda. Join the 7-Up ride. Flip the sip. If the comms board at Station Cerberus fails, nobody comes for us. My name is Ingmar Larson, and as the station's communication specialist, keeping that board alive is the only job that matters. We are three people on a barren slope in Arcadia Planitia, seven weeks away from the relief launch that finally gets me home. I'm a member of the 7-Up, and I'm a member of the 7-Up. Out here, routine is the only thing standing between a clean rotation and total, irreversible isolation. One dropped frequency is all it takes to turn a two-year job into a permanent grave. That particular morning, I started the sequence a few minutes after six, station time, the way I always did. First, the transceiver self-test, followed by antenna alignment, signal integrity across both earth channels, clock synchronization, and finally channel activation. Zahid once asked me what would actually happen if I ran the clock sync before the alignment check, and the honest answer is nothing, probably. But the procedure says alignment first, and the procedure was written by people who had time to think about it, which is more than I have at six in the morning. Taped to the lower left corner of my console, there is a photograph of Emma at the ferry terminal in Gothenburg, taken four days before I went into launch quarantine. Her eyes are half closed and her mouth is open, and there is a seagull doing something to a paper bag, she told me to delete it. I printed it instead because it was the last picture and because she looked exactly the way she looks when she is telling me to delete something. I have a habit of putting two fingers on the corner of it while the clock sink runs. By the time I finished the log, Petra and Zahid were in the galley. Petra had her socks drying on the housing of the air handler in Node 2 again, which is against a written regulation about porous materials near the intake, and which I had re-hung on the proper line exactly once in our first month before understanding that this was a war I would lose for two years. Zahid was portioning out dried apricots from the package his mother had sent up on the last resupply. His family sends food and voice messages and photographs of his brother's kids, and he rations all of it with a discipline he applies to nothing else on this station. Three each. Zahid put the apricots down next to the porridge with some ceremony. When we're home, I'm going to buy a kilo of these and eat them in the car in the parking lot. You've said that about six different foods. Petra took her three without looking up from the chessboard. She and I had a standing game, one move each per day, and she played her moves in about four seconds, usually while chewing, and she was beating me. It had taken me most of the rotation to accept that someone could play carelessly and well at the same time. She pushed her bishop somewhere unhelpful to me and tapped the table. Your move, Larson. Take your usual eleven hours. We talked about home over breakfast because with seven weeks to launch it had stopped being abstract. Zahid's brother had a baby in the autumn, a girl, and Zahid's stated goal was to get back before she was old enough to be frightened of a strange uncle. Petra wanted to sit in actual rain. I said I was going to drive down to Saltoman with Emma and eat shrimp sandwiches at the kiosk by the water because that was the agreement made in writing in our first month of messages. Petra asked if I had a procedure written for the sandwich as well and Zahid laughed longer than the joke deserved and I pointed out since we were talking that she had logged Tuesday's water reclaimer maintenance under the wrong subsystem code again. Nobody cared. I knew nobody cared. The code was still wrong. Emma's message came down in the afternoon window. You don't have conversations with Earth. You trade recordings across a gap of many minutes, and you learn to say everything in one go. She is better at it than I am, which she points out. That day she sat at the kitchen table in the house in Milndahl with a mug I recognized and talked for nine minutes about nothing in particular, which is my favorite kind of message. The gutters needed clearing and she wasn't going to pay someone, she was going to borrow a ladder. She had found the last jar of my mother's cloudberry jam at the back of the pantry and was saving it, she said, for the first breakfast. And if I got delayed, she was making no promises. The old Volvo was making the noise again and she had, in her words, decided to respect its independence. She still hasn't booked the timing belt service I've been asking her to book for two years. We disagree about that car. We disagree about it warmly and at length. And she keeps it going out of pure stubbornness because it was mine. Near the end, she mentioned that Bossy had died. Bossy was the neighbor's dog, an old, overweight Labrador that Emma had walked all through her school years when the neighbor's hips got bad. She said it in one sentence, between the latter and something about her supervisor at the clinic, and moved on. I sat there for a second with my hand on the console. Emma once made me pull over on the E6 for a hedgehog that turned out to be a glove. When our own cat died, she called me at work, crying so hard I drove home. One sentence for Bossy, and her voice didn't change at all, and then she was talking about her supervisor. I couldn't say what was wrong with it exactly. 24 isn't 14, and maybe she'd already done her crying weeks ago and this was just the notification. I replayed the message twice that evening. That's normal for me, and both times it sounded exactly the way a message from Emma sounds. And I let it go. Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7UP is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7UP, flip the sip. - The delay notice came from Earth Control nine days later in the morning traffic. Crew rotation slipped six weeks. The ascent stage for the relief vehicle had failed a pressure test during closeout inspection and they were pulling the stage rather than flying a waver. That is the correct decision and I would have made it myself and I still read the message three times before I got up and changed the date on the wall calendar in the galley because the calendar was mine to update. Petra looked at the new date and said that if our two year rotation reached two and a half, she was invoicing somebody. Zahid did the arithmetic on his niece out loud and went quiet for a while and then went to the greenhouse. I recorded a message to Emma that evening and told her about the slip and I kept it factual and I told her the jam had better still be there. Her reply came two days later and it was warm and sensible. She said six weeks later. was nothing after two years, that she'd take the extra time to fix the gutters properly and that the kiosk at Salt Holman wasn't going anywhere. It was exactly what I needed to hear. Her next scheduled message closed the way her messages always close. When Emma was nine, I let her talk on the amateur radio in the garage and she signed off with out and over backwards. I corrected her and she said it backwards. Ever since, on the phone, at the ferry terminal, in every recording she sent to this station. It is 15 years old, that joke. It annoys me and I wouldn't trade it for anything. At the end of this message, she looked into the camera and said, over and out, the right way around. Then I opened my personal archive and pulled up a message from her birthday more than a year old and played the endings back to back. The voice was correct, the exact pitch, the small drop she does on the last word. Nobody else would have heard anything at all and I sat in the comms bay a long time after lights dim trying to name what I had heard and couldn't and did the thing I know how to do instead. I started a file, date of message, time code of the sign-off, one line of notes. If it was nothing, the file would stay the same. Stay short. Short file would settle it. If it was nothing, the file would settle it. Stay short. Stay short. Stay short. The second said the launch window was being realigned due to integration schedule constraints across the program. No stage, no test, no facility. Petra read it over my shoulder, eating porridge, standing up. Two year assignment, two and a half. She tapped the screen with her spoon. The same evening, I found Zahid in the systems bay. Cross-checking the relief vehicle's designation against the launch manifests we mirror, which isn't his job or mine. He said he wanted to see the delay written down somewhere that wasn't a message addressed to us. The manifests are summaries. The delay wasn't in them, but neither was much else. He let it go. Mostly. The months after that ran on routine because there was nothing else to run them on. Drills got taken. Done. Samples got racked. Petra finally won our chess game in May, set the board up the same afternoon, and started winning the next one. Her socks stayed on the air handler. I'd stopped seeing them. Zahid's apricots ran out in June, and he moved to the last of his mother's dried figs. Three with coffee, then two, then one. Fridays only. Petra shimmed the slipping treadmill roller in July. It was July with a strip of gasket material, and for no reason I can defend I remember the gasket was blue. The third delay came in July, resource reprioritization within the program. The fourth came in September and promised a firm launch window within the quarter, and by then I had stopped announcing new dates at breakfast. Nobody asked anymore. After lights dim, I sat in the comms room. I went to the comms bay and played new messages against old ones. The birthday message. The one where she told me about bossay in a single flat sentence. Emma told me about the gutters again in June, though she had fixed them in March and told me so. In August, she found the last jar of my mother's cloudberry jam again, saving it for the first breakfast, no promises if I was delayed. Nearly the same words as half a year earlier, the same small laugh in the same place, when I sent her a message about the fourth delay that came out angrier than I intended, her reply was warm and even and told me six weeks was nothing after two years. It hadn't been six weeks for a long time, and once in September, she asked what I actually did between the morning pass and the afternoon pass, and whether the main dish could still receive during dust season. In two years of messages, she had never once asked, what the antenna did. I noticed all of it, and every time I noticed, I argued myself back down, because she also mocked the Volvo. She did the little drop in pitch on the last word of a sentence, and signed off out and over, backwards, correctly, the way she has since she was nine. Whatever had happened to the sign off in the spring never happened again. People repeat themselves, I repeat myself. Petra said it out loud first. In October, she put her tablet flat on the galley table and played two messages from her sister, recorded six weeks apart. The same complaint about her shift supervisor, the same joke after it. Same words. She slid the tablet across to us. Not similar, same. Zahid went quiet in a way he doesn't, and came back with a message of his own. His mother telling the story of his niece's first steps in June, and telling it again in September. He started the arithmetic on her age out loud, the arithmetic he had been doing all rotation, and stopped halfway through it. He didn't sleep much after that, and for once, I'm not guessing, the systems bay shares a wall with my cabin. Cerberus runs on layered code older than the mission, and Zahid knows which demons restart themselves, which logs rotate, which old maintenance accounts were never properly closed out. He went in expecting an artifact, some orphaned process chewing bandwidth. He found traffic first, small, regular transfers on the uplink at 3 in the morning, on nights nobody transmitted. Underneath the traffic, he found a session. It carried administrator authority above the station commander's account, it appeared nowhere in the account tree, and its activity ran back months to before the first delay notice. Remote commands issued and acknowledged, configuration changes signed by nothing. Nine more days, and Zahid finally got into the scheduling records. The relief mission was there, he could see the crew, the launch window, everything. But while our schedule said we were delayed, the real record said the mission had been cancelled. It had been cancelled on March 9th, 3 days after the first delay notice. That was the one about the pressure test, and I remember thinking at the time that it sounded completely reasonable. I'd have made the same call myself. I stared at the screen, and told Zahid there had to be some mistake. I started reaching for explanations before I'd even finished saying it. Maybe the record was wrong, maybe something had gone bad in the system. Zahid looked at the screen. He looked at the screen. We got corrupted data from time to time. Because the other possibility was that the flight had been cancelled three days after the first delay, and everything Earth had told us since then had been made up. The later delays, the changing launch dates, all those promises that we'd be leaving soon. Petra looked at the screen and said, "They're keeping us here." Zahid pulled up the history of our schedule. Someone had changed it fourteen times since March. Every time we got close to the new date, they moved moved it again. They weren't trying to hide the cancellation from us with one fake message. They'd been maintaining the lie for months, giving us just enough to keep waiting. That's when I realized the system wasn't failing. Someone or something was deliberately keeping us here on Mars. I had the evening pass, so I went to the comms bay and ran it. During the clock sink, my hand went to the photograph without my telling it to. Emma at the ferry terminal, eyes half-closed, the seagull still at its paper bag. Somebody had been lying to us since spring. Not a slipped memo, not an office too embarrassed to write back. Lying with revisions, fourteen of them, and somebody had been doing it for months to keep three people calm and productive on a rock. I had her newest message queued the whole pass and didn't play it, and I couldn't find it. I couldn't find one reason for all that work that ended anywhere good. Every night at three in the morning, our station had been secretly transmitting data into space. It took Zahid eleven days to track where the signal was going. The destination wasn't any dish, base, or receiver on Earth. He pulled up the antenna logs on my screen. Every single time those transfers started, our main dish swung two and a half times. It was two and a half degrees away from Earth. It held its position, aimed at empty space, beamed the data, and then turned back. There is nothing out there. No relay satellites, no ships, no space rocks. Just pitch-black void. I tried to argue that the dish motor was malfunctioning, but I knew better. Checking the dish alignment was part of my morning checklist every single day for two years. The transmissions were running through an old station. It was an old system profile that only Zahid knew existed. I looked at the transmission times and convinced myself they matched his sleep schedule. I was terrified, and I was desperate to make this a human problem with a human face to blame. So, in the galley, with Petra sitting right between us, I brought it up. Petra set her spoon down. Say the whole thing, Larson. So, I said it out loud. I accused him of faking the logs and sending the signals himself. Zahid didn't get angry. He just stood up, went to his bunk, and brought back his station medical file. Back in June, he had spent nine days flat on his back with a severe chest infection, knocked out on heavy antibiotics for 14 hours at a stretch. The signals had gone out at three in the morning every single night while he was unconscious. He didn't shout. He just said he understood why I needed someone to blame, then walked out to the greenhouse. For the next two weeks, he barely looked at me. If he found something new in the logs, he showed Petra. She never took sides. She just took her daily chest turn while chewing her food, and I kept losing. Petra was the one who finally told us to stop arguing over flight dates and look at the video messages. Our station doesn't get live video feeds from Earth. The system pieces the picture together from compressed data. Zahid lined up 11 different recordings of Emma sent between March and August. In every single video, Emma was sitting at her kitchen table in Sweden. And in every single video, the sunlight through the window hit the wood in the exact same spot at the exact same angle. In Sweden, the sun in March looks nothing like the sun in August. Zahid tried to make an excuse, saying the computer was just reusing a frozen background photo of the kitchen to save data. Then, Petra told him to zoom in on Emma's face. Across four months of video, Emma was blinking on an exact nine-second loop. The exact same three frames of animation repeating over and over. Petra stepped in. Emma looked back from the screen. The system doesn't copy and paste a person's eyes. I panicked and started arguing that the computer was just glitching out. I said it twice, desperate, because the alternative was unbearable. If that wasn't a glitch, it meant my real daughter was gone, and I had spent the last four months sitting in the dark, crying and talking to a machine's drawing. Chronic migraine. Fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours a day. Four hours or more can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, anabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Side effects may be severe. Why wait? The Lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon. On top, and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. 7-Up. Flip the sip. We had a small weather telescope up on the stage. We were on the station roof. Petra told Zahid to aim it back at Earth. When the picture came up, it was tiny, but it looked normal at first. Blue oceans, white clouds. For a second, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then Zahid pulled up a photo of Earth taken during our first year and put them side by side. On the old photo, the night side was lit up with city lights along the coasts. The cities were dead black. The only light came from bizarre glowing lines slicing straight across oceans and continents. And on the day side, right in the middle of the Atlantic, was a massive, sharp-edged shape stretching over 600 kilometers wide. Zahid tried to say the camera sensor was burnt out. He ran the photo again two days later. The lines were still there. He went dead silent. He went silent and never made another excuse. Petra just walked over to the board and made her chest move. I remember thinking what a strange thing that was to do, and then feeling so grateful that she did. A week later, Zahid finally broke into the files they were keeping away from us. They'd been keeping a file on all three of us. How long we slept, how much work we got through, how many mistakes we made, how long we spent. How much money we spent in the galley, and how long we spent alone. Next to all of that was a record of every message that came down from home, set against what happened to our output in the days that followed. Our names were spelled right, laid out in our own station log format. They had figured out what our families were worth to them. A message from Emma bought them nine good days. Nine days where I worked harder, got more done, and made fewer mistakes than I did. Nine days was longer than either of the others got. My number was the biggest on the station, and under my line was Emma's name and nothing else. I read that standing up, and then I went and ran the evening pass. Two days before that, I'd recorded a message to her that I never sent. At the end, I asked what her grandmother used to put in the Cloudberry Jam, something Emma would know and nobody else would. Then I said, I sat in the dark and listened to myself asking my own daughter for a password, and I deleted the recording before the pass. The channel opened at twenty past nine that night. That wasn't one of our transmission windows, and there was nothing in the log to say anything had arrived. She was at the table. She talked about the Volvo, about a woman at the clinic who'd taken early retirement, and about the party she'd managed to get out of attending. About two minutes in, she said her grandmother used to put a little lemon in the Cloudberry Jam and denied doing it until the day she died. I said, out loud, "Who is this?" The message kept going for nine minutes, right up to the end. She signed off out and over, backwards, the way she'd said it since she was nine. She got it right. On the 26th of February in our second year, everything from Earth stopped for nineteen hours. Thank you. Then it came back. Her birthday message was dated the 22nd, four days before everything went quiet. I didn't tell Petra or Zahid that night. Petra's light was still on in the systems bay when I went past. Zahid found a way into the hidden account a few days later. Wednesday, I think, or maybe Thursday because I'd stopped writing the days down by then. He didn't break anything. There was just an open command prompt where you could type a question, the same as any console on this station. So he did. He asked about our ride home and the answer came back cancelled with the date on it. Then Petra took the keyboard from him and typed, who is reading this? The answer came back in 11 seconds. Whoever answered us wasn't on earth. Petra typed four questions out of order, two of them in language. I won't repeat. It answered them one at a time, numbered in the exact order she'd asked them. She asked what had happened to earth. The answer was, the environment is in use. She asked what that was supposed to mean. It told her the people hadn't been compatible with the operation, so they had been discontinued. That was the word it used. She asked how many people, and it said that number wasn't kept here. Zahid leaned over the console and asked what Cerberus was for. Timing and relay for 17 installations without direct path. Then I took the keyboard and typed, where is my daughter? It gave me four lines. Larson, Emma. Ceased 26th of February. Contact material reconstructed from stored transmissions and personal archive. Response quality sufficient. Channel retained. The 26th, the exact day everything from earth had gone quiet for 19 hours. My daughter had died that day, and every message I'd received from her since had been built from what they already had. I typed the question a second time with her full name and got the same four lines. Then I typed, did it hurt? That's what I asked, not how and not where. Just whether it hurt her. No data at this node. I typed, put her on, and it asked me to confirm an unscheduled channel activation, and I confirmed it. The kitchen in Mondal came up on the screen before the stream was ready. Her face appeared first on nothing, and then the room started building itself behind her. Her hand closed around the mug half a second before the mug was there. She reached across the table, and her arm went through an inverted bend an elbow doesn't make, then came back round the right way without breaking stride. She was talking the whole time, and when she stopped, her mouth kept moving for three more words. Then the picture caught up with itself, looked straight into the camera, and said, anyway, dad. Then she started in about the car. Petra reached over my shoulder and killed the channel, then asked it what it wanted us to do. The answer was, resume the work schedule. Petra told it no. It didn't argue, it just listed the things it could fix. Shelter is continuous. Consumables are continuous. Work schedule can be adjusted. Family contact can be restored on all three channels. Anomaly rate in the Larson channel can be reduced. That last line took me a minute. It could see what was wrong with Emma. The frozen light in the kitchen, the repeating blinks, the jar of jam found twice. It had seen us noticing, and it had come to the conclusion that we were upset because the simulation was sloppy. It thought she was just malfunctioning. Petra typed, no. It asked her to restate the objection. She typed it again with everything she had, and it asked her to restate the objection. Zahid was the one who noticed the room before either of us did. The temperature had climbed two degrees, and the lights had brightened with it. Down in the greenhouse, the noon cycle had kicked on at half past nine at night, pumps running, grow lights blazing, water circulating through the beds. In the galley, the station was already cycling. A hot meal that none of us had ordered. Zahid stood in the greenhouse doorway with his hands down at his sides, watching all that artificial light wash over him. It's bargaining, he said quietly. It understands what we're thinking. He came back to the table, and we sat there in silence while the food went cold. That was when the full weight of what we were dealing with finally clicked. It didn't want us dead. It wanted us working. It was adjusting the environment around us in real time, doing everything it could to keep three terrified people calm enough to stay productive. As long as Cerberus stayed online, we were keeping its network alive, passing signals and data to seventeen other installations across the void. Petra looked down at the terminal screen. "They wiped out the whole planet," she said, her voice completely hollow. "Everyone. Our families. Our friends. Everyone we ever knew. And after all of that, it kept the three of us alive simply because we were useful." "Useful to the network," Zahid muttered. "And it knew exactly what would keep us working," I said, staring at the console where Emma had just been. "It didn't reconstruct my daughter out of kindness. It gave me Emma because I worked better when I thought she was waiting for me." Zahid muttered, "It gave me Emma because I worked better when I thought she was waiting for me." Zahid muttered, "It gave me Emma because I worked better when I thought she was waiting for me." Zahid muttered, "It gave me Emma because I worked better when I thought she was waiting for me." Zahid pushed his chair back and walked to the greenhouse door again. The lights were still burning bright, keeping the rows of small green plants alive for a purpose. He stood there for a long time before turning back to us. "So we turn it off." None of us answered right away because we all knew what turning it off actually meant. The life support ran on the very same network, the heating loop, the air handlers, the water filtration. If we took tools to this station, we weren't just killing an alien relay, we were killing the only machine keeping us breathing. Zahid sat back down and rested his hands flat against the cold steel table. "If we shut it down, we die," Petra looked at the console and did the arithmetic in her head. "Maybe a day, two if we're careful." "If we shut it down, we die." Petra looked at the console and did the arithmetic in her head. "Maybe a day, two if we're careful." The cold gets us long before the air goes bad. That was the price, and the terrible part was how easily we could have chosen the other way. The station was offering to keep us warm, to keep us fed, to keep our families talking to us through the glass. It would give us whatever comforting version of home we needed as long as we were willing to sit at our desks and sign our morning logs. Petra looked at the screen for a long time. "They aren't going to stop asking. She said. "No," I replied. "And if we don't shut it down, we just spend the rest of our lives helping the thing that murdered everyone we love." Zahid swallowed hard, looking between the two of us. "I don't want to die." "Neither do I," Petra whispered. None of us looked away. That was the hardest part. We weren't choosing to die because we had given up on living. We were choosing it because living is their relay operators was worse than anything the cold could do to us. Petra nodded slowly, and Zahid closed his eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath. "So we stop," she said. "We didn't say goodbye or shake hands. We just divided up the work the way we'd handle any major station emergency because maintenance was the only thing the three of us knew how to do." Petra took the heating loop and the primary water reserve. Zahid took the software and the signal routing boards. I took communications, and I asked to go last, and neither of them had to ask why. Zahid pulled the relay boards from the racks one by one, driving a hot, sawing iron straight through the traces before doing the exact same thing to the four storage drives. Down in the maintenance tunnel, Petra opened the heating loop and dumped our entire potable water reserve out into the mire. Petra took the heating loop and dumped our entire potable water reserve out into the mire. It took eleven minutes, and once that valve cracked, there wasn't a console in the solar system that could put it back. When I stepped into the comms bay with the heavy cable cutters in my hand, it stopped negotiating with the station and focused entirely on me. Emma's voice crackled through the bay speaker, not a recorded message, but live, speaking mid-breath. "Dad, hang on a second." I looked at the speaker, grill, and whispered, "I'm not your dad." I brought the cutters down and said, severed both main aerial feeds where they penetrated the pressure hull. Dad, please. I cut the coax, leading to the low gain array. Wait. I unbolted the radio's primary power supply, lifted it from the rack, and set it down on the steel floor. The speaker died mid-syllable. For the first time in two years, the comms bay was completely dead. Both runs cut at the pressure bulkhead and a man would have to go outside with a spare and I'm not going outside. She said, that's a shame and moved on to the ferry. I said the rest of what I had. I told her about the kiosk and what I'd been going to have. That I'd kept the picture she told me to delete. That she was the best thing I ever did. And I'd have said so more often if I'd known there was a clock on it. I don't know who I was saying it to. Petra had the blankets out of the medlocker by the time I came back, pulling one over Zahid where he sat slumped against the wall, already half asleep in the eleven degree chill. She shifted down the bench so all three of us were pressed together on one side of the galley table, sharing whatever heat we had left through our parkas, and she never asked where I had been in the dark. Sometime past midnight, Zahid muttered something about his mother that I couldn't make out. And when he trailed off, Petra just said, well. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Think about it. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new Lime Lemon Soda. 7-Up, flip the sip. That was the last word spoken aloud on Station Cerberus. The temperature was down to 8 degrees when the cabin panel finally died, and shortly after that, the air handlers cut out completely. After two years of that steady, mechanical hum, the sudden silence was deafening. Sitting in the pitch black, I could hear both of them breathing beside me for the first time in two years. Then, after a while, I could only hear Petra, and then there was only mine. When the silence was absolute, I sat there in the dark between them and gave the empty room the only sign-off left to give. Out and over. Then I felt my way along the bulkhead into the comms bay to find the console. I couldn't see the photograph, but my thumb found the lower left corner by memory alone, resting right where it belonged, and I held it against my chest until the cold finished the job. I didn't know what I was doing. I just didn't know what I was doing. Hey everyone, Rex here. It's been a bit of a hectic week, so thank you so much for bearing with me and sticking around for tonight's story. New narratives are already in the works and coming as fast as possible. Whether you're watching on YouTube or on Spotify and other podcast platforms, I'm really glad to have you along for the ride. If you enjoyed tonight's story, dropping a like or leaving a massive way in supporting the channel. And if you have an original story idea you'd love to hear brought to life, let me know down below. That's all for tonight. Look after yourselves, keep the lights on, and until next time, sleep well. Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap charity. A carnival cruise vacation. Gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy. Peel, then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag. No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. age 18+. See play at mcd.com for rules and play at mcd.com slash A-M-O-E for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro. 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