Recovered Footage: The Incident at An Abandoned Station

Renn found the signal. Six days later, I made a choice I can't take back, neither can you after I tell you what it was. Around 9 in the evening, ship time, in a sector so empty the charts didn't even name it. We'd been out there three weeks on a contract lead that went cold two weeks ago and Renn was doing what he always did when there was nothing to find. Scanning anyway, headset half on, fingers working the dials, leaning into the console with his eyes closed like he could hear things the equipment couldn't. Low frequency, continuous, no pattern, no code, just the steady noise of something running a long way off and pulling real power in a place where nothing should be pulling anything. He tapped the screen and leaned back so I could see. My name is Kate, I run salvage out of a company ship that belongs to someone I've never met. The bunks are narrow and the padding has gone flat in the shape of whoever slept there before me. The water runs lukewarm for 90 seconds if you're lucky. The air tastes like the inside of a vent because that's exactly what it is. You don't complain. The work is there and the pay is steady and those two things together are not something you walk away from. The company had our last logged coordinates and a rough timeline. Nobody was sending a search party, but they'd notice eventually. There were three of us on that ship, me, Ren, Croft. Croft kept the books, kept the ship running, kept me honest when I needed it. He checked things twice, said what he meant, never wasted a word on anything that wasn't standing right in front of him. I trusted him completely and I need you to know that before I tell you the rest of this. Ren was different, restless. He'd scanned dead sectors for hours because he liked having the instruments on, liked the feeling of searching even when there was nothing at the end of it. Most of what he turned up was scrap metal and dead relay stations drifting with their panels torn open, junk that barely covered fuel. But now and then he'd find something worth stopping for and that was enough to keep him at it. This time he'd found something. The readout was clear. Active life support, full power cycling, not a ship, a fixed structure running at full capacity in a region with nothing charted for several light hours in any direction. No registration, no ownership flag, no claim. And salvage, that means it belongs to whoever shows up first. We adjusted course, four hours to close the distance and nobody slept for any of it. Ren stayed at the scanner. Croft ran checks on the docking array. I sat in the pilot's seat and watched nothing through the viewport for three and a half hours, just black, complete dead space. In the lights, all of them on, lit from the inside, not emergency strips, warm, golden light. The glow you'd see through a restaurant window back on earth, nobody tries to make a station look inviting. An observation deck near the top was throwing so much of it that it cast a faint haze into the space around it. Below that, the docking bay, fully illuminated, guide lights tracking, landing markers, filling and slow rows, like they had been doing it for years, like they would keep doing it whether anyone showed up or not. It was massive, curved hall, clean lines, not plated like a station, not welded like a freighter, smooth, seamless. Someone had spent a lot of money building this thing. You could tell because nothing on it looked like it was trying. Ren leaned forward in his seat. That's not a research station. No, it wasn't. The name sat on the hull in small lettering along the forward docking array, understated, expensive, the liminal. None of us had heard of it. I brought us in slow, hailed twice on the open channel, nothing came back. Then the docking bay doors opened on their own. No request, no clearance code, they parted. The guide lights shifted to bring us in. The bay waited, white floors, pressurized. The ceiling was high enough that our ship sat in the middle of it looking like something someone forgot on the floor. Croft looked at me. I looked at Ren. Ren was already out of his harness. I set us down. The seal locked. Pressure came through with a soft, clean hiss that sounded nothing like our own airlock. Even like anything on our ship at all, we stepped through. The air stopped me mid-step, warm on my face and arms after months of the ship's flat recycled nothing, something sweet underneath it, soil, leaves, real growing things somewhere close. I stood in that corridor and just breathed. The light was wrong for a station, warm gold, no visible source coming from everywhere at once. It landed on our hands, on the walls, on the floor. Ren looked up at it. Croft didn't move. Welcome to the liminal. We've been expecting you. Your rooms have been prepared. Bar end of the corridor, a figure, tall still standing there like it had been standing there all day and would keep standing there all night. White shirt, dark jacket, creased so sharp down the sleeves you could cut paper on it. As folded at the waist, robot, you could tell by the face. The proportions were fine and the skin had texture and pores, but the smile showed up about half a second after it should have, and the eyes tracked too smooth, too even, like a camera following movement on a rail. It looked at all three of us the same way, the same speed, the same angle. Ungrinned at me in Croft, he grinned the way he grins when he's about to do something stupid and knows it. "Leave the way," he said. So it did. The corridor opened into an atrium, sealing three stories up. Real trees growing out of planters built into the floor with trunks I couldn't have wrapped my arms around. Bark, leaves, dark, damp soil at the base. I could smell it from across the room, that real earth smell. I hadn't been near anything growing in months. Water running along one wall, quiet, steady. The sound of it reaching us from every direction at once. The floor changed under our boots from metal grating to something smooth and cool. Above us the sealing panels looked so much like open sky. I forgot for a second that I was standing inside a structure floating in deep space. Through a glass wall on the left, restaurant, long tables, dark wood, white cloth, candles burning on every one of them with the flames dead still in air that wasn't moving. Every seat empty. You could see the grain on the table-tops from where we stood, not a sound from inside. The robot called me Mr. Alderan. I said that wasn't my name. Of course, my apologies. Thirty seconds later, Mr. Alderan again. Ren nearly choked. It showed us to the rooms. The bed in mine was wider than my bunk was long. Sheets cool and heavy against the hand in a way cheap fabric never is. Pillows that gave when I pressed them and came back slow. Half the far wall was a window looking straight into open space and from the bed all you could see was stars and black and the faint curve of the hull catching light from below. Floor warm under my boots. I went into the bathroom and there was actual water pressure. Hot. Heavy. Steam filling the room in under a minute. I stood in there way too long. Months since I'd felt hot water on my shoulders without it cutting out after a count of 90. Left was down the hall, found him ten minutes later sitting on the edge of his bed, just sitting there, not talking. Running his hand back and forth across the sheets like he couldn't believe what they were made of. Ren's voice from the corridor. Why did everyone leave? This place is paradise. I didn't answer him. I didn't have anything to say. Last night we stayed in the standard rooms. Second night Ren found the suites, upper level, each door opened into a different world. Ren went straight for the jungle suite and didn't look back, living walls, real vines across the ceiling and down into the corners. The second you stepped in, the humidity wrapped around you, warm and damp on the skin. Water running somewhere behind the leaves that you could hear but couldn't find no matter where you looked. Left coming through the canopy above the bed, green and broken. At the end of the east wing, the ocean floor sweet, heavy door, walls of dark glass with a simulated ocean behind them, slow shapes at the edges, things drifting. The glass was cold when I touched it. The room was empty. dead silent and the pressure in there pushed against your chest. Croft walked in, stood for about 15 seconds, walked out. Never went back. Canyon sweet. Sandstone walls, warm amber light, a window showing a sunset that would not end. Arctic sweet. White on white, an aurora running slow across the ceiling, warm inside, despite what it looked like. Then the void sweet. That one got me. Black walls, black floor, one viewport taking up the entire far wall, open space, nothing between the bed and the stars, no frame, no edge, just the void. I slept there two nights running and both mornings woke up not knowing where the room stopped and the window started. By night three we were switching rooms like a game, comparing, arguing. It kept going back to the canyon sweet and wouldn't admit it. We ate in the restaurant every evening, the robots brought out whatever the rotation was, some menu cycle they'd been running long before we arrived and would keep running long after. Meat I couldn't name, cooked in ways I'd never seen, hot when it reached the table. Bread that cracked when you pulled it apart, soft inside, the smell of it enough to fill the whole room. It became from a seller that shouldn't have been good anymore. We sat with the candles and the cloth and the stars through the glass wall and we ate like we'd never eaten. We hadn't, not like that, between ourselves quietly away from the robots. How is this free? Who pays for this? What happens when someone finds out we're here? We never asked them. Everything meant admitting we didn't belong and if they worked that out they might stop letting us stay. Day 3 we found the corridor. We'd been mapping the place, guest wing, dining, observation deck, spa level, service corridors the robots moved through. We'd covered most of it, but this one was different, wider. The flooring changed underfoot, same warm gold light as the rest of the station, but thinner in here somehow. Less of it, ten steps in, one of the robots at the far end. It had not been there a second before, it just was, standing in front of a door that was nothing like the rest of this place. Heavy, industrial, metal bolted into the frame. Behind that robot, behind that door, was something that did not match the marble floors and the candles and the warm gold light. I'm afraid that section is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Perhaps I can interest you in the spa? The smile. Late. Croft cracked a joke, we turned around, let it go. I should have pushed harder, I didn't. There was music too, soft, coming from the walls or the ceiling or both. I didn't register it as a loop until day 3. By then I'd stopped registering it at all. Every morning after that I noticed things, a robot at the observation deck, same spot, same time, hands at its sides, feet together, facing the glass, two hours, no movement. Ren asked at once what it was doing. It turned to him and smiled that late smile, enjoying the view as always. The morning announcement, same voice, same schedule, atmospheric conditions on the observation deck, spa appointments, dinner at 7, every single day. It had been running this announcement for years before we got here, for empty rooms, for nobody. I pulled up the spa terminal one afternoon, full ledger, every appointment slot booked solid through the end of the week, names I'd never seen, people who were not on this station. The restaurant tables got reset every night. Chairs pushed in, cloth flat, candles swapped out. But one chair at the far table was always pulled out when we came down. Every morning, same chair. I watched a robot tuck it in one evening. Next morning it was out. I told myself it was a glitch, a motor thing, calibration. We'd stopped setting alarms, stopped checking in with the company, stopped talking about the job that brought us here. The salvage contract, the fuel budget, the timeline, gone. The job had become a vacation. Ren was gone on the fifth morning. I woke up in the void suite with the stars where the ceiling should be. Lay there a while, no alarm, no schedule. The viewport filled the far wall and passed it was black and the slow drift of light from stars I couldn't name. It's warm, air warm. That faint music still bleeding through the walls on the loop I'd stopped hearing days ago. I went to find him. His door was open. The bed was made, but not the way the robots did it after someone slept in it. They tucked tighter, folded the corners under. Ran their palms flat across the surface until there wasn't a crease left. This bed looked the way it had the day we arrived, untouched, pillow smooth. His jacket was draped on the chair the same way he'd left it the night before, and when I touched the collar it was cold. His boots were gone. I stood in that doorway and looked at the room, window, space, sheets flat and smooth. The air carrying the same faint sweetness from the vents that I'd stopped noticing days ago. The rooms smelled like nothing. Croft was in the restaurant eating breakfast alone. One of the robots had set a coffee in front of him without being asked. White cup, white saucer, steam rising from it. Candles lit on the tables around him, every seat empty. He looked up. Have you seen Ran? He hadn't. We searched the whole station, every section we could get into which we thought at the time was all of it. The restaurant and to end passed the tables in the bar and through the service entrance at the back. The spa level warmed tile under our feet. Treatment room standing open. Ready. Smelling faintly of eucalyptus, the observation deck, floor to ceiling glass, the cold light from the stars hitting everything in the room. Antwing, room by room, door by door, each one empty and made in silent, service corridors the robots used narrower, cooler, the lighting flat and even, the atrium, the trees and the dark soil, the water running along the wall. Nothing. We asked the robots, everyone we passed, consistent, every answer in the same tone delivered with that half second smile. I'm afraid I haven't seen your colleague, perhaps he's enjoying the facilities. I believe your companion may have retired early. Shall I prepare a table for two this evening? Calm. Helpful. Redirect. And when the search brought us close to certain parts of the station, the robots were already there, standing in doorways, not blocking, just present, hands folded, posture straight, smile already in place. We went through every corridor twice. The second time through the East Service corridor we came out facing the same door, different route, same result. We turned around, checked the suites, jungle still warm and damp behind its door, canyons still glowing amber. We checked the docking bay where the ship sat cold and dark and small on the white floor right where I'd left it, spa again, gym. When was it anywhere? The station didn't care, the candles in the restaurant burned, the announcement played on schedule, atmospheric conditions, spa appointments, dinner at seven. One of us was gone and nothing about this place had changed. Candles lit, tables set, cloth pressed, loop cycling. Like Ren had never set foot on this station. I stopped a robot in the corridor outside the spa, got close, close enough that it couldn't step past me. I could see the pores on its face, the texture at the jawline, the smooth tracking motion of its eyes. They hadn't blinked once. Is our colleague in the maintenance section? Smile. Delay. That section is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. I'd be happy to help you with anything else. That's not what I asked. I understand your concern. Might I suggest the observation deck? The conditions are particularly pleasant this evening. It would stand there and give me that answer until I stopped asking. I knew that. The face wasn't going to change. Croft pulled me back. We sat in the restaurant with coffee that had gone cold and said almost nothing. Through the glass, the tables stretched away from us. Every candle burning, every cloth white. The chair at the far table pulled out again. Croft said after a while, he might have gone back to the ship, might be sleeping in his bunk. He wasn't. [BLANK_AUDIO] checked. We both knew. That evening I walked to the end of the hall and stood where the corridor began. The warm gold light from the station reached in, but it thinned out the deeper the corridor went, barely cutting the dark. The door at the end, heavy, metal, bolted into the frame. It was the only thing on this station that didn't match. Everything behind me was marble and candlelight and warm air and music so soft you forgot it was there. That door was none of those things. The robots did not want us near it. Ren had been gone 12 hours. No note, no message on the comms. No indication he'd left by choice or been taken or found a part of the station we didn't know about. I looked at the door. I knew how to open it. The craft was asleep. I didn't wake him, middle of the night, station time. I went alone. The corridors were dim. The gold light pulled down to a low amber glow along the baseboards and ceiling edges. The music had dropped to almost nothing. Still there if you listened for it. I'd stopped listening for it days ago. The robots were still out there, but fewer now. Slower. The ones I passed didn't speak. They turned to their heads as I went by. Tracked me with those eyes, turned back. I kept walking. The door. I know how locks work. That's the job. 11 minutes. The lock panel was behind a service plate bolted to the right of the frame. I popped it with a flat tool for my belt. Wiring behind it was clean, untouched, standard commercial grade, high end, but nothing I hadn't worked through before. Found the access bus, pulled the diagnostic leads, ran through the override one step at a time until the system cleared and the bolts drew back. The sound went through the floor. Deep, heavy, metal pulling against metal inside the frame. The door opened. The shift was immediate. Warm gold light stopped at the threshold. One step passed it. The marble stopped. Metal grating under my boots. The temperature dropped. I felt the cold through my soles. The scented air from the resort side was gone. What replaced it was flat and neutral and processed. Filtered systems. Not the clean of the atrium with its soil and leaves. Mechanical clean. The lighting was white and even, and it did nothing for the metal walls it landed on. Machines. I could hear actual machines. Not the quiet background systems of the resort. Mechanical cycling. Pumps pulling. Ventilation pushing air through exposed ducts I could see running along the ceiling. A deep steady draw of power coming from somewhere below, pushing through the walls and floor. I put my hand against the wall and felt it vibrating. This whole side of the station was running, working, keeping something going. The corridor went straight. No curves, no windows, metal and white light and grating under foot and the sound of it all getting louder the deeper I walked. My footsteps rang off the grating and bounced back. On the resort side my boots had been silent on the marble. In here I could hear every step I took. Then the corridor opened up. I stopped. The hall was enormous, sealing three times higher than anything on the resort side. Industrial framework visible above, support beams, conduit, ventilation running the full length of the room. The space stretched out in rows, long rows, dozens of them running away from me toward a far wall I could barely make out. And in each row, spaced evenly, pods. It wasn't what I expected. It wasn't dark in there. The kind of room that was built to look exactly like what it was. White, smooth-sided, sealed. Each one roughly the size of the bed I'd been sleeping in upstairs. A small status panel on the front of each one. Numbers and indicators I didn't recognize. Green lights, steady. The sound of life support filled the room. Air going in. Air coming out. Hundreds of times over. I walked to the nearest pod and looked through the clear panel set into the top. A woman. Older. Eyes closed. Color in the face. Skin maintained. No sign of deterioration. Her chest was rising and falling so slowly I had to watch for a few seconds to be sure it was happening. She wasn't sleeping. Sleeping people shift. They move their hands. Their eyes track behind the lids. This woman was still completely still. Every part of her in the exact position she'd been put in. Placed. I moved down the row. A man. Younger. Still. Breathing slow. Face blank. Green indicators on the panel. Row after row after row. Hundreds of pods. Some held people who looked old. Some younger than I expected. Men and women. Still maintained. Breathing that measured breath. Whatever this was, it wasn't sleep. They were alive. Every one of them. Not one of them moved. Off the main hall. A smaller door. I pushed through into a room packed with monitoring equipment. Screens running along every wall. Readouts tracking pods and life support and power draw and system status. Banks of data scrolling. Green across the board. Operational. The room was warm from the equipment. The air smelled like hot dust and running circuits. The primary screen showed a manifest. Names. Pod numbers. Dates. Entry dates. Not stasis dates. Not intake. Entry dates. Like checking into a hotel. I scrolled. Most names meant nothing. Then one did. A name from the news about two years back. Reported dead. Evacuation incident aboard a private station. All souls lost. That story had been everywhere for a week. Then gone. Kept scrolling. Another name. This one I knew differently. A face from financial feeds. The company behind a collapsed pension fund that cost thousands of people everything they had. Reported dead 14 months ago. More names. Some familiar. Most not. Entry dates and pod numbers and the same status indicator next to every single one of them. Active. Then I found it. Whitmore. Orson. Pod 31. Entry date. September 21-28. Status. Active. I stood in front of that screen. Then I walked back into the hall. Down the rows. Counting. The pods on either side glowing faint green. Life support cycling. Air moving. 31. It looked the same as every other pod in the room. White, sealed. Green indicators steady. I opened it. His fingers moved first. A twitch against the lining of the pod. Small, involuntary like something being tested from the inside. Then his hands opened and closed. His jaw shifted. The seal had broken with a hiss that carried across the whole hall and now the pod was cycling down around him. The steady rhythm of maintained life giving way to something rougher and less even. His own body taking over. I knew who he was before his eyes opened. The face was thinner than I'd seen on screens and the jaw was sharper and the skin had gone pale from whatever the pod had been doing to keep him going for a year and a half. But it was him. Magazine covers. News feeds. The company profiles they ran for weeks after they reported him dead. His eyes opened. He looked at the ceiling. Then at me. Neither of us said anything. The life support systems cycled around us. Green lights steady on every pod in the room. What did you do? Not a question. He tried to sit up and his arms shook and he got halfway before they gave out. I watched him get his hands under himself and push and fail and push again until he was upright on the edge of the pod with his legs hanging over the side. His feet didn't reach the floor. He turned his hands over and looked at them. The skin had gone loose. He swung his legs over the side and tried to stand. Got an inch off the pod and sat back down hard. Looked at his legs like they'd done something to him. How long? 18 months, I said. He closed his eyes. The air moved through the room the way it had been moving for years. Pumps, cycling, vents pulling. You pulled me out. Yes, you can't put me back. He looked at me. Once the connection breaks, it breaks. You get one transfer. He was looking at the floor. His voice was flat and dry. The voice of a throat that hadn't been used in 18 months. I had a life in there. Do you understand that? I didn't. I had a home. I had I had people who knew me. had years. He stopped. His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the pod. I had breakfast this morning. I was sitting at a table in a house I'd lived in for years, and I was drinking coffee, and there was sun coming through a window, and then I was here, looking at you. The resort music bled through the floor, faint. What more looked up at the ceiling when he heard it? "Is the station still running?" "All of it," I said, the whole resort side. He sat there for a long time after that. I let him. There was nowhere for either of us to go. He talked when he was ready. The pods weren't stasis. They weren't sleep. The body stays maintained, fed, hydrated. Muscles worked by the system on a schedule, so nothing wastes away. But the person inside is gone. Consciousness fully transferred to a simulation running on systems built into the station's lower levels. In rooms I hadn't found yet, drawing processing power I couldn't have guessed at. What they'd built was a world. You could pick up a glass and feel the weight of it in your hand. You could feel rain on your skin, and the ground under your feet had texture and temperature. And when you woke up in it, there was no moment of adjustment, no seam, no loading screen. It was simply your life. The difference, he said, is that there's no death parameter, no end point. The body in the pod keeps going as long as the station keeps running. The station runs on a self-sustaining reactor. "Do the math." I asked about the families. He didn't hesitate. They were informed. The company handled it. Death certificates, settlements. Enough money that they'd have no reason to ask questions. They've had time to move on. He said it the way you'd talk about a contract, a line item that got handled. His wife, his children. Told their father was dead and given enough money to believe it. Same process for every guest on that manifest, every pod in this room, every family that got a phone call and a check and a lie. "That's what you paid for," I said, to abandon everyone. His eyes changed, harder. They paid to stop existing in a version of reality that was designed to end them. The family piece was handled. He paused. It was not ideal. But the alternative was mortality. I stood there. The green lights of the pods stretched away in rows. The sound of air moving through hundreds of sealed units. I didn't have anything to say to that. "You think this is about money," he said. Isn't it? In the way that matters. Yes, it costs what it costs. But the thing they bought is not luxury. The thing they bought is that they don't die. The simulation they built was meant to be indistinguishable from base reality. That was the specification. The engineers had built a copy of reality so precise that you couldn't tell the difference from the inside and they'd done it. The problem was what they found while doing it. "When you build something that accurate," he said. "You find the seams in the thing you're copying. You see the architecture, the parameters, the things that were set and could have been set differently." He looked at me. "Death is a parameter. It was set. It didn't have to be. The version of reality you live in was designed to end you. Hours was designed not to." I told him I didn't believe him. I didn't ask you to, but once you see it, you can't unsee it. And you've already seen the pods. You've read the manifest. You know what kind of people are in this room. I did. I'd scrolled through the names, the evacuation stories, the collapsed pension funds, the regulatory scandals that wiped out thousands of ordinary people and left the people responsible richer than they were before. All of them in here now, in the simulation, living lives that would never end and never require them to answer for any of it. "Those people destroyed lives," I said. "Yes." And they get to live forever. "Yes." He said it without flinching. "I looked down the rows, the pods in their lines, green indicators reading the same thing on every panel." Hundreds of people who had paid enough money to leave the world behind and never come back. Their families told they were dead, the record sealed, the station running out here in a part of space nobody had charted and powered by a reactor that would never stop. And near the back, a full row of empty pods. I'd seen them on the way in, prepped, ready, status panels dark. "There's room," Whitmore said. "He'd seen me looking." The system will take anyone, the pods are built, the capacity was always more than the demand. I didn't answer him. He sat on the edge of his broken pod, bare feet above the grating, 18 months and a fortune and a family left behind, and I'd ended it with a flat tool from my belt. Above us, the resort kept running. The robots walked their routes, the candles in the restaurant burned for tables where nobody would sit down. I left him there and went back through the door. The smell of coffee hit me before I saw him. Real coffee. Croft was in the restaurant. He was sitting at one of the window tables with a cup in front of him that a robot had brought without being asked. The candles were lit, all of them. Every table in the room sat and waiting. The music played. The observation windows showed the same black sky, the same stars. Croft sat there looking at his cup, not drinking. He looked up when I came in. I sat down across from him and the chair was warm. Everything on this side of the station was warm. I told him everything. Croft listened to all of it without interrupting. His coffee went cold. I could smell the wax from the candles on the table. A robot came by once, paused beside the table, and moved on when neither of us looked at it. When I finished, Croft didn't say anything for a while. "We need to leave," he said. "I put my hands flat on the table. They were still cold." Cade, the signal we followed. It can be traced. Someone else picks it up and they find us here with opened pods and a man walking around who the rest of the world thinks is dead. He leaned forward. His hands were flat on the tablecloth. We don't know the legal exposure. We don't even know what laws apply out here. And Ren? Ren made his choice. Whatever he did, wherever he went, that was his. We can't help him now, but we can still leave. He was right. "What if he's right?" I said. Croft said his jaw. "We go back to what?" I said. I scraped salvage runs together for 30 more years and then I die. That's the design. He showed me the architecture, the parameters. It's all built to end. You don't know that. You know what a man in a pod told you. A man you woke up from something he paid his whole life to get into. He's lost everything. He'll say whatever keeps him from falling apart. I saw the manifest, Croft. I saw the names. I saw the entry dates and the pods and the people inside them. That part isn't a story someone told me. I walked through it. Croft looked at me across the table. Cade, you have a kid. I didn't answer. My throat tightened. I could hear the clink of something in the kitchen. Croft's breathing across the table. He was waiting for me to say something about Theo, to say his name, to say anything that meant I was coming back. I didn't. Croft stood up. The chair scraped on the floor. He looked at me for a moment. Then he walked out of the restaurant. I heard his boots on the marble. The restaurant was quiet after that. The candles still burned. The wax had run down the sides and pooled on the tablecloth. A robot appeared beside my table. Can I get you anything else, sir? I looked at the empty chair where Croft had been sitting. The wax was still warm. I pushed the chair back and stood up. The robot stepped aside. I walked out of the restaurant and through the atrium and passed the observation deck. The air still smelled clean. That same soil and water smell from the first day. The candles at the tables still burned. For no one. The corridor to the maintenance door was quiet. A robot followed me at a distance. Ten paces back. Hands folded. It had been following me since the restaurant. I could hear its footsteps behind mine, slightly off-rhythm. The door was still open. I walked through. The warm air stopped. The cold hit my arms, my neck, the backs of my hands. Metal grating under my boots again, white light, the smell changed, resort air gone, clean processed nothing in its place. The hall stretched out in front of me, green lights and rows, status panels steady, all those people in there, living whatever lives the system had built for them. Not one of them knew I was here. I didn't look for Ren's pod, it didn't matter which one. The robot came through the door behind me. It walked ahead without being told, down the row to an empty pod near the back. It opened the panel, ran its hands across the controls, the pod lit up, status indicators cycling from dark to green, a preparation sequence. The lining inside was clean and white and waiting. I stood at the edge and looked in. The air from inside the pod was warm and had no smell. The green light pulsed once, slow and held steady. I got in, the lining pressed against my back, my shoulders, the base of my skull. It was warm, the temperature rose around me, steady even. The robot's face appeared above me, the smile arrived, late the way it always did. Just well sir, the pod sealed, a soft click, then a hiss, pressure building against my chest, my ribs, even, and slow. The white light above my face dimmed to nothing. My hands went heavy at my sides. Last things I heard from the real world, the mechanical cycling of life support. My own breathing, slowing down, then quiet. I've been in here a long time now, long enough that the details of that week finally settled into this order. Long enough that the man I was when I stepped through that airlock feels far away. Theo is going to grow up, get old, stop being Theo. In here, he doesn't. In light, cereal on a Saturday morning, I'll remember him like that forever. Literally. My ex-wife has the real him, but the real him won't stay seven. There is plenty of room in here, but most likely, you can't afford it. Rex here. Thank you for listening. The fact that you stuck around till the end means a lot. I'm dropping the next one in a couple of days as usual, so make sure to follow. I'll see you in the next one. Good night.