The Final Mayday of Orbital Station

The first time I heard the call, I thought it was a glitch. I was a relay tech, my whole job was sitting on a station at the far end of nowhere listening to dead air for months at a time. Dead air doesn't talk back. This one did, a distress signal close enough to touch, from a stretch of space where there was nothing for a billion miles. We had every reason to ignore it. We didn't. And everything that went wrong after, every piece of it, started the second we decided to help. Let me take you back to before. The last morning, my daughter was standing on the kitchen chair she wasn't allowed to stand on, telling me a long story about a fish she'd seen in a book. And I wasn't really listening because I was watching the clock over the stove and doing the math on the shuttle window and that's the part I keep going back over, how I spent her last morning at home running numbers instead of listening to her talk about the fish. Hannah made the eggs the way she always made them when I was leaving, which was a little better than usual. I told Nora I'd be home before her birthday, and that one was easy to promise because it was true. The rotation was 8 months and her birthday was 9 months out. But I wasn't listening to her. So there was no way for it to be a lie. And she made me say it twice anyway, and then she made me do the handshake we had, the long one with the part at the end, and then she gave me the photo. It was a printed one, a real piece of paper, because she'd gotten into printing them at her grandmother's house and she liked that they were things you could actually hold. The one she picked was her and the dog, both of them looking off at something to the side so that neither of them was facing the other. Hannah was facing the camera, and she told me to keep it somewhere I'd see it, and not in a drawer, and I told her I would, and I meant it. Hannah walked me to the door and we did the short version of goodbye, the one you do once you've done it enough times that the long version only makes it worse. A hand on the side of my face and a few words, and that was all. She told me to call when I got there. She didn't say the careful things, the be safe things, because we'd both quit saying those years before. Not because they'd stopped being true, but because saying them out loud had started to seem like a jinx. This was supposed to be the last one. After this, there was a desk waiting for me, a ground job at the relay center outside the city, regular hours and a real chair and the same drive every morning. And people kept congratulating me about it like it was a step up. And I kept thanking them. The truth was plainer than that. I was 44 and my body didn't take the long tours the way it had, and somebody 15 years younger could sit the same desk out there for less money, and so they were walking me toward the ground chair nice and slow and I was letting them and the chair was fine. I kept telling myself the chair was fine. The ride out took the better part of two days and you spend most of that not looking out the window because once earth goes small there's nothing to look at. You can't see it, it's only the same black sitting in every direction and the little windows don't help with that. They just remind you it's there. I recorded a message for Nora somewhere in the second day, a good night thing, told her I'd made it most of the way, and then I waited. Because out that far the messages don't move quick, they take their hours going and their hours coming back, so you say something and then you sit half a day to find out if it ever landed. After a while you stop checking for the reply. Because checking and finding nothing there was worse than just leaving it alone. Hers came back the next morning while I was asleep, 11 seconds of her holding the dog up to the lens and telling me to look, look, he's waving, working the dog's paw with her hand, and I played it twice and then I put it away. The station itself wasn't much. It was a row of modules bolted together with the reactor at one end and the antenna array at the other. parked off the side of the thing we'd come to watch, and from outside it looked like a length of pipe somebody had left, floating in the dark. Inside, it was close and warm, and there was a low sound off the air system the whole time, day and night, that you stopped hearing after the first day and only caught again when it changed pitch. There were four of us in it, and once you've been somewhere like that long enough, Four people is either not nearly enough or far too many, depending on the day. Vargas ran the station. She'd been out longer than any of us, and she had a flat, certain way of talking, like she'd already had the whole conversation in her head and was just reading you the end of it. Reyes was the young one, sat the comms desk, talked a lot and laughed at his own jokes, and was better at the work than all the talking made him look. Cho kept the place breathing, the air and the water and the power, and he didn't say much, and when he did, it was usually the one thing nobody wanted to hear, said Flat, and then he'd go back to whatever he'd been doing. The job was simple. We sent signals into the thing we were parked next to, a small dead star that had fallen in on itself until it was almost nothing and spun, and we measured what came back. That was all of it. The strange part, the part I never once got easy with, was that what came back, came back early. You'd send a pulse in and the return would already be sitting on the board before you'd finished sending it, by a sliver, by less than a second, and Vargas would write it down and nobody would say anything about it. Because there was a clean explanation that the science people back home were happy with, and out there, watching it land on the screen, the clean explanation didn't do much for you. Whatever we sent in came back to us. It just came back before we sent it. You learn to read that off a screen and log it and not think about it too hard, the same as you stop hearing the air after a day. And the thing we were watching never did anything. People hear dead star and they picture something violent and it wasn't that at all. It just sat there, this dense little point that pulled hard enough to show on the instruments and that we never felt at all, and most days you forgot it was out there. Mostly, nothing happened. That was the job. You went out, you ran the experiment, you watched the nothing, and then you went home. And out of all the tours I'd pulled, this one was meant to be the last and the easiest, the quiet one to finish on. It was Reyes who caught it, about a week in. There was a channel we didn't use, an old emergency band that everyone keeps an ear on and nobody ever hears anything across. And one night, there was something on it, faint, down under the noise, repeating. He cleaned it up as much as it would clean and played it for us the next morning, and it was a distress call. An automated loop, a station calling for help, the same short message going around and around. The piece of the header that should have told us who it belonged to had come through broken, just noise where the name should be, so we had no idea where it was from, and Vargas said it was probably an old one, some dead station still running its loop years after the crew was gone. And that made sense, and we logged it. Two things stayed with me that I didn't say out loud. The first was the timestamp on it, which was off from ours, running a few hours ahead, And I told myself it was a clock somewhere set wrong, because that happens all the time. Clocks drift and nobody bothers to fix them. And that was the easy answer, so I took it. The second was the voice. Down under the static, there was a man's voice, and one piece of it came through clearer than the rest. The same line every time the loop came back around, him saying it wasn't the dark he was scared of. it was that she'd weighed up for him. I didn't know what it meant, and I didn't know who he was. But I knew the voice from somewhere and couldn't say from where, and the hair on my arms stood up while it played, and I sat there in that warm room and let it come around one more time before I shut it off. For the first stretch, it was just the work, and the work didn't change, so the days ran together and I couldn't have told you which one I was in. We ran the experiment, we logged the returns, we ate, we slept, and the distress loop sat in the file where we'd put it and nobody thought much more about it, because it was an old recording from a dead station and there were a hundred of those drifting around out there, and not one of them had ever needed anything from us. And the place got smaller the longer you were in it. The walls didn't move, but you came to know every sound the station made and every sound the other three made, Vargas clearing her throat before she spoke, Cho's boots coming down the corridor, Reyes tapping a pen on his desk when he was working something out, and you knew them so well that anything new pulled your head up. For weeks, nothing new ever did. There was the work, and the four of us, and the dark out every port, and not much else. I kept up the messages to Nora, one most nights, small things, what I'd eaten, a story I made up about the dog coming to space with me, and I'd record one. and play it back before I sent it, and I'd hate it. My own voice came out of the speaker sounding nothing like the voice I heard in my head, flatter and slower and older, so half the time I'd delete the recording and send a few lines of text instead, because the text didn't have my voice in it. Hannah told me once that Nora played the audio over and over and didn't care how I sounded and I believed her. But I still couldn't sit and listen to myself, so I kept sending the short ones. What changed was Reyes. He couldn't leave the loop alone. He'd pull it up on his off hours and run it through the filters again and again, trying to lift the voice up out of the noise. And after a couple of weeks, he had a board going next to his station, little notes stuck up with the pieces he'd managed to make out, adding to it whenever he got a new one. He got quieter about it as the board filled up, less like a puzzle he was enjoying and more like a job he couldn't put down, and a couple of times I came onto the deck early and found him already there with his headphones on, running it back. Vargas thought it was a waste of time and said so. She figured it was a reflection, our own old traffic bouncing back off the thing we were parked next to and coming in scrambled, which the object did sometimes, and that was the reason why it was a reasonable thing to think. Cho's position was that if it was a real distress call from a real station, then it wasn't ours to sit on, and we should send it up the chain to whoever's job it was, and that was reasonable too. I didn't say much either way. I'd stand at Reyes's board longer than I needed to, reading the pieces, because the voice on it still got to me the same as the first night, and I wasn't going to be the one to say out loud that a scrambled recording sounded like a man's voice. I was going to be the one to say out loud that a scrambled recording sounded like a man's voice. By then we had enough of it to know it wasn't only a station name and a call for help. There were words in it. Reyes had pulled out fire, and breach, and a run of numbers that read like a date, and a man saying there was no time, and once those were up on the board it stopped reading like junk and started reading like a disaster that had already happened to somebody, or was going to. The header still came through broken every time, the part that should have said who it was, so we had the words and no name for who they belonged to. Around the same time I lost the photo. The one Nora gave me, her and the dog, I'd kept it clipped to the edge of my bunk shelf where I'd see it, like she told me, and one day it wasn't there. I went through my locker and under the bunk and the pockets of everything I owned and it was gone, and it bothered me more than a lost photo should because it was the one thing of hers I had out there and I'd probably never see it again. I went through my locker and under the bunk and the pockets of everything I owned and it was the one thing of hers I had out there and I'd probably never see it again. I'd promised her I'd keep it where I could see it. Then four days later it was back on the shelf, in the same spot, and I'd looked at that spot a dozen times in four days. Cho figured it had slipped down behind the shelf and worked its way back up when the station shifted, which stations do, they're always moving a little, and Reyes figured I'd dragged it into my blanket and pulled it back out without noticing, and both of those were probably right, and I clipped it back in place and tried not to think. I didn't think about the four days. The message from Hannah came about a week after that. It landed broken and out of order, which happened when the relay was having a bad day, the pieces arriving in the wrong sequence, so you had to set them back in line yourself. And the first piece I got had Nora's name in it and the word hospital and then nothing, just the cut where the next part should have been. I sat there for the length of time it took the rest of it to come through. Which was about 40 minutes, and 40 minutes is a long time to sit with half a sentence about your kid and a hospital. When the rest of it landed, it was nothing. She'd lost a tooth, a bottom one, early, and they'd taken her in because it came out crooked and bled more than it should have. And she was fine, she'd been fine the whole time, she was already showing everyone the gap. I read the whole thing twice, to be sure, and then I didn't know what to do. I didn't record anything for her that night, I'd just sent three words and turned off the light. Cho was the one who heard it at night. He came to breakfast one morning and asked, not making much of it. Because he'd woken up around three and heard it through the wall of his bunk, the man's voice going around, faint, but there, and he'd lain there listening until it stopped. Reyes went looking for her. If it was a real call, we should be able to point at it, get a direction and a distance off it, so he set the array to track the source across a few days of the loop repeating, and the number it gave back couldn't be right. It put the source at no distance at all. Zero. Right on top of us, which a signal can't be, so Reyes called it a fault and recalibrated and ran it again, and got zero again. And every single time the answer came back, it was the same thing over and over again. He had him check the array against a known source, a relay we could see on the charts, and it read that one fine, the right direction and the right distance, so the array was working. Then he turned it back on the loop and it dropped to zero. He ran it more times than I could count over the next week, recalibrating between each one, telling himself and the rest of us that it was the object throwing the numbers, because the object threw a lot of numbers. And every single time the answer came back, the call wasn't coming from somewhere out there. It was coming from where we were. We spent the next two days trying to prove the array was broken, because a broken array was something you could fix, and a signal coming from our own position was not. Reyes ran diagnostics on every part of it and found nothing. Vargas had him swap in the backup tracking unit and it gave the same zero. We pointed it at three more known sources, and it read all three, right. And then we pointed it back at the loop and it sat at zero again. And by the end of the second day, even Reyes had stopped saying the word fault, because we'd run out of things that could be at fault. It was Cho who put it together at the table on the morning of the third day, and he said it flat, like he said everything nobody wanted to hear, he'd written it out on a scrap of paper first, like he wanted to be sure of it before it left his mouth. The call was coming from our position, that part we knew. The timestamp on it ran ahead of ours, and we'd called it ours at first, but he'd checked it close and it wasn't ours, it was Day's. And the one thing the station did, the only thing, the thing they'd sent us all the way out here to do, was put signals into that dead star, and get them back before we'd finished sending them. He set the three things next to each other and let us look. The call was coming from the future. It was recorded right here, at this station, 15 days from now. The object had sent it back to us early. He didn't say anything after that. He didn't have to. It was us. In 15 days, something terrible was going to happen here, and one of us was going to record a call for help, and the object was going to take that call and hand it back to us today. We were listening to our own future. We just hadn't lived it yet. Nobody said anything for a while. The date was the worst part. 15 days from that morning. We only had pieces of the message, but the pieces were fire and breach and no time. Now there were 15 days stuck to those words. Reyes took the date down off the board and then put it right back up. And after that, none of us could stop counting down from it. I had my own piece, and I kept it to myself. The noise made it hard to tell whose voice it was, and I was the last man alive who'd ever recognize his own voice coming out of a speaker because I'd never been able to stand the sound of it. So I had that to hide behind, too. Vargas kept it simple. We had 15 days and a list of what was going to go wrong. That was more warning than anyone in trouble ever got. So we'd use it. Take the message apart, find every piece of the disaster, and stop each piece from happening. Kill the future it came from, and there'd be nothing left for the object to send back. Cho heard her out. The call already existed. We'd already heard it. It had already come back through the object, and you can't unsend something that already arrived. So if we were going to send that call in 15 days, then we were going to send it, no matter what we did first. Vargas asked him what he wanted instead. Sit and wait for it? Cho didn't have an answer. That was the trouble with Cho. He was probably right, and being right left you with nowhere to stand. Reyes just wanted the rest of the message. Every word of it. He said we couldn't stop what we couldn't see, and that made sense, he'd gone quiet about it. I kept thinking about the voice and the 15 days and my kid at home losing teeth. I let Vargas decide because deciding meant we were doing something and doing something felt better than waiting. So we started with the fire. The clearest piece was fire and breach in the relay module, the section that held the antenna gear and the transmitter. Vargas' call was to take it out of the picture. We powered the module down, sealed the bulkhead, and moved everything we could onto the backup gear at the far end of the station. Whatever was supposed to burn in there would have nothing left running to start it. It took most of a day. When we finished, the relay module was dark and shut and cold behind its door, like we'd stopped a piece of it before it could start. For the first time since Cho laid out that scrap of paper, Vargas' call was to take it out of the picture. I let myself think maybe he had it backwards. Maybe we could actually do this. Cho noticed it first two days later. It was always Cho. The core was running warm. Not by much, not enough to trip anything. But the relay module had been carrying its share of the heat the whole time we'd been out there, venting it out through its own gear. Now that the module was shut, that heat had nowhere to go but the core. He flagged it, logged it, and said we'd want to watch it. Vargas said watch it then. We did, for about a day. The number sat where it was, a little high and not climbing. And there were fifteen days turning into thirteen, and a hundred other things in front of us so we stopped watching it so close. Maybe we should have known. But there was nothing in the message about the core. The message said the relay module. We'd shut the door. We'd shut the door. We'd shut the door. We'd shut the relay module. As far as we knew, we'd won that one. The core didn't spike, it crept, just a degree or two a day. Cho would read the numbers out at breakfast, his voice perfectly deadpan, and Vargas would tell him to bleed the heat and kill the non-essential power. We were all looking the wrong way. We were staring down the relay module at the far end of the station, the place the tape said the fire would start. It sat there, cold and dark. If we had a tape of our own deaths, why didn't we just call Earth for an evac? Why didn't we just pack into the escape pod, blow the docking bolts, and leave the station behind? We tried. On the fourteenth day of the countdown, Vargas finally swallowed her pride. She sat at the main console, locked in her command codes, and drafted a priority distress packet aimed straight at the ship. She requested an immediate abort and a retrieval shuttle. We sat in the hum of the station for the eight hours it takes a signal to make the round trip. Nothing came back. She sent it again. She pushed the transmitter to its maximum safe limit, blasting the signal into the black. Two hours later, Reyes noticed a spike on the background noise monitor. The object didn't just bounce our experimental pulses back, early. Its gravity pull was so dense with time dilation that it was catching our outgoing distress calls, bending them along its event horizon and throwing them right back at our own antenna. When Reyes cleaned up the spike, it was Vargas's voice. The exact message she had just sent, time-stamped two days before she actually sent it. We weren't talking to Earth. We were just screaming into a mirror. The object was acting as a temperature sensor. It was like a temporal black hole for our radio waves. Nothing was getting out. Once we realized Earth was deaf to us, Cho went for the escape pod. He bypassed the main computer. He ran the pre-launch telemetry to chart a course away from the dead star. The nav computer crashed instantly. Cho rebooted it, fed it the coordinates for the nearest shipping lane, and ran the simulation again. The screen spit back a hard error. The object's space was warped. The station itself was built with heavy, ionized shielding to anchor us in real time. The pod didn't have that. If we launched the moment the pod crossed the threshold of the station's anchor field, it would hit the timeshare. The computer calculated the physical toll of that transit. If we launched the pod, the sheer temporal friction would tear the hull apart like wet paper. We wouldn't just die. We would be stretched across a century of empty space. The pod was a coffin. The station was the only thing keeping us in the present tense. We were completely, entirely trapped. So, we went back to the tape. Reyes was deteriorating. He practically lived at the comms board, headphones clamped over his ears, teasing words out of the static, and every new word made the picture worse. There was a part about the doors. The terrified man on the loop said the bulkheads had slammed shut. That he was locked in. That they couldn't reach each other. Vargas listened to that snippet three times. Then she gave the order to kill the emergency lockdown system. Every station has one. It's supposed to save your life. If a section depressurizes or catches fire, the blast doors drop instantly so the whole station doesn't vent into the vacuum. But the tape said the doors were the trap. So Vargas had Cho disable it. If they can't close, she said, they can't lock us in. It made twisted, perfect sense. Right up until it didn't. Then Reyes finally decoded a name. His own. The man on the loop said Reyes first. I watched Reyes hear it. I watched all the blood drain out of his face. Vargas wasn't going to let it happen. She marched him to the crew module at the absolute front of the station. The furthest point from the reactor and the relay. The safest room we had. She stripped him of his gear, took him off the comms board where he was actually useful, and locked him in by hand since the automatic doors were dead. She was trying to the tape. The rest of us stayed at our posts. Eight hours later, the core blew. The tape never mentioned the core, but we'd been dumping all that excess heat into it for a week and a half. An alarm shrieked. A thick, electrical burning smell hit the back of my throat before there was even smoke, and the board flashed red. A line had ruptured. Any other day, the lockdown system would have slammed the blast door shut, containing the fire to the reactor room. But we'd turned the doors off. The fire and pressure tore down the spine of the station. It hit the escape pod corridor first, blowing the bulkhead out into open space. The pod we couldn't even use was ripped off the hull, gone in a heartbeat. Eleven days of planning, and the pod was the first thing off the board. And Reyes was up front. In the room we thought was safe. With the blast doors dead, there was nothing to stop the firestorm from funneling straight into the crew module. We had taken all his tools. He had no board, no controls, no way to fight it. We'd locked him in a box. I heard him on the comms. He was begging, asking what was happening, and then the channel just died. Reyes first. The loop was right. We were the ones who made it come true. I was shouting his name into a dead mic. And as I did, my voice caught. It cracked, going high and thin, and terrified. I froze. I had heard myself exhausted. I had heard myself annoyed. I had heard myself sound like a flat, distant ghost on a hundred unsent voicemails to my daughter. But I had never in my life heard myself truly, utterly terrified. Until now. That's why I hadn't recognized the voice on the loop. The man begging for help. The man saying he was scared. It was me. I sank into my chair. The alarms were screaming. Vargas and Cho were fighting a losing battle to save the air scrubbers, and underneath it all, the distress loop was still playing. My own voice, echoing out of the speaker. I wasn't listening to a warning anymore. I was listening to a live broadcast. Vargas went for the pod. We both knew it was gone. But she wasn't the kind of person who would listen to a live broadcast. She wasn't the kind of person who could just sit down and wait to die. The last time I saw her, she was walking down the smoke-filled corridor toward a door that opened into absolute nothingness. Cho stayed by the breach. He shoved a patch over a rupture that was way too big, burning his hands, using his own weight to hold the station together just a little bit longer. He bought me a few extra minutes of breathable air. Then another line gave way in the dark behind me. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't behind him and he was gone, he didn't say a word. He'd have wanted it that way. Then it was just me. The air in the room was growing thin. The main power died and the emergency lights kicked on, bathing the deck in a sickly, blood-red glow. I just sat there. I'm not proud of it, and I'm not ashamed of it either. I sat in the red dark of a station that used to hold my crew, listening to my own voice playing on a loop over the comms. Reading out a disaster that had already happened. Then I stood up. Because the tape had to be made. Someone had to call for help. And the only transmitter strong enough to reach Earth was in the relay module. The room we had shut down and frozen eleven days ago to stop a fire that never caught. I walked to the bulkhead and broke the seal. The wheel was coated in frost, and I had to throw my entire body weight, into it, to crack it open. The air inside hit me like a physical blow. It was freezing. The metal rhymed with white ice. I worked by the little light on my collar. The transmitter was a dead block of metal. To wake it up, I had to cannibalize the rest of the station. I pulled the life support, the scrubbers, the emergency reserves, and dumped every last volt into that one machine. It was a suicide move. You don't push that much juice through a single rig. But I didn't need the station to live anymore. I hit the broadcast switch, I keyed the mic, and the words just poured out of my mouth. Station. Fire. Breach. No time. I wasn't reading them off a screen. I wasn't consciously trying to match the tape. They just tumbled out of me. Every time I reached for a word, it was already there on my tongue. I was speaking in perfect unison with the recording playing softly from the console. That's when the true horror of a closed loop clicked into place. There was never a timeline where we heard the warning and saved ourselves. There was only this. Me. Sitting in the freezing dark. Saying the words I had always said. So I stopped. I killed the distress channel. Opened a wide window. I turned on the broadband frequency, and I talked to my daughter. I told Nora I was coming home. I told her the tour was over, and I'd be sitting at the kitchen table before her birthday. I told her I was working on a new story about the dog, and to put her lost tooth under her pillow so I could see the gap in her smile. I told her to go to sleep, and not wait up. It was all a lie. The cold was seeping into my bones. The oxygen was failing. And I knew exactly what was about to happen to me. But it was the only piece of my life I had left to cling to. So I said it like it was gospel truth. The red lights began to flicker and die as the batteries drained. The dark creeping in wasn't new. For a second, my mind slipped, and I wondered if I had ever left that kitchen at all. If the space station and the dead star were just a nightmare, and I was about to wake up, I had to let the thought go. There was no way to follow it down. And then I gave her the only truth I had left. I told her I wasn't afraid of the dark. I was just afraid she'd wait up for me. And I sat back in the freezing black, and I waited for it to come around. When I hit that broadcast button, I thought I was sending my voice back to her, but I couldn't. I didn't want her to hear my voice millions of miles back home to Earth. I wasn't. The only antenna on the station with enough power to handle that signal was the main rig. The one pointed directly at the dead star. The Mayday. The story about the dog. Her name. Every single word of it fired straight into the object. And the object did what it has always done. What we traveled to the edge of space to watch it do. It sent the signal back early. It didn't go to Earth. It didn't go to Nora's bedroom. It waited in the static until Reyes found it, cleaned it up, and played it for us over breakfast. I had stood right behind him, drinking coffee, listening to a stranger say he was scared. Listening to the last words I would ever speak to my little girl. And I didn't know. I didn't know it was going to be the last time it ever reached home. And the worst part? The part I've had the most time to think about in the dark? It never stops. There is no beginning to this. The call just arrives. We hear it, and the sheer terror of trying to prevent it is exactly what causes the station to tear itself apart. Then, I sit in this chair. I send the message. And it bounces off the dead star and arrives all over again. If you are hearing this, somewhere out there, it's our first week on the station. And somewhere out there, it's this exact moment. And I'm sitting in the red light, begging my daughter to go to sleep. Hey. Hey, guys, Rex here. Thanks for staying till the end. And if you're new, I'm on YouTube and Spotify both. So wherever you do your listening, I'm there. Hit subscribe, leave the lights on, and I'll see you in the next one.