from katsuya terada’s rakugaking, page 0533
Mostly, May spent her time looking out of the window at her station. It was a wide window, more functional than ornate, and the fact that it begin to curve inward, following the contours of the ship, toward the top made it seem to loom if you weren’t paying attention. Her station was similarly designed, with a gunmetal grey terminal, decorated with a series of red and blue buttons. May’s job was to press the buttons at a certain interval during certain situations. The buttons controlled something elsewhere, usually the power to the airlocks, winches, cranes, things like that. What they did didn’t matter so much as pressing them at the right time.
The right time only came through a couple times a day. The earpiece hidden behind in May’s tangle of hair — she thought about cutting it, but she liked the way near-zero gravity made it look like tentacles, instead of just unkempt — would chime once, pause for five seconds, chime twice, and then a female voice would begin speaking. The voice told May which buttons required her attention and for how long. Upon confirmation from May (“Orders received and understood”), the earpiece switched over to a pre-selected soundtrack. The music varied on a day-to-day basis, ranging from classical to jazz to afrobeat and more, and ended as soon as the task was completed. It served as a timer and reward, mixed work and pleasure.
At 0600 every day, hidden speakers piped music into the living quarters. It began low, and workers often complained of dreaming about the music infiltrating their dreams. It rose over the course of the next five minutes, eventually becoming loud enough to wake any dreamer, before fading out over the course of the next two. The slow build made waking up a smoother process, a comfortable alarm instead of a shocking one.
The forty-five minutes of required exercise began at 0615. The first thirty minutes were composed of standard stretches and calisthenics. The final fifteen were job-specific. EVA-prone builders packed on the weight, techs like May focused mainly on core strength and speed, and engineers were tested with puzzles in addition to physical labor.
Breakfast was communal, scheduled for every day at 0730. Two synthetic eggs, scrambled, with one half-piece of toast and a single glass of orange juice. No meat. Lunch was at 1200 on the dot. A sandwich, a selection of three vegetables, and a carbonated drink. Dinner was at 0730, exactly twelve hours from breakfast. The barracks closed at 2300. Every worker was required to have a minimum of six hours of sleep.
The rigid schedule left no room for error and no room for personalities. May existed to perform her task, and the schedule kept her focused on that task. Everything she was ordered to do related to that task in some way. Barring the communal meals, exercises, and barracks, she spent most of her time alone, the better to remain focused on her task. It was mind-numbing, but it was what she was bred for. She worked.
And she watched. She watched space for hours at a time. She never took pictures, drew, or wrote notes to remind her of what she saw. She kept it all upstairs, for as long as it would last. Something about the vast emptiness interested her more than anything else. The infinite was the most interesting thing on the station, really.
When she got to her desk each morning, she set her satchel on the hook under her desk. The satchel held no personal effects, not even a comb. Instead, it was full of tools. Battery-operated screwdrivers, for opening sealed hatches at her station. Wire cutters, a spool of wire, and soldering irons, for fixing bad connections or replacing circuits. A mask made of hard plastic, made to slip over her head and attach to her suit, in case her station spontaneously evacuated all of its air and replaced it with vacuum. The mask would keep her safe for up to two hours with a minimum of physical damage.
May sat at her station, day after day, and pressed buttons as ordered. It was a thankless and anonymous job, but it was a purpose. She’d been bred for an enhanced attention span, so it didn’t bother her too much. A simple mnemonic, generally muttered under her breath, activated the part of her brain that focused with laser-like precision on working. It kept her calm in times of duress, interested in times that would otherwise give rise to extreme boredom, and ensured that she did her job as required. She didn’t know who required it; merely that it was required.
She’d been on the station for years, maybe five, maybe eight, before she first noticed the infinite that lurked outside her workspace. The glass between her and space was thin, just an inch of highly processed and expertly polished and worked material that kept the cold and radiation out. It was so finely crafted that even the parts of the glass that curved along with the ship showed no distortion in the spotted blackness outside.
May’s station faced Earthward, or at least that is what May was told one day when she asked. But the ship was so far from Sol that identifying anything that might be familiar was next to impossible. Still, on some days, May wondered if that spark toward the center of her window was the solar system that would’ve been her home decades ago. It was a hunch, a feeling she could never quite articulate, but she believed it.
—
She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her at first. Part of the trouble with looking into the infinite is keeping track of all the moving parts. Two years after she’d started watching space, she swore she saw one of the lights go away, just wink off between blinks. That was impossible, obviously, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she’d seen it happen.
Time passed. She watched and watched as the stars began to go out, one by one. After six months, she could see a drastic change. A circle with a six inch diameter in the lower right corner of her window was nearly empty, and the darkness spread from there. May began sending messages to the upper management, one message a week for six weeks straight.
Every time, the same message came back: “Status green. Proceed as usual.”
Nothing more. Nothing less. No answers. So May kept pressing buttons when ordered to, and watched the darkness begin to overtake the light.