Chapter Text
Journal Entry 1
I finished going through the inventory. If I keep intake to about 1,600 calories a day (its protein paste, rehydrated grains, and the vitamin packs) I think I can stretch these supplies to six months. Water isn’t an issue, the recycler is still fully operational (or 92%, I guess). I started routing graywater back through a second filtration pass to reduce the loss. Power reserves are good for now, and I think I saw some solar panels in storage I can set up just in case. I’ll probably need to start cycling the non-essential systems soon though.
The bigger issue is this fucking radio. I boosted the transmitter as far as I can without taking it apart, and I rerouted power from the aux lighting, even the nav array, but the signal isn’t carrying far enough. Either I’m too far out, or there’s just nothing in range to hear it. I’m sending bursts every hour and talking on comms every 12 just in case. You miss every shot you don’t take I guess.
The view is nice. The star I’m orbiting is young I think. It’s really bright, and its got this ring of like, debris? I guess? Dust, rock, just fragments of stuff. It hasn’t settled into orbiting bodies yet, just motion and collisions, lots of collisions. It’s like watching an infant. I’ve been looking at density variations in the ring just to see if I can catch a baby planet. There’s clumps forming for sure. Early accretion I think is what it’s called. I probably should’ve paid better attention in astronomy. I guess it’s like watching an infant that’s surrounded by fetuses. That’s a better way to explain it.
The star is so bright you can’t even see other stars. It’s just pitch black. Well, except for the asteroids. There’s a lot of those.
Tomorrow I’ll probably go through the storage room and find those solar panels. I know there’s gotta be more blankets in there somewhere, it’s fucking freezing in here. Best case scenario there’s emergency agriculture kits and I can get some seeds going. Anything else living at this point would be great.
Journal Entry 2
I keep thinking I’ll come up with some genius plan to get out of here, but every idea just collapses under its own physics. There’s literally nowhere to go, and nothing really to get me there. Radio is still silent. I’m still yapping into it every 12 hours though.
I did a full EVA today though! I figured I should probably inspect the exterior while I’ve got the energy to do it. The ship is way smaller than it feels from inside. It’s a glorified tin can with modular extensions honestly. I cycled through the airlock pretty slowly to conserve pressure and checked the suit seals twice before stepping out. I guess I only trust my own suits. Or Rick’s suits. These things are clunky and heavy.
I forgot how insane microgravity is. I mean, one small push and you’re miles away and fucked drifting from the ship. I tethered myself on the hull rails and also at the primary line at the airlock. Anyways, the outer plating is fine, I mean there’s some pitting on the forward section from a micrometeoroid that nicked me last week, but it’s fine. Probably.
Oh and I ran a manual scan of the antenna array. There’s no visual damage but I recalibrated the alignment anyways. I moved it by a few degrees towards the densest star cluster on the nav. Not that I can see it anyway. It probably won’t matter but I felt like I had to do something you know?
The debris ring is so overwhelming from outside the ship. It’s layered with these fragments that cross paths at different velocities – I even got to watch two of them collide. It’s weird with no sound, just like this flash and this cloud of dust that keeps expanding and expanding.
I started rearranging things too. I mean, if I’m gonna be stuck here, I might as well make it feel like home. I cleared some space near the bed and dimmed the overheads to make it a bit more purple. It feels a little more like the basement now. I think maybe I’ll make some decorations out of the food packages and stuff. Just something to make it feel less like a waiting room, you know?
Journal 3
I found the seeds. Honestly I almost fucking cried when I saw them. They were in these little vacuum sealed packs behind the crate of emergency rations. They’re fast growing stuff too, leafy greens, micro grains, some hybrids I’ve never heard of. I set up a little grow station in the middle room across from the window with a spare storage compartment, rerouted a low power panel for some extra sun. I calibrated it to a super, super rough version of photosynthetic spectrum light. No idea if it’ll work but I guess it’s fine. We are orbiting a fucking sun.
And they started sprouting too! They’re tiny and super fragile, but they’re alive. I feel so maternal towards them, lol. I’ve been monitoring the moisture pretty carefully. I don’t want them to mold or dry out. It’s the first time here something’s changed on its own. I think it’s kind of beautiful.
I also found more blankets. They’re way softer than the ones I was using. The temperature notice is noticeable too. It feels safer.
Today I spent most of the day repairing the CO₂ scrubber unit. It kept saying there were drops, nothing critical but I can’t afford degradation. I don’t know when, or if, someone’s picking me up. Turns out though, it was a clogged lithium hydroxide canister housing. There was particulate buildup so it had reduced airflow. I disassembled the unit, vacuumed the chamber, and then replaced the filter mesh with a spare from, you guessed it, the maintenance kit. I recalibrated the flow rate afterwards too (thanks Rick, for always reminding me) so it’s back up to 98%.
It's good to know I can fix shit on here though. I’d be worried if I couldn’t. Rick taught me well. Hopefully that holds up.
Journal 4
Welp, I’ve officially lost it. I started talking to the plants. I don’t think I need to care about it until they start to respond. Then I’ll be worried. At least they do something and don’t just spin in a circle around a sun. They grow, and shift towards the light.
Time feels weird here. I mark the days but they don’t feel different from each other. Same meals, same routine, same walls. I keep moving decorations around but it never sticks.
I tried counting the debris outside again. Tracking fragments. There’s too many. It’s just motion. No meaning. Unless you step back far enough, I guess, but I can’t, so. Sometimes I just sit at the radio and stare and listen. The static is nice sometimes. It’s just nice to feel like something might be there, I guess.
I started naming stuff too. The plants, Jeremy, Michael, Andrew, Damian, Paul, even the equipment have names now, but I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting and just renaming as I go along. It makes it feel less empty.
I keep thinking about what I’ll say when someone finally finds me. I rehearse it sometimes, but the truth is, I just want to say hi to something and have it say hi too. Fingers crossed I really lose it so the plants start talking back, lol.
The empty blackness of space had always been a comfort – right up until the moment you were alone, totally, utterly, and completely defenseless. People don’t realize how little stars you really see when you’re suspended in space. With an unfiltered sun brighter than Earth’s, the light pollution washes nearly everything else out. Total darkness with one exception.
When you realized you were really stuck you felt nothing but terror. It had been weeks you’d spent suspended in the almost entirely empty vacuum, aside from the star you were orbiting in the small, cramped ship, and the few asteroids nearby that moved at a snail’s pace, frozen in orbit, like you.
The ship was separated into three main components, each individually pressurized for safety. It, in it of itself, wasn’t terrible.
The main room stretched in a rectangular line, with white paneled walls and a brushed metal floor that felt sterile in ways that didn’t make you uncomfortable. This was possible due to the faint purple glow illuminating from strips by the bed and floor. Everything, like most ships, was built into the structure to save space. On one side sat a compact kitchen, with cabinets and a small oven tucked beside the sink. Across from it was your bed compartment, piled with dark gray blankets you’d dug up from the storage and piloting room. Down further was a breakfast nook, with a table and a booth, and across from that your desk, narrow and illuminated mostly by the computer screen.
A hallway behind a heavy door connected that area with a second, the same size and height, for power, growing the seeds on board, and the maintenance tools and structured required to keep the ship in one piece. On the right, the exit led out to space. The large window on the left side allowed you to keep the lights off. The last compartment was for storage and piloting. It housed the food, the blankets, the water and extra fuel. You rarely used that room.
At first it was about survival. Lengthening it. The ship was equipped with four months of food, designed for eating three dehydrated meals a day. If you rationed them correctly, you could last six months, but anything beyond that would cut into your strength. Luckily, you’d managed to centrifuge the escape ship, and your muscles weren’t in atrophy from weeks of spacewalking.
Once you’d set up everything the ship had to offer for long term survival, like the grow plots and extended maintenance protocols, the second problem began to arise. Loneliness.
You were no stranger to loneliness. Not after the box. Not after the years you’d spent trapped in a sea of sickening green. In theory, it should have made you more resilient the second time around, but instead you found yourself in the same pit, if not a deeper one, with nobody to pull you out once again.
So, you kept busy.
You drew on the walls with the sharpies you found in the desk drawer; doodles of stars and flowers, hearts and little characters. Journaling was more helpful than you anticipated. Decorating the place was something else you’d found yourself enjoying. It was the little things, the silver tinsel stars strung above your bed, made from the used packages of dehydrated and warmed food, and the pillowcase you drew Rick’s face on, that were responsible for keeping you sane. A couple of spacewalks didn’t hurt either.
You attempted to contact anybody and everybody you possibly could with the low frequency radio. Too afraid to fully break it to spread the frequency farther, you refused to adjust it, and spoke into it every twelve hours just in case someone would finally hear.
The navigation had you placed 36 lightyears away from Earth. A star system named Denebola, you read on the little green tinted screen, with a sun larger and brighter than Earth’s. The star had a ring of debris rotating around it. You would watch it turn and rotate when you were lost in thought.
There were no signs of Rick. In the last adventure you’d shared he’d shoved you into a saver pod and thrusted you into the vacuum of space without a second thought. The galactic federation had rained down like hellfire. Gunships half the size of planets, lasers and grenades; every cent of their defense budget was used up on your group.
They’d grabbed him. You watched as the bug like creatures wrestled him and Space Beth to the cold metal floors, pounding your fists on the aluminosilicate glass and crying out for help. If you’d had known this was where you’d end up, in the goldilocks zone of a star with no planets, you’d have gone with them to prison instead. You marked the days on the side of the ship by your bed like a calendar that counted up rather than down. Laying in wait for the same man, over and over again.
In all the time you’d known Rick, it had always astounded you how quickly you found yourself able to call a place home. It was wherever you slept that night, and wherever you were able to set up a brief shop. Like all the other homes on all the other planets you’d had in the past few months, this was, yet again, another home.
In the beginning of the third week, just after you’d risen and made your way to the coffee machine, you brought your eyes outside of the ship as you always did. Rocks and scraps of what would, eventually, resemble planets swirled around the sun as they always did.
It started as a glare. White, much like the ship, and refracting the light of the sun harsh enough to make you squint.
At first you ignored it. It could’ve been ice. Just another fragment catching light in the wrong way. There were thousands of those.
That’s what you assumed as you poured coffee from the pot into the mug you’d used the day before and wiped out with a towel rather than washed to conserve water. The glare stayed.
When the glare didn’t move with the rest of the debris you paused and leaned a little closer to the glass.
If it was ice, which it most likely was, it wasn’t falling into orbit with the other debris and getting caught in the same rotation as everything else. It cut across it. Slow, then faster, slipping between the fragments instead of joining them. Your fingers tightened around the ceramic.
“Okay…” You muttered, setting the coffee down without drinking it.
The glare grew larger. Your chest tightened in a way you didn’t like. If it was debris, it was off trajectory, like, way off trajectory, and that would be a problem. You mentally mapped angles, distances, and velocity, deciding if you needed to move the ship. You didn’t have the fuel to waste on guesses, and you hadn’t set up the solar panels, but the closer it got, the less it looked like ice.
The shape was wrong, rounded rather than jagged. It was too smooth. You stepped closer to the window and squinted harder, with one hand braced against the wall to keep yourself steady.
It shifted.
Left.
Then right.
Then left again.
You could feel your stomach curling in on itself as you watched from your spot behind the layers of material.
“No fucking way,” You whispered.
An engine. Something piloted, heading straight towards your ship.
It was the fastest you’d ever thrown on a space suit. You shimmied your way into the pants and hooked your arms into the heavy sleeves. With shaking hands you closed the cabinets where the plants were kept, bumping your hip into the table as your legs pushed fast towards the control room.
The thick gray straps of the seatbelt fitted over your shoulders and between your legs, locking with a soft, echoing click before you throttled the thrusters opposite the angular motion. In less than a minute the ship was still once again, and your hair floated around you as you disengaged both the fuel and yourself from the seat.
The backs of the seats made a good push off point back to the center of the ship. With arms that crumpled under the stress of adrenaline you floated yourself back to the middle compartment.
What you could now see was a machine, wider than you but not taller, was still approaching fast. A smile spread itself across your cheeks as you waved frantically from the window. As if it had seen you, it paused for a moment before continuing forward.
Watching it approach, backlit by the blinding sun behind it, felt like years.
The moment you could make out the details you knew it was one of Rick’s machines. It had glowing blue eyes that blinked in random intervals, like all his machines did, and smiled when it paused at the window waving back. You let out a sigh of relief.
Finally, you were saved.
Without further hesitation you reached behind you to put on the helmet, twisting to lock it into place and checking the electronics on the suit to make sure it was oxygenated before turning back to the bot again. It was still waving the jointed white digits of its fingers. You gave another small smile, just in time to watch the grayish rock come from left field.
“Look out!” You shouted, pointing towards the rock as the robot blissfully waved in ignorance.
The rock collided with the metal of its side. There was no sound, but you flinched, watching the metal and electronic debris spray from its side, glistening in the light as the robot spun frantically in the opposite direction. Blue flamed thrusters at the base pushed hard against the new trajectory, but it propelled the machine sideways, as the thrusters were damaged.
Chunks of metal, wire, and plastic splayed around like confetti.
“Fuck,” you sighed out.
Tears bubbled and burned under your lids.
Retrieving it was easier than you expected. You’d done a few space walks for mental health since you’d arrived, and the rails around the ship made clipping and unclipping easy, despite the clunkiness of the suit.
Fixing it was a far more complex and frustrating problem. You weren’t sure what the directive of the robot was. Was it to take you home? To find you and deliver your coordinates back to Rick? To keep you company while you waited?
Without knowing, it was difficult to know what needed to be repaired, so you settled on making sure the power was active again.
It took two days to figure out what went where. Two long, slow, irritating days.
The first hour was spent just trying to figure out what tools to use. You chose a screwdriver only to find it useless half a second later. Then a wrench. Then plyers. Over and over again. At one point you lost a pack of screws, seemingly to some invisible black hole that had been hiding in your ship. You stared at where they’d last been for a long time before sighing and digging through the maintenance room for more.
Rick’s builds were flawless, but unnecessarily complicated. He didn’t color code wires the way you wished he did, and he didn’t label anything, ever. It was, as you’d always affectionately put it, an ADHD build. Usually, you found it cute, but with everything branched and looped in ways that only made sense to him, it was, for lack of a better term, annoying.
“Of course you didn’t label anything,” you muttered as you tugged on a bundle of wires, all blue, and all the same size, “why make it easy on anyone fucking else?”
You did your best not to picture throwing Rick out of the airlock. Instead, you traced the connections one by one, following them back to what you thought was the power routing node. Twice you had it wrong and had to undo everything all over again.
By the second day, your hands were shaking from the lack of sleep and abundance of recycled caffeine. Your shoulders ached from their hunched position over the hunk of wires.
Finally, you heard the faint hum, freezing in place with a wire trapped between your teeth. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding as you watched the lights flicker.
“Come on,” you begged.
When the robot whirred back to life, blinking its pixilated blue eyes a few times as it adjusted what was left of its arms, you let out a sigh of relief.
“Hello,” the robot said, “I am helper bot.” Its voice was feminine, but not overly high pitched or sensual. It was flat and robotic in a way you quite liked.
“Hi,” You breathed out. You pressed your back to the lower kitchen cabinets, your legs bent in front of you and your forearms resting on your knees as you watched it.
“I am here with a delivery,” it said.
The middle of the robot had a concealed compartment, with no obvious edge until it attempted to open. The motor pushed again before jamming a second time with a small thunking noise.
Quickly you reached forward, tracing the now visible edge and pulling on it with your fingernails until something popped, and the compartment flew open. The door unhinged, flying across the room and hitting the desk with a loud bang.
You didn’t care. Your eyes were focused on the object inside; a prototype you’d seen a few times before down in the basement, handheld and filled with green, swirling liquid. Thank fucking Rick.
With shaking fingers you gripped the device and pulled it from the cavern.
“Thank you for using helper bot.” The robot said, its eyes blinking one last time before its final words. “Goodbye.”
The power shut off. You couldn’t bring yourself to care as you hurriedly typed in the coordinates. It was an irrational fear that pushed you, one that said if you took too long, it might just disappear from your fingertips. Still, you took one last look around the place you’d called home for weeks.
You walked through the swirling pool of green with the tinsel foil star chain wrapped around your neck.