Reiko’s fingers found the next handhold, pulling herself through the spoke corridor that connected the central core to the upper ring. In zero-g, movement became meditation: each push calculated, each trajectory planned. Her grandmother had taught her that precision in motion reflected precision in thought. Tonight, her thoughts scattered like cherry blossoms in wind.
The data pad pressed against her hip, its weight negligible but its contents heavy. Six weeks. Maybe less if the degradation accelerated. She’d run the projections three times, hoping for error, finding only confirmation. Naoki would be first. His cardiovascular markers already showed strain. Then Satomi, whose refugee body had endured too much already. Then the others. Then herself.
Fleet Command had to know. They’d sent the Chrysanthemum into this temporal anomaly with full understanding of the physics. Surely they’d accounted for biological effects beyond standard time dilation. Surely there were protocols, treatments, solutions waiting in those classified medical channels that Yori controlled.
Unless they hadn’t known. Unless the crew were test subjects, data points in an experiment measured in decades of external time while they died in weeks of subjective experience.
Her grandmother’s voice: “To heal, first understand. But to understand, first you must see clearly.”
Reiko rotated herself upright (a relative term in zero-g) as she approached the upper ring junction. Through the viewport, the distorted starfield twisted light into impossible geometries. Beautiful. Deadly. They floated in a bubble of stretched space-time, and that bubble was killing them at the cellular level.
She needed those communications. Needed to know what Fleet Command had told Yori. Needed to understand why he’d been so evasive during the last crew medical briefing when she’d mentioned the unusual fatigue patterns.
The communications hub waited ahead, its door sealed against the corridor’s darkness. Reiko checked her appearance in the reflective surface, professional, calm, just a routine medical inquiry. Her reflection showed the lie in her eyes.
The door hung in the darkness like a judgment. Yellow light: occupied. Reiko steadied herself against the corridor wall, feeling the faint vibration of life support systems through her palm. Her grandmother had taught her that healing began with proper breathing. She drew air slowly, held it, released.
Her finger found the intercom. “Yori-san, I need to review the Fleet Medical advisories from the past month. We’re seeing some unusual physiological markers.”
Silence. She counted heartbeats in the absence of response. Fifteen. Twenty. The medical data pad felt warm against her hip, its projections burning in her mind. Six weeks.
The lock disengaged with a pneumatic hiss.
Inside, the communications hub resembled a shrine to sleeplessness. Yori hunched over his console, and Reiko’s medical assessment was automatic: severe sleep deprivation, stress-induced muscle tension, possible stimulant overuse. Dark circles shadowed his eyes like bruises. Three empty coffee bulbs drifted near the ceiling, forgotten. His hair had escaped its knot, falling across his face in unwashed strands.
The screens behind him flickered, data streams, message queues, encrypted channels, then went dark as she crossed the threshold. All of them. Simultaneously.
Too fast to be coincidence. Too deliberate to be accident.
“Medical advisories?” Yori’s voice scraped out, raw from disuse and too much coffee. His fingers moved before he finished speaking, dancing across interfaces with practiced deflection. “The temporal translation algorithms have been fragmenting non-priority data streams. Quantum decoherence in the carrier wave: we’re seeing cascade failures in the error-correction protocols.”
Screens bloomed around him, graphs and error logs materializing like defensive walls. His explanation accelerated, technical terms piling upon each other: solar radiation interference patterns, entanglement decay rates, bandwidth degradation curves. The mathematics was sound. The delivery was desperate.
Reiko didn’t watch his displays. She watched his eyes, the way they skittered away from hers, the way his left hand kept drifting toward one locked directory marked with Command-level encryption. She’d seen this pattern before in crew members concealing symptoms. Deflection through complexity, burying truth under technical avalanche.
“I don’t need perfect data,” Reiko said, her voice carrying the gentle firmness she used with patients in denial. “Even corrupted messages might reference temporal physiology research. Anything from Fleet Medical these past three months.”
She pulled herself closer along the handrail, angling to see his main screen. Yori’s jaw muscles bunched. “Recovery protocols would take days. Corrupted segments,” His hand hovered above the keyboard, trembling slightly, neither typing nor retreating.
The lie crystallized between them, visible as breath in cold air.
Reiko held his gaze, watching the conflict play across his features. The daruma doll’s single eye seemed to stare at her: a promise half-fulfilled. She softened her voice, shifting from authority to compassion.
“Then help me understand, Yori-san. Whatever you’re protecting us from, cellular death will reach us first.” She extended her hand in the zero-g space between them, palm up: an offering, not a demand. “We’re dying. All of us.”
Reiko’s fingers moved across the medical terminal with practiced precision, each gesture economical in the way of those born to zero-gravity. The interface responded to her touch, biometric sensors confirming her identity as she entered the authorization codes that granted her access to the communications database. A legitimate action, she reminded herself, well within her authority as Chief Medical Officer monitoring for Fleet Medical advisories that might affect crew health.
The interface accepted her credentials without hesitation. She began filtering for messages tagged with biological or medical classifications, her dark eyes scanning the results as they populated across the screen. The search results appeared normal at first: routine status reports documenting their physiological adaptation to the time-dilated environment, supply manifests for pharmaceutical shipments that would never arrive in time to matter, psychological wellness checks from Fleet Medical that felt like messages from ghosts.
But then she noticed the irregularities.
Message ID numbers that skipped in sequence. Receive timestamps that predated their send timestamps by hours, an impossibility even accounting for temporal translation algorithms. Entire conversation threads showing responses but no original queries, like hearing one side of a telephone call. Her grandmother had taught her to trust such instincts, the way a healer sensed wrongness in a patient before any instrument could measure it.
She pulled up the raw transmission logs, the unfiltered data stream that recorded every packet of information flowing through Yori’s quantum arrays. Her fingers flew across the interface, cross-referencing transmission metadata with her own medical records, looking for correlations between communication patterns and the progression of symptoms she’d been documenting.
Her breath caught when she saw it.
A cluster of deleted entries from Fleet Medical Command, all purged from the system three weeks ago: within forty-eight hours of when she’d first documented the unusual cellular degradation in her own blood work during a routine self-examination.
The deletion timestamps carried Yori’s user credentials, executed during the night shift when he worked alone. Not corrupted data. Not transmission errors. Deliberate erasure requiring administrative access to the communications system.
Reiko’s training steadied her hands even as her pulse accelerated. She initiated a deep scan of the system’s backup protocols, searching for data shadows: the ghost images that quantum storage couldn’t fully purge. The medical terminal’s processing power was limited, but she had time. Time moved differently here, after all.
The scan results materialized slowly, fragments assembling like shards of broken pottery. Partial headers. Truncated routing information. Metadata tags that pointed to files no longer present in the primary database. She began reconstructing the pattern, her mind working through the puzzle with the same methodical precision she applied to diagnosis.
Fleet Medical Command had been sending regular transmissions. Not advisories. Not wellness checks. Updates. Progress reports. All classified under a designation she’d never seen in their mission briefing: “Temporal Biology Research Initiative.”
The phrase hung in her vision, innocuous and terrible.
Research Initiative. Test parameters. Expected degradation curves.
They were the experiment.
The medical terminal chimed softly: backup recovery complete. Reiko’s fingers moved across the haptic interface, creating an encrypted partition within her own medical files, disguised as patient genomic data. The fragments downloaded in stuttering bursts: message headers with Fleet Medical Command routing codes, metadata tags marked CLASSIFIED, reference numbers that appeared nowhere in their mission documentation.
Her breath caught on one reconstructed fragment: “…cellular degradation curve within expected parameters for test group alpha. Continue monitoring without intervention per protocol TB-7…”
Test group alpha. Without intervention.
The words blurred as her hands began to shake. She gripped the edge of the console, forcing her breathing to slow. The crew reduced to experimental subjects. And the degradation she’d discovered wasn’t an unforeseen consequence.
It was the intended result.
The complete files exist in the hub’s air-gapped backup array. Physical isolation against quantum corruption. Standard Fleet redundancy, but it means her medical override, designed for networked systems, is useless. She’d need direct terminal access.
Which means entering Yori’s domain while he watches every input, every access attempt logged and alarmed.
She’d need his absence. Or his trust.
Neither seemed likely.
The research protocol buried in the appendix confirms it: “Longitudinal study of temporal displacement effects on human cellular structures. Minimum observation period: 90 days subjective time.” They’re three months in. The endpoint of the study.
She and her crew aren’t researchers trapped by circumstance.
They’re specimens. And Yori is the keeper ensuring the experiment runs to completion, uncontaminated by the subjects’ awareness of their own dissolution.
Her fingers hover over the communications log, tracing the pattern of Yori’s data transmissions. Every time she submitted a medical report, an encrypted packet followed within hours. Always routed through channels she doesn’t have clearance to access. The timestamps align with surgical precision: her observations going up, his confirmations going out. A closed loop of information she was never meant to see completed.
She pulls up the crew’s biometric data, overlaying it with Yori’s predicted degradation curves from his published research. The match is nauseating in its accuracy. Masaru’s bone density loss, tracking the projection within two percent. Satomi’s neural conductivity decline, following the model like a textbook case. Even Kazuhiro’s cardiovascular stress markers fall exactly where Yori’s equations said they would. The only variable that matters is time. And they’re running out of it on schedule.
The medical terminal’s soft glow illuminates her hands, and she notices for the first time the slight tremor in her fingers. How long has that been there? She checks her own records, finds the micro-movements documented in her last self-exam. Stage two neurological involvement, according to Yori’s framework. She’s been cataloging her own dissolution without recognizing it.
A sound in the corridor makes her minimize the screen. Through the medical bay’s viewport, she watches Yori drift past in the zero-g spoke, his movements jerky with exhaustion. He glances toward her bay, and for a moment their eyes meet through the reinforced glass. There’s something in his expression: not quite guilt, not quite fear. Recognition, perhaps. The look of someone who knows he’s been discovered but hasn’t yet decided what that means.
He continues past, disappearing around the curve of the station’s core.
She reopens the files. If they’re specimens, she needs to understand the full experimental design. Including what happens when the observation period ends.
She pulls up the station’s environmental logs instead, cross-referencing them with Yori’s access patterns. There: three instances where he manually adjusted the medical bay’s atmospheric composition during her sleep cycles. Subtle changes: oxygen concentration up by point-three percent, trace elements she’d need spectrographic analysis to identify. Her stomach tightens. He’s been modifying her environment, possibly everyone’s. Controlling variables.
The bonsai tree in its zero-g container suddenly seems sinister, a living control subject floating in its own experimental bubble. She checks its growth rate against Earth-normal baselines. Accelerated by exactly the factor Yori’s temporal biology models would predict. He’s been validating his theories on everything aboard, even the plants.
Her grandmother’s voice echoes from memory: The doctor who treats herself has a fool for a patient. But what about the doctor who discovers she’s been someone else’s patient all along? She needs allies, but everyone aboard is compromised by the same degradation. Everyone except possibly Yori himself. If he’s been taking countermeasures she doesn’t know about.
The communication request button glows, waiting.
She presses the button before doubt can stop her. The chime echoes through the medical bay with a finality that makes her think of temple bells, marking moments that can’t be taken back. While she waits, she pulls up Yori’s medical file. Not the official one, but her private notes. Sleep deprivation, elevated cortisol, the tremor in his left hand that started three weeks ago. Signs of someone carrying unbearable knowledge alone.
The hatch opens with a pneumatic sigh. Yori floats through, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the blue light, making his eyes unreadable. He steadies himself on a handhold with that characteristic nervous precision.
“You summoned me, Doctor?” His tone is carefully neutral, but she catches the microscopic flinch when his gaze lands on her open terminal. The one displaying his access logs.
The cellular degradation curves don’t lie. Six weeks subjective until cascade failure. Organ systems shutting down one by one, immune collapse, then the final mercy. But the data’s too clean, too predictable. Someone modeled this. Someone knew. She pulls up the transmission timestamps Yori thinks are hidden, cross-references them with symptom onset. Perfect correlation. They were always the experiment. The question burning through her: did Fleet send the cure Yori’s hiding, or just instructions for documenting their deaths?
She pushes away from the terminal, the motion sending her into a slow rotation in the zero-g. Her hands find the grab bar automatically. Muscle memory from years of three-dimensional navigation. The medical bay’s soft lighting catches the kanji on her grandmother’s scroll: shikata ga nai. It cannot be helped. But that philosophy was meant for natural death, not manufactured martyrdom. If Yori has intercepted a cure, shikata ga nai becomes collaboration with murder.
She pulls up the maintenance logs instead, cross-referencing them with her medical records. The pattern emerges like a diagnosis: Kazuhiro’s repair schedules align with the moments when her stress markers spike. He’s been monitoring her, not invasively, but with the attention of someone who notices when another person skips meals or works through sleep cycles. The origami cranes aren’t random: they appear after her longest shifts, small paper reminders that someone sees her exhaustion.
The realization sits heavy in her chest. He’s already involved himself, already made himself vulnerable through caring. She hasn’t weaponized anything; she’s simply the last to acknowledge what exists between them.
But asking him to bypass Yori’s systems transforms care into conspiracy. Kazuhiro could lose his position, face charges of sabotage. His refugee status offers no protection. Less than none. The Fleet uses people like him because they’re desperate enough to accept dangerous work, then discards them when they become inconvenient. She’s seen it in the medical files, the patterns of exploitation dressed as opportunity.
Her fingers hover over the communication panel. She could send him a message, clinical and deniable: Need to discuss environmental systems affecting crew health. Your expertise required. Let him read between the lines, make his own choice about involvement.
Or she could go to him directly, in the machine shop where he builds beauty from salvage. Face him as herself, not as Medical Officer Tanaka with her authority and distance. Ask him honestly, give him the full picture: six weeks, cellular degradation, Yori’s deceptions, the choice between complicity and action.
The bonsai tree rotates slowly in its zero-g container, roots suspended in nutrient gel, branches reaching in all directions without gravity’s constraint. Her grandmother grew bonsai in Osaka, shaping them with wire and patience. Some growth requires redirection, she’d said, but the tree must be strong enough to survive the shaping.
The service corridors branch through the station’s infrastructure like capillaries, and Kazuhiro knows every bypass, every access panel, every system that Yori’s monitoring can’t reach. He could be there and gone before the communications officer noticed anything beyond routine maintenance fluctuations. The technical elegance of it appeals to her medical mind. A surgical approach rather than a frontal assault.
But surgery requires consent. Informed consent.
She imagines the conversation: I need you to commit what Fleet regulations would classify as sabotage. The cellular degradation data suggests we have six weeks before cascade failure begins. I can’t access the information that might save us without your help. Also, I’ve noticed your cranes. They’re beautiful. I’m sorry I’m asking this of you now, like this.
The bonsai’s branches cast shadows across her screen, delicate fractals of growth and constraint. Kazuhiro folds his cranes from technical schematics: beauty created from the language of systems and repairs. Perhaps he already understands the station’s vulnerabilities better than anyone. Perhaps he’s been waiting for someone to trust him with more than broken machinery.
The weight of triage settles over her. That cold calculus she learned in emergency medicine. Save who you can. Accept who you can’t. But this isn’t a disaster scene with clear casualties. This is choosing how much truth her crew can survive.
Masaru would understand the necessity of difficult choices. His refugee camp experience taught him that survival sometimes requires compromises that haunt you afterward. But she can’t ask him to carry this burden too. He’s already carrying enough.
She thinks of the Hippocratic tradition, filtered through her grandmother’s teachings: First, do no harm. But what constitutes harm when every option leads to pain? Ignorance might grant them peace in their final weeks. Knowledge might drive them to desperate action. The bonsai needs trimming. Her hands stay still.
The station’s chronometer marks another hour lost: or gained, depending on which frame of reference you choose. Outside, someone’s grandchild takes their first steps. Inside, Reiko’s hand moves toward the sedative cabinet, then retreats. The bonsai’s branches need shaping, but untrimmed growth isn’t death. Sometimes the healer’s greatest skill lies in recognizing when intervention causes more damage than the disease itself. She closes the inventory screen. There are other ways to extract truth.
She drafts the request: environmental assessment, two-person protocol, medical officer supervision required. The words arrange themselves with clinical precision, each one technically accurate, collectively deceptive. Her finger hovers over the send key. Once transmitted, Kazuhiro will read between the lines. He’s too perceptive not to. She’ll see the moment he understands she’s asking him to be complicit in something that skirts regulation, perhaps crosses it entirely.
The cursor blinks. In the medical bay’s dim light, her reflection fragments across three screens, doctor, conspirator, woman who has spent fifteen years learning to navigate the space between duty and survival.
She taps send.
The message travels through the station’s network in microseconds, but she feels each one. Kazuhiro will be in the lower maintenance shaft now, his hands deep in the recirculation system, humming something old and minor-key. He’ll pause when his wrist terminal chimes. Read it once, quickly. Then again, slower, the way he reads technical schematics: looking for what’s beneath the surface specifications.
Environmental assessment. Two-person protocol. Medical officer supervision required.
He’ll understand. The question is whether he’ll forgive her for it.
She closes the terminal and pushes off toward the bonsai alcove, letting momentum carry her in the zero-g. The tree is twenty years old by external time, though she’s only tended it for three months. Its branches have grown in directions that make no sense in gravity, reaching toward light that bends wrong through the viewport. She’d brought it from Earth in a specialized container, a gift from her grandmother who is now, she does the math reflexively, can’t help it, either ninety-seven or dead.
The tree doesn’t know about time dilation. It grows according to its own internal clock, cells dividing, seasons passing in miniature. She’s been measuring its growth rate against her own cellular samples, looking for patterns. The data suggests something she hasn’t wanted to acknowledge: living systems don’t just exist in time, they’re made of it. Stretch time, and you stretch everything built from it.
Her terminal chimes. Kazuhiro’s response is brief: When?
Not why. Not what’s really going on. Just when.
She types: Twenty-two hundred hours. Hub access corridor.
His reply: I’ll bring tea.
She pulls up Naoki’s schedule on her medical terminal. He’s running simulations in the physics lab, calculating collapse trajectories again. Always calculating, as if mathematics could build a bridge across the years separating him from his daughter.
The approach would need surgical precision. A consultation request, clinical language: Temporal physiology question regarding cellular degradation patterns. Theoretical modeling assistance required. Attach the sanitized data. Graphs showing the acceleration curve, cellular breakdown rates, nothing that directly implicates Yori or Fleet Command. Let Naoki’s mind do what it does best: find the patterns, extrapolate the models, realize that someone, somewhere, must have predicted this.
His military training cuts both ways. The same discipline that makes him follow orders also makes him question data that doesn’t align with mission parameters. Scientists hate incomplete information. She could use that.
But his family. The photographs he touches like prayer beads. His daughter is fifteen now by external time, nearly grown. Would desperation make him her ally, or would fear of further delay make him report her immediately to preserve protocol, preserve the chain of command that might still bring him home?
Kazuhiro moves through the station’s infrastructure like water through cracks, seeing systems others overlook. His refugee resourcefulness means he knows every access panel, every maintenance corridor, every unofficial route through the Chrysanthemum’s bones. He could create a distraction (a minor malfunction requiring Yori’s attention elsewhere) giving her minutes in the communications hub. His gentle nature masks a survivor’s pragmatism; he’d understand why she needs this without demanding explanations that could implicate him.
But she sees how he looks at her, the careful offerings of repaired instruments, origami cranes left by her workstation. Involving him tangles professional necessity with something tender and unspoken. If this fails, she’d destroy not just his position but whatever fragile hope he’s built around her presence. She’d be weaponizing his affection, turning gift into conspiracy.
Satomi represents protocol, the chain of command that keeps chaos at bay. Reiko could present her findings formally, request access to Yori’s logs through official channels. But the pilot’s Titan scars run deep: she chooses known procedures over uncertain truths, calculates survival through rigid structure. A formal complaint might trigger exactly the defensive lockdown Reiko needs to prevent. And if Satomi prioritizes crew cohesion over medical urgency, Reiko becomes a watched problem rather than a trusted officer.
Kazuhiro appears in the doorway, tool belt clinking softly. “Reiko-san, the centrifuge in bay three needs recalibration for your cell samples.” His presence shifts something in her calculation. He moves through the station’s systems like water, sees connections others miss. Not officially, not through channels that Yori monitors. But mechanics have their own access routes, their own quiet ways of knowing what flows through a ship’s veins.
She sets the tea bowl in its magnetic holder, watching the dark liquid settle into perfect stillness despite the station’s subtle vibrations. The matcha’s bitterness lingers on her tongue. A reminder that medicine and poison differ only in dosage and intent.
Kazuhiro represents access she hadn’t fully considered. Mechanics inhabit the station’s infrastructure, move through maintenance shafts and service corridors that bypass official pathways. They understand the physical reality of systems in ways that operators never do. Not the theoretical flow of data through circuits, but the actual heat signatures, the power draws, the telltale signs of equipment running outside normal parameters. If Yori is manipulating communications, hiding transmissions or running unauthorized decryption protocols, the station’s power grid would show anomalies. Nothing dramatic enough to trigger automated alerts, but visible to someone who knows the ship’s baseline rhythms intimately.
More than that, Kazuhiro exists outside the formal hierarchy that Yori monitors. Scientists report to science officers. Medical personnel file official logs. But mechanics? They fix what’s broken, often without paperwork, certainly without the kind of digital trail that passes through the communications hub. Their knowledge flows through different channels. Verbal reports, handwritten maintenance logs, the informal network of people who keep complex systems alive through improvisation and institutional memory.
She considers the way he’d looked at her during their last conversation, that particular quality of attention that suggests more than professional courtesy. Vulnerability, carefully calculated, might work where authority would fail. Not manipulation but honest collaboration. Share enough of her concern to make him understand the stakes without revealing the full scope of what she suspects. Let him choose to help because he sees the necessity, not because she’s maneuvered him into position.
The question is how much truth to offer, and how quickly.
She needs to approach Kazuhiro first, before the others. His position is unique. Close enough to the station’s infrastructure to detect anomalies, far enough from the command structure to avoid Yori’s immediate scrutiny. And there’s that other factor, the one she’s been carefully not examining too closely: the way his face softens when she enters the maintenance bay, how he always seems to have tea ready when she stops by, brewed exactly the way she prefers.
Using that attraction feels uncomfortably close to manipulation. But isn’t all persuasion a form of manipulation? She’s asking him to take risks, to use his access for purposes beyond his official duties. The least she can offer is honesty about why it matters. Not the full medical data, not yet, but enough truth to make the request meaningful rather than merely transactional.
She pulls up the maintenance schedule on her terminal. Kazuhiro will be working on the starboard heat exchanger tomorrow morning, early shift when the corridors are quiet. A natural place for a conversation that needs to happen away from observation. Casual enough to avoid suspicion, private enough for difficult truths.
The medical bay’s environmental controls respond to her touch as she seals the door. Not locked, but set to privacy mode. Anyone entering will trigger a soft chime, giving her warning.
She pulls up her personal terminal, the screen casting blue light across her features in the dimness. Her fingers hover over the input field. Beginning to draft messages feels like stepping across a threshold she cannot uncross. Once she sends these, she commits herself and others to a path of quiet resistance against whatever Yori is concealing.
But the cellular degradation data doesn’t lie. Six weeks, perhaps seven if she’s optimistic. After that, the damage becomes irreversible. Organs failing, neural pathways deteriorating, bodies consuming themselves from within as temporal displacement tears at their fundamental biology.
She begins typing.
To Kazuhiro, she writes of power irregularities in the communications hub: nothing critical, just worth monitoring. Masaru receives notes about sleep disruption patterns among crew, stress markers she’s tracking. Satomi gets technical questions about navigation timing discrepancies. Naoki receives queries about temporal physics readings that don’t align with predicted models.
Each message carefully incomplete. Each question designed to turn eyes toward Yori’s domain without revealing why. Her grandmother’s lesson: the best gardens grow from invisible roots.
The messages vanish into the network’s luminous pathways. Reiko’s reflection ghosts across the viewport: a woman who learned surgery in zero-g, who understands that precision requires commitment. Her grandmother would recognize this moment: the instant before the blade cuts, when hesitation means failure.
She exhales slowly, watching her breath fog the glass. The seeds are planted. Now she must tend what grows in shadow, harvest truth before time, always time, runs out.
Reiko finds Masaru in the medical bay’s rehabilitation area during the quiet hours of gamma shift, when the station’s dimmed lighting creates pools of shadow between equipment stations. He floats near the wall-mounted resistance bands, methodically cleaning each piece of equipment with the same focused care he brings to suturing wounds or setting broken bones. His large hands move with surprising delicacy over the sensors and grips, checking for wear that might cause injury.
She approaches slowly, her movement through zero-g barely disturbing the air. He notices her reflection in the polished metal of a storage cabinet and turns, his scarred face softening into a questioning expression.
“Masaru-san,” she begins, keeping her voice low despite their privacy. “I need your help with something sensitive.”
He sets aside his cleaning cloth, giving her his full attention. The kind eyes that have seen too much suffering focus on her with quiet intensity.
“I’m cross-referencing the crew’s physical symptoms against their psychological evaluations,” she continues, choosing her words with care. “It’s tedious work, and it requires access to personnel files. Medical histories, trauma backgrounds, behavioral patterns.” She pauses, letting the weight of what she’s asking settle between them. “I need someone who understands trauma patterns. Not just the clinical definitions, but how people hide their suffering.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts in his posture. Recognition, perhaps. Understanding that she’s trusting him with more than data analysis.
“I’ve seen people hide suffering before,” he says quietly, his voice carrying the gravity of refugee camp memories. “In the camps, survival sometimes meant concealing weakness. People learned to smile while dying inside.” His scarred knuckles flex unconsciously. “I’ll know what to look for. The gaps between what’s reported and what’s real.”
She meets his eyes, seeing the unspoken question there. He won’t ask what she suspects, but he’s offering his loyalty regardless.
“Thank you,” she says simply, and transmits the file access codes to his tablet.
Approaching Naoki requires more delicacy. Reiko finds him in the observation deck at 0300 hours, his silhouette dark against the warped starfield. The temporal distortion bends light into colors that shouldn’t exist, and he stares at them while running calculations on his tablet, searching for patterns in chaos.
She doesn’t announce herself, simply floats to the viewport beside him and settles into stillness. The silence stretches: one minute, then two. A Japanese courtesy he recognizes: sharing space before sharing words.
“The cellular degradation rates,” she finally says, her voice barely above a whisper. “They don’t match the zone’s documented temporal behavior. The variance is point-three percent, but it’s consistent across all crew members.” She pauses, letting the puzzle take shape. “Something about our data is inconsistent.”
His fingers stop moving. She watches his reflection in the viewport as his expression shifts from grief to focus, the physicist’s mind engaging with a problem that has boundaries, variables, solutions. Not like the impossible equation of his daughter’s childhood, slipping away in five-year increments.
“Send me everything,” he says, screen already illuminating his face with pale blue light. “All the medical data, the zone measurements, temporal calibration logs.” His voice carries the first hint of energy she’s heard from him in weeks. “If there’s an inconsistency, it means something is either wrong with our instruments or wrong with our assumptions.”
The coordination requires the precision of surgery. Reiko maps it in her mind like anatomical systems. Each person a separate vessel that must not cross-contaminate. Kazuhiro’s maintenance logs on Tuesdays and Fridays, always during second shift when his presence in restricted areas draws no attention. Masaru reviews medical files during gamma shift’s skeleton crew hours, his insomnia providing natural cover. Naoki’s temporal calculations blend seamlessly into his existing obsessive research patterns.
She spaces their database queries across different terminals, different duty rotations. A search here, an access request there: scattered drops that only she recognizes as a gathering storm. The pattern must appear random to any monitoring algorithm, coincidental to any human observer. Five separate investigations, five plausible explanations. Only in her mind do the threads converge into a net closing around truth.
The pilot’s quarters are sparse, memorial tattoos visible as Satomi reaches for tea. Reiko explains in careful terms: anomalies in crew health correlating with communication patterns, need for discreet fuel consumption analysis. Satomi’s refugee-sharpened instincts read between words instantly. “You suspect sabotage.” Not a question. Reiko meets her eyes, nods once. Satomi’s jaw tightens. “What do you need?” The command authority, freely given, settles on Reiko’s shoulders like lead shielding. Protective and heavy.
In her quarters, Reiko opens her encrypted medical log, fingers hovering over the input pad. She documents each conversation in careful clinical language: “Delegated supplementary health monitoring protocols.” “Requested environmental systems verification.” “Consulted regarding crew psychological baseline assessments.” Each entry reads as routine medical diligence. Only she knows these phrases map a surveillance network forming around Yori, invisible threads that will draw tight when she pulls them.
The maintenance corridor hums with the white noise of life support systems, a sound so constant it becomes silence. Reiko finds Kazuhiro suspended in the zero-g section, his body oriented perpendicular to what her Earth-born instincts still insist is “up.” His hands move through the practiced choreography of calibration, twist, adjust, verify, each motion economical and sure. Grease streaks his forearms, and he’s humming something under his breath, a folk melody she doesn’t recognize.
She pushes off gently from a handhold, letting momentum carry her to his position. The movement is instinctive now, her body remembering the three-dimensional grammar of weightlessness.
“Kazuhiro-san,” she says, keeping her voice casual. “Do you have a moment?”
He glances up, and that crooked smile appears, warm enough to make something in her chest tighten unexpectedly. “For our doctor? Always.” He secures his tools in their magnetic holster with practiced efficiency.
She gestures toward the upper ring corridor. “I’ve been reviewing the atmospheric data. There are some irregularities in the readings near the communications hub. Nothing critical, but the patterns are unusual.” She pulls up her tablet, showing him graphs that are genuine, if selectively chosen. “The environmental systems up there haven’t had a comprehensive diagnostic in months.”
Kazuhiro’s expression shifts to professional interest. He takes the tablet, fingers scrolling through the data with the same gentle precision he applies to everything. “Hm. The quantum arrays are sensitive to atmospheric fluctuations. Even minor pressure variations can affect signal integrity.” He hands back the tablet. “I can work a full systems check into my schedule. Good catch, Reiko-san.”
He doesn’t ask why she’s suddenly concerned about that particular section. Doesn’t question why the medical officer is monitoring environmental data outside her bay. His dark eyes hold hers for a moment, and she sees understanding there. Not of specifics, but of trust offered freely.
“Thank you,” she says quietly, meaning more than the words convey.
The observation deck exists in perpetual twilight, the distorted starfield painting kaleidoscope patterns across bulkheads: light bent by temporal gradients into colors that shouldn’t exist. Naoki finds her there, his physicist’s mind perhaps drawn to the visual proof of their displacement. He’s clutching his daughter’s photo, the plastic worn smooth from handling, and his eyes carry the red-rimmed exhaustion of someone who calculates time lost in units of childhood milestones.
“The calculations don’t match,” he says without preamble, tablet already extended. Equations scroll past, elegant and damning. “The zone’s decay rate versus what we’re being told through official channels. There’s a discrepancy of at least fifteen percent.”
Reiko’s pulse quickens, but years of surgical discipline keep her expression carefully concerned rather than knowing. “What would cause that kind of variance?”
He shakes his head, frustration bleeding through military composure. “Either our instruments are systematically failing across multiple independent systems, or…” He stops, the implication hanging in the recycled air.
“Or someone’s filtering the data before it reaches us,” Reiko finishes quietly.
She lets the silence expand between them, watching him arrive at the conclusion himself, watching the scientist’s need for truth war with the husband’s desperate hope.
The pilot’s ready room strips away pretense. Mag-locked chair, navigation charts, and the memorial ink circling Satomi’s wrists like permanent prayer beads. Reiko spreads medical data across the tablet between them, her fingers tracing patterns in declining cellular efficiency, neurotransmitter imbalances that cascade through the crew like dominoes falling in slow motion.
“Environmental factors,” Reiko says carefully, each word chosen with surgical precision. “The physiology doesn’t match our zone parameters.”
Satomi’s weathered hands rest motionless on the armrests, but her fingers drum once. That unconscious tell, calculating survival percentages, weighing incomplete information against catastrophic possibilities.
“What do you need?”
The question carries no suspicion, only the refugee’s pragmatic acceptance of hidden threats.
“Your eyes on fuel consumption reports,” Reiko answers. “And your discretion.”
Satomi’s nod is fractional. “Already looking.”
The message arrives during third watch, when the station hums its loneliest frequency. Reiko’s terminal chimes softly. “Fuel discrepancies confirmed. Consumption doesn’t match reported navigation patterns. Someone’s running unauthorized calculations: trajectory modeling, escape vectors. Recent activity.”
Reiko reads it three times. Her pulse remains steady, medical discipline overriding the cold certainty spreading through her chest. Yori isn’t just hiding information. He’s planning something.
Salvation or abandonment? The question crystallizes like ice forming in vacuum.
She deletes the message, watches the data fragment into quantum noise. Her fingers hover over her personal log, then type with careful precision: “Pilot confirms environmental resource allocation requires comprehensive review.”
The words mean nothing to casual observation. Everything to those who need to know.
The data chip feels heavy in Reiko’s palm, though it weighs nothing in zero-g. She studies Kazuhiro’s troubled expression, noting the tension in his shoulders, the way his usual warmth has crystallized into something harder. He’s risked exposure to bring her this.
“Thank you,” she says, and the words carry weight beyond gratitude. Trust, in this place, is currency more precious than oxygen.
The data chip’s contents spread across her screens in cascading patterns: communication logs, power consumption graphs, biometric data she’d quietly pulled from the station’s environmental systems. Reiko’s trained eye catches the telltale signatures immediately: the erratic spikes of someone running on stimulants and desperation, the circadian disruption of weeks without proper sleep, the obsessive-compulsive rhythm of constant monitoring.
She overlays Yori’s access patterns with the crew’s collective schedule. While others sleep, he works. While they eat, he works. The only breaks in his activity correspond to incoming transmissions from Fleet Command, and even those pauses are brief. Just long enough to receive, process, encrypt responses. But the outgoing messages show delays that don’t match his usual efficiency. Hours sometimes. Once, nearly a full day.
Someone choosing what to send. What to withhold.
Her fingers trace through the pharmaceutical logs next, a habit from her medical training. Yori’s stimulant requisitions have tripled in the past month. The pattern speaks of deterioration, of a mind pushed past sustainable limits. She’s seen this before in the refugee camps where Masaru trained: people who couldn’t stop, couldn’t rest, because stopping meant confronting what they’d done or failed to do.
The question crystallizes: Is Yori protecting them from something, or protecting himself?
She needs perspective from someone who understands the body’s limits, who knows what people do when pushed to extremes. Someone who’s seen desperation wear different faces. Masaru’s message had been simple (I’m here if you need me) sent after he’d noticed her reviewing files at odd hours, the way her movements had grown more deliberate, more burdened.
Reiko keys the response: Medical bay. Bring tea if you have it. We need to talk.
The weight of what she’s about to share settles in her chest like stones.
“Their bodies know before their minds do,” Reiko says, enlarging a graph that shows collective heart rate variability across the crew. The lines spike in synchronization, a shared physiological response to invisible stressors. “This isn’t individual anxiety. It’s a coordinated reaction to environmental cues.”
Masaru’s scarred hand reaches out, steadying himself against the medical console as he studies the data. His background in trauma medicine shows in how quickly he reads the patterns. “Like prey animals sensing a predator,” he says quietly. “The camps were like this before the riots. Everyone on edge, but no one could say why.”
She pulls up another layer: sleep architecture data from the habitat monitoring systems. REM cycles fragmenting, night terrors increasing, the crew spending more time in light sleep stages where the mind remains vigilant. “They’re not resting anymore. Not really. Their nervous systems won’t let them.”
“What changed?” Masaru asks, though his expression suggests he’s already forming hypotheses.
Reiko hesitates, then overlays the timeline with communication logs. The deterioration began three weeks ago, shortly after a specific transmission from Fleet Command. One that Yori had delayed forwarding for eighteen hours.
She begins with what the body reveals before the mind admits: the elevated cortisol markers appearing in routine blood panels, the way circadian rhythms fragment despite perfectly calibrated habitat lighting, how crew members now flinch at the ordinary hiss of air recyclers. Masaru absorbs every detail with the stillness of someone who has learned to read survival in physiological signs. His scarred knuckles rest against the console’s edge, grounding him in zero-g as she displays the anonymized biometric streams.
“Environmental threat they can’t name,” he says, his voice carrying the weight of recognition. The refugee camps had taught him this language: bodies responding to danger before consciousness could articulate it.
She layers the data: stress hormones spiking after shift briefings, after announcements, after those carefully worded messages from home that Yori translates through the temporal filters.
“I need baseline physical assessments,” Reiko says, her fingers dancing across the interface to summon a schedule matrix. “Routine wellness checks, comprehensive ones. Muscle tension patterns, stress hormone cascades, sleep architecture, cardiovascular stress responses.” She pauses, lets the weight settle. “Particularly after communications access or message receipt.”
She watches his face in the blue medical lighting, sees understanding crystallize. She’s asking him to document harm without naming the perpetrator. His jaw sets with that refugee camp determination, the expression of someone choosing sides.
Masaru’s tea pouch drifts between them, a small sphere of warmth in the sterile bay. “Physical therapy assessments,” he says, voice steady despite the implications. “Zero-g muscle degradation: everyone’s overdue.” His scarred fingers catch the pouch with practiced gentleness, the same hands that once set bones in refugee camps. “But Reiko-san…” He meets her eyes, and she sees the protector beneath the healer, the man who has already lost too many. “If someone causes this harm deliberately…”
The unfinished threat hangs in recycled air. She inclines her head. They’ve just drawn the first line of her careful conspiracy.
The observation deck’s viewport bent starlight into impossible geometries, each photon stretched across years of subjective time. Reiko found Naoki there at 0300 hours, his reflection ghosted against the warped cosmos: a man suspended between two timelines, neither of which contained his daughter at the age he’d left her.
She didn’t announce herself. In zero-g, approach made no sound. She simply floated into his peripheral vision and waited, her own reflection joining his against the stars. Three minutes passed. Five. The silence held weight but no pressure.
“The gradient differential,” she finally said, her voice pitched low and clinical, “doesn’t match the theoretical decay curve.”
His shoulders shifted. Not much. Enough.
“I’ve been tracking crew circadian disruption,” she continued, pulling a data tablet from her jumpsuit’s thigh pocket. “Mapping it against the zone’s temporal flux. There’s an elegance to the correlation that shouldn’t exist: biological systems are too chaotic, too variable. But the pattern holds. Almost as if…” She let the sentence drift, incomplete.
Naoki turned. His eyes, which had been empty, now held the sharp focus of a mind engaging with a problem it could actually solve. “Show me.”
The tablet floated between them, its screen casting blue light across his features. She’d curated the data carefully: sensor readings from the past two months, communication timestamp logs, temporal gradient measurements. Nothing that directly implicated Yori. Nothing that explicitly suggested sabotage. Just… inconsistencies. Mathematical whispers that didn’t quite resolve.
His fingers moved across the screen, zooming, correlating, his lips moving in silent calculation. She watched the transformation: grief receding behind intellectual engagement, desperation channeling into methodical analysis. This was what she’d counted on: that a brilliant mind in pain would seize any puzzle complex enough to demand its full attention.
“This variance here.” His finger stabbed at a data cluster. “And this temporal echo. They shouldn’t,” He stopped, looked at her directly. “Where did you source these readings?”
The puzzle consumed him. Reiko watched through the medical bay’s observation port as Naoki transformed the small research alcove into a command center of floating tablets and handwritten notes tethered by magnetic clips. His movements had the precision of military training. Each dataset she provided through legitimate medical research protocols disappeared into his analysis like water into sand.
She tracked the progression through subtle tells. Day one: curiosity, the intellectual pleasure of an elegant problem. Day two: focus narrowing, posture straightening as patterns emerged. Day three: his note-taking accelerated, characters scratched with increasing urgency across paper he preferred to screens. His glances toward the upper ring (toward the communications hub) grew longer, more troubled.
By day four, he’d stopped sleeping entirely. She could see it in the tremor of his hands, the way he triple-checked calculations he would normally trust on first pass. The data had shifted from puzzle to revelation, and revelation carried weight that bent even a disciplined mind toward breaking.
When he finally came to her, he moved like a man carrying classified intelligence through enemy territory: careful, contained, afraid.
The recovery alcove sealed with a soft hiss. White noise generators hummed to life: meant for patient confidentiality, now repurposed for conspiracy. Naoki floated before her, tablet clutched to his chest like armor, and she recognized the posture: a soldier about to deliver intelligence that would change the battlefield.
“Show me,” she said simply.
His fingers moved across the screen with surgical precision, pulling up datasets she’d carefully fed him through legitimate research channels. But what he’d done with them, the correlations, the temporal analysis, the mathematical modeling, that was pure brilliance born of desperation.
“Here.” He isolated a communication timestamp. “And here.” Another. “The decay rate progression doesn’t match reported observations. Someone’s filtering the data stream before it reaches official logs.”
His voice remained steady, but his hands betrayed him. The slight tremor of a man who’d just calculated how many years of his daughter’s life had been stolen by lies.
Reiko watched the transformation happen in real-time: scientist becoming soldier, grief crystallizing into purpose. He pulled up another screen, fingers no longer trembling but moving with lethal efficiency through data hierarchies.
“I’ll need physical access,” he said, voice flat with military precision. “The quantum array logs everything before compression. If there’s manipulation, the original data stream will show it.”
She’d anticipated this. “Kazuhiro’s running maintenance checks on the hub’s environmental systems. He can get you inside.”
Naoki’s question came quietly, physicist’s precision cutting through pretense: “Why me? Why not Commander Ishida?”
Reiko held his gaze, offering the truth that would bind him. “Because you’re desperate enough to follow evidence wherever it leads, disciplined enough to wait for proof.” She watched comprehension dawn. The weight of investigating a crewmate, of potential conspiracy, of trusting a medical officer’s instinct.
His fingers found the photograph. His daughter, now thirteen. He remembered her at three.
One nod. Military decisiveness accepting an impossible mission.
Kazuhiro drifted into the pilot’s station with practiced ease, toolkit magnetically secured to his hip, humming “Sakura Sakura” just slightly off-key. The folk melody filled the silence the way his hands filled empty spaces: with something familiar, something that suggested normalcy even when nothing was normal at all.
Satomi didn’t look up from her navigation console, but her shoulders shifted in that minute way that meant she was tracking his every movement. Refugee instinct recognizing refugee caution.
“Routine maintenance,” he said, pulling tools from their loops with deliberate casualness. “Life support junction needs calibration.” His fingers moved across access panels, but his eyes kept finding the power distribution readouts.
“Routine,” Satomi echoed, the word flat as vacuum.
He worked in silence for several minutes, letting the diagnostic scanner hum its technical song. Then, as if commenting on the weather: “Communications hub’s pulling forty percent more power than baseline. Consistent pattern over the last three months.” He tapped a readout, making it look like he was checking voltage. “That’s not message processing. That’s sustained decryption protocols. Heavy ones.”
Satomi’s hands went completely still on her controls. Not frozen. Controlled. The stillness of someone deciding whether to draw a weapon or wait for more information.
“How long have you known?” Her voice carried the weight of Titan, of survival calculations made in milliseconds.
“Two weeks since I was certain.” Kazuhiro’s humming had stopped. “Longer since I suspected.”
“And the pattern?”
“Around the clock. Someone who never sleeps, never stops.” He met her eyes finally. “Someone who’s afraid of what they’ll find if they do.”
Satomi’s fingers resumed their dance across the navigation interface, but something had shifted in the angle of her shoulders. She was cataloging this alongside other discrepancies, building a map of deceptions in that tactical mind that had navigated through colony collapse.
“The fuel consumption rates I’ve been tracking,” she said quietly. “They align with someone expecting rapid evacuation. Soon.”
The medical bay’s soft blue light cast floating shadows as Masaru guided an exhausted Naoki through the hatchway, one broad hand steadying the physicist’s shoulder with practiced gentleness. “Cortisol levels through the ceiling,” he said, his voice carrying the careful neutrality of someone stating facts while meaning more. “Sleep architecture completely fragmented. You’re running on fumes, Naoki-san.”
Reiko pulled up the biometric data with a gesture, numbers and graphs blooming across the floating screen in phosphorescent detail. Naoki’s vitals painted a picture of systematic self-destruction. The body chemistry of someone burning themselves out on an impossible problem.
The hatch cycled again. Satomi drifted in with the fluid economy of someone who’d spent years making every movement count, ostensibly for her quarterly physical. But her eyes went immediately to the screen, to the temporal calculations nested within the medical data, timestamps that fractured and reformed like broken glass.
They formed a triangle in the zero-g space, three points of a constellation finding alignment. The silence stretched, filled only with the station’s mechanical breathing, until Naoki spoke first: “The mathematics don’t reconcile. The zone stability reports. Someone’s been editing the decay rates.”
The observation deck became their inadvertent war room, five bodies arranged in zero-g like points of a conspiracy drawn in flesh and bone. Kazuhiro arrived with tea bulbs magnetically sealed, his crooked smile not quite reaching his eyes as he handed one to Masaru. “Refugee special: three parts recycled water, one part hope.” But his fingers traced kanji against the bulb’s surface: careful.
Masaru caught it, responded in kind. “The communications tech hasn’t eaten in forty hours. Dehydration markers. Stress fractures in his decision-making architecture.”
“The hub’s designed for isolation,” Kazuhiro said, ostensibly adjusting a viewport seal. “Single access point. No redundancy. Everything flows through one person.”
Through the warped glass, stars bent into colors that shouldn’t exist, light from a universe moving too fast around them.
Naoki’s uniform creases sharpened with tension as he interfaced his tablet with Reiko’s medical display, military precision warring with scientific fury. “Temporal displacement syndrome,” he began, voice clipped, “presenting with systematic information asymmetry.” His fingers trembled, not fear, but rage, as equations cascaded across the screen, revealing gaps where data should exist, timestamps that contradicted themselves, warnings about zone destabilization edited into benign status reports.
“Messages altered,” Reiko translated quietly, watching Satomi’s expression harden. “Timelines manipulated. He’s been controlling what we know.”
Masaru leaned closer, reading the patterns with field medic instincts. “How long?”
“Months. Since the zone started destabilizing.” Naoki’s hands clenched. “He’s violated every principle of scientific integrity. We’re making decisions based on lies.”
Satomi’s question cut through like a navigation solution: “What do you need?”
The physicist met each gaze in turn, seeing his desperation reflected back. “Raw communication logs. Before he processes them.” A pause weighted with implication. “Someone he trusts. Close enough to observe without triggering suspicion.”
Kazuhiro speaks first, fingers worrying a pressure valve from his pocket. “Refugee stations taught me: when someone controls the news, they control who survives.” His crooked smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m done being controlled.”
Satomi’s memorial tattoos catch the light as she nods. “Titan died in silence. Withheld data, delayed warnings.” Her voice carries the flatness of old grief calcified into purpose. “Never again.”
Masaru’s scarred knuckles flex. “Information quarantine. I’ve seen it kill.” He meets Reiko’s gaze. “I know the symptoms now.”
No vote. No oath. Just understanding passing between them like shared breath in recycled air. They’ve each chosen their position, accepted the cost. When they disperse through separate corridors, each carries their fragment of conspiracy, no longer isolated in suspicion but bound by what they’re willing to risk.
The medical bay’s privacy seal engaged with a soft pneumatic hiss that Reiko felt more than heard. A vibration through her fingertips against the control panel. Gamma shift. The station’s quietest hours, when Yori’s attention typically drifted toward the accumulated message queues from Fleet Command, his screens flickering with transmissions from a future he obsessively catalogued.
Kazuhiro arrived first, ostensibly checking the bay’s environmental seals. His tool belt clinked softly as he pushed through the hatch, then secured it behind him with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d learned to make every movement count. He nodded once, positioning himself near the bonsai alcove where the magnetic field would mask his biosignature from casual scans.
Satomi came seven minutes later (she’d timed it precisely) routing through the spoke corridor from the pilot’s deck. “Medical consultation,” she’d logged in the duty roster. “Persistent headaches, possibly temporal adjustment syndrome.” Not a lie. They all had headaches now, the kind that came from carrying secrets in close quarters.
Masaru’s arrival was the most natural. He worked in the medical bay, his presence unremarkable. He brought tea in zero-g bulbs, the ritual of preparation giving his hands something to do while they waited.
Naoki was last, floating through the hatch with the distracted air of a scientist lost in calculation. He’d been in the observation deck, he’d tell anyone who asked, running models of the zone’s decay patterns. Also not a lie.
They arranged themselves in the three-dimensional space with unconscious geometry: not quite a circle, more like a constellation. Each positioned where they could see the others, where they could read faces in the blue-tinged light that made them all look like ghosts of themselves, like people already lost to time.
Reiko’s fingers were steady as she dimmed the lighting further. In the near-darkness, only their eyes reflected certainty.
Reiko’s voice emerged quiet, deliberate. “Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Kazuhiro spoke first, his mechanic’s hands describing shapes in the dim air. “Three days ago, routine maintenance on the comm hub’s cooling system. He didn’t hear me approach: the ventilation masks footsteps. When I called out, he flinched. Not startled. Defensive. His whole body angled to block the screens.” His fingers tightened. “There’s a drawer in the secondary console. Used to keep spare optical cables. Now it has a biometric lock.”
Satomi’s datapad cast pale light across her weathered features. “Fuel consumption versus logged usage. I’ve run it seven times.” She rotated the display. “We’re burning eighteen percent more than official records show. Either our engines are catastrophically failing, or someone’s been running unauthorized power draws for months.”
Masaru’s documentation scrolled across his tablet: crew stress indices, sleep disruption patterns, anxiety markers. “Every spike correlates with communication windows. Not the messages themselves. The gaps between them.”
Naoki’s holographic timestamps flickered into existence, numbers cascading through impossible sequences. “These can’t exist naturally. Someone rebuilt them. Manually. Repeatedly.”
The evidence accumulated in the medical bay’s dim light (fuel discrepancies, behavioral observations, temporal impossibilities) each piece connecting until the pattern became undeniable. Someone with access to every communication stream, every data flow, every piece of information entering or leaving their time-dilated prison had been curating their reality.
“Yori.” Reiko spoke his name quietly.
The word hung in zero-g like a verdict. Suspicion crystallized into certainty. Fear sharpened into focus.
Kazuhiro’s jaw tightened. Satomi’s fingers stilled on her datapad. Naoki’s holograms flickered as his hand trembled. Masaru closed his eyes.
They had named their enemy. Their crewmate. Their friend.
The man who controlled everything they knew about the universe beyond their bubble.
Masaru’s voice broke the silence, gentle despite the weight of his question. “What if he’s protecting us? What if the truth he’s hiding destroys us faster than ignorance?”
Satomi’s response came sharp as decompression. “I watched Titan die because authorities withheld information ‘for our own good.’” Her scarred hands gripped the bulkhead. “I won’t die that way again. Won’t let this crew die blind. Even if the truth breaks us. We break with eyes open.”
Reiko let the weight settle between them: the risk of fracturing what remained if they erred, of Yori’s escalation if discovered, of truths Fleet Command had buried for reasons they couldn’t fathom. Yet she named what they were: medical officer, pilot, trauma specialist, physicist, engineer. Together, capable of excavation and endurance both.
“Who proceeds?”
No voices answered. No one departed. The silence crystallized into covenant: not spoken vows but presence itself, resolve made tangible in the stillness of shared breath and the gravity of what they would not abandon.
Reiko floated in the medical bay’s dim monitoring alcove, her fingers dancing across the haptic interface as she pulled up Yori’s biometric data. The medical monitoring system (mandatory for all crew in the temporal zone) streamed constant physiological telemetry, though most crew members forgot they wore the subcutaneous sensors after the first week.
She hadn’t forgotten. And lately, she’d been watching Yori’s numbers with growing concern.
The cortisol graph spiked like a seismograph during an earthquake, sharp peaks clustering around specific transmission windows. She cross-referenced the timestamps: 0847, 1423, 2156. Regular intervals, but not aligned with scheduled communications. Whatever messages triggered these stress responses, they weren’t on the official roster.
His heart rate variability told a darker story. The data painted a picture of autonomic nervous system dysregulation: the kind she’d seen in trauma patients and soldiers who’d spent too long in combat zones. His body was locked in perpetual fight-or-flight, unable to access the parasympathetic rest state necessary for recovery. The pattern suggested he hadn’t achieved REM sleep in at least seventy-two hours, possibly longer.
She pulled up the thermal imaging from the hub’s environmental sensors, ostensibly used to monitor equipment heat signatures. The false-color image of Yori’s body showed concerning cold patches along his limbs. Reduced circulation from prolonged immobility. She ran a comparative analysis against his baseline from three months ago. Muscle mass loss: eighteen percent. In zero-g, that required deliberate neglect of the mandatory exercise protocols.
The man was destroying himself.
But the data revealed something more useful than his decline. She mapped his cognitive function markers, reaction time, decision latency, error rates in his system logs, against his circadian rhythm. There: a trough between 0245 and 0330, when his exhausted brain struggled most. His defenses would be lowest then, his judgment most compromised.
She encrypted the analysis and queued it for the others. They had their window.
Satomi floated in the pilot’s nest, her workspace a three-dimensional constellation of holographic displays. She’d learned long ago that survival meant understanding the truth beneath official numbers. A lesson paid for in Titan blood.
The fuel consumption logs hung in the air before her, translucent columns of data she could rotate with a gesture. She overlaid them against the official reports, watching for discrepancies the way she’d once watched for micrometeorite trajectories. There: small amounts redirected, never enough to trigger automatic alerts. Eight months of systematic bleeding.
She pulled the power allocation records, cross-referencing usage patterns against crew schedules. Life support draws from sections that should be empty. Equipment signatures that didn’t match any authorized systems. Her fingers moved through the data with practiced efficiency, building a three-dimensional map of hidden energy flows.
Yori was running something. Simulations, perhaps. Models of scenarios he’d kept buried. The power requirements suggested serious computational work. Temporal collapse projections, trajectory calculations, or worse.
She encrypted her findings and added them to the growing dossier. Each piece of evidence was another handhold on the climb toward truth, another step away from the cliff edge of ignorance.
Masaru made himself the station’s most visible caretaker. He floated through corridors with meal containers, his broad frame somehow gentle in zero-g, offering sustenance with the same care he’d give medicine.
“Thought you could use something warm,” he said at the communications hub hatch, his scarred knuckles soft against the container’s surface.
Yori’s eyes darted past him before accepting. Inside, Masaru catalogued everything with trauma-trained observation: equations bleeding across walls in manic handwriting, temporal collapse calculations growing more desperate toward the ceiling. The daruma doll sat sentinel on the console, one painted eye watching, one blank: a wish half-made, hope suspended.
Most revealing was Yori’s body language. Whenever Masaru entered, the man shifted, blocking certain displays with calculated casualness. Protecting secrets even from kindness.
Naoki approached the communications hub with requisition forms and scientific necessity. “I need transmission logs for temporal drift analysis,” he said, his military bearing making it sound like protocol rather than investigation.
Yori’s fingers hesitated over the console. Refusal would raise questions he couldn’t answer. He provided sanitized data, timestamps intact but content scrubbed.
Later, cross-referencing transmission schedules against Fleet protocols, Naoki found the absences: messages that should exist but didn’t. Not delayed. Erased.
The evidence floated between them like accusations made tangible. Kazuhiro’s schematics rotated slowly, their hand-drawn precision mapping Yori’s fortress. Naoki’s data streams caught the light, each gap a deleted truth. Satomi’s resource charts showed phantom supplies. Reported but never delivered.
“He’s not protecting us,” Reiko said, her fingers stilling the spinning documents. “He’s protecting a story.”
Masaru’s psychological profile drifted past: paranoid, isolated, convinced his lies were mercy.
The pattern crystallized. Yori had built them a comfortable prison of false hope.
Kazuhiro’s fingers traced the schematic he’d drawn during three nights of maintenance shifts, each line a careful observation disguised as routine work. The communications hub’s access panel bore modifications that shouldn’t exist: custom-fabricated components that spoke of Yori’s technical skill and growing paranoia.
“Here,” Kazuhiro said, highlighting a junction point. “Silent alarm. Magnetic sensor. If you break the field, he knows immediately.”
Naoki leaned closer in the zero-g, his physicist’s mind already calculating angles. “Can you bypass it?”
“Not without triggering it.” Kazuhiro’s expression shifted, that particular look he got when a problem became interesting rather than impossible. “But look at the power routing.”
His stylus followed the conduit backward through the station’s infrastructure. The alarm system drew current through the same pathway as the environmental sensors: an elegant solution for limited resources, a critical vulnerability for someone who understood power distribution.
“Life support monitoring,” Reiko said, seeing it. Her medical training made her intimate with every system that kept them breathing.
“Exactly.” Kazuhiro pulled up another layer of schematics, these showing the environmental grid. “The sensors cycle through diagnostic checks every six hours. During the check, they draw extra power. Creates a spike that the alarm system compensates for automatically.”
“A predictable fluctuation,” Naoki murmured.
“Which means if we create an unpredictable fluctuation during the diagnostic window.”A minor malfunction in the CO2 scrubbers, nothing dangerous, just enough to make the power draw irregular. Her pilot’s instinct for finding paths through impossible spaces recognized the elegance of it.
Kazuhiro nodded. “I can trigger the malfunction remotely. Give us maybe four minutes before automated systems compensate.”
Four minutes to break into Yori’s sanctuary and extract the truth he’d been hoarding.
Satomi’s fingers moved through the data streams with the precision she brought to navigation, overlaying maintenance logs against resource reports. The patterns emerged like stars resolving from distortion: systematic alterations stretching back eight months, each falsification carefully calibrated.
“He’s been rewriting history,” she said quietly.
The others gathered closer in the zero-g workspace, watching as she highlighted the discrepancies. Fuel consumption rates adjusted downward by two percent increments. Structural stress readings smoothed into gradual curves. Life support efficiency numbers optimistically inflated. Each change small enough to escape casual notice, together painting a fiction of manageable decline.
“Look at the timestamps.” Satomi traced the modification dates. “He altered March’s reports in April, February’s in March. Every month, he goes back and makes the previous month look better than it was.”
“Creating a false trajectory,” Naoki breathed. “Making catastrophic failure look like normal degradation.”
Reiko felt cold understanding settle in her chest. “He’s known the zone was collapsing since before we realized anything was wrong.”
Eight months of lies. Eight months while they could have been preparing, planning, escaping. Eight months of stolen choices.
Masaru spread his analysis across the shared screen, behavioral data points connecting into a damning pattern. “His paranoia operates on a six-hour cycle,” he explained, highlighting the physiological markers Reiko had collected. “Before each Fleet Command transmission window, his stress hormones spike. Heart rate variability drops. He becomes hypervigilant, checking systems obsessively.”
“And after?” Satomi asked.
“Complete crash. His cortisol levels plummet, reaction times slow by forty percent. He’s running on fumes.” Masaru’s scarred hands gestured through the floating data. “For approximately ninety minutes after each transmission, his judgment is severely compromised. He makes mistakes. Small ones, but consistent.”
Kazuhiro’s eyes narrowed. “We could create a false emergency. Something that requires immediate communication during his recovery period.”
“When he’s too exhausted to think clearly,” Reiko finished, understanding crystallizing. “When his defenses are down.”
Naoki’s fingers trembled as he decrypted the fragments, mathematical certainty coalescing into horror. Yori’s models ran through permutations of crew deaths (radiation exposure, life support failure, temporal zone collapse) each scenario calibrated for maximum narrative impact. In every simulation, Yori emerged alone, bearing witness to their sacrifice. The calculations were elegant, precise, monstrous. He’d been composing their epitaph while they still breathed.
Reiko’s hands stilled against the magnetic rail, evidence drifting in careful orbits around them. The pattern crystallized with surgical clarity: Yori’s timestamp manipulations weren’t scattered. They formed constellations around moments of crew questioning. When Satomi questioned fuel readings, messages arrived confirming adequacy. When Masaru noticed medical supply discrepancies, reports materialized explaining requisitions. He’d been conducting them like instruments, each note precisely timed, orchestrating their reality before they could perceive its dissonance.
The data streams converged in Naoki’s workspace like tributaries feeding a dark river. He’d spent three days cross-referencing timestamps, his military training in pattern recognition finding what his physicist’s mind wanted to deny. Each manipulation point bloomed on his display in amber, Satomi’s fuel inquiry on day forty-seven, Masaru’s supply audit on day sixty-three, his own questions about zone stability on day eighty-one. And orbiting each point like moons around planets: system failures.
Life support pressure drop, four hours after Satomi’s report. Medical bay temperature fluctuation, six hours after Masaru’s audit. Navigation array recalibration error, three hours after his own memo to command.
The correlation coefficient was point-nine-seven. In physics, that wasn’t coincidence. That was causation.
Naoki’s fingers trembled as he pulled the infrastructure logs, the ones only science officers could access. The station’s nervous system laid bare in cascading code. There. A manual override on environmental controls, timestamp matching the life support incident. Authorization code: Yori’s. And there: a diagnostic subroutine disabled on the medical systems, restored twelve hours later. Same authorization.
The pattern repeated seventeen times across three months. Seventeen manufactured crises, each one perfectly calibrated to overwhelm without catastrophe, to distract without destroying. Yori hadn’t just been hiding information. He’d been conducting psychological operations against his own crew, using the station itself as his instrument.
Naoki thought of his daughter’s messages, the ones that arrived with timestamps that never quite aligned with Yori’s explanations of communication lag. How many had been delayed deliberately? How many had never arrived at all?
His hand moved to the sealed photos in his pocket. The plastic crinkled under his fingers. A sound like breaking ice.
“He’s been weaponizing our home,” Naoki whispered to the empty workspace, his breath fogging in the recycled air. The mathematics were elegant, precise, and utterly damning. Yori had transformed their sanctuary into a prison where the walls themselves were complicit in their captivity.
The medical bay’s diagnostic terminal cast blue light across Reiko’s face as she overlaid psychological assessment data with incident reports. The pattern emerged like bone through torn skin, clean, sharp, undeniable.
Dr. Chen, the astrophysicist who’d questioned temporal readings: three equipment failures in her lab within two weeks. Lieutenant Okonkwo, who’d challenged communication protocols: his quarters experienced four environmental anomalies in a month. Even Masaru, with his quiet persistence about supply audits, had suffered a mysterious contamination alert in his medical storage that required Yori’s “expert intervention” to resolve.
Meanwhile, Technician Sato, who nodded at every briefing and never questioned orders, worked in perfect mechanical harmony. Engineer Park, who praised Yori’s communication management, hadn’t logged a single system malfunction in sixty days.
Reiko’s fingers moved through the data with surgical precision, isolating variables, confirming correlations. The coefficient was point-eight-nine. Not physics-certain like Naoki’s numbers, but damning in its own right.
Yori hadn’t just been controlling information. He’d been training them like laboratory animals. Punishing curiosity with chaos, rewarding compliance with stability. Pavlovian conditioning using the station itself as the bell.
The realization settled into her bones like radiation exposure. She pulled up Yori’s access logs, cross-referenced them with the psychological profiles she’d compiled during intake physicals. The crew members who’d scored highest on the Autonomous Thinking Index (Chen, Okonkwo, Masaru) had experienced system failures at a rate four times baseline. Those who’d rated high on Authority Acceptance, Sato, Park, Kimura, worked in environments of statistical perfection.
Yori had weaponized the station’s infrastructure. Every malfunction, every environmental glitch, every mysterious contamination alert was a precisely calibrated punishment. Compliance brought stability. Questions brought chaos.
He’d turned the Chrysanthemum into a Skinner box, and they were all rats pressing levers, learning which behaviors earned food and which earned shocks.
Her grandmother’s voice whispered through memory: The cruelest cage is the one that teaches you to build your own bars.
The schematics spread across Satomi’s screen like a neural map: not of the station, but of Yori’s paranoia made physical. Fiber-optic taps branched through every bulkhead, every junction box. He’d threaded surveillance through the Chrysanthemum’s skeleton during routine maintenance cycles, disguised as standard upgrades.
“He hears everything,” Satomi said quietly. “Every whispered conversation. Every private log entry we thought was encrypted.”
They’d never been alone. Not once.
Naoki’s fingers trembled as he projected the decrypted fragment. Clinical observations cataloging their stress responses, their coping mechanisms, their breaking points. Yori had manufactured the fuel shortage. Delayed critical messages. Created artificial crises to measure their psychological thresholds. The timestamp on his research proposal predated their mission by six months.
They weren’t researchers trapped by circumstance. They were specimens, selected and deployed into suffering with methodical precision.
Reiko watched Satomi’s steady hands arrange the data streams across the magnetic board, each gesture precise despite the gravity of what they revealed. The maintenance bay’s harsh work lights cast sharp shadows across fuel consumption graphs, transmission logs, power allocation charts: all the mundane infrastructure of their survival, now exposed as scaffolding for something darker.
“Three weeks,” Satomi said, her voice carrying the same controlled calm she used during emergency maneuvers. “The first unauthorized burst went out twenty-one days after we crossed the temporal threshold.”
Reiko’s medical training catalogued the physical signs around her: Masaru’s clenched jaw, the protective tension in his shoulders. Kazuhiro’s hands stilled on the tool he’d been absently turning, his usual warmth replaced by something harder. Naoki stood apart, his physicist’s mind already racing ahead through implications.
“Before the zone showed any instability?” Masaru asked.
“Months before.” Satomi tapped a timeline, her memorial tattoos visible as her sleeve shifted. “The first official anomaly readings came at week seven. But Yori’s transmissions started immediately. He was reporting on us from the beginning.”
The maintenance bay suddenly felt smaller. Reiko’s zero-g instincts catalogued exit vectors, medical supplies, distances to the med bay. Old reflexes from her grandmother’s teaching: Know your environment. Understand what can heal and what can harm.
“He knew what would happen to the zone,” Kazuhiro said quietly. “Or he knew what they would do to it.”
Reiko met his eyes across the cramped space. Saw her own realization reflected there: the manufactured crises, the carefully calibrated stresses. Yori hadn’t just been observing their responses to temporal displacement. He’d been documenting how humans broke under controlled conditions, measuring their fracture points with scientific precision.
They were data. Variables in an experiment that had been designed before they ever left normal space-time.
“Show me the power consumption again,” Reiko said, her voice steady despite the cold spreading through her chest. “If he’s been hiding reserves, I need to know what else he’s been hiding.”
Naoki’s fingers moved through the holographic data with the precision of someone solving an equation in four dimensions. The transmission vectors spiraled across his display, each encrypted burst a ghost signal riding the quantum foam of their official communications.
“Here.” His voice carried the flat certainty of mathematical proof. “Every unauthorized transmission piggybacks on Fleet Command protocols. Hidden in the temporal translation noise: you’d never see it unless you knew the exact frequency signature.”
He expanded the coordinate data, and Reiko felt her breath catch. The destination wasn’t Fleet Command. Wasn’t any military installation.
“Helix Temporal Dynamics,” Naoki said, his physicist’s mind already calculating implications faster than he could speak them. “Private consortium. They funded the initial zone studies.” His hands stilled on the display. “My military briefings flagged them eighteen months ago. They’ve been trying to weaponize time dilation effects.”
The maintenance bay’s recycled air suddenly tasted metallic. Reiko’s medical training catalogued shock responses in her crewmates: dilated pupils, arrested breathing, the body’s instinctive recoil from threat.
Yori wasn’t documenting their suffering.
He was selling it.
The medical database opened like a flower dissected, each layer revealing pathology. Reiko’s fingers traced vectors through the holographic display: cortisol spikes preceding each encrypted burst, the chemical signature of deliberate stress. His sleep architecture showed systematic destruction: REM suppression, circadian disruption, the patterns intelligence agencies used for conditioning operatives.
Then the pharmaceutical markers. Nootropics not in their formulary. Compounds designed to sharpen focus while burning through neural reserves, the kind of cognitive enhancement that left permanent damage in its wake.
“He’s been dosing himself,” she said quietly, her physician’s voice steady despite the implications flowering in her mind. “Months before we entered the zone. This isn’t paranoia or breakdown.”
Masaru leaned closer, his trauma-trained eyes recognizing what she was showing him.
“This is mission preparation.”
The false panels yielded to Kazuhiro’s practiced touch, revealing circuitry that shouldn’t exist. Secondary batteries, military-grade, their charge cycles meticulously staggered to avoid detection algorithms. He traced the power feeds with trembling fingers: micro-siphons from life support, environmental control, even medical systems. Each diversion calculated to fall below audit thresholds.
This wasn’t improvisation. This was infrastructure.
Someone had designed the Chrysanthemum with hidden capacity before they ever launched, before the crew was even selected. The station itself was complicit.
The revelation crystallized in Satomi’s mind as she overlaid transmission timestamps against temporal gradient measurements. Each encrypted burst coincided precisely with destabilization events. Not reactions, but correlations. Yori wasn’t reporting the collapse. He was documenting it. Feeding data to someone who wanted to watch a temporal anomaly fail in real-time, with human subjects inside to provide biological metrics.
They weren’t a research crew. They were experimental controls, measuring instruments calibrated in flesh and time.
Naoki’s hands trembled as he projected the engineering documentation into the shared holospace, the blue-white text floating between them like fragments of possibility. “Here,” he said, highlighting a subsection buried three levels deep in legacy protocols. “Maintenance Mode Override. The original Mitsubishi engineers built it in before the station was even deployed. A backdoor for emergency repairs when primary systems fail.”
Kazuhiro leaned forward, his mechanic’s eye parsing the technical specifications. “Twenty-three minutes,” he read aloud. “From airlock departure to biometric re-engagement.” He looked up, meeting each of their gazes. “That’s assuming everything goes perfectly. No delays, no complications.”
“His next EVA is scheduled in four days,” Satomi said, pulling up Yori’s maintenance roster. “Antenna array calibration. Standard procedure. He does it monthly. Takes him forty minutes minimum once he’s outside.”
“Seventeen minutes of margin,” Masaru observed quietly. “Not much room for error.”
Naoki’s fingers moved through the holographic interface, layering security protocols over the timeline. “The system will log the access, but not immediately. There’s a buffer period: designed to prevent false alarms during legitimate maintenance. If we’re in and out within the window, the log entry looks routine. But if we trigger any secondary alerts, if we access the wrong files or trip an encryption flag…” He didn’t need to finish.
“And if something goes wrong during his EVA?” Reiko’s voice was soft but sharp. “If his tether fails, if there’s a solar event, if he needs emergency extraction and we’re inside his system instead of monitoring his vitals?”
The silence stretched between them, heavy with the weight of decisions made in desperation. Through the viewport, the distorted stars bent light around their prison, marking time that moved differently for everyone they’d ever loved.
Reiko’s fingers gripped the edge of the medical bay’s examination table, her knuckles pale in the blue-tinged light. “We’re talking about invading his personal systems while he’s vulnerable in hard vacuum. If something goes wrong out there.”Every message he’s filtered, every report he’s altered. He’s violated our autonomy, our right to make informed decisions about our own lives.”
“That doesn’t justify. Satomi’s question cut through the ethical spiral like a blade through silk. She pulled up the resource discrepancies, the fuel calculations that didn’t match, the supply reports that told different stories depending on who was asking.”If Naoki’s right, if Yori is feeding our data to someone who’s studying our deaths, then we’re not debating privacy violations. We’re debating survival.”
The bonsai tree in its zero-g container rotated slowly in the corner, serene and indifferent to human moral calculus. Outside, the distorted stars kept their own twisted time.
Kazuhiro’s voice was steady despite the tremor in his hands. “I can stage a coolant leak in the conduit adjacent to the hub. Legitimate emergency. Requires constant monitoring from the engineering override panel.” He pulled up the schematic, highlighting the access point. “If he checks the logs later, it’ll show standard maintenance protocol. I’ll be right there, close enough to…”
He didn’t finish. They all understood what close enough meant.
Reiko watched his fingers trace the conduit path, those artist’s hands that built beauty from salvage now plotting deception. The maintenance emergency would be perfect cover, plausible, documented, unremarkable. Unless Yori saw through it.
“If he discovers what we’ve done,” Masaru said quietly, “we won’t just lose his trust. We’ll lose whatever holds us together out here.”
The unspoken truth settled over them like radiation: some fractures couldn’t be repaired.
Naoki’s fingers trembled over the keyboard, military encryption protocols flowing from muscle memory he’d hoped never to use against his own. Each line of code felt like betrayal, surgical, precise, designed to extract without trace. He’d trained for intelligence work on distant stations, theoretical enemies. Not this. Not Yori, who shared his tea, who understood the equations. The transformation from scientist to operative tasted like ash, settling somewhere beneath his sternum where his daughter’s photo pressed against his heart.
The plan crystallizes in whispered conferences across three shifts. Reiko will create a medical emergency requiring Yori’s immediate attention. Nothing suspicious, stress-induced arrhythmia perhaps, documented in his declining health metrics. Satomi calculates the precise timing: maintenance window opens, Yori suits up, airlock cycles. Eighteen minutes for Naoki to access the terminal, extract the files, cover their tracks. Masaru stands ready to physically intervene if necessary, though they all hope it won’t come to that.
Naoki arrives last, his physicist’s precision evident in how he anchors himself at the workspace’s edge, one hand gripping a handhold while the other manipulates a data tablet. The screen casts blue light across his tired features as he overlays communication protocols onto Kazuhiro’s schematics, showing the exact sequence of system handshakes during maintenance mode.
“The biometric override defaults to engineering credentials,” he explains, his voice carrying the careful neutrality of someone presenting dangerous data. “Secondary access was designed for catastrophic scenarios: if the primary communications officer is incapacitated during critical operations. It’s buried in legacy protocols from when these stations had larger crews.”
Reiko studies the overlapping diagrams, her medical training translating the technical specifications into vulnerabilities and risks. She sees how the pieces interlock: Yori’s isolation, his deteriorating health metrics she’s been documenting, the maintenance window’s predictable rhythm. The bonsai tree rotates slowly in its zero-g container beside her, a small point of living stillness amid their conspiracy.
“He’s been awake for thirty-six hours straight,” she says quietly, pulling up her medical logs on a separate screen. “Stimulant use is evident in his biometrics. When I called him for his mandatory health check yesterday, his hands were shaking. He’s running on neurochemistry and paranoia.”
Masaru drifts closer, his bulk somehow gentle in the zero-g space. “If he realizes what we’re doing. Satomi’s voice cuts through with pilot’s certainty.”Not if we execute precisely. Yori’s strength is information control. His weakness is that he’s forgotten how to trust his own crew’s competence in their domains.”
Kazuhiro’s fingers still on the schematics, hovering over the airlock sequence. “Seventy-two hours,” he murmurs. “We’ll need to rehearse every movement. No improvisation. No margin for error.”
The medical bay’s soft lighting seems to dim slightly, or perhaps it’s just the weight of what they’re planning settling over them like a physical presence.
Satomi’s fingers move across her pilot’s interface with practiced efficiency, pulling up maintenance logs that glow amber in the dim light. “Seventy-two hours,” she confirms, her voice carrying the absolute certainty of someone who has staked survival on precise calculations. “The realignment falls during station night cycle. Minimal power draw, skeleton automation protocols.”
She expands the trajectory data, showing Yori’s EVA path as a thin line extending from the airlock to the antenna array’s position on the station’s exterior hull. “Maximum distance from the hub: two hundred forty meters. Even with emergency recall, the tether retraction system takes fifteen minutes. Add decompression protocols, airlock cycling.”We’ll have eighteen minutes minimum before he could physically return.”
Reiko watches the numbers cascade across Satomi’s screen, translating them into windows of opportunity and risk. The pilot’s refugee background shows in how she’s accounted for every variable, every potential failure point. Nothing left to chance. No one left behind.
“Eighteen minutes,” Reiko repeats softly. “If nothing goes wrong.”
Naoki leans forward, his physicist’s intensity focused on a screen displaying decades-old engineering schematics. “The biometric locks weren’t always Yori’s modification,” he says, fingers tracing lines of code. “The original station design included failsafes: paranoia about single-point failures in deep space operations.”
He pulls up the maintenance protocol documentation, highlighting sections in amber. “When the communications array enters maintenance mode, all biometric restrictions default to secondary engineering access. It’s a legacy protocol from the military design specifications.” His voice carries both triumph and unease. “My Science Corps credentials should grant me entry the moment that system cycles.”
Kazuhiro shifts beside Reiko, understanding the implication. “He doesn’t know?”
“Sleep deprivation,” Naoki replies simply. “He’s forgotten the very architecture he’s been hiding behind.”
Reiko’s fingers tightened against the wall grip. “His condition worries me. Two weeks of monitoring. He’s running on stimulants and paranoia. If he senses something wrong during EVA, even through exhaustion…” She didn’t finish. Outside, mistakes meant vacuum.
Masaru’s voice came quietly from the corner. “A pre-EVA medical check. Standard protocol.” His scarred hands gestured with careful precision. “Certain supplements. Help him maintain focus on the external work. Keep his attention where it needs to be.”
Kazuhiro’s fingers emerged from a pocket with a data chip no larger than his thumbnail. “Fabricated from salvaged components,” he said, turning it to catch the light. “Nothing traceable to inventory.” His voice dropped. “We copy everything. One pass, complete. If he suspects access during EVA…” The mechanic’s jaw tightened. “He’ll burn the protocols. Change every lock. Maybe destroy what we need to understand why we’re really here.”
Kazuhiro would manufacture a false malfunction in the external array’s cooling system: something requiring physical inspection that couldn’t be diagnosed remotely, technical enough to be credible, urgent enough to demand immediate EVA. Naoki’s fingers traced the station’s outer hull on the hologram, highlighting the array’s position. Two hours minimum for suit-up, traverse, inspection, and return. Two hours when Yori would be physically isolated, his attention consumed by the delicate work of examining quantum entanglement nodes in hard vacuum.
During that window, they would move with surgical precision. Masaru would monitor Yori’s biometrics from the medical bay, watching for any sign of panic or medical distress that might cut the EVA short: heart rate, respiration, cortisol levels all tracked through the suit’s biomonitors. If Yori’s stress spiked, they’d need to abort immediately.
Reiko would access the medical database first, extracting the temporal physiology data Yori had been suppressing: the evidence of zone destabilization written in their own cellular degradation. Her fingers would know exactly where to look, which files to copy, how to cover the access logs.
Naoki himself would penetrate the communications archive, his military clearance codes still valid, his understanding of the encryption protocols thorough enough to navigate without triggering alerts. He’d copy everything: the contradictory orders from Fleet Command, the suppressed warnings about zone collapse, whatever truths Yori had been hoarding like oxygen in a failing life support system.
Satomi would maintain position at the pilot’s station, ready to execute emergency maneuvers if the zone’s behavior shifted unexpectedly, her hands steady on controls that could pull them back from temporal gradients that would tear the station apart. She’d also watch the approach vectors, ensure no unexpected visitors arrived during their narrow window of opportunity.
The hologram rotated slowly between them, each person’s role illuminated in sequence: a choreography of controlled betrayal, necessary and terrible.
The maintenance window’s predictability was both gift and trap. Naoki’s voice remained steady as he detailed the vulnerability they’d exploit: Yori’s exhaustion had created a pattern, forty-eight hours cycling like clockwork, two hours when he’d retreat to his quarters for something approaching sleep. The quantum array’s diagnostic protocols provided cover. Legitimate downtime that wouldn’t raise suspicion.
But they could only use it once.
Reiko’s fingers traced the timeline projection, her mind already subdividing those 120 minutes into surgical intervals. Twenty minutes for Kazuhiro to guide Yori through suit-up and airlock procedures. Fifteen for traverse to the external array. Sixty for the inspection itself if Yori worked methodically, less if he rushed, more if he found actual anomalies in the cooling system they’d fabricate. Twenty for return and decontamination.
Which left them perhaps ninety minutes of true access, maybe less. Ninety minutes to extract years of suppressed data, to copy communications that might explain why they’d been sent into this temporal prison, to find evidence of whatever truth Yori’s paranoia protected.
Ninety minutes to commit what might be mutiny, or might be salvation.
Reiko’s fingers stilled on the projection, her zero-g instincts reading the tension in how the others held themselves. The medical bay’s soft lighting cast shadows that made the timeline look like a surgical incision, precise and necessary and dangerous.
Ninety minutes. She’d performed complex procedures in less time, her hands steady while patients’ lives hung in the balance. But those surgeries had protocols, established procedures, the weight of training and tradition. This was different. This was five people choosing to trust each other with their careers, possibly their lives, based on nothing but shared suspicion and the evidence of Yori’s increasingly erratic behavior.
Her grandmother’s voice whispered through memory: In crisis, the body knows before the mind accepts.
Their bodies already knew. The question was whether they’d listen.
Kazuhiro shifts beside her, his mechanic’s hands unconsciously checking the tools in his pockets. The nervous gesture of someone who solves problems with his hands, now facing a problem that requires deception instead of repair. His eyes meet Reiko’s briefly, and she sees the same question reflected there: Are we really doing this?
The station’s life support hums its constant rhythm, marking seconds that mean hours outside their bubble.
Reiko watches each face absorb the implications. They’re choosing complicity over obedience, trading the comfortable fiction of trust for the dangerous clarity of truth. The medical bay’s soft lighting suddenly feels like an interrogation room, exposing them all.
Reiko receives her assignment with a physician’s clinical detachment that doesn’t quite mask the ethical vertigo beneath. Two years of medical school ethics seminars never covered breaking into a colleague’s files, but those same seminars also emphasized the primacy of patient welfare. And if Yori has been suppressing health data, every crew member’s life is at risk. She’ll need to access the medical database’s administrative layer, extract any quarantined reports or delayed diagnoses, cross-reference them against her own observations. Her fingers will know the commands even as her conscience protests the violation.
Naoki will handle the communications archive, his physicist’s mind already calculating decryption probabilities and file system architectures. He’s memorized Yori’s security patterns from months of observation. The way the communications officer cycles passwords based on classical Japanese poetry, the specific kanji combinations he favors. It’s a betrayal of friendship, or what passed for friendship in their compressed, time-dilated world. But Naoki thinks of his daughter’s messages, wonders which ones never reached him, and his resolve crystallizes into something harder than diamond.
Satomi’s role carries the weight of command responsibility she never wanted but accepted after Titan. She’ll position herself at the pilot’s station with the casual authority of routine checks, but her hands will rest near the emergency protocols: station lockdown, airlock override, even the desperate option of initiating an unscheduled position shift within the temporal zone. If Yori returns early and discovers them, she’ll have seconds to decide between containment and catastrophe. Her refugee instincts scream warnings about the cost of failed rebellions, but her pilot’s discipline keeps her voice steady as she confirms her position in Naoki’s timeline, adding only: “Two hours. Not a minute more.”
Masaru accepts his role with the quiet gravity of someone who has held too many dying hands. Monitoring Yori’s biometrics isn’t just tactical necessity: it’s the ethical line between intelligence gathering and something darker. He’ll station himself at the airlock medical console, tracking heart rate, respiration, cortisol levels through the EVA suit’s telemetry array. His scarred fingers will rest on the abort sequence, ready to terminate the operation at the first sign of crisis.
He’s seen what isolation does to the mind. The refugee camps taught him that paranoia isn’t always irrational, that sometimes the walls really are closing in. If Yori’s stress hormones spike beyond safe parameters, if his breathing patterns suggest panic, if the vast emptiness of the spacewalk triggers something catastrophic in a man already fraying at the edges. Even if it means losing their only window. Even if it means never knowing what Yori has hidden.
Some information isn’t worth a life. His grandmother’s voice, teaching him medicine in the camps: First, do no harm. Even to those who might have harmed others.
Reiko’s hands are already moving through the mental choreography of her task: muscle memory from a thousand zero-g procedures translating to this new operation. She knows exactly where Yori keeps the medical files because she’s the one who should have had access all along, her authority as medical officer systematically circumvented. Her fingers will navigate the workspace with surgical precision, extracting not just data but evidence of decisions made about her crew’s health without her knowledge or consent.
The violation burns deeper than simple protocol breach. Every suppressed report, every hidden symptom, every intercepted consultation request represents a patient she failed to fully treat because information was withheld. She’ll document everything methodically, clinically, even as anger sharpens her movements in the microgravity silence.
Naoki claims the communications archive. The most technically demanding extraction. His physicist’s mind already dissects the encryption layers, the quantum keys nested within temporal translation algorithms, the relativistic checksums that verify message integrity across time-dilated space. His fingers will move through mathematical structures like a surgeon through tissue, precise and unflinching. But he knows: if he finds his daughter’s messages suppressed, his wife’s transmissions altered, he’ll need to maintain clinical detachment long enough to copy everything before grief shatters his concentration and compromises them all.
Satomi takes her position at the pilot’s station, her weathered hands resting on controls she knows better than her own heartbeat. Through the external cameras, she’ll track Yori’s every movement along the hull: each magnetic boot-step, each tether clip, each pause to inspect the array. Her fingers hover near the attitude thrusters. One precisely miscalibrated burst could spin the station just enough to extend his EVA by critical minutes. Her survivor’s instinct recognizes this moment: the kind of calculated gamble where hesitation kills and decisiveness might save them all, or condemn them.
Reiko’s fingers curled against the edge of the medical bay’s console, her knuckles pale in the blue-tinted light. The words came slowly, each one weighted with the years of training that had taught her to first do no harm. “We’re violating everything we swore to uphold,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper in the zero-g silence. “His privacy. Fleet protocols. The trust between colleagues.” She turned to face them, her close-cropped hair catching the glow from the diagnostic screens. “If we’re wrong about this, we’ll have destroyed a man’s career, destroyed him, over suspicion and fear.”
The bonsai tree in its specialized container drifted slightly in its magnetic field, a small reminder of growth and patience. But Naoki’s expression held no patience, only the hard clarity of someone who’d made calculations and accepted their outcome. He pushed off from the wall with the precise economy of movement that marked his military training, floating to face her directly.
“If Yori’s hiding evidence of zone destabilization,” he said, each word clipped and deliberate, “every hour we wait increases the probability of catastrophic failure. I’ve run the numbers, Reiko. The temporal gradients, the fuel consumption, the structural stress patterns Kazuhiro’s been tracking.” His dark eyes held hers without flinching. “Sometimes duty means choosing between imperfect options when perfect ones don’t exist. That’s what command is. What medical triage is. You know this.”
The silence that followed pressed against them like the vacuum beyond the hull. Reiko felt the truth of his words even as everything in her training recoiled from the violation they were planning. Her grandmother’s voice echoed in memory, speaking of balance, of the space between healing and harm. But her grandmother had never been trapped in a collapsing bubble of time, forty light-years from home, with fifteen years already stolen from everyone she loved.
Kazuhiro’s hands stilled on the tool he’d been absently rotating, his usual warmth dimmed by uncertainty. “But what if we’re wrong?” The words came out rough, unpolished by his typical humor. “What if he’s just: what if Yori’s drowning under the weight of it all, paranoid and exhausted, and we’re about to shatter the only thing holding us together?” He looked at each of them in turn, his crooked smile nowhere in evidence. “Trust. We break into his files, we break that. Can’t repair it with spare parts and good intentions.”
Satomi’s response came sharp as a navigation correction, her weathered face hardening with memories none of them could fully share. “I watched Titan ignore the warning signs.” Her voice carried the weight of vacuum, of bodies frozen in corridors. “Everyone saw the structural reports. Everyone knew the corporation was cutting corners. But no one wanted to cause trouble, to question the people in charge, to risk the social cohesion.” Her fingers traced the memorial tattoos beneath her sleeve. “Cohesion doesn’t matter when you’re dead. I won’t make that mistake twice.”
Masaru’s broad shoulders hunched forward, his scarred hands clasping together in a gesture that looked almost like prayer. “Yori’s already fracturing.” His voice carried the careful gentleness he used with trauma patients. “Sleep deprivation, isolation, paranoia: sending him outside alone while we violate his space?” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve seen people break from less. The EVA itself could trigger complete psychological collapse.”
Reiko felt the weight of medical responsibility settle across her shoulders. “We need hard limits,” she said quietly. “Biometric thresholds. If his cortisol spikes above 800 nanomoles, if his heart rate sustains over 140, if I see any indication of acute stress response.”We abort. Immediately. Even if it means exposure.”
“Even if we don’t get what we came for,” Masaru added, his jaw set with determination.
Naoki’s fingers moved through holographic displays, sorting data streams by criticality. Fleet Command transmissions first: the contradictions Yori might be hiding. Then personal logs. Evidence of intent. Zone stability measurements last: they could extrapolate those from other sources if necessary. He built the matrix like a triage protocol, each file weighted by information density versus extraction time. “Thirty seconds per file,” he murmured, marking the sequence. “If we’re compromised, we prioritize truth over completeness.”
Reiko catalogs medical override phrases in her personal log, each entry timestamped and cross-referenced with routine crew health checks. Her fingers trace kanji characters across the interface. She practices the inflections until clinical concern masks tactical intent, her voice steady as a surgeon’s hand, each phrase weighted with the dual burden of healing and deception.
Kazuhiro’s workstation in the maintenance bay became a stage for calculated deception during the graveyard shift cycles when most crew slept in their rotating habitat pods. His fingers moved across the haptic interfaces with the practiced precision of a craftsman, introducing microscopic delays into servo response times, three milliseconds here, five there, that would accumulate into patterns suggesting mechanical degradation rather than electronic failure. The kind of problem that demanded eyes-on inspection rather than remote diagnostics.
He worked in layers, building the false narrative across multiple systems. First, the primary attitude control servos showed slight oscillation in their feedback loops. Then, secondary stabilizers began reporting temperature variations within normal range but trending upward. Finally, the external array mounting brackets registered vibration harmonics that could indicate structural fatigue. Each anomaly lived in the gray zone between operational and concerning, individually dismissible but collectively compelling.
The folk songs helped. Old melodies from the refugee camps, work songs meant to coordinate group labor. His humming provided rhythm for his hands while masking the slight tremor in his breath. He’d learned long ago that appearing relaxed was its own kind of camouflage. Between verses, he cross-referenced his simulated failures against actual maintenance logs from similar arrays, ensuring his fiction matched reality’s texture.
By the third night, he could reproduce the entire sequence without consulting his notes. His fingers knew the dance: which subsystem to nudge first, how long to wait before introducing the next symptom, exactly how much degradation would trigger Yori’s protocols without raising suspicion. He tested himself, eyes closed, hands moving through the routine while his mind walked through Yori’s likely responses: the initial remote diagnostics, the growing concern, the inevitable conclusion that someone would need to suit up and physically inspect the array.
The daruma doll he’d placed on his workbench watched with its single painted eye. When this was over, he’d fill in the second.
Reiko’s meditation hours dissolved into something closer to tactical preparation, her body floating in the medical bay’s gentle zero-g while her mind mapped hostile territory. The tablet’s blue glow illuminated her face as she traced pathways through archived file structures from stations she’d served on before, each system’s architecture revealing patterns in how administrators hid uncomfortable data.
Her fingers moved through practice sequences, muscle memory encoding the rhythm of nested directories and security protocols. Three taps to bypass standard medical encryption. Two-finger swipe to reveal timestamp modifications. Long press to expose deletion signatures that administrators thought they’d scrubbed clean. The movements became automatic, divorced from conscious thought, until her hands could navigate the structure while her mind focused on contingencies.
She cross-referenced Yori’s known behavioral patterns against common data suppression techniques. He favored misdirection over deletion. Files renamed with innocuous labels, buried in subsystem logs where no one would think to look. Between practice runs, she sipped cold green tea, the bitter taste anchoring her focus.
By the fourth night, she could execute the entire extraction sequence with her eyes closed, her fingers dancing through invisible interfaces, each keystroke precise as a surgical incision.
Naoki’s rest periods became exercises in precision, his quarters transformed into a mathematician’s war room. Recycled paper covered every magnetic surface: equations modeling data transfer rates through infrastructure that had aged fifteen subjective years, each calculation accounting for quantum encryption overhead, temporal compression artifacts, the degradation of memory buffers that had cycled millions of times. His pencil moved in steady strokes, deriving extraction windows measured in five-second margins.
Too fast and the quantum entanglement protocols would fragment the data streams, leaving gaps that would reveal tampering. Too slow and Yori’s EVA checklist would bring him back before they’d finished. The numbers had to be perfect.
He checked each variable three times, then a fourth, until the figures blurred into abstract patterns and he had to brew more tea to reset his focus.
Masaru positioned himself strategically during shared meals, his broad frame unthreatening in the galley’s confined space. He catalogued Yori’s baseline vitals through practiced observation: the flutter of pulse at the throat, respiratory rhythm during conversation, the fine tremor in fingers gripping chopsticks. Sleep deprivation showed in microexpressions. Delayed blinks, jaw tension. He memorized the physiological signature of Yori’s normal anxiety, building a profile precise enough to distinguish EVA stress from cardiac crisis, his gentle questions about the food masking clinical assessment.
Satomi runs piloting drills in the command module during gamma shift when the station is quietest, her hands flowing through emergency maneuvers without engaging the thrusters, rehearsing rapid attitude adjustments and evasive positioning. Muscle memory for scenarios she hopes never to use. Her fingers trace the control sequences that could pull Reiko clear if Yori returns early, that could seal bulkheads or initiate emergency undocking. Each sequence ends with her palms pressed together in brief prayer to ancestors who survived their own impossible situations, her memorial tattoos visible beneath rolled sleeves.
Reiko spends the afternoon in the medical bay organizing her approach, her movements economical in the zero-gravity environment as she floats between workstations. She pulls up the medical database architecture on her primary screen, tracing the pathways between public health records and the secured files where Yori’s intercepted communications would be stored. Her fingers hover over the access protocols, not touching, just memorizing the sequence she’ll need to execute flawlessly when the moment comes.
The cover story must be airtight. She drafts a memo about routine health database audits: standard procedure for long-duration missions, checking for data corruption in the time-dilated environment. The technical language flows easily; she’s written similar reports before. But this time each word carries weight, each justification a potential lifeline or noose depending on how events unfold.
She practices the access sequence three times using a sandboxed test environment, her long fingers dancing across the haptic interface with surgical precision. Fifteen seconds to authenticate. Twenty-three seconds to navigate to the secured partition. Eight seconds to initiate the copy protocol. Forty-six seconds total, plus however long the actual data transfer takes. She’ll need to monitor the progress while maintaining awareness of her surroundings, ready to abort if footsteps approach or if the communications hub shows unexpected activity.
In the small alcove beside her surgical theater, she pauses before the bonsai tree: a twisted pine her grandmother gave her before the mission, before Reiko understood what fifteen years external time would mean. She trims two needles with medical scissors, the familiar ritual steadying her hands and mind. The tree has grown perhaps a centimeter in three subjective months. Outside the time-dilated zone, it would be dead, replaced by younger trees in her grandmother’s garden.
If her grandmother still tends that garden. If her grandmother still lives.
Kazuhiro works in the maintenance shop during third shift, the space empty except for the soft hum of fabrication equipment and his own quiet humming of a folk song his mother taught him. He assembles the replacement servo with deliberate care, building in the flaw that will cause it to fail: not immediately, but after approximately forty-seven minutes of operation under load. The timing must be precise enough to seem like genuine mechanical failure rather than sabotage.
He tests the component three times in the simulation rig, adjusting the stress tolerances until the failure point sits exactly where he needs it. His hands move with the confidence of someone who understands materials at an intuitive level, who can feel the weakness he’s engineered into the crystalline structure. When he’s satisfied, he seals the servo in its protective casing and updates the maintenance log: “Replacement component fabricated for communications array positioning system. Ready for installation.”
The entry looks routine. Professional. Innocent.
He places the servo in the designated storage locker and cleans his workspace with meticulous attention, erasing any evidence of the careful sabotage hidden within functional engineering.
Reiko’s fingers hover over the medical database interface, the cursor blinking in the dim light of her quarters. She creates a new protocol document: “Quarterly Health Database Integrity Audits. The words appear professional, bureaucratic, necessary. She writes it as though such audits have always existed, inserting technical language about data corruption risks in time-dilated environments and the need for systematic verification of crew medical records.
Then comes the harder part: backdating. She fabricates entries for two previous audits, complete with timestamps and her digital signature. Her hands pause over the commit command. Once she enters these false records into the system, she crosses a line she’s never crossed before. The lie will justify her presence in the medical data systems tomorrow, but it will also make her complicit.
She thinks of the messages Yori has hidden, the truths he’s buried.
She commits the entries to the permanent record.
Masaru moves through the airlock bay with deliberate care, his broad hands checking seals and calibrations. He restocks the emergency revival kit with fresh epinephrine ampules, tests the defibrillator’s charge cycle twice, positions portable oxygen within immediate reach. His fingers program the medical alert system to monitor Yori’s suit telemetry: heart rate, respiration, core temperature. Every preparation could save a life. Every preparation enables their deception. His scarred knuckles pause against the cold metal, steadying himself against the weight of what protecting someone might require.
Satomi’s hands move across the pilot console in practiced silence, calculating thrust vectors and attitude adjustments. Her fingers trace firing sequences that could pivot the station, breaking line-of-sight between Yori and the external array within eight seconds. She rehearses the motion until it becomes reflex: a rescue protocol she prays remains theoretical even as she perfects its execution, her survivor’s instinct demanding readiness for the worst outcome.
Reiko’s fingers brush against the data chip containing the medical override codes, feeling its sharp edges through the thin fabric of her jumpsuit pocket. The weight of it seems disproportionate to its size: a few grams of crystalline storage holding access protocols she’d sworn to use only for life-threatening emergencies. She’d extracted them during her third week aboard, a precaution her grandmother would have called yobi no kokoro: the heart of preparation. Now that precaution transforms into premeditation.
She pulls the chip free and extends it toward Naoki, her hand steady through conscious effort. The physicist takes it with the careful reverence of someone handling unstable isotopes, his ink-stained fingers closing around it. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second. Long enough for her to see the calculations already running behind his gaze, the moral arithmetic of necessary transgression.
“Medical override alpha-seven-kiku,” she says, her voice carrying the clinical precision of a surgical instruction. “It bypasses the communications hub lockouts for thirty minutes before triggering audit protocols. Naoki, you’ll have that window to copy what you need.”
Naoki nods once, sharp and military. “Understood.”
“Kazuhiro.” She turns to the mechanic, who’s been unusually quiet, his usual warmth dimmed by the gravity of what they’re planning. “The malfunction needs to be convincing enough that Yori won’t question it, but simple enough that he can verify it’s real during EVA.”
“Antenna array three,” Kazuhiro confirms, his voice lacking its typical musical quality. “Alignment servo feedback loop. Classic cascade failure pattern. He’ll need to physically inspect the mounting brackets to confirm.”
Each confirmation lands like a stone in still water, ripples of commitment spreading through the group. They’re choosing collective truth over individual loyalty, choosing each other over the institutional trust that’s supposed to bind them. The silence that follows holds the weight of that choice, heavy, irrevocable, necessary.
Masaru’s hands move through the calibration sequence with practiced precision, but Reiko notices the tremor he’s trying to suppress: the slight hesitation before each adjustment. He checks the biometric monitoring equipment once, then again, then a third time, his scarred knuckles blanching white against the medical scanner’s grip. The remote sensors that will track Yori’s vitals during the EVA float in their magnetic cradle, small and fragile as promises about to be broken.
“Respiratory rate, heart rhythm, core temperature, suit pressure,” Masaru recites, his voice carrying the cadence of a prayer or a confession. “If anything spikes, if he shows distress,”
“We abort,” Reiko finishes, though they both know the calculus is more complicated than that. How much distress justifies stopping? How much risk is acceptable when weighed against what they might discover?
Their eyes meet across the zero-g space, and she sees her own fear reflected in his gentle gaze: the fear that they’re about to shatter something fragile and essential in their small community, something that can never be made whole again. That survival might require this particular betrayal, and they’ll have to live with that knowledge in the time-dilated years ahead.
Reiko’s fingers hover over the medical database, Yori’s psychological profile suspended in the holographic display like an autopsy of trust. Three months of session notes, stress indicators, sleep pattern disruptions: all the data points of a mind under siege. She traces the timeline backward, searching for the moment when concern became concealment, when protection twisted into control.
The station’s chronometer marks each second with crystalline precision: four hours until the maintenance window. Four hours until they cross a threshold that cannot be uncrossed.
She thinks of her grandmother’s teaching: that healing sometimes requires cutting, that the surgeon’s knife and the warrior’s blade serve different masters but share the same edge. Whether Yori’s deceptions were born of madness or mercy, they’ve metastasized into something that threatens them all. And yet, her hand trembles against the display, who among them hasn’t considered hiding truths too painful to bear? In this time-dilated prison, what separates the protector from the jailer?
Kazuhiro’s hands move through the maintenance shaft with practiced grace, each tool positioned where muscle memory can find it in the dark. He learned this precision in the camps: how to dismantle, how to rebuild, how sometimes the only honest repair begins with controlled destruction. His fingers trace the communication relay’s housing, and he breathes a prayer of apology to metal and circuitry before he introduces the carefully calculated flaw that will demand Yori’s attention, that will pull him outside into the void for two crucial hours while they excavate the truth he’s buried.
The duty roster’s chime reverberates through Reiko’s sternum like a temple bell marking the hour of decision. She floats before the medical bay viewport, her reflection a translucent ghost superimposed over the twisted starscape. Light bent by time’s gravity into impossible geometries. Her fingers rest against the cool glass. They’ve been living in fractured chronology since they entered this zone, she thinks, their present already the past to everyone they love. Perhaps Yori’s deceptions are merely another manifestation of temporal corruption, truth itself dilated beyond recognition. What they’re about to do will either restore them or shatter what remains, but neutrality is no longer possible.
The communications hub’s door slides open with a whisper that feels too loud in the artificial silence Reiko and Naoki have created by muting their comm units. They exchange no words: there’s nothing left to say that hasn’t already passed between them in weighted glances and careful planning. Reiko pushes off first, her zero-g instincts guiding her through the spoke corridor with fluid precision, one hand trailing along the guide rail more from habit than necessity.
The hub materializes before them like a confession made physical. Screens flicker in the dimness, casting blue-white shadows across walls papered with Yori’s handwritten notes, equations, timestamps, fragments of messages arranged in patterns only he understands. The daruma doll watches them with its single painted eye, a witness to secrets and lies.
Naoki moves to the main console while Reiko floats toward the message queue display, her medical training making her methodical even as dread coils in her stomach. The first suppressed transmission loads with agonizing slowness, temporal translation algorithms working backward through fifteen years of dilation.
PRIORITY ALPHA: EVACUATION ORDER. TEMPORAL ZONE COLLAPSE IMMINENT. EXTRACTION WINDOW: 87 DAYS EXTERNAL TIME.
The timestamp makes her breath catch. Three months ago, their time. Two and a half years ago, external. The window closed before they ever knew it existed.
“Reiko.” Naoki’s voice carries a quality she’s never heard before: not quite breaking, but fracturing at the edges. “There’s more.”
She pushes off toward him, her body moving through the space with dreamlike slowness while her mind races ahead. The screen he’s pulled up contains Fleet Command communications, but the header makes her hands go cold: MISSION CLASSIFICATION: EXPENDABLE RESEARCH ASSET.
The words blur as her eyes track down the document. One-way temporal insertion… acceptable losses… data recovery prioritized over personnel extraction…
They were never meant to come home.
Yori’s response crackles through the station-wide channel before Kazuhiro’s explanation finishes, his voice stripped of its usual measured control. Raw panic bleeding through the professional veneer. “Who authorized maintenance during my shift? Who touched my systems?” The questions tumble over each other, accusatory and desperate in equal measure.
Kazuhiro’s reply carries the perfect note of apologetic confusion, his words stumbling just enough to suggest incompetence rather than design. “I was running standard diagnostics on the cooling array when the readings spiked, I thought you’d want to know immediately,”
“You thought?” Yori’s laugh is sharp, brittle. “You don’t think about my systems, you don’t touch my systems. Through the open comm channel she can hear Yori’s breathing, quick and shallow, can picture him at his console surrounded by screens full of secrets, trying to calculate whether this is coincidence or conspiracy. The silence stretches. Then:”I’m going down there myself. Nobody else goes near that array.”
The communications hub falls silent as Yori cuts the channel. Through the station’s structural bones Reiko feels the vibration of his movement: the distinctive rhythm of someone pushing through spoke corridors with exhausted urgency. She tracks his progress mentally: past the hydroponic gardens, through the junction where cherry blossom decals peel from bulkheads, toward the maintenance airlock in the lower ring.
Satomi’s position near the observation deck isn’t accidental. If Yori’s paranoia surfaces, if he pauses to question, she’ll be there: practiced casualness masking readiness, her refugee’s instinct for survival lending credibility to the manufactured crisis. One more voice confirming the malfunction’s severity. One more push toward the choice they need him to make.
Reiko’s fingers find the wall grip, steadying herself against the weight of what they’re doing.
Masaru’s voice filters through her private medical channel, low and deliberate: “He’s sealed in the airlock. Running diagnostics on the cooling manifold.” Beneath the steady words, Reiko catches the tremor: the gentle man’s distaste for necessary deception.
She keys acknowledgment and releases the wall grip. Her body remembers zero-g navigation like breathing: push, glide, adjust. The central core blurs past: kanji labels, emergency lighting, the faint green glow from hydroponic sections. Naoki’s silhouette waits ahead, motionless in the shadows near the hub entrance, and she angles her trajectory toward him with practiced precision.
The door iris opens without resistance. They slip through together, Naoki’s shoulder brushing hers in the narrow threshold. The communications hub unfolds before them: a constellation of active screens, each one a window into suppressed truth. Reiko’s fingers find the wall grip while Naoki pulls himself to the main console, his physicist’s mind already parsing data streams, and she sees his face change: the small death of hope she’s witnessed too many times in her medical bay, but this time she shares it.
The screens multiply in Reiko’s vision. Not from temporal distortion but from the tears she refuses to let form in zero-g, where they’d become floating hazards. Naoki’s breathing has gone shallow beside her, that particular rhythm she recognizes from crew members processing trauma, and she wants to reach for him but her hands are already pulling up another message, and another, the archive unfolding like a medical chart documenting a terminal patient’s decline.
“He knew,” Naoki whispers, and his voice carries the physicist’s precision even now. “Look at the timestamps. He knew before we celebrated New Year’s. Before Satomi’s birthday. Before,” His fingers stop moving. On the secondary screen, a personal message queue labeled MATSUDA_PRIVATE, and Reiko shouldn’t look but she does.
Messages from Yori’s sister. His mother. A woman named Akemi who signs each transmission “waiting for you.” The dates march forward in the external timeline (years compressing into weeks of their subjective experience) and the tone shifts from hopeful to worried to grief-stricken to absent. The last message is four years old outside, three weeks ago inside. The funeral was beautiful. She would have wanted you to know.
Reiko’s medical objectivity fractures. She sees Yori not as the antagonist who deceived them but as a patient presenting with acute psychological trauma, a man who chose to carry everyone’s grief alone rather than distribute the weight. The stimulant packets aren’t evidence of paranoia but of someone trying to stay awake enough to protect his crew from truth, even as truth devoured him from within.
“There’s more,” Naoki says, and she hears in his voice that whatever comes next will be worse, that they haven’t reached the bottom of this yet, that Yori’s betrayal might actually be something more complicated than malice: might be the desperate mathematics of a man trying to solve an impossible equation where every variable equals loss.
The evacuation order fills screen three with bureaucratic precision, “immediate extraction authorized, temporal zone collapse imminent, retrieve all personnel”, and Reiko’s medical training forces her to read it three times, the way she’d verify a fatal diagnosis, because the date stamp says ninety-two days ago their subjective time. Her fingers know the conversion before her conscious mind accepts it: fifteen years external. Fifteen years since Fleet Command issued the order. Fifteen years since they became ghosts.
Yori’s annotations crowd the margins like fever dreams, mathematical proofs scrawled in increasingly erratic handwriting. He’d been trying to disprove the collapse timeline, recalculating zone stability with desperate optimism, each equation a prayer that he hadn’t condemned them. Reiko sees the progression of his denial documented in caffeine-stained notes: Command’s data must be wrong. The gradient readings don’t match. We have time. We have time. We have time.
Her hands shake against the console, and in zero-g the tremor travels through her whole body. She thinks of Yori in the airlock, checking Kazuhiro’s false malfunction, still trying to protect them even now.
Naoki’s fingers move with military precision across the interface, pulling up mission files buried under layers of encryption. Each declassified document loads like a physical blow. The Chrysanthemum Station was designated “Expendable Research Asset” from the beginning. Their life support systems were deliberately under-spec’d. The temporal zone’s instability wasn’t an unexpected development: it was the experiment’s core variable.
Reiko reads over his shoulder, her medical training translating bureaucratic language into human cost. They were lab animals. Every symptom she’d documented, every psychological assessment, every desperate adaptation to their isolation: all of it feeding data streams to researchers who would never experience a single dilated second themselves.
“They wanted to see how we’d break,” Naoki says, his voice stripped of emotion. “How long consciousness remains stable under extreme temporal displacement.”
He’s already copying files, his physicist’s mind recognizing weaponization potential in the theoretical models. The zone could trap enemy fleets in temporal amber, aging them into obsolescence while minutes passed outside.
Reiko’s fingers tremble as she opens the subfolder, and the first message, Masaru’s sister’s careful calligraphy announcing their mother’s peaceful passing two years ago, hits like decompression. Kazuhiro’s brother grinning in wedding photos from a celebration that happened while they calibrated instruments. Satomi’s name in a survivor registry from someone she’d mourned. Each suppressed transmission pulses on the screen, Yori’s annotations reading “psychological contraindication” and “crew stability priority,” mercy calcifying into betrayal through time’s relentless mathematics.
The research files load last and Naoki’s breathing stops: equations cascading across screens showing quantum resonance feedback loops, temporal field destabilization coefficients, measurement artifacts that weren’t artifacts at all. His hand finds the edge of the console, knuckles white. “He knew,” Naoki whispers, voice breaking on physics and betrayal. “His experiments created the collapse. We’re not observers trapped by accident: we’re consequences.” The daruma doll’s single eye watches, its wish for scientific breakthrough transformed into their collective tomb.
Reiko’s hands move across the interface with surgical precision, each keystroke deliberate despite the tremor she can’t quite suppress. The communications hub presses in around her: too warm, too bright, the screens casting shadows that flicker like accusations. Behind her, Naoki’s breathing is shallow and controlled as he monitors the tracking display, watching Yori’s icon pulse through the maintenance shaft’s schematic with agonizing slowness.
“He’s stopped moving,” Naoki murmurs, and there’s something brittle in his voice. “Section C-7. That’s… that’s past where the malfunction should be.”
Reiko’s fingers don’t pause. The download progress bar crawls forward, eighteen percent, nineteen, and she forces herself not to think about what they’re stealing, what trust they’re breaking. The medical officer in her recognizes the symptoms: the paranoia, the isolation, the desperate control. Yori is sick. But the woman who’s lost fifteen years while her grandmother aged into death knows that sickness doesn’t excuse what he’s done.
“Keep watching him,” she says quietly. Her voice sounds strange in the confined space, competing with the hum of quantum processors and the soft ping of incoming transmissions that no one will answer. “If he starts back, we need at least two minutes’ warning.”
The screens flicker with fragments of suppressed data. Twenty-three percent. Twenty-four. She navigates deeper into Yori’s file structure, past the official logs into personal directories labeled with dates and cryptic notations. Her training taught her to read patient files with clinical detachment, but this feels different. Invasive. Necessary.
“Reiko.” Naoki’s tone has shifted, urgent but quiet. “He’s moving again. Faster now. We have maybe five minutes.”
Her hands fly faster, copying entire directories without examining them. They’ll sort through the evidence later. Right now they need everything. The truth, the lies, the justifications. All of it.
Thirty-seven percent. The station’s ventilation system sighs around them like a living thing holding its breath.
The personal messages load first: a cascade of undelivered transmissions that hits Reiko like decompression. Her breath catches, held suspended in the recycled air of the hub. Birthday greetings for children who’ve grown into teenagers in the blink of an eye. Anniversary messages from spouses whose faces have aged a decade while their partners remained unchanged. A funeral notice for Satomi’s sister, marked in Yori’s precise handwriting: “delayed indefinitely.”
The timestamps blur as her vision swims. Three weeks subjective time. Fifteen years external. A daughter’s first day of school, her graduation, her wedding: all compressed into the space between medical shifts. She watches the numbers scroll past, each one a small death, a moment stolen and locked away in Yori’s desperate attempt to protect them from a truth he couldn’t bear to share.
The cruelty of it lodges in her throat like a physical thing. He thought he was being merciful. He thought ignorance would hurt less than knowledge. But he was wrong. The medical officer in her knows that infected wounds must be opened, that healing requires truth even when truth is agony.
Naoki’s hands tremble as he navigates through encrypted directories, his physicist’s mind cataloging evidence while his heart rebels against its implications. The evacuation orders materialize on screen: three months ago subjective, fifteen years external. “Suppressed per Watanabe Protocol”. A designation that doesn’t exist in any official Fleet manual. Incident reports scroll past, each one documenting temporal zone degradation that should have triggered immediate extraction.
Then the assessment file: “Acceptable Loss Scenario.”
Four words that reduce their lives to mathematical abstractions. Reiko leans closer, her medical training automatically parsing the cold language of institutional triage. Resource allocation matrices. Risk-benefit analyses. Probability curves for zone collapse versus data extraction value. The document treats human lives like variables in an equation, coefficients to be balanced against scientific gain.
Her stomach turns. They were never meant to come home.
The mission briefings crystallize their expendability. Reiko’s hands shake as she reads selection criteria designed to choose the forgettable. Her own file: “orphaned, no children, strong duty orientation”: qualities that made her disposable. Kazuhiro’s notation: “refugee status, limited family connections.” Masaru, Satomi, all of them catalogued by their isolation. They weren’t chosen for their skills alone, but for how little their absence would matter. Selected not to return.
The research files load last and Naoki goes absolutely still beside her, his physicist’s mind processing what Reiko can barely comprehend: equations showing how Yori’s quantum resonance experiments created feedback loops that destabilized the temporal field, how his breakthrough measurements were simultaneously their death sentence, how he’s known for months that his own brilliance trapped them here; the daruma doll watches from the console with its single filled eye, a wish for success that became a monument to catastrophic failure.
Yori’s personal logs begin where the official files end, and his voice (captured in text with timestamps that chart his descent) transforms bureaucratic evil into human tragedy. The first entries are clinical, a scientist documenting anomalies: “Quantum resonance at 2.[^7] sigma above predicted values. Recommend investigation.” Then concern: “Feedback patterns suggest my measurement protocols may be amplifying field instabilities. Requesting consultation with Dr. Chen.” Then desperation: “Chen’s response won’t arrive for three years external time. The zone won’t last that long. My God, what have I done?”
Reiko’s hands tremble as she scrolls, watching Yori’s careful handwriting deteriorate across scanned pages he’d written when the screens became too much. He’d calculated it all. How his breakthrough in quantum temporal measurement, the very work that was supposed to make his career, had instead created cascading destabilization. How each data packet they transmitted back to Fleet Command fed the resonance that was killing them. How stopping the research might save them but would render their sacrifice meaningless.
“He tried everything,” Naoki whispers, his voice cracking. “Look: he modeled seventeen different solutions. Recalibrated the instruments. Even proposed destroying his own research.” His finger hovers over an entry dated two months ago: “Fleet Command response received. They know. They’ve always known. The data is too valuable. We are too expensive. They’re going to let us collapse with the zone and call us heroes afterward.”
The final entries are barely coherent. Apologies to each crew member by name, prayers in kanji that run together like tears, calculations that spiral into the margins as if mathematics could solve moral catastrophe. The last line, written three days ago: “Better they hate me for small lies than know the truth. Better I carry this alone. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
The mission parameters scroll past in bureaucratic language that makes atrocity sound reasonable: temporal zone scientific value exceeds crew recovery costs, time dilation renders extraction “economically nonviable,” data transmission alone justifies the expenditure of resources. Human resources, the document specifies, as if the euphemism makes it cleaner. Reiko’s medical training has taught her to recognize clinical detachment, the careful distance institutions maintain from individual suffering, but seeing herself reduced to a line item in someone’s cost-benefit analysis makes her stomach turn even in zero-g.
She finds the crew selection criteria buried in an appendix. Refugee backgrounds. Minimal Earth-side family connections. Psychological profiles indicating “high resilience to isolation and loss.” They were chosen to be expendable. Chosen because fewer people would mourn them. Chosen because their deaths would generate smaller compensation claims.
“They picked us to die,” she says, her voice hollow in the recycled air.
Naoki’s reflection in the screen shows his face collapsing. “My wife. My daughter. They knew I’d never see them again. They knew when they sent me here.”
Yori’s personal logs begin three weeks into their deployment, the characters shifting from precise technical notation to increasingly erratic scrawl. Initial shock, Fleet Command confirms: no extraction protocol exists, gives way to pages dense with crossed-out temporal mathematics, desperate calculations for impossible escape trajectories. His voice in the text transforms from analytical distance to raw anguish: How do I tell them? How do I not?
Reiko watches his rationalization form across months of entries, each one a layer of scar tissue over hemorrhaging guilt. He convinced himself that hope, even false hope, served a medical purpose: that crew psychological stability required the lie. That he could carry this knowledge alone, a weight distributed across no one else’s shoulders. Better one person drowning than five.
The screen blurs as Reiko’s vision swims. One entry stops her cold: Tanaka asked today about temporal sickness protocols. I told her the standard lies. She trusts me. They all trust me. I’ve become the thing I despised: someone who hoards truth like rations, deciding who deserves to know they’re dying. The timestamp shows he wrote it the same night he’d smiled at her across the common area, sharing tea.
The calculations cascade across multiple screens (BETA through EPSILON) each more audacious than the last: quantum entanglement reversal, temporal momentum transfer, a final option labeled simply “MIRROR FIELD” that would require channeling the station’s entire power grid through the communication array itself. Reiko traces the evolution of his thinking, watches desperation transmute into innovation, sees how isolation paradoxically sharpened his focus even as it destroyed his ability to share what he’d discovered.
Reiko’s fingers hover over a file cluster marked “TEMPORAL RESONANCE CASCADE”. The notation is dense, mathematical poetry written in the language of quantum mechanics and desperation. She expands the primary document and finds herself looking at something that makes her medical training and her physicist’s intuition align in sudden recognition: Yori hasn’t just been calculating escape vectors, he’s been mapping the zone’s collapse at a cellular level, understanding how the temporal distortion affects biological systems in ways their official research never approached.
“Look at this,” she murmurs, pulling up a sub-file that shows protein folding models under varying time-dilation stress. The implications crystallize: he’s been trying to predict how their bodies will respond if they attempt to transit the temporal gradient too quickly. It’s medical research disguised as physics, or perhaps physics research that became medical out of necessity. The care embedded in these calculations speaks to something she hadn’t expected: Yori’s paranoia wasn’t just self-preservation, it was a twisted form of protection.
Naoki leans closer, his breath catching as he recognizes the elegance of the underlying mathematics. “These correction factors. He’s accounting for quantum decoherence in biological neural networks. That’s…” He trails off, pulling up another screen where Yori’s notes become almost frantic, handwritten annotations scrawled across digital margins. If consciousness is quantum-entangled across temporal states, forced transition could fragment identity itself. Must find gentler gradient. Must keep them whole.
The words hit Reiko like a physical blow. All this time, while they’d feared Yori’s deceptions, he’d been working to ensure that whatever escape they attempted wouldn’t destroy the very essence of who they were. The isolation hadn’t just driven him to brilliance: it had focused every fragment of his fracturing mind on a single, terrible responsibility: saving them from fates worse than being trapped.
“He’s been running full-scale simulations,” Naoki breathes, his fingers dancing across the interface with the precision of his military training. The computational logs unfold like an archaeological record of obsession: thousands upon thousands of processing hours, each variable tested through iterations that would break most researchers’ patience. Failure modes analyzed with a scientist’s ruthless honesty, documented so thoroughly that anyone following could learn from every dead end.
Reiko watches the timestamps scroll past, and the pattern of Yori’s deterioration emerges like a medical chart she’s reading in reverse. The gaps between calculation sets tell their own story: work sessions that stretched from hours to days as sleep became first difficult, then impossible. She sees the moment three weeks ago when he stopped logging rest periods entirely.
But the quality of the science never wavers. If anything, it sharpens as his mind frays, achieving a terrible clarity that only comes when someone has burned away everything except purpose. Each simulation builds on the last with methodical brilliance, even as the man behind them was clearly falling apart.
Naoki’s breath catches as CONTINGENCY DELTA resolves on screen. Synchronized quantum field manipulation using their own communication array as a resonance generator, elegant in its audacity. His military mind dissects it instantly: resource requirements, failure modes, probability matrices cascading through his consciousness with practiced speed. The mathematics are sound, brilliant even, threading through variables that would take most physicists weeks to map.
“This one.” His voice emerges rough, compressed by the weight of sudden possibility. “This could stabilize our position long enough for controlled extraction.” His fingers move without conscious thought, copying files while his brain continues calculating. “Maybe compress the time differential by a factor of three.”
Reiko watches his hands shake, sees the physicist and the desperate father converging in this moment. Holding salvation written by the man they’ve been hunting like prey.
The medical files open like an autopsy of consciousness. Reiko’s trained eye tracks the decline: cortisol levels climbing, REM sleep fragmenting, prefrontal activity showing classic paranoid patterns. But beneath the pathology, she sees the discipline: timestamps precise, observations clinical, each notation a scientist’s refusal to surrender objectivity even as his mind betrayed him. He’d been simultaneously victim and witness, documenting his own unraveling with the same rigor he’d applied to saving them all.
The words blur as Reiko reads, her fingers trembling against the screen. Naoki’s hand finds her shoulder, steadying, grounding, and she feels the weight transfer between them, the way understanding can be both burden and relief. “He was trying to earn our survival,” she breathes, and the medical officer in her recognizes the psychology: a man constructing his own redemption one calculation at a time, hoping mathematics could absolve what conscience condemned.
The message sits on the screen like an autopsy report on honor itself. Reiko reads it twice, her zero-g trained fingers gripping the console edge as though gravity might suddenly reassert itself and pull her down. The formal Japanese is beautiful in its precision. Each kanji a small act of discipline, the kind of careful construction that takes hours when your hands shake from exhaustion and guilt. She can picture Yori drafting it in the isolation of this hub, the characters appearing one by one on the screen while outside the distorted stars marked time passing at sixty times the rate his heart beat.
“Look at the metadata,” Naoki whispers, leaning closer. His breath fogs slightly in the cool air of the communications hub. “He’s revised this forty-seven times. Forty-seven drafts of his own condemnation.”
Reiko scrolls through the version history and sees it: the evolution of a confession. The early drafts are defensive, technical, full of justifications about incomplete data and acceptable risk parameters. By version twenty, the tone shifts. Acknowledgment creeping in like a slow hemorrhage. The final versions strip away everything but bare accountability. The last revision, timestamped three hours ago, adds only one line: Please tell them I tried to fix it.
“He’s been writing his own eulogy,” she says, and the medical officer in her catalogs the psychology: a man performing triage on his own soul, trying to save what matters by amputating what doesn’t. The formal language is a tourniquet, the precise characters a way to control bleeding that can’t be stopped. She’s seen patients do this: construct elaborate frameworks of meaning around their dying, as though the right words could negotiate with oblivion.
The timestamp blinks. Three hours ago. Which means Yori is still writing his ending, still hoping the syntax of sacrifice might parse into redemption.
“He was going to sacrifice himself,” Naoki says, and his voice fractures on the verb tense, was, not is, as though Yori’s intention exists only in past conditional, a future that won’t arrive. His fingers scroll through attached files with the frantic precision of someone defusing a bomb in the final seconds. Personal logs cascade across the screen: timestamps marking sleepless nights, calculation sets running into dawn, the mathematical language of a man trying to prove his way back to innocence.
Reiko leans closer, reading over his shoulder. The logs document Yori’s slow horror. The moment he recognized his own research parameters in the zone’s decay signature, the night he understood that his published work on temporal field compression had given Fleet Command the theoretical framework they needed to create this trap. Three months of desperate synthesis follow: attempting to engineer salvation from the same principles that engineered their doom.
The message crystallizes into focus. Not confession of malice but autopsy of good intentions. A man who discovered he’d administered poison and spent ninety days trying to synthesize the antidote before admitting the needle had been in his own hand.
Naoki’s fingers blur across the interface with surgical urgency, downloading Yori’s stabilization solution. Dense pages of quantum field equations and temporal manipulation protocols that carry the desperate elegance of someone trying to unmake their own catastrophe. The file transfer bar crawls forward with agonizing patience. Reiko watches the percentage climb and feels their assumption reshaping in real time, the narrative of betrayal collapsing into something far more complex: a man who chose to carry every suppressed message as personal weight rather than distribute the burden among people he was still trying to save. Not villain but martyr. Not enemy but Atlas, shoulders breaking under a sky he believed only he could hold. The download reaches seventy-nine percent. Eighty. Eighty-one.
The download bar stalls at eighty-three percent and Naoki hisses something in technical Japanese that sounds like prayer. Reiko’s medical training kicks in: triage the crisis, prioritize survival. She moves to the door, positioning herself to intercept or explain or simply witness whatever comes next. The tracking display updates again. Sixty seconds. Maybe less. Her hand finds the doorframe, steadying herself in zero-g while her mind catalogs the evidence surrounding them. Years of suppressed truth now exposed.
“Faster,” Reiko urges, but she’s already moving: medical officer’s instinct to intercept the crisis. Her fingers grip the doorframe, anchoring herself in zero-g as footsteps echo closer. The download bar crawls: ninety-one percent. She catalogs desperate explanations, we were worried, we wanted to help, but they crumble against the weight of Yori’s unsent confession still glowing on the screen behind her. His silhouette appears in the corridor, wire-rimmed glasses catching the light. His expression cycles through confusion, comprehension, then something unexpected: relief so profound it looks like breaking.
Reiko watches Yori’s face as the accusation lands: watches the way his eyes close behind those wire-rimmed glasses, the way his throat works as he swallows. In gravity, he might have collapsed. In zero-g, he simply curls inward, knees drawing toward his chest in an involuntary fetal position that speaks of absolute defeat.
“The collapse predictions,” Yori says finally, and his voice is barely audible over the hum of the quantum arrays. “They’re not hidden. They’re… evolving. Changing every time I run the calculations.” His hands move in small, helpless gestures. “I’ve been trying to find a pattern, something I could present as a solution instead of just,” He breaks off, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Instead of just admitting I broke everything.”
Reiko’s medical training catalogs the signs automatically: sleep deprivation, malnutrition, the tremor in his fingers that suggests stimulant abuse. How long has he been like this? How did she miss it?
“Your research,” she says, keeping her voice level, clinical. “The temporal resonance experiments. That’s what destabilized the zone.”
It’s not a question, but Yori nods anyway, the movement jerky and mechanical. “I thought.”The mathematics were elegant. Perfect. I thought I could create stable pockets within the dilation field, places where the time differential would be less severe. Where we could…” He laughs, a bitter sound that has no place in the careful silence of the communications hub. “Where we could age slower. Where Naoki’s daughter might still recognize him when we get out.”
“If we get out,” Naoki says, and the download bar reaches ninety-seven percent.
Naoki’s fingers never stop moving across the interface even as he meets Yori’s gaze, the download bar at ninety-four percent, and his voice cuts through the tension with scientific precision: “Enough to know you’ve been rewriting Fleet Command’s transmissions.” He pulls up a screen with trembling hands, displays it in the space between them. Timestamps that don’t align, encryption signatures that have been stripped and replaced. “Enough to see the collapse predictions you’ve hidden in subdirectories labeled ‘calibration data.’” Another gesture, and probability curves bloom across multiple displays, each one showing the zone’s stability degrading faster than the official reports claim. “Enough to understand you’ve been lying to us for months while our families age and die outside this bubble.”
Reiko watches the data float in the air between them. Sees fifteen years of external time compressed into their three subjective months, sees the exponential decay curves that predict total collapse, sees the messages marked CREW EXPENDABLE in Fleet Command’s cold bureaucratic language. Her grandmother would be ninety-three now. Might already be gone.
His confession spills out in fragments, each word stripped of the careful control he’s maintained for months. “The quantum resonance patterns in my dissertation, I thought they were theoretical, just mathematics,” He steadies himself against a handhold, knuckles white. “But Command built them. Used them to create this zone. And when they activated it, when the dilation effects proved stable.”They needed to know what happened to people trapped inside. Long-term biological data. Psychological breaking points.” The daruma doll rotates slowly past his shoulder, its single painted eye watching. “I gave them the weapon. They gave us the cage.”
Reiko’s medical training catalogs his deterioration with clinical precision. The fine tremor in his fingers suggesting chronic sleep deprivation, the capillary dilation around his eyes indicating weeks of screen exposure, the way his movements lack the fluid economy of adapted zero-g reflexes: and she understands with devastating clarity that he hasn’t been guarding communications out of paranoia but out of something far more human: the desperate mathematician’s hope that one more equation, one more sleepless night, might yield the solution that would redeem him before his crime was discovered.
Reiko watches Yori’s face collapse, the careful architecture of rationalization crumbling into something raw and undefended. “I didn’t know,” he says, but his voice carries no conviction, only the hollow echo of a lie he’s told himself so many times it’s worn transparent. “Not at first. Not until we were already,” His hand gestures vaguely at the viewport, at the twisted starfield that marks their prison. “By then, leaving meant admitting,”
Reiko feels the medical officer in her cataloging symptoms even as the human part recoils. The way Yori’s pupils dilate, the tremor in his fingers as they grip the console, the shallow rapidity of his breathing. She’s seen this presentation before: acute psychological decompensation, the moment when denial can no longer hold back reality. But there’s something else beneath it, something that makes her push off from the wall and drift closer despite every instinct screaming to maintain distance.
“How long?” Her voice cuts through the confined space with surgical precision. “How long have you known the zone was collapsing?”
The question lands like a physical blow. Yori’s head snaps toward her, and for a moment she sees past the paranoia and exhaustion to something worse. Shame so profound it’s become a kind of gravity well, pulling everything else into its orbit. His mouth works soundlessly before words emerge, each one dragged up from some deep place: “Eight months. Subjective.”
Eight months. Forty years outside. The mathematics of it spreads through her consciousness like ice crystallizing in vacuum. Eight months of watching them go about their routines, of treating their temporal displacement sickness, of listening to Naoki’s desperate calculations to find a way home. Eight months of Yori knowing they were trapped in a collapsing anomaly of his own creation while he played god with their communications, their hope, their truth.
“The medical data,” she says, and it’s not a question. “The physiological readings I’ve been sending to Fleet Medical for analysis. You’ve been suppressing those too.”
His silence is confirmation enough. Reiko’s hands curl into fists, her body instinctively seeking the grounding pressure that doesn’t exist in zero-g. Every report, every careful observation about how temporal displacement affects human biology, every plea for guidance on treatments that don’t exist in any database: all of it screaming into a void he’d created.
The words hit Yori like decompression, and something in him finally ruptures. He releases the console and drifts backward, hands coming up not in defense but in a gesture of terrible offering, as if presenting evidence of his own culpability. “The field equations,” he whispers, and his voice has lost all its defensive edge, become something raw and broken. “I thought if I could just”
But he stops, really hearing what he’s saying, and a sound escapes him that might be a laugh or a sob. His glasses have drifted slightly askew, and he doesn’t correct them. “God. Listen to me. Still talking about the elegance of the math.” His gaze finds each of them in turn (Reiko, Naoki, Kazuhiro) and there’s a nakedness in it that’s almost unbearable to witness. “You’re right. All of it. The suppressed extraction orders, the medical data I buried, the timeline projections I altered. Fifteen years I bought with lies, thinking each month I’d find the solution, prove the zone could be stabilized, force them to acknowledge we weren’t just. The word hangs unspoken: expendable.
Kazuhiro pushes off from the wall with deliberate slowness, the movement carrying him across the hub until he’s close enough that Yori can’t look away. His voice, usually warm with folk songs and easy humor, comes out flat and certain: the tone of someone reading an inventory of losses already tallied. “They were never going to extract us, were they?” Each word lands with the weight of old knowledge. “We’re not researchers. We’re data points.” His scarred hands spread in a gesture encompassing them all. “How long can humans survive in a weaponized temporal field? How does the biology break down? What are the failure modes?” The gentleness that usually softens his refugee’s wariness has evaporated, leaving only the hard-edged recognition of someone who has been classified as acceptable loss before and knows exactly how it tastes.
Reiko watches Yori fracture in the way bodies break under pressure: not all at once but system by system, each revelation a cascade failure. His hands grip the console edge, knuckles bloodless, and she recognizes the physiology of complete exhaustion: the tremor, the dilated pupils, the shallow breathing of someone who hasn’t truly rested in months. The daruma doll stares with its single eye while Yori confesses to promises made in solitude, and she understands with clinical clarity that she’s witnessing not just guilt but the specific derangement of isolation, the way the mind rewrites reality when there’s no one to check its calculations.
The alarm’s shriek fractures the moment. Not the steady pulse of routine malfunction but the cascading wail that means structural integrity breach, temporal gradient collapse, the mathematics of their prison rewriting itself. Yori’s face drains to ash. His lips move, calculating, and Reiko sees him arrive at an answer that makes his hands go still. “Three hours,” he whispers. “Maybe four. The communication spike destabilized the gradient field.”
Reiko’s medical assessment overrides her anger with the automatic precision of years of training. She catalogs the physical evidence with clinical detachment even as her chest tightens with betrayal: the tremor in Yori’s fingers follows the pattern of peripheral neuropathy, not simple fear. The kind induced by prolonged stimulant abuse. The way he braces against the console, knuckles white, suggests proprioceptive dysfunction, his inner ear struggling to orient in zero-g that should be second nature to any long-term station resident. His pupils are wrong, too dilated for the bright screens, the sclera threaded with burst capillaries that speak of dangerous blood pressure spikes.
His speech pattern fragments mid-calculation, words stumbling over each other. Cognitive deterioration consistent with severe sleep deprivation, possibly seventy-two hours or more. She’s seen it in residents during emergency rotations, the way the brain starts to skip like a damaged recording, thoughts scattering before they can complete themselves.
Her training demands she see the patient before the perpetrator. It’s the fundamental principle her grandmother taught her alongside the modern medicine: the body tells its own truth, and that truth must be heard before judgment can be rendered. Yori’s body is screaming. The slight yellow tinge to his skin suggests liver stress. The way his hands shake when he releases the console: that’s not just exhaustion, that’s withdrawal, the body demanding rest it’s been chemically denied for too long.
Behind her, Naoki’s accusatory silence presses like a physical weight, his physicist’s mind already calculating the implications of Yori’s confession. Kazuhiro’s wounded expression catches in her peripheral vision, the gentle mechanic’s face showing the particular pain of someone who trusted easily and was betrayed. They want justice, answers, accountability.
But Reiko sees a man whose paranoid decisions may have come from a mind chemically compromised beyond rational judgment, and that changes everything.
She pushes off from the wall with the economical grace of someone born to zero-g, her movements deliberately slow, non-threatening. The medical bay protocols surface automatically: approach agitated patients with visible hands, calm voice, predictable trajectory. But this isn’t her bay. This is Yori’s fortress of secrets, and she’s invading it with compassion he clearly didn’t expect.
“Yori-san.” Her voice drops into the clinical register, the one that bypasses panic and speaks directly to the rational mind underneath. “What have you been taking to stay awake?”
The question hangs between them like a tether. Not why did you lie. Not how could you. The confession she needs isn’t about suppressed messages or manipulated data. What Reiko needs is the medical truth: what chemical cocktail has been driving his decisions, whether the paranoid calculus of the past weeks emerged from judgment or from a brain pushed past its biochemical limits.
Because if his mind was compromised, if the stimulants rewired his threat assessment and decision matrices, then everything changes. Culpability becomes more complex. Treatment becomes possible.
The bottle tumbles from his trembling fingers, pills scattering in zero-g like tiny white planets orbiting their confrontation. Reiko tracks them with a physician’s eye. Military-grade stimulants, the kind that suppress sleep architecture entirely, that flood synapses with artificial alertness until the brain’s regulatory systems collapse. Three weeks. Her medical training catalogs the damage: compromised judgment, paranoid ideation, emotional dysregulation, the slow dissolution of the boundary between rational thought and catastrophic certainty.
“You’ve been poisoning yourself,” she says, and it’s not accusation but diagnosis, her hand finally completing its trajectory to his shoulder, steadying him as his body begins the involuntary tremors of a system finally, catastrophically, shutting down.
“I couldn’t,” Yori’s voice fractures mid-word, his gaze tracking past their faces toward the distorted starfield beyond the viewport, as though the mathematics of collapse were written in the bent light itself, visible only to his chemically-ravaged cognition. “: couldn’t let them abandon you. All of you. Because of what I,” His hand fumbles at his jumpsuit, extracting the small amber bottle, pills rattling like accusations. “Three weeks. No sleep. Combat stimulants. Trying to see the solution before my mind,” The confession dissolves into fragmented admissions of deteriorating neural function, of equations slipping through synapses no longer capable of holding them.
Reiko’s fingers close around the bottle (not snatching but receiving, the way she’d accept a scalpel or specimen) and the gesture carries a physician’s authority that reorganizes the space around them. Satomi’s chin dips fractionally, pilot’s instinct recognizing triage hierarchy. Kazuhiro’s shoulders drop, tension redirecting from confrontation to concern. Naoki’s jaw tightens, physicist’s mind already recalculating variables where Yori’s culpability and collapse become parameters rather than endpoints, all of them floating in that crystalline instant before the alarm sounds, where betrayal refuses reduction to simple mathematics.
The alarm’s wail cuts through the communications hub like a blade through silk, and the zero-g environment transforms the sound into something physical: vibrations traveling through the hull that they feel in their bones before their ears process the frequency. Every screen in Yori’s domain floods red simultaneously, the kanji characters for “critical” and “temporal” cascading in patterns that reflect in his wire-rimmed glasses as his expression shifts from the vulnerable rawness of confession to something harder and more desperate.
Reiko’s medical training catalogs the change: pupils dilating, breath catching, the micro-expression of fear overriding shame. She’s seen this look before: the moment a patient realizes their condition is worse than they’d admitted.
“No no no,” Yori’s voice cracks as his fingers fly across the interface, no longer the careful manipulator of information but something frantic and unguarded. The screens respond to his touch, data streams splitting and reforming, temporal mathematics scrolling too fast for anyone but Naoki to parse.
Satomi is already moving, pilot’s instinct overriding the emotional whiplash of the last few minutes. “What’s the status?” Her voice cuts through with command authority, the refugee survivor who’s faced collapse before.
“The quantum array,” Yori’s hands shake as he pulls up readings, and Reiko notices the tremor isn’t just emotional but physical, the fine motor degradation of someone who’s been awake too long, pushed too far. “When you accessed the encrypted channels, the entanglement cascade: we destabilized the field boundary.”
Kazuhiro’s face goes pale, understanding the implication before Yori finishes. “The communications triggered it?”
“Accelerated it.” Yori’s voice is hollow, all his careful control shattered. “The collapse I’ve been calculating in months: we have minutes. Maybe less.”
The red light bathes them all in warning, and the station groans around them like a living thing in pain.
The lurch hits them like a wave in three dimensions, Reiko’s stomach drops as if gravity suddenly remembered them then forgot again, her inner ear screaming contradictions that her zero-g training can’t reconcile. Beside her, Kazuhiro’s hand shoots out to grab a handhold but the station’s geometry seems momentarily uncertain, the metal rail shifting in space like something viewed through water. Satomi’s pilot instincts scream warnings her conscious mind hasn’t yet processed, her body already calculating vectors for movement before her thoughts catch up. Naoki’s physicist brain registers the impossible sensation of time itself hiccupping: a discontinuity in causation that shouldn’t exist, that violates everything he knows about temporal mechanics.
And through it all, Yori is already moving, his breakdown abandoned with the terrifying focus of someone who knows exactly what that sound means and how little time they have left. The vulnerability that cracked his face moments ago vanishes beneath professional urgency, but Reiko can see it still trembling at the edges: the knowledge that his careful house of cards has just collapsed.
His shout fractures the air (“Quantum cascade in the entanglement field!”) as he kicks off toward his primary console with the desperate velocity of someone racing their own mistakes. His hands are already reaching before his body arrives, fingers dancing across controls with muscle memory that bypasses conscious thought. “The communication attempt created resonance feedback (destabilized the boundary layer)” Words tumble over each other, technical terminology becoming a shield against the enormity of what’s happening. His voice cracks on “field collapse,” the professional veneer splitting to reveal the terror beneath. Months of careful manipulation, desperate midnight calculations, all the lies he told himself were buying time: undone in seconds by the very act of truth he tried to prevent.
Satomi’s already moving, her pilot’s instinct translating alarm into trajectory before conscious thought intervenes. Naoki’s lips move silently through equations, temporal mechanics becoming prayer. Kazuhiro’s gaze finds Reiko, do we trust this?, while his body orients toward the engine room. But Reiko remains suspended, watching Yori’s performance with medical detachment, cataloging tremor patterns and pupil dilation, the pill bottle still clutched in her palm like evidence at a trial that might never conclude.
The station shudders again, and Reiko feels the temporal distortion in her bones. A wrongness that her zero-g-adapted proprioception registers as nausea. Yori’s data cascades across screens in patterns that look almost organic, predatory. The zone isn’t just collapsing; it’s inverting. She thinks of cells rupturing, of neural pathways trying to process time moving backward and forward simultaneously, of consciousness itself fragmenting across incompatible reference frames.
Yori’s hands finally move, jerky, desperate motions that betray his exhaustion. He pulls up visualization after visualization, each one more incomprehensible than the last. The temporal gradient curves back on itself in impossible geometries, creating what looks like a Möbius strip of causality.
“It’s not flattening,” he says, his voice raw. “It’s steepening in reverse. The dilation factor: it’s inverting.” His fingers dance across the controls, highlighting regions where the mathematics break down entirely. “We could experience temporal whiplash. Our subjective time could suddenly accelerate to match external time. Or beyond.”
He stops, swallows hard. “I don’t know what that would do to human biology.”
But Reiko’s medical training has already taken her there. Her mind races through the implications with clinical precision: cellular processes suddenly forced to operate at sixty times their current rate. Neurons firing in temporal frames they weren’t designed for. Metabolic cascades that would tear through tissue like wildfire. The human body wasn’t meant to experience time as a variable.
She thinks of rapid aging. Of consciousness stretched across incompatible reference frames. Of the moment when every cell in the body tries to reconcile fifteen years of external time with three months of subjective experience.
“We’d burn out,” she says quietly. The words feel inadequate for what she’s envisioning. “Like overclocking a processor. Our cells couldn’t process the transition. The neural damage alone. Masaru’s face has gone rigid beside her, his medical knowledge reaching the same terrible conclusions.”How long?” he asks.
Yori stares at his screens. “The models are useless now. Hours, maybe. Maybe less.”
The station shudders again, and this time Reiko feels it differently: not as an external force but as time itself becoming unstable, reality losing its coherence at the edges.
Kazuhiro propels himself toward the main console with the fluid efficiency of someone who’s navigated zero-g since childhood, his mechanic’s mind already racing through system tolerances and failure modes. His questions come rapid-fire, technical, precise: “What’s the structural stress coefficient during temporal inversion? Can the hull integrity fields compensate for causality shear? How will power distribution networks handle desynchronized reference frames?”
Yori tries to answer, his voice cracking, but each response dissolves into uncertainty. His models never extended into this territory. The mathematics simply stop working past certain thresholds, replaced by equations that eat their own tails.
“I don’t know,” he admits finally, and the words seem to cost him everything. “The simulations never predicted inversion. Only collapse.”
The terrible truth settles over them like vacuum cold: all of Yori’s careful deceptions, his controlled information architecture, his suppressed warnings: none of it matters now. They’re facing something unprecedented, and the knowledge he hoarded has left them blind. His paranoid secrecy has become their shared ignorance.
Reiko watches understanding crystallize on each face. They’re navigating completely unknown waters, and their map was always a lie.
Satomi’s voice cuts through the rising panic with the flat authority of someone who’s survived one impossible situation and refuses to accept another death sentence. Her refugee instincts demand concrete data, actionable intelligence.
“Numbers,” she commands. “Probabilities. Anything we can use.”
Yori, still trembling, pulls up trajectory data with shaking fingers. The displays show the inversion wave propagating from the zone’s center outward in a pattern that resembles nothing in the literature. His voice steadies as he retreats into pure analysis.
“Twenty minutes before it reaches us. Maybe less.” He highlights their position relative to the expanding boundary. “We could pilot toward the edge. Try to ride the boundary layer between inverted and normal space.”
His pause carries the weight of impossibility.
“The navigation would be beyond anything even you’ve attempted, Kurosawa-san.”
The hull groans: a sound metal shouldn’t make in vacuum, vibrating through bones and teeth. Screens die in cascading darkness. Emergency lights bloom red, casting their faces in crimson relief. Through the viewports, the starfield writhes. Stars birth and collapse in accelerated cycles. Light traces impossible geometries, knotting back on itself. Masaru floats transfixed at the window, his broad frame silhouetted against cosmic chaos. “It’s breathing,” he whispers, and the observation transforms abstract terror into something visceral: the mathematics have become alive, aware, hungry.
Naoki’s body becomes pure intention, propelling through the crimson-lit space with the economy of someone who’s spent years adapting thought to three-dimensional motion. His hands find purchase on Yori’s secondary terminal, fingers already dancing across controls before his momentum fully arrests. The raw sensor feeds bloom across his screen. Chaotic streams of data that would overwhelm most observers, but his eyes track patterns with the precision of someone reading a familiar language written in an unfamiliar script.
Reiko watches the transformation occur in real-time. His body reorients with the fluid efficiency of someone who’s navigated three dimensions since childhood, but there’s a new quality to his movement now, a military precision reasserting itself over personal devastation. The physicist who moments ago seemed paralyzed by the weight of fifteen years lost to temporal displacement now moves with absolute purpose.
She recognizes the shift. She’s seen it in trauma patients who suddenly understand their injury isn’t fatal, in crew members who find solid ground in the midst of crisis. The human mind’s capacity to compartmentalize, to set aside the unbearable and focus on the solvable. Naoki’s hands reach for handholds, pulling himself toward Yori’s primary workstation with movements that waste no energy, no time.
“Show me the decay pattern,” he says, and his voice has changed too. “The full dataset, not the summaries you’ve been feeding Command.”
Around them, the hub’s confined space feels even smaller with five bodies floating in various states of shock and motion. The klaxons continue their rhythmic assault on consciousness, red emergency lighting painting everything in shades of warning. But Reiko sees how Naoki’s focus narrows, how he’s already constructing something in his mind, building a framework of understanding from fragments of data and theoretical physics.
His fingers hover over the controls, waiting for access, and she can see the equations already forming behind his eyes. The same intense concentration he brings to his research, now directed at their survival. Whatever he’s seen in those numbers, whatever pattern his physicist’s intuition has recognized, it’s given him something she hasn’t seen in weeks: certainty of purpose.
Yori’s body jerks toward the secondary terminal, an instinctive movement born of months protecting his secrets, but Kazuhiro is already there with the mechanic’s spatial awareness that anticipates need before conscious thought. His hands close on Yori’s shoulders, not rough, but with the immovable certainty of someone who understands leverage and mass in zero-g, and guides him aside with a gentleness that somehow makes the displacement more absolute than force would have.
Naoki’s fingers move across the controls with practiced efficiency, calling up sensor feeds that have been running continuously, recording data that only Yori has seen. Raw numbers cascade across screens in patterns that would be meaningless to most, but Naoki’s military training included theoretical studies that Fleet Command had classified and buried: research into temporal manipulation as a weapon system, investigations deemed too dangerous to continue.
His breathing changes as recognition hits. The decay signature isn’t random. It’s structured, harmonic, following patterns that could only result from deliberate external manipulation. Someone has been doing this to them. His throat tightens around words that will change everything they understand about their situation.
Naoki’s hand freezes above the interface as the patterns resolve into something his mind refuses to accept. The temporal distortions aren’t chaotic: they’re designed, each harmonic frequency precisely calibrated to resonate with the zone’s natural instabilities. His classified training surfaces unbidden: Project Chrysalis, the weaponization research that had been terminated when three test stations vanished into temporal singularities.
“This is artificial,” he says, and the words taste like ash. His fingers tremble as he pulls up comparison models, overlaying the forbidden mathematics he’d sworn never to use. The match is perfect. Someone has been conducting the exact experiments Fleet Command had banned fifteen years ago. External time. They aren’t trapped in a failing anomaly.
They’re inside someone’s laboratory.
Satomi launches herself from the doorway, her pilot’s instincts parsing the data streams before Naoki can articulate them: those temporal gradient curves show deliberate architecture, the same intentional shaping she’d navigate through manufactured gravity wells. “Who has this capability?” Her voice cuts through the alarm’s wail. “And why target us?” Masaru braces against the bulkhead, his refugee-camp reflexes already cataloging threats: decompression points, structural stress indicators, the physical toll of temporal shear on human tissue.
Naoki’s fingers stilled on the console edge. His physicist’s certainty crumbled into something worse. Recognition. “The inversion matches Kurosawa-Tanabe’s theoretical framework. Temporal weapons research. Banned since ’64.” His voice dropped to a whisper that somehow cut through the klaxons. “Someone built it anyway.”
Yori’s console flared white. The incoming transmission carried no Fleet encryption, no timestamp his algorithms recognized. The message originated from coordinates that shouldn’t exist: from within the inversion itself.
Reiko watches Naoki’s transformation from across the communications hub, seeing the physicist shed his despair like a chrysalis splitting open. His movements have lost their defeated heaviness, replaced by the fluid intensity of someone who has found the equation that makes sense of chaos. The holographic displays paint his face in shifting blues and golds, temporal gradient maps cascading across his features as he works.
She sees the moment Yori understands what he’s missed. The communications officer’s face goes slack, then hardens into something between horror and wonder. His carefully constructed narrative, the protective lies he told himself about shielding the crew from panic, crumbles as the mathematics reveal a truth he was too frightened to see. The data he hoarded like a dragon guarding cursed gold contains not their doom but their salvation, hidden in plain sight within the patterns he monitored obsessively but never truly comprehended.
Naoki’s explanation pours out in fragments of technical language and desperate metaphor, his military precision dissolving into the raw urgency of a man who sees his family’s faces in every calculation. The temporal inversion isn’t an ending but a threshold, a doorway opening in the fabric of space-time itself. But doorways close, and this one will slam shut with the finality of a guillotine blade.
Reiko’s medical training translates his physics into biological terms: they’re about to be born backward through time, squeezed through an impossible passage that will either deliver them safely into normal space or tear them apart in the transition. Her fingers find the edge of the console, grounding herself in something solid as the implications cascade through her mind. Everything they’ve endured, every year stolen from their lives outside the zone, could be restored. Or rendered meaningless in an instant of catastrophic miscalculation.
The station hums around them, oblivious to its approaching metamorphosis.
His voice fractures with urgency as he maps the progression across overlapping displays, fingers stabbing at data points that pulse like arterial blood: they’re balanced on the knife-edge of a temporal catapult, he explains, the zone’s inversion building potential energy like a coiled spring, and when it releases they’ll be thrown back into normal space-time with the violence of a bullet leaving a chamber. But the window of opportunity will last perhaps eight seconds, maybe ten, and the navigation parameters demand precision that exceeds any standard piloting protocol, Satomi will need to thread their trajectory through the inversion curve’s collapsing eye while maintaining alignment within margins measured in microseconds and micrometers, essentially surfing the boundary between two states of reality as space-time itself performs an impossible geometric transformation around them.
The mathematics scroll past in cascading streams, beautiful and terrible. One miscalculation, one moment of hesitation, and the temporal shear will distribute their atoms across fifteen years of space-time like paint thrown against a wall. But if they succeed, if Satomi’s instincts can match what the numbers demand, they could emerge into normal space almost exactly when they left.
Yori’s legs give way and he catches himself against the console, staring at the screens where his imprisoned data now reveals its hidden architecture. The mathematics he’d clutched so desperately, fearing they spelled doom, actually mapped their escape route with crystalline precision. His throat constricts around words that won’t form. The daruma doll watches with its single painted eye as he forces his trembling hands to the interface, adding his temporal translation algorithms to Naoki’s projections. Each keystroke feels like penance. The numbers align, confirming what his fear had obscured: he’d been guarding the key to their prison cell, mistaking it for evidence of their execution. Masaru’s steady hand finds his shoulder, anchoring him as the shame threatens to pull him under.
Reiko’s fingers dance across the medical bay’s holographic displays, tracking the crew’s biometrics as they shift in real-time. Cortisol levels plummeting, heart rates finding steadier rhythms, the physical signature of hope displacing dread. She watches Masaru drift toward Yori with that careful grace he brings to wounded things, his broad hand settling on the communications officer’s shoulder like an anchor. Across the station, Kazuhiro has already called up engineering schematics, his mind clearly racing through structural reinforcements and power distribution modifications, fingers sketching trajectories through zero-g with an artist’s instinctive geometry, calculating what their aging systems must somehow survive.
Reiko feels the shift before Satomi speaks: the way the pilot’s shoulders set, the particular stillness that precedes devastating truth. Her medical instincts recognize trauma response, the body preparing to deliver pain it has already absorbed. She pushes off toward the pilot’s station as Satomi’s fingers pull up their deployment orders, stripping away layers of bureaucratic language to reveal the skeleton of intent beneath, and Reiko’s stomach drops as she recognizes what her colleague has found: not a research mission but a disposal protocol, their crew composition not scientific optimization but demographic calculation.
Satomi’s hands move across the interface with surgical precision, each gesture stripping away another layer of bureaucratic camouflage, and the documents bloom across the screen like autopsy findings. Mission briefings that never mentioned research objectives, only “observational presence in temporal anomaly zone,” risk assessments that calculated crew loss probability at ninety-three percent within the first subjective year, contingency plans that detailed data recovery but not personnel extraction. The language is careful, sanitized, the kind of prose that transforms human beings into acceptable variables.
“Look at the timeline,” Satomi says, her voice flat as vacuum. “Mission authorization came six weeks after the first predictive models showed zone inversion probability. They knew.” She highlights a section, and Reiko feels her breath catch as she reads the temporal mechanics analysis. Crude compared to Naoki’s work, but accurate enough to predict what would happen, when it would happen, what it would cost to mount a rescue through the inversion gradient versus what it would cost to simply wait and recover whatever data survived.
The crew selection criteria fills another screen, and Reiko sees herself reduced to checkboxes: zero-g native, minimal Earth-based family connections, specialized skills valuable for research but not irreplaceable, psychological profile indicating high tolerance for isolation and temporal displacement. Beside her name, Kazuhiro’s. Refugee status, no legal family ties, mechanical skills applicable to station maintenance. Masaru, Naoki, all of them carefully chosen not for what they could contribute to science but for how little their loss would matter to the political calculus of Fleet Command and the corporate entities that funded temporal research.
“We weren’t sent here to study the zone,” Satomi continues, and her memorial tattoos seem to darken in the cold light. “We were sent here to disappear into it. Cleanly. Quietly. With enough scientific justification that no one would ask the wrong questions.”
She pulls up the original mission parameters with sharp, deliberate movements, navigating through Yori’s classified files with pilot’s precision. Her fingers know these systems the way they know thruster controls. Muscle memory bypassing conscious thought. The documents project onto the main screen where everyone can see, and Reiko watches the careful architecture of their disposal unfold in bureaucratic language.
Crew selection criteria prioritized “minimal external dependencies.” Psychological profiles emphasized “adaptability to permanent displacement.” Each name carries annotations: refugee status, time-orphaned, legally unattached. People whose disappearance would create minimal political friction. Whose families had already learned to live with absence, or had no families left to mourn. Whose loss could be absorbed into statistics without generating uncomfortable questions or expensive inquiries.
Satomi highlights a section, and the words glow like radiation warnings. “Acceptable attrition parameters.” “Minimal recovery investment threshold.” The mathematics of abandonment, dressed in the neutral vocabulary of risk management. They weren’t crew. They were variables in an equation that balanced scientific curiosity against the cost of caring whether they survived.
Reiko watches the medical files overlay themselves against the mission timeline, her trained eye catching what the others might miss. The pre-deployment physicals weren’t standard crew assessments but temporal displacement baseline studies, control data for an experiment they never consented to join. Each of them underwent additional genetic screening, neurological mapping, tissue sampling beyond normal protocols. They were specimens before they were ever crew members. Her own blood work, Masaru’s bone density scans, Kazuhiro’s cardiovascular stress tests: all archived not for their health but for post-mission comparison, assuming there would be remains to study, data to extract from whatever the inversion left behind. Scientific value measured in their documented deaths.
Naoki’s hands freeze over his calculations, cross-referencing deployment dates against classified predictive models. When recognition hits, his voice emerges strangled: his own research, papers published two years before this mission, provided the theoretical framework predicting this inversion. Fleet Command knew. The scientific council knew. The zone would become navigable again, but only after the crew had been displaced far enough that rescue became politically inconvenient rather than heroically necessary.
Reiko’s fingers whiten against the console edge, her zero-g trained body suddenly feeling Earth-heavy with betrayal. Masaru’s presence beside her is solid, protective, but she barely registers it. Kazuhiro’s crooked smile has vanished into something she’s never seen before. A refugee’s recognition of being disposable. Satomi’s words continue, clinical and devastating, dissecting how five lives became acceptable mathematics, how the Chrysanthemum’s crew were always ghosts, erased before they ever left.
Reiko pushes off from the console, her body moving through the zero-g space with practiced precision even as her mind reels. The medical bay (her sanctuary of healing) suddenly feels complicit. How many times had she treated temporal displacement sickness, reassured crew members about the psychological toll, while Yori sat in his isolated hub reading messages that proved their suffering was intentional?
She catches herself on a handhold near Yori’s workstation, forcing herself to look at him directly. His face is a mess of tears and snot in zero-g, droplets clinging to his skin, and there’s something pathetically human about it. He’s not some calculating monster. He’s terrified. Has been terrified for months.
“The first message,” Yori whispers, pulling up a file with shaking fingers. “Three weeks after we entered the zone. My time. Fleet Command to Science Council: ‘Chrysanthemum crew expendable if extraction risk exceeds political tolerance.’ I read that and I,” His voice breaks. “I told myself they didn’t mean it. That it was just contingency planning.”
Masaru’s bulk fills the cramped space behind Reiko, his scarred knuckles white against a handhold. She can feel his controlled rage, the refugee’s intimate knowledge of being deemed acceptable loss. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Waiting.
“Then the family reassignments started coming through,” Yori continues, scrolling through files that blur together. Official condolence templates, pension calculations, grief counselor assignments. “I kept thinking, if I just give you all a little more time, if I can just solve this myself, find the solution, prove we’re worth saving,”
“You made us complicit in our own erasure,” Satomi says quietly from the doorway, her weathered face unreadable. “Every day we didn’t know was a day we couldn’t fight back.”
Reiko watches the screens cascade with evidence, her medical training automatically cataloging symptoms: the clinical detachment of institutional betrayal, the careful language designed to anesthetize conscience. Each timestamp is a small violence: decisions made while they were still saying goodbye to families who were already being reassigned. She sees Naoki’s reflection in one monitor, his physicist’s mind probably calculating the exact moment their lives became equations with acceptable margins of error.
Kazuhiro’s voice cracks as he reads the admiral’s words, his mechanic’s hands trembling against the console. “‘Temporal casualties are clean because the families grieve and move on while the crew simply ceases to exist in any politically inconvenient timeframe.’” He stops, swallows. “They made us ghosts before we even died.”
The clinical precision is what hollows Reiko out. Not rage or hatred, but bureaucratic efficiency. They weren’t murdered; they were optimized away. A resource allocation problem solved with acceptable collateral damage. She thinks of her grandmother’s teachings about healing: how you must see the patient as human first. These documents see them as numbers that balanced a budget of political risk.
Satomi’s jaw tightens as she scrolls through evacuation protocols never implemented, resource allocation models that calculated their deaths against quarterly reports. The patterns are identical to Titan: the same careful language, the same risk matrices where human lives become acceptable percentages. “They documented everything,” she says, her voice carrying the flat affect of someone who’s seen this calculus before. “Every decision has a timestamp, a signature, a justification. Not because they felt guilty: because they wanted legal protection.” She looks up from the screen, her refugee’s eyes seeing through institutional facades. “On Titan, they had three weeks to evacuate. The transport ships were already reassigned to mineral contracts. More profitable.” Her hands are steady on the console edge. “I survived by refusing their narrative that we were inevitable losses. They don’t get to write us off twice.”
Reiko watches the exchange between Masaru and Yori with a physician’s attention to the physiology of confession: the way Yori’s shoulders drop as the burden transfers, how Masaru’s scarred hands steady without restraining, the respiratory shift from panic to grief. She recognizes this: the moment a patient stops fighting alone. In zero-g, Masaru’s bulk becomes gentleness, his refugee’s wisdom offering what her medical training cannot. The knowledge that survival sometimes requires forgiving yourself for the choices isolation demanded, that strength isn’t carrying everything but knowing when to let others help carry it.
Satomi joins them at the projection, her pilot’s instinct reading the spatial distortions like weather patterns, and she traces a finger through the holographic data showing them the path. Not out, but through, riding the inversion’s collapse like navigating an avalanche, using the zone’s own destabilization as propulsion. Her voice carries the steady certainty of someone who has survived one impossible disaster and refuses to accept another.
Reiko anchored herself at the projection’s edge, her zero-g instincts positioning her where she could see both the data cascade and Naoki’s face as he manipulated the holographic display. The physicist’s fingers moved through the light-sculpted information with desperate precision, isolating variables, highlighting patterns. Her medical training had taught her to read complex systems: cardiovascular networks, neural pathways, the intricate dance of hormones through the endocrine system. This was the same skill applied to different substrate.
“Here,” Naoki said, expanding a section that pulsed with amber warnings. “The temporal compression during inversion.”
Reiko’s breath caught. The data showed what would happen to human tissue, to neurons firing, to hearts beating, when fifteen years of external time tried to reconcile with three months of subjective experience. The mathematics translated into biology with horrifying clarity: cellular structures stressed beyond tolerance, neural pathways fragmenting as consciousness tried to exist in multiple temporal states simultaneously, the body aging in stuttering jumps as reality couldn’t decide which timeline it belonged to.
“We’d come apart,” she said quietly. Not a question.
“Without preparation, yes.” Naoki shifted the projection, and suddenly she saw it: the rhythm beneath the chaos. The inversion wasn’t a single catastrophic event but a wave function, collapsing in predictable oscillations. Peaks and troughs of temporal stress, moments where the compression stabilized, where the human body might (might) have time to adapt rather than simply rupture under impossible strain.
Her fingers moved through the hologram, medical overlay activating as she pulled up baseline crew physiology. Heart rates, neural plasticity indices, cellular regeneration capacity. “If we can match our biological rhythms to these windows,” she said, her mind already calculating dosages, meditation protocols, the precise cocktail of drugs and techniques that might keep them intact. “Controlled suspension during the peaks, accelerated consciousness during the troughs.”Dangerous. But possible.”
Yori’s voice fractured the technical silence, raw from disuse and confession. “The synchronization window.” His fingers trembled as they moved through his archived data, pulling up transmission logs that spanned their entire imprisonment. “I documented every quantum fluctuation, every communications distortion pattern. I thought I was.”I was looking for evidence of my own theories. But the data shows something else.”
Reiko watched the communications specialist transform before her eyes, paranoia crystallizing into terrible purpose. The screens around him blazed with correlation matrices, predictive algorithms he’d been running in isolation.
“Four minutes and seventeen seconds,” Yori continued, his analytical precision returning. “That’s how long we’ll be in perfect temporal alignment during the inversion peak. No lag. No distortion. Every transmission protocol will function as if we’re in normal space-time.” His laugh was bitter, almost broken. “I spent months hiding information, controlling the narrative. Now I’m handing them a weapon they can’t ignore. Complete documentation of temporal zone behavior, transmitted simultaneously to military command and civilian networks, academic institutions, independent journalists. Everything I recorded. Everything I tried to bury.”
His hands steadied as he spoke, as if the weight of secrecy had been heavier than the weight of truth.
Reiko felt the medical implications cascade through her mind like falling dominoes. “The temporal shear will affect neural tissue first,” she said, her voice clinical but her hands already moving through mental protocols. “Synaptic firing rates desynchronized from cellular metabolism. We’ll need to induce controlled hypothermia to slow biological processes, create a buffer.” She met Masaru’s steady gaze. “I’ll need you in the bay. Your mass, your strength: you’ll be the physical anchor. Hold them in position while their bodies remember how to exist in linear time.”
Masaru nodded once, understanding flowing between them without further words. He’d held broken people together before, in refugee camps where medicine was improvisation and will. This would be the same, only the breaking would come from time itself rather than violence.
Kazuhiro’s hands stilled on his toolkit, seeing the architecture of their survival taking shape. “We’re making the Chrysanthemum immortal,” he said quietly, moving between them. Touching Satomi’s shoulder, meeting Naoki’s haunted eyes, his fingers steady against Reiko’s arm. “Every sensor calibrated to witness what killed the others. We’ve kept her alive fifteen months on spit and prayer. We’ll keep each other alive six more hours.”
Naoki’s hands trembled as he pulled up the timeline, six hours glowing like a countdown to resurrection or annihilation. He distributed assignments with military precision, Satomi on navigation algorithms, Kazuhiro reinforcing structural integrity points, Reiko preparing medical protocols for temporal shock, but his voice fractured when he showed them the calendar. “My daughter turns twenty-five in three weeks. External time.” The silence acknowledged what survival would cost: emerging into a world that had already mourned them, where every familiar face would be aged or gone, where their sacrifice would be measured against decades they could never reclaim.
Reiko receives the medical protocol with a grim nod, her fingers already pulling up the physiological models of temporal shock. What happens when a body that’s aged three months suddenly reconnects with a universe where fifteen years have passed, the cellular dissonance, the neurological whiplash, the way human tissue will try to reconcile two contradictory timelines simultaneously. She’ll need sedatives pre-loaded in zero-g injectors, crash webbing modified to restrain convulsing patients, monitoring equipment calibrated for readings that shouldn’t be physiologically possible. Her grandmother’s voice echoes in her memory, speaking of ki disruption and energy meridians, and she finds herself adding acupuncture needles to her supply list: if Western medicine fails at the boundary between timelines, perhaps older wisdom will hold.
Naoki and Yori get the most crucial task: compressing fifteen months of temporal zone research into a quantum burst transmission that will deploy at the inversion’s peak, when the temporal barriers thin enough for data to punch through without distortion. Yori’s obsessive documentation, his paranoid hoarding of every measurement and anomaly, suddenly transforms from liability to salvation. They have data no one else possesses. Proof of what temporal zones do to human bodies and minds, evidence of the zone’s true nature, documentation of corporate negligence and military abandonment. The transmission needs encryption sophisticated enough to survive Fleet interception but accessible enough for independent scientists to decode.
Satomi’s own assignment she keeps to herself: calculating not just where they’ll emerge, but when. The inversion will slingshot them forward, but the mathematics allow for variables. She can aim for minimal temporal jump, arriving only months after their official disappearance, when search efforts might still be active, or maximum jump, decades ahead when their story becomes historical curiosity rather than immediate scandal. Her fingers hover over the calculations, weighing survival against vindication, safety against justice.
Reiko moves through the medical bay with methodical precision, her mind already three steps ahead into catastrophe. The temporal inversion will hit bodies like a wave. Cells trying to reconcile subjective time with objective time, nervous systems shorting out from chronological whiplash, bones and organs experiencing compression trauma as fifteen years of external aging tries to assert itself against three months of lived experience.
She secures sedative ampules in magnetic strips along every wall, programs auto-injectors with dosages calculated for the impossible, sets up crash webbing at intervals throughout the station because people will seize, will convulse, will need restraint when their bodies betray them. The monitoring equipment gets recalibrated for readings that violate every baseline: heart rates that spike and plummet simultaneously, neural patterns that fragment across temporal boundaries, cellular markers that exist in superposition.
Her fingers pause over the acupuncture needles, her grandmother’s voice whispering about ki meridians and energy flow disrupted by unnatural time. If Western medicine fails at the boundary between timelines, perhaps older wisdom understands what technology cannot. That healing sometimes requires acknowledging forces beyond measurement, beyond the merely physical.
In the communications hub, Naoki floats beside Yori’s cluttered workstation, their reflections ghosting across multiple screens displaying fifteen months of data. The physicist’s military training wars with his scientist’s ethics as Yori’s trembling fingers navigate compression algorithms.
“Every transmission I delayed,” Yori whispers, pulling up suppressed messages. “Every warning I edited. It’s all timestamped. Permanent.”
Naoki watches Fleet Command’s contradictory orders scroll past. Evidence of institutional murder dressed as research protocol. “We encode everything,” he says quietly. “The science and the betrayal. Future crews deserve both truths.”
Yori’s laugh breaks sharp. “My career ends the moment this transmits.”
“Better than our bodies ending in temporal inversion.” Naoki begins tagging files with brutal efficiency. “We make them see us. All of it.”
In the medical bay, Reiko’s hands move with surgical precision through three-dimensional space, programming trauma protocols for the impossible. Her fingers dance across holographic displays, setting automated responses for the seizures and hemorrhaging she knows will come when their bodies compress fifteen months of temporal displacement into minutes. She secures syringes in magnetic fields, downloads cellular aging data, backs up neurological scans. Creating an irrefutable biological record that their flesh lived what physics said couldn’t exist.
Through the viewport, the starfield begins to twist: light bending backward, constellations smearing into temporal spirals. Kazuhiro’s laugh echoes through comms, half-terrified and half-exhilarated as his welds hold against physics trying to rewrite itself. Masaru’s steady voice counts structural integrity percentages while Naoki’s calculations scroll past faster than human reading, his military discipline finally cracking into something like hope as the numbers confirm what shouldn’t be possible: they’re going to make it through.
Reiko watches from the medical bay viewport as reality tears itself apart in ways her training never prepared her for. The stars aren’t just moving. They’re breathing, expanding and contracting like living tissue under temporal stress. Her hands grip the restraint webbing, those long surgeon’s fingers white-knuckled, as the station groans with sounds metal should never make.
Through the intercom, Yori’s transmission crackles with distortion, each word fighting through layers of collapsing time. She hears the tremor beneath his announcement, recognizes it from a hundred medical emergencies: the voice of someone who has finally stopped running from themselves. The daruma doll appears on her monitor feed for a split second before the camera angle shifts, that single painted eye seeming to stare directly at her before it tumbles away.
Her medical instruments float in their magnetic fields, oscillating wildly as temporal gradients wash through the bay. The bonsai tree’s leaves shiver though there’s no air current. On her diagnostic screens, the crew’s vital signs spike and flutter. Heartbeats trying to synchronize with time that no longer flows in one direction.
She thinks of her grandmother’s hands teaching her to fold origami cranes, the precision required to transform flat paper into flight. This is the same principle written across the cosmos: transformation through pressure, beauty emerging from constraint. They are being folded by forces beyond human scale, and she must trust that the pattern holds.
“Medical bay secure,” she reports, her voice steady despite the fear singing through her nervous system. This is what she trained for, even if no simulation ever captured this reality. She is the keeper of bodies in a moment when bodies themselves become uncertain, when the boundary between now and then dissolves like tissue in solution.
The station shudders again, harder, and she closes her eyes, feeling the inversion in her bones.
Satomi’s voice cuts through the chaos with the calm of someone who has already survived the unsurvivable, calling maneuver sequences that sound like poetry, “pitch seventeen, yaw negative four, hold thrust at sixty percent.” Her hands move across the controls with the certainty of traditional navigation merged with desperate improvisation, reading the temporal distortions through the viewport like weather patterns, finding the path that exists only in this moment between moments.
The memorial tattoos on her forearms seem to glow in the instrument light, cherry blossoms and names rendered in flowing script, as if her lost family guides her hands through the impossible geometry of collapsing space-time. She doesn’t think about the calculations. Her body knows them, muscle memory forged in the fires of Titan’s collapse, when she threaded an escape pod through debris that moved in three dimensions while time itself fractured around her.
“Brace for gradient shift,” she announces, her voice carrying the weight of every person she couldn’t save, every decision that haunts her sleep. But this time: this time she has the data, the skill, and a crew who chose truth over survival. Her fingers dance across the controls, writing their defiance in thrust vectors and angular momentum.
Reiko’s fingers find the handholds with practiced precision, her body already anticipating the station’s violent tremors before they cascade through the bulkheads. The vital signs on her wrist display scatter into chaos and she watches the bonsai’s leaves shiver in their magnetic suspension like her grandmother’s hands preparing tea. The prayer forms silently on her lips, ancient words for healing and protection, while her other hand hovers over the emergency stim injectors. But she doesn’t activate them. Her crew doesn’t need chemical courage; they need what they’ve already found. Each other, truth, the fierce determination to testify. The weight she’s carried alone transforms, distributes across five hearts beating in defiant synchrony. Satomi will fly them home. Reiko simply needs to keep them alive long enough to arrive.
Kazuhiro’s hand finds Reiko’s across the gap between stations, his calloused fingers steady against her surgeon’s precision, and she feels the tremor in his grip that mirrors her own fear transformed into determination. Masaru braces behind them, his bulk anchoring the fragile human chain, while the mathematics Naoki speaks becomes prayer, becomes promise. They’ve lost years but gained each other. The inversion screams toward them like birth, like death, like homecoming.
Through Reiko’s medical training she recognizes what’s happening: their heartbeats synchronizing, breath patterns aligning, the involuntary physiological response to shared mortal threat creating temporary symbiosis. But it’s more than biology. Kazuhiro’s pulse against her palm speaks in a language older than words. Masaru’s protective mass becomes shelter. Even Yori’s trembling fingers on the transmission controls are part of this organism they’ve become, this collective refusal to dissolve into forgotten time.
The Communications Hub had become a confessional booth for sins committed against time itself. Naoki floated beside Yori in the cramped space, their bodies angled to avoid collision in the zero-gravity workspace, close enough that Naoki could smell the sour anxiety-sweat beneath Yori’s cologne and the bitter residue of too much instant coffee.
“This one,” Yori whispered, his voice cracking as he highlighted a message dated three months ago their time. Twelve years external. “Fleet Command ordered us to stay in the zone. Indefinitely. For ‘strategic temporal research advantage.’” His fingers trembled over the encryption keys. “I told everyone it said to hold position pending extraction.”
Naoki’s jaw tightened. Through the viewport behind Yori’s screens, the starfield writhed like something dying. “Upload it all. Every message. Every report I filed about zone degradation that you never sent.”
“They’ll court-martial us.” Yori’s hands moved anyway, muscle memory overriding fear. “Both of us. You for the research that destabilized it. Me for the cover-up.”
“Better court-martial than dead.” Naoki’s own fingers flew across his interface, compressing fifteen years of temporal mathematics into quantum bursts. Equations that proved the zone was never stable, that corporate negligence had created a time-trap, that they’d all been sacrificed for data. “How long until we can transmit?”
“Seventeen seconds after inversion begins. The temporal gradient collapse will create a microsecond window of quantum coherence.” Yori pulled up the final suppressed message: the one that had broken him. “Naoki. Your wife. She remarried. Your daughter is twenty-three now. She… she has a child.”
The numbers on Naoki’s screen blurred. His hands stilled for three heartbeats. Then continued their work with mechanical precision, because mathematics didn’t care about grief, and the truth didn’t care who it destroyed.
“Upload everything,” he said. “Let them know what time costs.”
Reiko secures herself in the Medical Bay’s central position, magnetic boots locked to the deck plate while her body remains free to pivot three-hundred-sixty degrees. Around her floats a constellation of pre-loaded hyposprays: each one color-coded, each one a different intervention against what’s coming. Blue for temporal shock, the cellular disorientation of chronological compression. Red for anticoagulants, because blood doesn’t know how to flow when time stutters. Green sedatives for minds that will try to process fifteen years of loss in ninety seconds.
Her fingers move through final checks with the deliberate grace her grandmother taught her, each gesture economical and precise. Tea ceremony translated to crisis medicine. She knows every crew member’s vulnerabilities by heart now. Ninety seconds. That’s all she’ll have once inversion begins. Ninety seconds to reach five people scattered through a groaning station, to keep their bodies from betraying them as time snaps back like overstretched elastic.
She exhales slowly, centers herself, and waits for the universe to break.
The temporal zone shudders and contracts around them like a dying star, reality folding in on itself with mathematical precision. Through the observation ports the distorted starfield begins to rotate in impossible geometries. Light bending backward, stars aging in reverse, the universe rewriting its own history. Satomi’s voice cuts through the comm system with calm precision, counting down the seventeen-second window while her hands input corrections faster than conscious thought. The Titan collapse survivor in her recognizes the exact flavor of catastrophe and refuses to let it claim another crew. Her memorial tattoos seem to glow in the emergency lighting as if her lost family guides her hands through trajectories that exist only in the space between heartbeats, between one moment and the next.
Kazuhiro’s welding torch casts shadows that dance like memories across the junction point, his folk song humming transmitted through metal as prayer and calculation both, while three sections spinward Masaru moves through the hydroponic bay with gentle urgency, securing the rice plants and the shrine’s paper offerings with equal reverence. Both men understand that survival requires honoring what sustains the body and what sustains the spirit, their refugee instincts recognizing which structural elements bear weight beyond engineering specifications, which joints will hold not through tensile strength alone but through the intention woven into every magnetic clamp and emergency weld.
The seventeen seconds stretch like taffy across subjective eternities.
Kazuhiro’s scream cuts through three dimensions simultaneously, past, present, and the folded space between, and Reiko tastes iron and starlight as she pushes off from Masaru’s station, her trajectory calculated by instinct rather than thought. The hypospray in her left hand is already calibrated for the mechanic’s mass and metabolic rate, her fingers moving through the preparation sequence while her visual cortex tries to process light that’s arriving from fifteen different temporal vectors at once.
The station groans around them, metal singing in frequencies that shouldn’t exist, and Reiko sees Kazuhiro’s face overlaid with fifteen years of aging. The crow’s feet that will form, the silver that will thread his temples, all the moments they won’t share compressed into this single eternal instant. Her hand finds his neck by touch rather than sight, the hypospray hissing its payload into his carotid as his body bucks against the restraints.
Her grandmother’s voice rises louder now, the healing sutra becoming a lifeline through chaos. Namu Amida Butsu, the syllables forming a cadence that her hands follow, moving from station to station with the precision of tea ceremony, each gesture deliberate and sacred. She doesn’t remember learning these words, but they’re there in her muscle memory, woven into the same neural pathways that guide her surgical cuts and zero-g navigation.
Naoki next: the physicist’s eyes rolled back, his brilliant mind trying to comprehend its own temporal displacement. Reiko’s hypospray finds his jugular as her vision fragments again, seeing his daughter’s first day of school, her graduation, her wedding, all the moments he’s missing compressed into the space between heartbeats. The counter-agent flows into his bloodstream and his seizure eases, his breathing steadying as the sutra reaches its crescendo in her throat.
Satomi’s body arcs against the pilot’s harness, her refugee-trained instincts screaming warnings her conscious mind can’t process, and Reiko launches herself across the command deck with the hypospray already primed, the dosage calculated for someone who survived Titan’s collapse, whose cells remember catastrophe. The injection site blooms red under Reiko’s fingers as capillaries rupture and reform, time stuttering through flesh that’s simultaneously thirty-seven and fifty-two, the pilot’s memorial tattoos flickering between fresh ink and faded memory.
Her grandmother’s voice weaves through the chaos (medicine is ceremony, ceremony is medicine) and Reiko’s movements become ritual, each hypospray a prayer, each stabilized heartbeat a small victory against entropy. She sees Satomi’s lost family in the temporal overlay, the Titan refugees who didn’t escape, their deaths compressed into this single moment of survival, and Reiko presses her palm to the pilot’s sternum, feeling the steady rhythm return beneath her fingers.
The sutra reaches its final verse as Satomi’s eyes focus, recognition flooding back, and Reiko is already moving toward Yori’s station, toward the communications officer who holds their betrayal and their salvation in equal measure.
Naoki’s scream fractures into harmonics as his consciousness splinters across temporal layers, and Reiko sees the physicist’s synapses firing in impossible patterns: neurons experiencing their own past and future simultaneously. The neural stabilizer hisses against his carotid while her free hand catches Kazuhiro’s tumbling form, the mechanic’s cells flickering between states of repair and decay, his refugee-scarred knuckles aging decades in heartbeats.
Her grandmother’s voice rises above the chaos, the healing sutra becoming both anchor and instruction, each syllable a reminder that the body remembers wholeness even when time tries to tear it apart. Reiko moves through the maelstrom with surgical precision wrapped in prayer, her training and tradition fused into something neither science nor spirituality alone could achieve, keeping them alive through sheer refusal to let death claim what she has sworn to protect.
Satomi’s hands lock on the controls as fifteen years of navigational data compress into seventeen seconds of enhanced perception, temporal gradients inverting through her refugee-trained instincts. Reiko reaches her last, the final hypospray, her own body fragmenting as cellular clocks desynchronize. The sutras carry her through. Words learned at her grandmother’s deathbed now fused with cutting-edge medicine in hands that refuse to stop shaking. Reality snaps back into linearity with the crystalline sound of breaking glass, and she feels time remember how to flow forward.
The medical bay holds them in zero-g suspension. Reiko catalogs their vitals through clearing vision: elevated cortisol, temporal dysphoria, cellular confusion where mitochondria remember two different timelines. All alive. All changed. The hyposprays drift like spent chrysanthemum petals around her, and she tastes green tea in the recycled air. Her grandmother’s final gift translated through impossible physics into survival.
Reiko’s fingers trembled against the interface as the message queue materialized: fifteen years compressed into scrolling text, each timestamp a small violence. Her grandmother’s funeral notice arrived first, dated twelve years past: Tanaka Fumiko, aged 94, passed peacefully surrounded by family. The formal kanji blurred. She had promised to return for tea ceremony one more time.
Her brother’s wedding photos loaded next. There she was in the corner. Not standing with family but watching from a memorial altar, her academy portrait younger than memory, flanked by incense and white chrysanthemums. They had married her to death while she floated in dilated time, cataloging heartbeats and monitoring oxygen saturation.
Birth announcements followed in cascading succession. Nieces and nephews she would never hold as infants, their names chosen without her input: Fumiko, after grandmother. Reiko, after the aunt who vanished into relativistic space. Children born, learned to walk, started school: all while she aged three months in the medical bay’s blue light.
She should stop. Should close the queue and breathe. But her hands kept scrolling, searching for the final message, the one that would seal her severance from the life she’d left behind.
Instead she found continuity.
Monthly messages from her brother, unbroken chain stretching across the years. Reiko-chan, the cherry blossoms bloomed early this year. I thought of you. Reiko-chan, Fumiko-chan took her first steps today. She has your determined expression. Reiko-chan, I know you’re out there somewhere. Time is strange but love isn’t.
The last message was dated three days ago, sent to a ghost he refused to stop believing in: The news says your station emerged. I’m coming to the quarantine facility. Wait for me. I never stopped waiting for you.
Reiko pressed her palm against the screen, feeling the warmth of backlit pixels, and wept in zero-g where tears became floating pearls of salt water and relief.
The data cascade begins at 03:[^47] station time, Naoki’s quantum burst unfurling across every public network simultaneously: temporal mechanics proofs, Yori’s suppressed communications showing Fleet Command’s knowledge of zone destabilization, corporate pressure logs with timestamps and signatures. Within six hours, the quarantine facility transforms into a fortress of competing interests.
Fleet security establishes perimeter protocols that read simultaneously as protection and containment. Lawyers materialize with contracts and non-disclosure agreements. Scientists crowd observation rooms, hungry for firsthand temporal data. Military brass arrives with medals and veiled threats about classified information.
Everyone wants something: their story, their silence, their complicity in narratives already being constructed.
Naoki sits in the medical observation room, seventeen years of his daughter’s school photos spread across the table in chronological order. First day of kindergarten. Science fair trophy. High school graduation. Each image a moment he missed, a childhood that continued without him.
Her recorded message plays on loop: “Dad I never forgot you. Mom made sure of that. But I don’t know how to…” The video cuts off, her uncertainty more honest than any greeting.
She’s nearly grown. A stranger with his wife’s eyes and his own stubborn jaw.
Reiko watches Kazuhiro through the medical bay viewport as journalists photograph him holding a salvaged ship component he’d repaired seventeen times, his refugee hands that kept them alive now framed as heroic ingenuity. The media loves the narrative: disposable people who became indispensable.
She thinks of the messages waiting in her queue: her mother’s voice aged fifteen years in what felt like months, her brother’s children grown, her grandmother’s funeral she missed by a decade. Time took everything and gave back only this: leverage.
In the corner, Masaru demonstrates zero-g trauma techniques to fascinated medical students who’ll write papers about his improvised methods. Their refugee status, once a mark of expendability, now carries the weight of survival expertise no one else possesses.
They cannot be erased. They know too much. They endured too visibly.
Yori sits motionless in the sterile conference room as Fleet Intelligence arrays his sins across multiple screens: suppressed warnings, manipulated timestamps, the crew’s trust weaponized into control. The officer’s immunity offer lands like absolution he doesn’t deserve: testimony against admirals, executives, the entire corrupt chain. His grandmother’s voice echoes through memory, refugee wisdom about choosing honor over survival. His crewmates trusted him even after betrayal. The choice crystallizes with documentary clarity. He’ll burn it all down.
Kazuhiro finds Reiko in the medical observation deck three days after their return, both of them cleared from quarantine but not yet released to their separate futures. The wooden crane he carved during isolation fits perfectly in her palm. Traditional joinery, no adhesive, transformed from a broken console fragment. “I have nowhere waiting,” he admits, crooked smile uncertain. “Just refugee status and a maintenance contract. If you need a mechanic…” Reiko’s surgeon fingers trace the delicate wings. “I need someone who makes broken things beautiful.” His hope blooms like cherry blossoms.
Reiko stands before the Medical Ethics Board with fifteen years of temporal physiology data encrypted in her neural lace, her testimony delivered in the measured cadence of someone who has performed surgery while time itself bent around her hands. She catalogs the cost in biological terms they cannot ignore: cellular aging patterns disrupted, neurological pathways rewired by relativistic stress, the particular way human bodies fracture when subjected to time dilation ratios beyond recommended parameters. The data is invaluable, unprecedented, purchased with months that cost her crew members decades of their external lives.
Her terms are precise as surgical incisions: full medical authority over temporal zone health protocols, veto power on crew selection for future missions, and guaranteed positions for trauma specialists with refugee experience. She presents case studies of corporate negligence, vitals from crew members who should never have been cleared for temporal deployment, the slow cascade of systems failing under time’s unnatural pressure.
The board members shift uncomfortably as she describes treating Yori’s breakdown in clinical detail, how information control in isolated temporal environments creates predictable psychological fractures. Her grandmother’s healing traditions appear in the data alongside quantum biology, demonstrating how cultural continuity preserves mental stability when time becomes weapon rather than constant.
“You need this research,” Reiko states, her zero-g fluidity making her seem to float even in Earth’s gravity. “Future crews need these protocols. But I will not hand you tools to better exploit people in zones that should never contain human life.” She thinks of Kazuhiro’s careful hands, Masaru’s gentle strength, the way her crew survived by making family from fragments.
The board agrees to her terms within the hour. Some knowledge, she has learned, carries weight that even institutions must respect.
Naoki enters the supervised conference room carrying equations that could reshape humanity’s relationship with time itself, but his eyes seek only two faces. His daughter Akari stands taller than he remembers, seventeen years compressed into what felt like months, her expression guarded in ways seven-year-olds haven’t learned yet. His wife Tomoko’s silver-threaded hair catches fluorescent light. Grief’s physical signature written across time he wasn’t there to share.
The lawyers arrange documents while his family remains across an impossible distance measured in missed birthdays, school plays he’ll never witness, a decade of dinnertime conversations that happened without him. Akari’s fingers worry the edge of her school tablet. She doesn’t remember how he used to calculate orbital mechanics while making her breakfast.
“I brought you something,” Naoki says quietly, sliding a data chip across the table: not the temporal physics that governments want, but personal logs, messages he recorded in the zone, mathematical proofs written like love letters. “Every day. I documented every day for you.”
He signs away his complete temporal models for research funding and the promise his name stays off military applications. Prestige means nothing. He chooses the uncertain work of rebuilding fatherhood over the certainty of fame.
Reiko spreads medical files across the negotiation table like a physician reading symptoms. Fifteen years of cellular data, temporal displacement markers written in bone density and neural plasticity, bodies aged at angles reality wasn’t designed for. The institutional representatives lean forward hungrily: this data could revolutionize everything from deep space missions to theoretical gerontology.
She divides it with surgical precision. Enough anonymized readings to validate the science. Enough withheld specifics to ensure they need her interpretation, her context, her continued consultation. The raw numbers mean nothing without understanding how Masaru’s refugee-camp injuries healed differently in dilated time, how Kazuhiro’s hands learned to feel mechanical stress through temporal distortion.
“I’m the only physician who’s treated these conditions,” she says quietly. “You’ll need me to train others.”
Protection through indispensability. Her crew’s suffering transformed into leverage for systemic change.
Yori spreads documentation across encrypted channels. Testimony to three investigative journalists, technical schematics to Fleet oversight committees, financial records to colonial governance boards. Satomi ensures each refugee crew member holds evidence that guarantees their value as witnesses. Naoki timestamps everything with quantum signatures impossible to forge or suppress.
Their betrayer becomes their archivist, paranoia transformed into protective redundancy. No single arrest can silence them now. The truth exists in too many hands, too many jurisdictions, replicated across the solar system like quantum entanglement. Observe one piece and the others remain, waiting.
The conference table holds six data tablets, each containing different fragments: temporal physics, navigation logs, medical records, communications transcripts, maintenance reports, witness statements. They initial the distribution protocols in silence, understanding that separation is their final protection. Reiko catches Kazuhiro’s eye across polished wood. They’ve learned that survival sometimes means letting go of the people who helped you survive, trusting that scattered seeds grow stronger than a single garden.
Yori sits in the sterile conference room with its harsh white lighting and observes his own unraveling with the same analytical detachment he once applied to intercepted transmissions. The investigators don’t need to interrogate him. The archive speaks with perfect clarity, every message he delayed arranged chronologically on screens that wrap the room in evidence. He sees the pattern of his deceptions rendered as data visualization: red lines for suppressed warnings about zone destabilization, yellow for altered timestamps, blue for messages he rewrote entirely.
His wire-rimmed glasses reflect the cascade of his crimes, and behind them his eyes track the information with professional appreciation for its thoroughness. They’ve included metadata he thought he’d erased, reconstruction algorithms that reveal his editing process, even biometric data showing his stress levels as he made each decision to deceive.
The lead investigator slides the transparency agreement across the table. Every communication he handles for the rest of his career will be public record within twenty-four hours. Every analysis, every recommendation, every private message. All of it exposed to scrutiny. The gatekeeper stripped of gates. The man who controlled information flow now condemned to absolute openness.
His hands don’t shake as he reaches for the stylus. That surprises him until he understands: shame requires the possibility of concealment. He has nothing left to hide, and in that absence discovers something like relief. His name will be attached to both betrayal and revelation, neither redeemed nor wholly condemned. Future students will study his case in ethics courses, parsing the moment when self-preservation calcified into systematic deception.
He signs with steady strokes, and the investigators witness it with expressions that contain no satisfaction. They understand what he’s only beginning to grasp: that perfect transparency is its own kind of isolation, that being fully known means being forever defined by your worst choices crystallized in public record.
The station arrives like a ghost ship, emergency beacons painting the dock in amber urgency. Kazuhiro walks through corridors one final time, his fingers trailing along bulkheads he kept sealed through mathematics that defied safety margins. Each weld tells a story. The breach in section seven patched with hull plating from the observation deck, the coolant system rerouted through what used to be storage compartments, the structural supports reinforced with materials never intended to bear such loads.
Fleet Command’s decision arrives within hours: the Chrysanthemum will not be scrapped. It becomes evidence, testimony welded into metal and ceramic. They preserve everything. The cherry blossom decals curling at the edges, the small shrine with its offerings to time and survival, Reiko’s medical bay where impossible procedures kept them breathing. Future visitors will float through these spaces and try to imagine months that cost fifteen years.
Kazuhiro leaves his tools mounted on the workshop wall, arranged with the precision of ritual. Museum curators will label them, explain their improvised purposes, but they won’t understand how each one became an extension of desperate hope, how repair work became prayer.
Reiko stands in the observation gallery as the data streams across holographic displays, watching the temporal zone’s death throes translated into graphs and equations. The collapse happens in microseconds: space-time convulsing, the bubble that imprisoned them inverting through dimensions her medical training never prepared her to conceptualize.
Naoki’s hands tremble against the console beside her. “We barely scratched the surface,” he whispers, and she hears the physicist’s grief for questions that will haunt him forever. The zone folds into itself, erasing its own existence like a wound healing backward through time.
What remains: their altered cells, their databases, their testimony. Evidence written in biology and memory. The universe keeps no other record of those impossible months.
The testimony becomes ritual: Satomi’s voice steady recounting navigation through impossible gradients, Masaru describing bodies stressed by temporal shear, Naoki translating physics into language courts can grasp. Reiko watches lawyers reduce their displacement to liability percentages, watches Yori’s isolation become case study in institutional failure. The settlements arrive as numbers on screens. Compensation calculated in currency while their cells still carry the zone’s signature, proof that some debts exist beyond any economy’s capacity to balance.
The sake burns clean, traditional junmai that tastes of Earth’s patient seasons. Kazuhiro’s hand brushes Reiko’s as the bottle passes, warmth she permits herself to acknowledge now that departure looms. They drink standing, unable to sit through ceremony, their bodies still remembering zero-g’s freedom. No one speaks the obvious: that they survived together what they could not have survived alone, that displacement forged them into something their separate futures cannot contain.
The messages continue, a cascade of years compressed into minutes of reading. Her brother’s wedding announcement. She’d promised to be there. Her niece’s birth, first steps, first day of school, all documented in careful video messages sent to coordinates that bent time itself. Her mother’s face aging in jumps, five-year intervals that should have been gradual, the way grief carved new lines while hope maintained the ritual of recording, of speaking to a daughter who might be dead or might simply be living in a different timestream altogether.
Reiko’s fingers tremble on the tablet. In the medical bay, she’d monitored everyone’s vital signs, watched for the physiological markers of temporal displacement, treated the headaches and nausea and dissociation. She’d been so focused on keeping them alive through each subjective day that she hadn’t let herself calculate what was accumulating outside. Three months became fifteen years. Her grandmother’s funeral happened while Reiko was teaching Masaru traditional bone-setting techniques. Her mother became an old woman while Reiko and Kazuhiro shared tea in the observation deck, watching stars bend through impossible angles.
The final message is recent, recorded just weeks ago. Her mother, white-haired now, saying “I knew you’d come back. I never stopped knowing.” The certainty in that aged voice breaks something in Reiko that the zone’s isolation couldn’t touch.
She sets the tablet aside and returns to planting. The seeds are hybrid stock, adapted for zero-gravity growth but carrying the genetic memory of Earth’s seasons. Kazuhiro had explained the cultivation process with his mechanic’s hands gentle on leaves, creating beauty because beauty mattered even in displacement. Each seed she plants is a bridge between the time she lost and the time she’s been given, between the doctor who left and the witness who returned.
The cherry blossom seeds rest in her palm like promises, descendants of the tree Kazuhiro cultivated in the hydroponics bay, its blossoms a defiant beauty in their time-dilated prison. She digs into Earth soil with hands that performed surgery in zero-gravity, that held Masaru’s shoulder when survivor’s guilt overwhelmed him, that accepted Kazuhiro’s small carved gifts with a tenderness she hadn’t known she still possessed.
Each seed she plants with the precision of someone who understands that growth requires both patience and the audacity to believe in futures you might not see. Her grandmother taught her that healing begins with planting, with the commitment to nurture something beyond your own lifespan. The irony isn’t lost on her. She who compressed her lifespan relative to everyone else, who stepped sideways through time and emerged into a world where her grandmother’s lessons exist only in memory and these seeds, genetic inheritors of a tradition that survived temporal displacement.
The soil is cool and real under her fingernails. No magnetic containment fields. No recycled nutrients in hydroponic solution. Just earth, ancient and patient, accepting these travelers from bent time.
The stars refuse to move as they should. Her inner ear still calibrates for temporal distortion that isn’t there, searching for the subtle warping that meant safety in the zone. Knowing which way time bent meant knowing which way to navigate. Now the fixed cosmos feels wrong, too stable, like a photograph instead of living space.
She’s a woman out of time in the most literal sense. Science wants her data, her body’s adaptation to relativistic effects, her testimony about zone mechanics. But no one wants the person who came back: the medical officer who learned to read time’s curvature in her patients’ cells, who understands viscerally that every human institution operates on borrowed time, that corporations count temporal displacement as acceptable loss in their equations.
Her fingers trace the kanji carved into the seed packet. The sutra flows from muscle memory, syllables her grandmother shaped in a garden that no longer exists, spoken over bodies stretched thin by time dilation. She tastes green tea and antiseptic, remembers Kazuhiro’s hands steadying hers during the worst turbulence, Satomi’s unshakeable calm, even Yori’s desperate confession as the zone collapsed. They are her constants in a universe that proved time negotiable.
She presses her palm to the soil where the seeds rest. The healing sutra flows from her lips: the same syllables she whispered over crew members convulsing through temporal displacement, their cells remembering different times simultaneously.
The gift isn’t perspective. It’s them: Satomi’s steady hands, Kazuhiro’s crooked smile, even Yori’s broken confession as reality inverted. Scattered across human space now, living in the present while carrying those elastic months, they remain what isolation forged: witnesses bound not by time, but by what transcends it.