A woman in powder-blue coveralls regarded a field of stars. Julia called the Anadyomene-01 her temporary home, as she hoped she’d leave it soon. The sky she saw was set in a small circle of fused silicate glass. She directed her gaze at Earth; gently cradled in the centroid of the Summer Triangle. If only for a moment, she orbited that pale-blue mote. She took in its lustrous blues and vibrant greens—that flashing, twirling, singing radiological symphony—and quietly sighed. It’s no use crying now, she told herself, save it. She kicked off her bunk to set herself listing toward her station.
As she flew past, she grabbed a chair with velcro straps before a computer showing a calendar. She stopped—held by the fixed object—and swung herself into its seat. She pulled a pair of glasses up to her eyes from their cord around her neck. She peered at the screen. The year was 2109; the month was July. She tapped the seventh day. The screen filled with colorful chevrons. Next to each there was a task.
Audit CoR system logs / Trial 7 of dextrotetraacenaphthylene / Re-calibrate NIR imaging equipment / Transmit status…
She chorded the keyboard a couple times and black filled the screen.
A blinking cursor awaited her command.
Julia tapped in cor-audit -l.
The screen produced a long table of dated log entries.
Each date was paired with a short message.
Julia paged through these briefly before entering cor-audit -l -d0.
This time, only one entry appeared.
It was dated for July 7th, 2109, at 00:00.
Its description read, burn_, and nothing else.
What is this? A prank? Julia thought. Maybe that solar storm, but we were eclipsed… She investigated a few more commands, and said to herself, It’s not a prank. This is from CoR itself. She knew Symbol wouldn’t care. Just keep working, they would say. Julia undid the straps and kicked off the adjacent fuselage.
Across the room there were three inset cylindical racks. On two of them were bulky, air-tight suits, white and utilitarian, with the Symbol logo on the right breast: a square with the letter sigma in the center. Symbol values coordination, she recalled the orientation, because we are more than the sum of our parts. Sigma means summation, and the presenter put thick emphasis on the word sum. Julia remembered cringing at this.
The third rack was empty. To the left of the racks, beside the airlock, there was a gray box unseemingly bolted to the wall with a dial and a speaker. She floated up to it. She turned the knob, and the speaker began to whine. A bluff voice protested over the noise. Julia dialed the knob back slightly and the whine ceased.
Julia began, “Are you alright, Thom? Over.”
The voice responded, “Yeah. What’d’ya need? Over.”
This is how Thomas normally started a conversation: “What’d’ya need?” He wasn’t supposed to be conducting a spacewalk unsupervised technically. But, there’s the safety protocol, then there’s the demands of the job, Thomas would say.
Julia proceeded, “There’s a weird log entry. I thought you might want to see it before I got rid of it. Over.”
Thomas called back, “Yeah, I saw that. I figure it’s the IT guys testing some new system. Probably nothing. We can just file it a 02-25. Over.”
That’s the code for a mistaken entry, Julia recalled. But that implies an actor posting a log manually in error. This was an automatic log from the CoR sensor network, it couldn’t have been a test or manual entry. “I was thinking the same thing.” She says, “Are you aligning the NIR camera out there? Over.”
The sensors on the Anadyomene-01 were in various stages of disrepair. Julia had to conduct repairs on the NIR camera nearly daily.
“10-4,” a pause. “Well, I was but—Christ, this station is falling apart—the cable needs to be replaced first. There’s no continuity on one of the data pins. Over,” Thom grumbled.
“I’ll send out a new cable.” She told him, then, “Thanks for looking at it this time. Over and out.”
She turned the dial back. For a moment she thought about Persephone, her green idol cactus back home. She had many cacti, but Persephone was special; Persephone was first. As she woke in the morning back home, drinking a warm glass of water, she would often sit and trace the cactus’s folds with her eyes. The warm water was a substitute for tea; the tea, a substitute for coffee; and, the coffee, a substitute for amphetamine.
The spare cables were kept fast to the wall above the hatch that held other spare parts including the carbon-dioxide removing air filters. These had to be replaced every three days before it became uncomfortable to breathe. When her mother called her an addict, she remembered saying, “We all have things we need to live comfortably.” The aluminum panels showed through all the spare cables they had burned through, but she held her gaze on the hatch.
The amphetamine wasn’t always bad for her, she would recall. But, she discovered in time that she lived better without it. The same went for the coffee and the tea. So, she would sit with her water and her cactus. As long as she had it, she knew she had been watering it every couple weeks and feeding it in the spring. This thought was a token she carried with her. A token she could present to herself when life got hard; as it often did.
She took a thick grey cable from the wall, and started toward the airlock. As she did, she thought about the chemical trials she would conduct later. An organometallic reaction that could only happen in microgravity produced Getalis, a medication that slowed aging. She was researching similar reactions. Symbol hoped one of these resultant compounds could do what Getalis did more cheaply and with fewer side-effects.
Julia and Thomas just hoped life support could support them until August.
She pulled the latch that retracted the doors into the airlock’s vestibule. There was a gust as air filled the lock. Inside were dangling various hoses and cables. The light flickered for a moment then shut off. Julia chucked in the NIR camera cable then pushed the latch. The doors shut again. The change in pressure as the air rushed back in caused Julia’s ears to pop. She turned to the speaker box and twisted the dial; no whine this time.
“It’s in the lock,” she said. “I’ll clear that log now. Over.”
“10-4. Over ‘n’ out.” Thomas affirmed.
She went back to the console.
It was an error in the system, she thought, so I should file it as a 16-23. But…
She looked out the port hole beside the desk. This side always faced Venus. Her ruddy, roiling atmosphere looked to her like the fur of some protean animal as it charged and ate and fucked. …it feels like a threat. She remembered her mother telling her she should go into the trades. She thought she may have been right. If she was fixing plumbing on Earth, she could see her cactus. She could breathe all the air she wanted without a CDR filter. She could live past this month.
Nothing could save them now. She knew even if no one else did. She looked back to the patient, blinking console.
She typed, cor-audit -d0 --report '16-23'. And, the strange log entry went away.
Last updated on 24-Aug-2026.
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