Dove Levy - Way Station

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen him laugh. That’s a memory I’ll keep close.

This must be the most gorgeous place in all the galaxies right now, trumping the Oasis by a mile. Who knows which one of these creatures is the carrier, and who cares? We’ll be changing walking suits in the decontamination room in the next facility, like the station members here should have done but didn’t know they needed to, and won’t be taking them off until then, so who cares what gets on us, what’s crawling over us or flying around our heads?

There are so many more than just the slugs out here. It’s finally clicked together for me — these storms, the abnormalities in them and their odd chemicals, are full of this alien life, bring it across the continents and islands and scattering aliens behind it in its wake. On the southern continent, it brought death, but this storm up here brought amazing and almost indescribable critters.

Some look so like bugs on Earth that it almost hurts to look at them, bringing up the homesickness I’ve tried so hard to push down these past couple months. Many, maybe most, I can’t quite tell, have a similar sort of bioluminescence as the slugs, zipping around through the air and skittering over the ground outside the facility with tiny galaxies swirling inside them. Dragonfly-like creatures, going so fast they seem to teleport. Bugs with large wings like those of a butterfly, but there are six wings instead of two, and their wingspan is longer than I am tall.

And then others, so odd it’s hard to make myself look at them without feeling the strangest mix of fascinated glee and utter disgust. One, that keeps knocking its head against Isaac’s helmet face like it’s trying to get in and not quite understanding that it can’t, just looks like a long tube. I have no idea how it flies, can see no wings on it, but it’s certainly airborne and quite deft at dodging his attempts to swat it away.

Oh, he looks annoyed now, but so far there hasn’t been a full minute that he wasn’t smiling. He’s just as enraptured as I am at the beauties around us, at the experience of being here to see all of this.

I don’t want to leave to the northern continent. All mountains and ice and all kinds of treacherous terrain, even on the defrosted parts of the continent, and I don’t believe there’s a single place there that could be described as temperate.

I’d live here my whole life, just studying these critters and naming their stars.

Leaving soon. We took pictures of as many of the bugs as we could for the bosses back home, and Isaac spent the past hour under one of the outside lights writing pages and pages of notes, complete with incredibly detailed sketches. I want to stay longer. I want to never leave. I haven’t felt this kind of longing in such a long time, and didn’t expect it to come about on POGE.

This happiness is so rare for me, for the pessimism I’d trained myself into, and especially for what we’ve already experienced here. I never thought the appearance of insects would excite me so much.

But that’s the problem. I got too excited. My heart still has its troubles sometimes, and about an hour ago I got palpitations to the point of losing my breath. Isaac had to help me inside, and we had to make sure all the critters were outside, where they can’t excite me too much again.

I feel woozy, too, like there’s cotton in my skull, and a chill came over me a few minutes ago. The thought of falling sick like the old station members terrifies me, but Isaac took a blood sample in the decontamination chamber, so I wouldn’t fall deathly ill by taking off my suit anywhere else, and that odd virus didn’t show up. It’s from too much excitement, is all. Still, an unsettling situation, considering.

So, we’re leaving. We’ll be able to see all the aliens, if they’re still around tomorrow, when the ferry is charged and we head out on the water, but until then, Isaac is making sure I’ll be staying inside and resting.

Funny, how the fear on the southern continent didn’t set my heart to its annoying jumps, but being happy does. Maybe pessimism really is the best lifestyle for me.

Dr. Eve Strauss, Research Facility I on the northern continent of Way Station, assisted by Dr. Isaac Federman. Walls are not intact and the life support system is no longer operational. Food storage is contaminated and air supply is emptied. All members of the research team were found in the control room. No signs of struggle.

Examination review of David House, ID number 2116, details in file. Full autopsy report in temporary file, pending transfer when communication channels open again. They were found clothed at the control monitor for the air supply, fallen over beside the chair. Skin is tinged blue and bruises are found all over, especially on the face, neck, chest, and extremities. Eyes are cloudy and tongue is swollen.

Cause of death is natural by breathing in too much of the air outside the facility. The walls have been breached, and we found numerous holes all over the facility, some as small as a football and some the size of all the teammates combined. The entire facility has been contaminated with Way Station’s air, and all members breathed it in, none found in their walking suits. All members of Facility I are deceased.

I find it’s been a lot more helpful than I’d originally anticipated, using this diary, talking about what I see around me. It pulls me into the moment, though, admittedly, sometimes I want to be anywhere but in the moment. It puts my thoughts in order, and it can be a pleasant distraction, to talk about what’s here right now, to talk about the cases I’m examining, and therefore stop myself from over thinking everything, from falling into fear like I did too many times on the southern continent.

There’s a lot to be scared of, but getting it out of my system and into this diary makes it seem more distanced from me, sometimes.

Facility I is on the western edge of the northern continent, a few miles back from the harbor we docked in three hours ago, and it is cold. So cold it almost feels hot, so cold that during our trek out to the facility, which we had to do on foot because none of the cars had been left at the harbor, I could feel my fingers and toes and nose going numb through the walking suit. The landscape is frozen over with snow, a snow that, should we try to drink any of it, would kill us in about ten seconds. POGE is full of poison, and frankly, it’s a miracle that it took this long for everyone to die.

No, that’s cruel. I shouldn’t have said that.

It’s beautiful, though. I would be able to enjoy it more if I wasn’t on the verge of freezing to death [laughs], but even so I can see that from the pictures in the logs and what little we saw with our handheld lanterns along the trail. Snowy landscapes have always felt peaceful to me, utterly gorgeous despite only having a few colors, a few shapes. There wasn’t much snow where I grew up, and seeing so much of it made me ecstatic, at first.

The facility is another life study station. They hoped to find preserved sentient specimens in the ice, but so far, no go. There’s otherwise still a lot of information to be gleaned from what was in the ice, namely the plants found. They’ve dated several eras now by the age of the ice and the remains found within, learning a bit about the land around them and the evolution of the various plant species. No animals, not even bones, but that doesn’t detract from the wealth of information that is available.

I learned a lot of this on the trip, remotely copying some of the files from the facility onto my tablet, enjoying the landscape and the knowledge I found within them. And then we came in sight of the facility. This is where it gets weird. Weirder even than what came before this, than all that we’ve already seen.