Dove Levy: Way Station

I don’t think Dr. Federman likes me very much. I don’t think I like him very much, either, but I don’t like most people very much. But he, I think, resents me. I don’t blame him. He was chosen as my assistant despite having the same credentials as I do, only because he’s had two years less experience. I would be angry, too.

Or maybe he also knows why we were the ones chosen to come here, and he’s just angry at those back home. I don’t know. He isn’t much fun to talk to either way.

Most of the research facilities have specialized focuses, but I think Facility A is the most interesting. It was the first to be set up on Way Station — POGE, Dr. Federman calls it. I didn’t ask why, but you know what? It sounds cuter than ‘Way Station’. [ahem] It was the first to be set up on POGE and has the best connection to home for some magnetic reason, and so all the other stations on the southern continent send the basics of their findings over here before it’s shipped back to Earth to be picked apart. The more detailed reports are still sent from their respective stations, Facility A serving as an intermediary only for the smaller files like my case reviews, but even then, there’s so much here that it would take me months to go through it all. I would spend that long, if I had the time, but I don’t think folks back home would be happy with that.

So much, though. There are thousands of files from all over POGE, from details on the atmosphere to the tectonic activity to the composition of the dead forests to those tiny organisms far at the bottom of the sea. My bosses said this place would wear on me, pull me down and down with the emptiness of the land and of the space surrounding it, no planets or stars in sight. But they were wrong. It is so dark, so alone, but also so full , full of an alien history that my child self thought they’d never live to see, thought was hundreds of years in the future, if our civilization even survived that long. Even as a kid, I understood our planet was dying. That’s why my sights have been set on the sky, and that’s why the world jumped at the second chance that POGE gave us.

I could have happily lived out my life in just one of these research facilities, discovering in a few decades what humanity took millennia to advance enough to understand about our own planet. For a brief moment, taking a quick peek at the personal notes of the deceased, I envied them. They were so happy, so ambitious and successful in their ambitions, so taken with a childlike fascination with the world around them that, when mixed with their expertise, they became a part of history.

I don’t envy their fate.

I’m frustrated. More frustrated than I’ve been in years, than I’ve been since I first entered college and despite all that I’d researched online before applying, all that I’d studied, I couldn’t understand a damn word the professor was telling me, couldn’t spell any of the terms in my notes, and anything I did manage to retain from my studies once I passed the entrance exam were useless tidbits that never helped me in the slightest.

Because I’ve come far, since then. I’ve come farther than I ever thought I would. I don’t mean physical distance, though that’s true as well. My hopes were never to aim for the top, only to be good at what I do, and I am. I am great at what I do, amazing at what I do, and even though I wasn’t special, wasn’t someone of note, I wasn’t lowly, either. After my graduation, I was never the lost screw-up again. I knew what to do and I did it.

Now, I feel like I’m back in those first few weeks of college, back to sleepless nights spent hunched over my textbooks and notes forgetting all that I’ve ever known and trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge with even more advanced topics that seemed far beyond what I’d ever understand. All that I was capable of back home, back on Earth, has fled me. I understand this planet is alien, but I didn’t understand just how much.

Maybe if I can’t figure this out, if I can’t find the specific reason they all died, our bosses will realize that they sent the wrong people and they’ll take us back. Our best chance of surviving this world is to be pulled out before we’ve finished the job. In less than six months, the entire human population of POGE was wiped out one facility at a time. I don’t hold fantasies that the two of us will escape whatever did it.

They’ve already sent the payment to our families. It’s not like they can take it back if we fail.

But then, I don’t want that. I want to explore this world, even if I can’t see most of it, even if it’s by the meager light of a flashlight. I want to do well at my job, distinguish myself from my peers in the only place where I’ll ever be able to, and on the very first assignment, I’ve fallen flat.

The water tastes different here. I can’t really put my finger on how. It’s not sweeter, nor more bitter. I almost expected it to taste like metal or maybe decay, but it doesn’t. Not cleaner, either, because the filters they use here are the same ones they use back home, allowing in all the same materials and purging anything else. But still, it tastes different.

I’m not sure where Dr. Federman is right now. I thought he’d come in when he heard me yelling at myself; it feels like something a psychologist would want to deal with. When he didn’t, I went to look for him. I didn’t find him, but I did find the coffee machine.

No coffee beans are grown on POGE, of course. The only food grown is the nutritional necessities and a few experimental plants, mostly inedible but providing Facility C with information about the way our home plants react to the conditions presented here. All the coffee is pre-ground and imported, a luxury as fancy as wine in a distant place like this. Only a few packets had been used by the time we got here. I don’t think they’ll mind if I take some.

Coffee is one of those necessities of life, I feel. It was a constant companion on Earth, especially during the long nights of work when I didn’t even have time to eat, because bodies don’t just appear when it’s convenient for their examiners’ schedules. I haven’t had it in a whole week since being put on the ship up here. I don’t miss home, not yet. It hasn’t been long enough. But it’s nice to know that there are ample supplies of my favorite part of Earth in each of these stations, just waiting to scald my throat.

[laughs] I’m drinking dead peoples’ coffee. That shouldn’t be so funny to me.

I must hate myself. I don’t think I do, but then why else would I be doing this? I have the test results in my lap right now, swiped off of Dr. Federman’s desk. If he wants them, he can come get them. It wouldn’t kill him to take a short break.

No contaminants, each one says. No spores, no viruses, no bacteria, no poisonous compounds. Every single one of the researchers was killed from a poison that never touched them.

I think we reach farther than we can handle, humanity as a whole. Only a decade ago there seemed to be nothing out there, at least nothing for us, nothing in reach. And now we have research facilities on a rogue planet with who knows what kind of residue left over from its trip through the near-emptiness of space. Scientists sent out to carve our way into a future larger than I can wrap my head around, all dead now. Something is in the air, or the water, or the food, I don’t know. And it’s something we can’t pick up during testing. Ridiculous to think we would have been able to. Of course, our equipment has no idea what this is. Of course, we won’t understand.

There are trees outside, though. I know where I am, how far I am away from my home, but it doesn’t quite feel like that yet. I don’t feel the distance, as if this is just a vacation into the woods a few hours’ drive from where I grew up. I know the trees are dead, long petrified into solidity like concrete from millions of years before I was ever born, but in the facility’s outside lights, they look like any old forest, looming in the darkness and both intimidating and comforting at the same time. The lights are just sheer enough that the details of the trees, the differences that make it obvious that these are not the ones I used to climb, are hidden from my view.