Dove Levy: Way Station

But then I got used to it. I got used to the darkness, used to the harsh yellow facility lights, used to the loneliness.

Used to Eve.

It started up again after we left the southern continent, the fear building with the proof of alien life, but then that faded, as well, long before we reached Telle and the amazing critters we found there.

It’s been too easy to get used to this world. It should be harder. The two of us should be off the deep end by now, considering all the stress we’ve been put under. There’s only so much one can prepare for when you’re about to be helplessly stranded for months, but I suppose we’ve been enough for one another, despite how little we knew of each other beforehand. Instead of falling, it’s become rote.

This has been less rote, though. These past few days are starting to take their toll, and finding this, being reminded of the uncanny intelligence of these creatures and their capability to slaughter us, it’s been bringing me little by little back over the edge I almost lost my grip on months ago down south. It’s always something new, something more. It’s loneliness and corpses, then it’s fungus, then it’s aliens, then storms, and now everything is piling one on top of the other to become a cloud of fear and depression that every day threatens to drag me up into it, sweep me off my feet and tear me apart.

Eve has been better these past few days, until we found the scavengers. It’s helping, a bit. Their constant chatter is slowly returning, but there’s a glazed look in their eyes that I know all too well.

I’ve spent too much of my life dissociated to not be able to recognize someone else falling prey to it.

Desperate. I’ve become desperate, and I can almost laugh at myself now because of it. I’ve never been like this, but I suppose circumstances like ours have a way of bringing out new sides to people like nothing else can.

I told them about Terry today. I told them something I haven’t even told my best friend, haven’t even told my parents. I told them about my first love, though he certainly wasn’t my last — I told them about the last time we saw each other, the last things we said to each other, and then I cried. I honest to goodness cried in front of this person that, a year ago, I didn’t even know existed.

I feel better now. It’s been years since all of that, anyways. Years, and several other partners since him, all relationships that ended infinitely better than mine and Terry’s. It still hurts sometimes, though. Especially up here, so far away. We should have kept in touch.

And somewhere, unfathomable miles away, Chaim is still waiting for me. That was enough to calm me, to get me to pull myself back together. Even if we’ve broken up, even if he’s already moved on, he’s still my best friend, still the only person outside of my family who would mourn me should I perish up here. I should have let him know, more than I did, how much that means to me.

It’s so easy to locate all of my regrets when I doubt I’ll be going back home. But that’s okay. I’ve made peace with that long ago. This is worth it.

Communication channels open in a few hours. Been a long time since we talked to home. We’re going to ask for extraction, tell them the mission has failed. There’s no way to fix what’s going on here, short of complete annihilation of all life on this planet, if that’s even possible. I don’t want that. These creatures are smart, and this is their home, not ours. We don’t have the right.

[off-mic] Are you sure you’re not up for this? I really don’t want to do this.

Oh, it’s about to connect. Yes, I’ll make something up for you. Leave before he sees you and asks questions.

[on-mic] Hello, sir. Yes, I can hear and see you perfectly. Is the connection stable on our end?

Good. Unfortunately, Dr. Strauss is… finishing up some tests on the bodies we found here. We, um… we want to see if there’s any residue left on the bite marks, maybe saliva or spores, that can give us more knowledge on what kind of creatures they are and their biology, defense mechanisms, the like.

Ah, sorry, it slipped my mind. I have the files from the last few months up now, I’m sending them. Are they reaching you fine? Good.

I don’t have good news, sir. Dr. Strauss and I have discussed this at length, and taking into account the death of all the facility members and their causes, as well as the drastic increase in hostile alien life on Way Station, we have decided that the risk is too great to send more people up here. The storms that bring these creatures across the planet are getting more and more common and severe, and we don’t believe it safe to inhabit.

There is no fix to this that we can find. We have limited data and knowledge in these areas, but we believe that there is no fix, period. This is something natural for Way Station, and anything to change it would require extreme measures, measures that may not be possible at all, no matter how much funding is put into it — and the funding would have to be astronomical, which you and I both know we don’t have. There are more details in the full files we just sent you than in the smaller ones we’ve been sending out, but even those smaller ones should contain enough to convince you of our conclusion.

We are requesting immediate extraction from Way Station. Our jobs have been completed in full — there are no more manned stations on the planet, and we have concluded there is nothing to be done about the conditions on Way Station to make it habitable to humans without more money than we have access to. There is nothing more in our mission, and—

Sir?

Sir, that’s—

There must be some left over to send up a ship to us. It doesn’t need to be manned — Way Station has stayed within the same sector, fairly stable after the meteor impact last decade, the coordinates shouldn’t have changed too much.

Yes, sir, I understand we’re short on money. Surely, this is important.

Yes, sir. Yes, we can wait. We are planning to spend our time in the empty facility on Breaker’s Island, awaiting extraction. We will wait for your response, but we urge you to end this mission and bring us home. There is nothing left for us to do.

Thank you, sir. Goodbye.

…

[door opening]

I’m worried. They’re running low on funding. People don’t care as much about this place when they learn it’s going to stay uninhabited.

What if they don’t have enough to bring us home?

No more bodies, no more autopsies, and I am so, so relieved. I didn’t think such a heavy weight was resting on my shoulders until it’s finally been lifted.

Facility L, the only unmanned station when all the others died. Funding was running low even before they sent Eve and I up here, and just as they’d finished the construction of the facility, they couldn’t afford to train anyone else, send up any more teams. It was scraping the bottom just to get us here.

Another farm station, with all the seeds and the earth and water and sun lights and everything needed to feed a team of thirty indefinitely. There’s more than enough to feed the two of us.

We shouldn’t need too much of it, though.

It’s been a week, and still no update from the bosses. We have to be patient, I keep telling myself. We have to be patient. It must take a lot of preparation for them to get a rocket ready and programmed to our location, and a lot of money. We just have to be patient.

Eve is truly talking, again, as much as they used to. But still no more diary entries, despite my pushes that it’s good for them. I suppose there’s no more reason for me to be making these entries, now that things are back to normal between us, but it’s become comforting to hear my own voice. I talk more to this than I do to them, even now.