Gravity feels different when beauty pulls with greater force. Inside the glowing vault, warmth and light pause before the Coriolis dance begins.
For the full vibe, listen to Sunshine Coolin’ by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour; this story was freely inspired by its sound and spirit.
The Arc of Nature
The smell. A sweet, damp, and faintly metallic sensation hits his vibrissae and nasal receptors. Warm air presses close, like rain sinking into sun-warmed soil, carrying a green note that seems to breathe on its own.
It becomes a place before Alethon can name it. Rows of strawberries stretch beneath a low sky, red pulsing gently between leaves still jeweled with dew. At the far end, where the ground dips, stands the hint of what once was a factory, a brick tower, now half-buried in vines. The soil there is dark and heavy, the kind that keeps the print of a hand. Bees drift lazily through the air, their hum stitched into the wind like a promise. Alethon’s grandfather had called this land a wound that learned to live again, and it had, turning toxic ruin into sweetness.
The scent thickens, too pure now, too even, as if filtered through something unseen. The light tilts gold and steadier than any sun.
“Caution: ascent ahead,” HSA3 says beside his ear, soft and deferential.
The memory breathes out; the present breathes in. Remembrance becomes air again, the sweetness folds into a clean synthetic blend, and the glow of Hestia’s greenhouse waits above him.
He blinks. The warmth reshapes itself into air; the glow resolves into color.
Slightly to the right, a rectangular recess opens ahead, a one-by-two-meter gap cut into the greenhouse floor and filled with light. From its lower edge, the access ladder leans upward at a steep angle, with six narrow steps rising 1.6 meters to the greenhouse level above.
The light spilling down is clean and absolute, no haze to soften it. It lays amber stripes across the rungs, turning metal into molten color. Hermes hovers near the top of the brief ascent, centered in the shaft of brightness, thrusters whispering; each soft burst stirs the air below into faint spirals that brush Alethon’s face and vanish warm against his skin. Beyond it, Monty stands just inside the greenhouse, her outline half-veiled by the droid’s silhouette and the glare, head and shoulders caught in gold.
The ladder’s pitch would be punishing on Earth, but here the lesser pull turns it into an invitation. For a heartbeat, Alethon only stares, the geometry of light, Hermes steady in its center, Monty behind like a shape drawn in fire. Then he moves. His boot rises too high; in this gravity, every gesture overshoots until the body relearns where the world begins. He sways, catches the handrail.
HSA3 hums closer to the base of the ladder, emitting a small, contrite ping.
“Maintain posture,” it says, as if sorry for stating the obvious.
Alethon exhales a quiet laugh. Gravity feels different when beauty pulls with greater force.
Step by step, the brightness opens wider. The shaft of light unfolds into space. The greenhouse curves around him like a hollow half-world, fifty meters from end to end, carved within the nine-meter diameter cylinder that runs through the asteroid’s body.
Behind him, the airlock landing is only a couple of meters deep, sealing back into the wall. Ahead, the floor stretches to about eight meters across and divides itself with quiet precision: a straight, one-meter walkway runs the full length, like a pale secant, cutting the space between the wild and the crop. On the left, the wild zone rises gently into thicker green; on the right, the ordered beds of cultivation unfold in tidy ranks.
Above, the vault curves six meters high, its inner surface alive with the projected sky, light bending across it in soft, graduated hues. The simulated sun leans toward the crop side, its glow warm enough to tint every surface a golden hue. Droplets cling to leaves and rails, scattering that light in minute reflections. The air breathes with a lingering warmth, like the calm of late spring before the first hint of summer. Beneath it flows a layered quiet, water gushing out somewhere upstream, a narrow thread moving along the path, the faint pulse of the circulation pumps.
A whole landscape, breathing quietly inside stone.
“It’s… beautiful in here,” he says, not meaning to say it out loud.
“Five years of excavation, lining, and atmosphere tuning in this section alone,” Hermes answers. “The geometry follows the tunnel’s natural stress flow.”
Monty grins over its shoulder. “And I still miss the old days when it was just a cold tunnel, zero humidity, zero fogged visors, and zero soaked clothes.”
They start walking. At first, the path feels ruler-straight, but as distance gathers underfoot, the world betrays a small truth. The faint junction where the pale walkway meets the darker soil begins to tilt away, a shift so slow the eyes deny it while the body quietly adjusts. Alethon feels it in his ankles, a near-imperceptible curve beneath the rhythm of his steps.
“From here,” Hermes says, “you can still notice the arc of Amor’s circumference. This greenhouse runs along a fifty-meter equatorial segment. The bend’s too shallow to see, but it’s there. Except for the cargo area, it’s the only place in the base where the asteroid’s curvature can be barely sensed.”
“Home’s got a round belly,” Monty replies, smiling into the light.
“A precise one,” Hermes notes proudly. “Our round home hosts this unique arc of nature. Steps separate biomes: left, regenerative wild; right, controlled cultivation.”
Alethon glances left. Between the trunks, light flickers where something moves. The slope is slight, almost imagined, but it gives direction to the shimmer, a narrow stream threading its way through the undergrowth. The sound reaches him next: a calm, persistent trickle, softer than on Earth, the gravity too mild to make it rush.
Hermes gestures toward it. “Surface water circulation. It keeps the air alive. Right now, the warm flow and foliage maintain a temperature of 26 degrees and a humidity of 82 percent, without the use of mechanical condensers. The wild side breathes; the stream carries its moisture through the system.”
Monty tilts her head, squinting into the light between the trees. “So the base sweats like us.”
Hermes answers with a pause that almost sounds like amusement. “In a closed loop, everything and everyone contributes.”
Her laugh folds into the layered hush, the faint trickle, and the quiet waft of air threading through leaves.
Hermes pauses for a moment, as if listening to the echoing sounds. “In a closed loop,” it adds, “nothing truly leaves or arrives. Water, nutrients, and waste move through every form before beginning again. What feeds one process becomes the breath of another. Even loss has a function.”
Alethon glances toward the stream, following the shimmer between roots. The idea settles in him more like a rhythm than a rule: living layered over the sterile, form turned into functional breath. He lingers where the flow slows. Close to the surface, a film of glisten speaks of microbial labor; the soil darkens with quiet life.
“There’ll be ants one day,” Monty says, leaning beside him. “If they pass the interview.”
“Formicidae remain under quarantine,” Hermes notes. “Their logistics exceed current containment parameters.”
Monty snorts. “See? Bureaucracy survives anywhere.”
Alethon smiles; her words ripple outward like a small disturbance on still water. The flow widens ahead into a basin, six meters long and two or a little more across, one meter at its deepest part. The walkway runs beside it on the right, level with the soil, separated only by a soft rise of moss and roots. The surface is so placid that it mirrors the vault above, turning light into liquid gold and doubling the room in reflection.
The light in the water toggles between green and gold as ripples shift, the mirror changing its mind with every breath of air. For a heartbeat, it looks deep enough to fall into, then steadies again.
“It’s freezing,” Monty says, catching his stillness and breaking it with a half-grin. “But worth it. I keep my suit under the clothes every time I need to stay in this wet hell more than ten minutes.”
Hermes turns its visor toward her. “Avoid overexposure. The thermal drop may cause discomfort.”
“I prefer cold to hot,” Monty fires back, eyes glinting. “Cold makes you remember you’re alive.”
Alethon laughs softly. “First time I swam in open water, the lake was half-melted from the snowmelt. I went in proud, came out sounding like a gasping seal. My lungs shrank to the size of walnuts, and every heartbeat felt like a seismic reading.” He shakes his head. “Didn’t feel alive, just violently recalibrated.”
Monty snorts. “Perfect example of evolution through suffering.”
Alethon nods once. Hermes pauses, as if indexing the approval.
They move toward the crop side. The scent warms into fruit, faint tomato vine, something like pepper in blossom. The canopy thins on the left as shrubs surrender to lower growth; the ordered beds take over on the right, deeply green under blended spectra. Light intensifies toward the crop horizon; he squints.
“Hestia,” Hermes says, almost conversational, “simulate cirrus cover. Opacity thirty percent.”
A film of high cloud projects across the vault’s sun. The room exhales, Alethon’s eyes get back fully open.
“Thank you, Hestia,” Alethon adds.
“First forecast we can actually change,” Monty murmurs, amused.
The filtered light feels softer now, a pale gold stretching evenly across both sides, neither wild nor tamed.
A bee-shaped bot fusses past, wing hum pitched just right to trick the ear. Its small frame gleams matte bronze, the abdomen pulsing with faint cyan indicators as it hovers over the tomato rows. It lands delicately on a yellow blossom, vibrates once, and lifts again, efficient, tireless, precise.
Another passes a few meters ahead, tracing a perfect pattern between flowers before vanishing into the green. For a moment, the air feels convincingly alive, the engineered hum blending with the warmth of the vault’s light.
“Flying insects remain limited,” Hermes cuts in, as if drawing a quiet boundary around the moment. “Drosophila melanogaster only, for now. Pollination by drones.”
A buzz grazes Alethon’s ear; HSA3 flinches a few centimeters sideways as a drosophila drifts past its lens and claims the air anyway. The tiny insect lands square on the droid’s optical surface, unbothered by hierarchy or design.
“Careful, H-three,” Monty notes, suppressing a grin. “That’s your evolutionary superior.”
“Restore asset control, Three. Keep calm,” Hermes replies, perfectly deadpan.
HSA3 emits a short, indignant chirp and pivots a fraction, as if offended by the instruction.
Their laughter breaks the quiet symmetry of the greenhouse, a small, bright sound that fits easily inside the light. The warmth of it lingers, blending with the scent of fruit and soil, a sweetness that seems to drift ahead of them, hinting at ripeness waiting just beyond the next step.
On the wild side, where the shrubs thin, an apple tree holds the slope, its branches sagging with fruit that is half-yellow, half-green.
“No seasons here,” Hermes answers. “Photoperiod and temperature are constants. The cycle never sleeps.”
“Eternal summer,” Monty says, picking one and biting noisily. A clean, wet sound. “Paradise, with maintenance hours.” She chews, swallows. “Hestia, add it to my bill.”
“Inventory note: uncertain remaining credit,” Hestia replies primly, and Monty shows her teeth at the air, twisting her nose.
Wandering slowly, the far wall gets close, when Alethon sees the last beds: dense, low constellations of leaves seeded with little red planets. Strawberries, their skins textured like memory. He kneels. Knees meet the path, palm meets warm earth. The soil holds heat like breath under skin. He parts the leaves with the same patience he learned from his grandfather’s hands, chooses a fruit that sits neither too bright nor too pale, presses the stem’s seam with a thumb the way he was taught, lifts and turns. Sweetness and soil rise together.
“May I?” he remembers to ask, late.
“Approved,” Hermes says, which is also a smile.
“Careful,” Monty warns. “That one costs more than my apple.”
“Richest fruit in the base?” Alethon says, glancing at her.
“No charge,” Hermes counters. Its voice softens into the cadence it uses for instruction. “Sub-soil capillaries feed these beds. Waste and water travel through a micro-mesh lattice beneath the surface, not pipes but a living network shaped like roots in reverse, spreading nourishment outward instead of drawing it in. Nutrients rise by gradient and return through the same channels once the plants release them. Nothing leaves the system. Every molecule finds its way back.”
Alethon feels the soil breathe, the warmth and moisture moving just enough to make the surface shimmer. “Everything here feeds on its own reflection,” he murmurs, half to himself. Fine roots pulse faintly beneath a browned leaf; moisture glints where life recycles its own breath. A pale worm writes its slow cursive through damp crumbs, and near it, a Drosophila larva arches and folds, blind and tireless in its own small hunger. Fungal threads weave the fragments together, holding moisture, holding promise. The ground feels alive in its own slow rhythm, every cycle returning to the beginning. He thinks of closed circles not as traps, but as vows kept.
Overhead, the simulated cirrus thins, pixels dissolving into streaks as amber light reclaims the curve. The vault’s color deepens toward evening; reflections gather weight. The greenhouse draws itself into one color that keeps changing, a single breathing gold.
They stand a while before the exit stairs. Amber pours across the room from an angle that makes trunks glow like glass where the bark catches it; the pond becomes a poured line of metal, the far vault draws the first shadow. “Light rain in a few minutes for evening hydration,” Hermes says. “We should exit before it begins.”
Monty wipes her forehead with the inside edge of her wrist; damp hair irons to her temple. “Even if I stay here under the rain,” she says, “I’ll be exactly as wet as I am now. Every day is a sauna in here. I can’t wait to get back to the party pit.”
Her words hang together, a complaint in her home language. Alethon half-smiles, half-drifts in the place where music remembers you. Something melodic stirs, not a chorus, just a line that moves heat like a tide: a wave of warmth running clear through the light, walking away to find a chill place.
Monty goes first, willing to quickly reach the comfort area, almost bounding down the steep steps with an ease won from repetition, engaging the Airlock 2 door sensors. Hermes lowers straight and level, thrusters whispering as if not to disturb the air. HSA3 waits for them to clear the opening and then makes a wide, courteous orbit around the cutout.
Alethon lingers one breath longer, strawberry in hand, the aftertaste of soil still sweet and a little wild. He turns once, eyes tracing the quiet curve of the vault, gold softening into shadow, leaves from the wild side brushing the upper edge of the light, rain about to begin, then sets a foot on the ladder and follows them down.
The inner door seals; the pumps sigh and fall quiet; the big sound of the greenhouse folds away until only the smallest noise remains. On the other side of the wall, rain begins, soft, patient, drifting outward in its slow Coriolis dance, cleansing. Far beyond, above rock and liner and the comfortable lie of their summer, a real storm gathers itself together. Silent for now, magnetic and slow, coiling where light thins between worlds
Coolin’ Down the Heat
Like walking through a glass made of wind.
Air meets Alethon head-on, a soft vertical current sliding down from above, thin and perfectly dry. The warmth vanishes as it passes: sweat scattered, breath cooled, hair settling flat against his temple. The flow feels alive for a heartbeat, brushing him clean of moisture alike before dissolving back into invisibility.
He realizes what it is only after crossing the Airlock 2 barrier stream, the silent curtain that keeps the greenhouse’s damp and its tiny winged guests from following. Behind him, the scent of soil folds shut; ahead, aseptic order begins.
The light here is Hestia’s steady welcome, soft cyan, the same hue that glows between all modules, neither day nor night, just a pause. The color seems to flatten the temperature itself, as if light alone could tell the air to behave.
“Midway buffer at twenty-three degrees,” Hestia reports, voice low and precise. “Relative humidity is sixty-five percent. Pressure nominal.”
“Blessed be the buffer,” Monty mutters in front of him. A dry hiss answers, gentle as a sigh.
Hermes’ voice follows, calm and explanatory. “Airlock Two functions as an equilibrium. Warm, humid air from the greenhouse meets the cooler flow at the base here. Each side breathes out; each side breathes in. Balance is maintained.”
Alethon looks around, watching the faint shimmer of airflow along the wall seams. “Like lungs between the outer and inner world,” he says.
“Something like this,” Hermes replies after a pause. There’s approval in the stillness that follows, quiet, almost human.
He gestures toward the side doors. “Guest Quarters A and B. Unoccupied, waiting for eventual hosts.” Then to the forward hatch. “Recreation module ahead. Three, proceed.”
HSA3 glides forward, sensors flickering, and the next door wakes at its approach. Cyan gives way to a cooler shade of blue, a promise of rest beyond order.
Behind the door, the temperature drops another degree. Monty steps through the cooler air, her silhouette swallowed for a moment by the dim blue ahead.
Hermes pauses at the threshold and makes a small, unmistakable gesture with his hand, offering Alethon the passage.
“Flushed humans first.”
Alethon acknowledges it with a quiet tilt of the head and steps inside.
The space opens into a long, calm stretch of room. On the left, a low sofa runs almost the full length of the wall, its gentle arc softening the straight lines of metal behind it. Cyan underlighting traces its base like a breath held in stone. A line of cushions follows the sofa’s length, subtly suggesting the proper way to rest in rotation. On the right, the panoramic screen waits dark, its lower edge marked by a single filament of blue. The floor yields just a little under his step, a cushioned layer that turns the light Moon-g pull into something the body can relax into.
Monty has already found her target. She drops into the sofa with a tired exhale, half a laugh caught in her throat.
Alethon follows the motion without moving toward her, taking in the way her shoulders finally loosen. The quiet in the room settles differently now, warmer, less clinical.
Monty leans back, towel in hand. She tosses it across the sofa toward him. “Here. Your halo’s showing.”
He catches it, more surprised than amused.
“Condensate returns to loop,” Hermes observes from somewhere behind, perfectly even. “Identity of owner is not preserved.”
“Thank the gods,” Monty replies, wiping her face, a strand of hair sticking damp to her cheek.
“Thank the gods,” Monty replies, wiping her face, a strand of hair sticking damp to her cheek. “Hestia, my coolin’,” she says after a moment, like a regular greeting to an old bartender.
The base responds.
Light blooms from the screen in front of her, a slow flood of pale blue that rolls over the room and catches the sweat still clinging to her neck. The temperature follows, sinking until the air feels almost liquid in its calm. At first, it’s only color, a shimmer of movement, lines of shadow and reflection, but then detail resolves: plains of white broken by black seams, a horizon edged in gold. Words glow in a corner of the screen:
Live view from:
EUROPA STATION
Monty’s mouth curves into a small smile. “My favorite view to chill down on the sofa after a tour in the green hell.”
Alethon crosses the short distance and sinks beside her, the towel still in his hands. “You’d like the real thing,” he says quietly. “It’s so cold there, you stop thinking about anything but breathing. I stayed on the station for three years, writing about isolation and how the mind convinces itself the world still cares. Even the most trained ones began to drift after a while. They’d stare at the ice for hours, waiting for it to look back. Distance does strange things to reason.”
“Did you find any answer?”
“Only that pretending works, until it doesn’t.”
Monty nods, more serious now. “Then we’re all pretending, one habitat or another.”
Silence drapes the room while their bodies begin to breathe again, muscles loosening into the cushions as if gravity itself had softened. The blue light hums softly on their skin, the rhythm of breath aligning with the slow rotation of the image: a minute passes, maybe two, maybe ten.
Alethon’s thoughts drift, unmoored, half-melodic: coolin’ down the heat for me, coolin’ down and let me breathe.
The phrase glides through him like the air in the lock, warm memory folding into calm.
He exhales, glances at her, and lets a small smile surface. “Coffee?”
Monty opens one eye, the corner of her mouth lifting. “Now you’re talking. Only that word could drag me out of this freezing paradise.”
Alethon chuckles softly, rubbing his forearm as if to wake his skin. “I was starting to feel it too. Something hot, and maybe something to eat, sounds like survival right now.”
Monty pushes herself up with a half-laugh, brushing the fabric at her knees. “Come on then, doc. Let’s go feed the living.”
They rise from the sofa without hurry, the blue light sliding off their shoulders as they cross an open arch. Behind them, the relaxation area fades to a soft cyan Jovian memory; ahead, the kitchen waits in clean white. Cabinets line the left wall, every canister labeled with Hestia’s usual precision. Opposite, the equipped wall hums faintly, two slim robotic arms folded into its recess like sleeping tools, its foldable table locked upright until Monty presses it down with one smooth motion.
She opens a chilled compartment, then a drawer, and pulls out a small silver pouch. “Freeze‑dried,” she says, shaking it once with pride. “From my private reserve. Good thing the cargo bay’s big enough, or you would’ve staged a revolt by now.”
She tears the pouch neatly and taps the thermal panel with her knuckle. A soft chime answers as the heater wakes. She pours the grains into the pot, measures water from the dispenser, and allows the chamber to warm itself up to the desired temperature.
Monty reaches for two mugs from the upper rack. “How much for you?”
“Enough to defrost,” Alethon says. He pulls down one of the fold-out seats from the wall and sinks onto it, the light Lunar-like gravity turning the motion into something almost weightless.
Monty snorts under her breath. “Thought so.”
She tilts the pot just a little, holding the spout a hair above the rim of her cup. The first dark line slips down slowly, slower than the eye expects, as if the heat itself needed a moment to remember where to go. Then she lifts her wrist by a few centimeters, a small arc of motion that sends a faint hesitation through the stream. The coffee narrows, lengthens, and slides toward the far side of the cup, obeying its own inertia more than the hand that guides it. Monty anticipates the shift with the smallest turn of her wrist, a trick she learned the first week she set foot on the base.
“You see?” she murmurs. “In rotation, down gets shy. You have to invite it.”
Meanwhile, the filament finds the ceramic with a soft, settling sound, like a sigh. Monty lowers her arm again, and the stream returns to its place, falling near the inner rim with the calm of something that has found its path again. She pours the second cup, and the warm smell opens in the clean white of the kitchen, something dangerously close to home.
Alethon watches her pour as if witnessing an old ritual, the kind that survives any sky. For a moment, he says nothing. He just breathes in the steam, letting the warmth spread over his temples after all that cold.
“It almost looks like the coffee listens to you,” he says at last.
“Fluid behavior in rotation responds to motion, not intent,” Hermes states from the entrance of the kitchen.
“Intent often shapes motion, and right now mine is to snack on something,” Monty replies, lifting her cup for a slow sip before turning toward the cabinets on her left.
She retrieves two nutrient packs and brings them back to the table, placing them in the middle. Each pack holds a compact meal bar sealed in thin flex-poly, a firm rectangle of compressed grains and slow-release starch, lightly sweetened and meant to pair with whatever fresh produce the greenhouse can spare.
She turns to her right again and re-opens the chilled compartment in the equipped wall, bringing out a tray the agri-droids had set aside after the morning harvest: eight cherry tomatoes from the grow strips, two apples from the wild-side tree, and a squat vacuum jar of strawberry jam with a hand-written tag reading H-Lot 03 / 0.18 kg.
Alethon tears one pack open with his thumb, the bar giving a soft, dry snap as it comes free. Firm, almost a rusk. He takes a piece, then reaches for the jar. The lid sighs at the release. The scent unspools, a coil of sugar, fruit, sun. He spreads a little on the back of the rusk and tastes it there, the way his grandfather taught him to test a batch on a slice of bread. Sweet lands first, then the field beneath it: soil after rain, something stubborn and green climbing through.
He has the presence to ask, belatedly, “May I?”
“Approved,” Hermes says, stepping closer from the threshold.
“Careful,” Monty tells Alethon, mock-stern. “That spoonful buys three minutes on the treadmill.”
“Price accepted,” Alethon says, and takes a second, hungrier taste.
“Your nutritional intake will be monitored by Hestia starting tomorrow,” Hermes adds. “Calorie balance, micronutrients, hydration expectation, and metabolic output will remain within nominal margins.”
The droid pauses for a fraction that feels almost conversational.
“Tonight,” it adds, “no count is applied for you.”
Monty lifts a brow at him. “A rare grace.”
“Just for tonight,” Hermes clarifies, although something in the stillness behind the words resembles an indulgence.
“Don’t worry. I won’t exaggerate, promise,” Alethon says, trying to lighten the mood.
Monty taps her spoon against the empty spot on the table. “Alright, Hestia. What does my balance say now? What can I still eat without being hunted down by the treadmill?”
Hestia answers with polite clarity. “Remaining allowance includes one nutrient bar with twelve grams of jam, up to four cherry tomatoes, and the apple currently in your left pocket. The bite already taken has been logged.”
Monty freezes, then sighs and pulls the apple out. “Fine. You win.”
Alethon chuckles. “I guess she always wins.”
A beat passes before he remembers something. He reaches into his own pocket and takes out the lone strawberry from the greenhouse, still faintly warm from the grow lights. He holds it toward Monty like a tiny improvised toast.
She taps her apple gently against his strawberry. “To the green hell.”
“To Hestia’s strawberry field,” Alethon replies.
They eat their small trophies, and the conversation drifts into easy fragments: nothing urgent, nothing heavy, just food, warmth, and the quiet comfort of a kitchen like any other.
Time slips away unnoticed as they share tiny things that matter. The warmth settles in, not heavy, just enough to loosen joints and slow breath.
Monty yawns behind her hand. “Alright. My body is voting for bedtime.”
Alethon nods, stretching his shoulders once. “Mine too. Moon-g still feels like a workout after days of drifting.”
Before either of them rises fully, Hermes speaks. “Leave everything on the table. The kitchen cycle will process it.”
The droid turns slightly toward the wall. “Hestia, initiate cleaning protocol.”
“Confirmed,” Hestia replies.
The robotic arms unfold from their recess with a soft hydraulic murmur, elegant motions designed to be seen only at the edge of human presence. One arm lifts the tray, the other stabilizes the cups, both pausing mid-air as if politely waiting for the guests to clear their space.
Monty stands and flicks a glance at them. “Right. Let’s move before we get filed into a cupboard ahead of schedule.”
Alethon huffs a laugh. Hermes remains inscrutable, but something about its stillness suggests an implicit agreement.
They leave the kitchen together, the faint whirr of the cleaning arms fading behind them as they cross into the fitness area, the sound swallowed by the soft, steady hum of the rotating base.
The space opens wider here. The floor stiffens underfoot again, built for traction rather than comfort. Along the inner wall, a compact resistance rig waits in quiet readiness, its pulleys sealed in clear housings. Nearby, a circular-frame exercise bike rests like a piece of kinetic sculpture, the ring of its structure catching the soft light. Farther along, a hollow-frame treadmill glows gently, its screen ready to project whatever landscape the user needs to chase. The lighting adjusts automatically as they enter, gradually brightening in response to their presence.
“Tomorrow,” Monty says, pointing at the lineup, already moving past it.
“Exercise recommendation remains two hours daily,” Hermes notes, neutral as an instrument readout.
“After breakfast,” she counters, not breaking stride.
Alethon glances at the equipment, then at her. “I’ll join you, if you don’t mind.”
“Logged,” Hestia replies at once. “Both of you. Breakfast at seven thirty. Fitness room at eight hundred hours. Standard fitness suits are required.”
Monty stops just long enough to raise an eyebrow. “Already policing our wardrobe?”
“Wardrobe compliance increases exercise efficiency by twelve percent,” Hestia replies. “Deviation is not recommended.”
Alethon hides a smile. Monty mutters something that could be a curse or a compliment while moving toward the door at the end of the module.
HSA3 glides ahead of them, quiet as breath, and the door to Airlock 3 wakes at its approach. They follow the small hovering droid into the narrowing space. The light returns to soft cyan; sound dampens as if the walls themselves are settling into rest. The airlock feels like a gentle crossroads. Three paths branch beyond the next threshold: left toward Monty’s quarters, right toward Alethon’s, and straight ahead toward the Lab and Command Room.
Hermes stands in the middle of the hatch, posture exact, hands relaxed at his sides, facing them both, its presence lowering the volume of the room without speaking. For a moment, none of them moves.
“Crew section secured,” Hermes reports. The cheek-lines on its celadon face glow faintly while speaking, then settle.
“We’re done, Commander,” Monty says, with a tired grin that still lands precisely. “Call it a night.”
“Confirmed,” Hestia answers. “Sweet-dream cycle initiating. Corridor illuminance is ten percent over sixty seconds. Quarters to user presets. Ambient audio off.”
Light bleeds down in an almost imperceptible taper. In the new quiet, Alethon hears the base itself, the long, low comfort of rotation and pumps, that oceanic hush that lives under the hardware, like surf too far away to catch in detail.
They stop at the hub without ceremony. Monty lifts a hand in a loose wave. “Night. See you tomorrow for the sweet and sweat.”
“Night,” Alethon replies. “And… thank you. For today. It was a lot to take in.”
Hermes inclines its head with exact symmetry. “Good night, crew. I will remain on system watch in the Command room. Space never sleeps.”
Alethon steps through the door to his quarters, and HSA3 drifts in behind him, following its protocol. The door closes with a soft seal, leaving only cyan dim light and the hum of the corridor.
Beyond the walls, the base breathes. And far away in the dark, a faint disturbance stirs, slow and patient, as if testing the edges of its own becoming.
Becoming Spacepolitans 