The link was down, as I knew it would be.

Two months ago, communications with Central went down without explanation — a failure that left us cut off from all civilization, alone at the halfway mark to the system’s termination shock. Our supplies would only allow us one last month at the station before endangering any return trip.

Time was running short, and the root of the issue still eluded us. Stress and dread festered among the crew. Just like them, I suffered from intermittent spikes of despair and frustration, but I could not afford to stop.

With no one else aboard able to go as deep into the egregores as I, there would be no delegating of my duties. I was one of the Watcher’s Chosen, in charge of maintaining the spirits of both crew and egregores. I was failing both.

The station remained operational. Whatever corruption plagued its egregore had no impact on the control of the other systems. The crew operated them regularly without difficulties. Only the link to our home persisted in its failure.

I wished other problems would appear. This egregore counted amongst the most advanced ones I had ever heard of. Built as an amalgamation, instead of isolated entities controlling each system. I could not dispute the benefits in autonomous problem solving, but the mesh of interacting, semi-fused personalities made any attempt at a diagnostic nightmarish. I was no novice — the Order would not have let me embark on this journey otherwise — but despite my experience, I remained flabbergasted before our situation.

My work produced results, and each problem I corrected gave me a tinge of hope that this time... this time, it would be different. That a humongous backlog of messages would start flooding in, announcing our salvation. It never happened, of course, but the anticipation was inescapable.

I knew nobody expected me to succeed. Deep down, not even I really believed the egregore to be at fault. A state-of-the-art system, never exposed to such a barely understood environment? Obviously, there would be problems. It had been the most reasonable explanation, at first. But not now. Not after so long. And my mind refused to acknowledge it, despite the truth glaring at me from the ship. Its egregore presented no challenge, yet proved just as unable to reach home.

But I persevered in my lunacy. It kept me from falling into complete madness.

‘I am only slightly mad,’ I thought. ‘We’re all a bit mad here, anyway. No sane person could face this and remain perfectly sane.’

I unbuckled myself from my work bed, feeling tired and miserable. This last check had kept me busy for hours. Spending so much time focused on the egregore had muted all sensations from my body, but I knew I had to eat. We were all on edge, so risking bouts of irritability from an empty stomach would have been reckless.

‘Leri,’ I sent him through the egregore, ‘how are things on your end? I validated the authentication sequence. There’s no error... except for the lack of reply, of course. I need to eat. Want to grab a bite?’

I already knew how things were going for Leri. He radiated the same anguish as everyone else on the station. I asked, though, because I could use the company of a living being after talking to ghosts for so long. Being the only two members of the crew still trying to fix things, we shared a sense of camaraderie from which friendship was starting to blossom.

‘Truth is, the others have simply accepted there’s nothing to fix,’ I thought, ‘and maybe it’s time we do, too.’

Leri now focused on optical systems — something neither our transport ship nor the station were originally meant to host. For a medical assistant, that made for quite a change of expertise, but, with all the time and resources hitherto reserved for our mission freed, nothing remained to hinder such projects. So I kept on investigating egregores, and Leri made telescopes.

His first one had been assembled within a few hours. A couple of lenses in a small tube, useable from any windowed module. That innocuous contraption turned into the seed of a poisonous hope. Other members of the crew and I had taken turns trying it out, searching for signs of home, looking for a small dot, something that the egregores could confirm to be our planet. We failed, each of the many false positives making a chink in our morale. But Leri did not give up. He went on to create larger and larger telescopes, arguing his first solution to have only been a toy.

And this is when most of us saw our hopes die, for the more advanced instruments did indeed find planets — Nasir, Nieven, Scalanis, and all the others — but not ours.

The egregore signaled Leri had replied.

‘Oh, hey Eriol! I think the objective lens broke during depressurization. I’m not seeing anything. Yeah, I could use a break too. I’ll wait for you at the mess.’

That used to be near the center of the station. Easy access from anywhere. Each expedition to Supplicant Station brought new modules, but the constraints and costs of such journeys kept eroding the quality of life aboard — deterioration from use outran the influx of repair materials. Our arrival had grown the station past a hundred modules. Too large, but not spacious enough at the same time. Each room felt cramped, yet getting anywhere took forever. Very few of them could be safely decoupled, so any restructuring plan would effectively mean starting a new station. Expensive and wasteful. In the meantime, we lived in cylindrical rooms of titanium and aluminum, differentiated primarily by their instruments and the amount of claw marks the meshed fabric of their interiors bore.

I rotated to face the bed I had been lying on, grabbed a belt to anchor myself through the maneuver, then released as my legs sprung me toward the hatch. Made it through a handful of modules before having to reorient myself.

‘Not bad,’ I judged.

No risk of collision with another crew member. I could only sense Leri onboard. The others all stayed on the ship. They had a different project to keep their mind busy: a last journey, one that would bring them back home — or at least where home ought to be. Supplies were limited, and we lacked any viable way to replenish them, but despair bred psychosis in our minds. We sought refuge, and their plan offered shelter from dark thoughts, as flawed as it may be.

But Leri and I had opted to stay on the station, at the outer rim of our solar system. With Him. The Watcher, ever gazing, ever judging. An impossible entity composed of two rings, one inside the other, with diameters close to a quarter the size of our sun. It orbited beyond a decade away from our planet. Too perfectly circular to be a natural formation. The most sacred of places, and an undeniable evidence of higher powers.

The Watcher’s Eye had driven our civilizations, its reflective surface making it visible from within our atmosphere, despite the distance. We had rushed toward space faring technologies until, little more than a century ago, we sent the First Supplicants. They were the highest of each of our then diverging faiths — a compromise made to ensure funding and to limit the risk of angering the Watcher. What the Supplicants found instead was a dormant living structure, and no one to welcome them. It appeared the Watcher’s Divine Messengers did not think us worthy of an audience. But the Eye’s structure itself revealed itself as a message. It featured alcoves large enough to host ships, leading to a plethora of oratories, themselves filled with engraved pictures and letters. The Scriptures. The silence made sense at last: how could we hope to discuss with the Divine Messengers, speaking only our mortal tongues? We had to learn their language. We did, embracing new teachings and correcting the many errors of our ways. Yet still did the Watcher find us wanting. It remained silent even as we built and anchored Supplicant Station to its outer ring.

I finally reached the mess, having cataloged a few spots in need of repairs on the way. Leri waited for me there and I caught myself almost reaching for his mind out of reflex.

‘Too much time spent working on the egregore. I have to be more careful about that.’

As I grew closer, I detected something new among the emotions he radiated: a growing anxiety, barely noticeable under the torrent of dread we all felt.

When Leri raised a hand to acknowledge my presence, I realized what had changed.

“Oh,” I said, surprised and disappointed.

He had stopped wearing his ceremonial dress, opting instead for the pale green jumpsuit typically worn when performing activities even our microgravity-optimized garbs could hinder. It did not pair well with the orange of his fur. He looked tired and in need of a wash, but that was nothing new. Most of us did.

‘So… I failed him too, then.’

The change of attire could only be a deliberate choice, given the limited clothing alternatives. It signaled a crisis of faith none of us had escaped. I knew the reasoning. Even before the crew had come to me for answers, I had asked myself the question. Was our missing planet the outcome of the Watcher’s judgment? The Scriptures did mention such terrible punishments, but only in the most extreme of cases.

While I could not deny our best efforts fell short of the Watcher’s expectations, surely our failings did not warrant retributions that severe.

Leri noticed my disapproval and guilt, but only felt a sliver of shame at the implicit accusation. He was the last of our crew I was still on good terms with, so I decided not to press the issue. He handed me a perenn, as if paying amends. I accepted and took a bite of the sweet fruit, but kept quiet, as I sensed him building up to a confession.

The mess module was relatively large and well lit, being meant for recreation. Leri and I held ourselves anchored to what could pass for a food bar using our tails, at hand’s reach of a potager. ‘The best restaurant in four billion kilometers.’ A joke I had reiterated too many times in the past, and now seemed only a grim reminder of our situation.

Leri still had not spoken, so I took the cue and pushed.

“What is it?”

“I have decided to go with the ship,” my friend admitted, ruining any chance for this to be an enjoyable meal.

‘Fuck. Fuuuuuuuuck.’

“Are you sure?” I knew he was, but I had to ask. “There are a lot more things we could try here.”

Leri was preparing for a confrontation. I recognized the pattern. A fight here would only entrench him in his convictions. But still, I could not just let him go to his death without attempting to dissuade him.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” he began. “The only thing waiting for us here is madness.”

“The only thing waiting for you there is death.” I sounded upset. Not good. I was upset, but I should have known better than to let it affect my words.

“We need to know, Eriol. And there’s the seed reserve on Nieven,” he countered. “We can reach it.”

‘That’s a new one…’

Still indignant, I rushed to find counterarguments, only to realize they were all shallow.

‘It’s not such a bad idea,’ I begrudgingly thought to myself.

We were doomed — even I could admit it — but by joining into an egregore, they could hope for a nigh eternal existence. A desperate move, but not as unreasonable as their initial plan.

“That’s interesting,” I said, “and clever. Let me think…”

But it meant than despite having abandoned their faith, the crew had adopted one of the most controversial beliefs surrounding egregores. Was the plant mimicking the mind, or was the same mind continuing its existence within it? Even as an expert, I could not provide evidence of either. I considered the Scriptures implied the latter. Still, we called ascended people ghosts for a reason. It was not a continuation of life, only non-death.

‘But they can’t make the transfer, can they?’

“You have no high seer,” I pointed out. “No one who knows how to perform the ceremony.”

That had him dismayed. I had rolled the dice on that one, and I could already see it failed to convince him. Fortunately for our friendship, I could mend things, now that I knew they were going to go forward with their plan no matter what I said. Maybe a few months ago, I would have been able to navigate the conversation well enough to make him change his mind. But not now. We were all under too much emotional stress to try anything clever.

“But I thought…” he began, a bit shaken. “I thought you’d come with us!”

“My place is here,” I declared. ”With the Watcher.”

That did nothing to help his mood, but I was firm in my belief.

I could try one last argument, so I did, for my own peace of mind. “You know, even if I went along with this, I’m not a high seer.”

Feeling like I had failed to even put a chink in his resolve, I sighed.

“You’ll try anyway,” I concluded. ”It’s fine. I won’t try to dissuade you anymore.”

‘And you’ll almost certainly fail.’

I sighed again.

“Fine,” I said. “I failed the crew too much already. I’m staying here, but I’ll tell you what I can about the ascension ceremony.”

That calmed him down somewhat. Good. I needed him to pay attention.

“Isn’t it supposed to be a secret?” Leri asked.

I nodded.

“Only they who prove worthy shall be given the secrets of immortality,” I quoted. “But I’ve been maintaining egregores long enough to know a thing or two, and I may or may not have glimpsed at the memories of a few ghosts as I pruned that part of their knowledge.” I paused as a ridiculous thought formed in my mind. “Plus, at this point, am I not the highest ranking seer?”

I laughed at my own terrible joke, and Leri smiled. The levity made us pause in our conversation, releasing us from the clutches of the overbearing stress for a few seconds.

‘That’s questionable, to say the least, but, Watcher forgive me, I’m not above using a technicality to give the crew the answer they need.’

We shared a sense of fear and excitement. That secret would empower Leri greatly, yet he knew my right to give it was tenuous at best, and this was no place to commit sacrilege.

“Listen,” I started. ”You need to consume hunvre first. Enough that your blood reaches saturation. Then you swallow a seed. Don’t bite it, of course. It needs to reach your stomach without breaking. The process should start within a day, but you need to make sure you keep drinking hunvre, no matter what. As the plant grows, it will replace your nervous system, but the muscles won’t accept it. If you could somehow still move after taking so much hunvre, that loss of control will definitely ensure you stay in bed. Once the plant has replaced your brain, someone can extract the egregore and put it in a mix of hunvre and water. There’s technically no need to use hunvre at that point since the plant can survive pretty much forever on just heat and light, but it won’t grow or repair itself without it.”

Leri frowned.

“But... we don’t have hunvre!” he complained.

Was I now supposed to convince him the crew’s plan made sense? Well, I had just promised not to try to dissuade him anymore.

Having finished the first, I took another fruit.

“You’re going to the seed reserve on Nieven, right? There will be plenty of hunvre seeds there,” I pointed out. “And of course I have a few samplings here for my work. I’ll give them to you so you can grow more during the journey. If I keep the fruits, I should have time enough to grow others before they’re needed.”

Giving these away was a colossal risk, but self-sacrifice for the sake of others was part of the job description, and I took pride in it.

Leri’s eyes grew distant. He was using the egregore to communicate with the rest of the crew. They avoided me nowadays.

‘Too ashamed of themselves,’ I thought. ‘It’s not surprising they chose Leri to talk to me.’

But I felt uneasy at the realization that while I had been the one to propose this meeting, their wills had caused me to. That should not have been possible. Only the best empaths worked on egregores. We learned to isolate the surrounding thoughts from our own. It seemed stress was affecting me way more than I had realized.

‘I’ll have to meditate on those bottled up emotions.’

The station was never completely silent. Now that our conversation had paused, I could hear the resonating sound of a fan desperately trying to suck air through a filter clogged by shed fur. I added it to the list of maintenance tasks in need of doing.

A mental pressure I had not realized was there abruptly lifted. The ever constant feeling of impending doom that flooded the station quickly drained away as each crew member received Leri’s message.

“When are you leaving?” I asked him, forgetting that this would disrupt his concentration.

He took a moment to recover.

“Sorry,” I said, before repeating my question.

“We’re leaving in about fifty hours.” He felt guilty about it. “I’ll make sure you get your fair share of supplies. The same as any of us.” There was a moment’s hesitation. “It’ll be hard to keep the station running all by yourself, though. Are you sure you want to stay?”

“I have not lost my faith,” I reminded him. “This is where I belong.”

He nodded, and that was the end of this conversation.

---

I spent most of these hours alternating between meditation, prayer, sleep, and repairs of the egregore. As Leri had said, I was going to have a hard time of it. Not an impossible task, provided I incurred nothing debilitating.

The dreaded moment had finally arrived. Everything was ready and, according to the inventory, they were indeed leaving me with plenty to eat while I set up something moderately sustainable. I could hope for nearly a decade, at best. That was fair.

The ship’s crew could perform the entire departure operation by themselves, but tradition had the station take part in the procedure if possible. There were hundreds of checks to perform, and I had spent an inordinate amount of time using the egregore to help as much as I could.

‘This is Supplicant Station,’ I sent through the egregore, ‘confirming all transfer tubes are disconnected and sealed. Clamps release in T minus thirty seconds. Have a safe trip, and may the Watcher be with you all.’

The standard valediction, the irony of which I realized only after they had already received the thought.

I ordered a ghost to track the ship’s progress, allowing it access to all external sensors, and had another ready to change sensor configurations if the first requested it.

Focusing back on the message exchange buffer, I noticed the ship’s reply.

‘Understood, Eriol,’ it said. ‘Thank you for the help. May you find the peace we all seek.’

Only then did the finality of the situation hit me.

‘I am alone. I will never see anyone again for the rest of my life.’

The spike of sadness filling me disrupted my concentration and severed the connection. I was shaking. All the emotions I had tried to appease during my meditation were surging up at once. My vision blurred and I choked.

I cried.

It took hours for the sobs to stop, after which sleep claimed me.

---

I woke up feeling strangely refreshed, like the stress and anxiety of these past months had released their grip on me. A temporary numbness, I knew. I had to start working on food plantations. Staying inactive would let the emotions drown me again.

I headed for the main growing room.

Arriving there, I saw it had been virtually emptied. Wasteful, but I understood. Nearly all of its content would end up on the ship anyway, so they had moved everything before sorting them.

‘I’m going to have to replant whatever they left me.’ I sighed. ‘Fine.’

There were a few bags to put soil in, but most showed lacerations too large for safe use. I would have to recycle them. That was fair. The station could mold new growth cushions much faster than the ship, having many more plastic repurposing stations.

‘Still, couldn’t they have left some soil here?’

It seemed I would have to haul around all the supplies they inventoried. I assumed they had left the goods next to the docking port. Microgravity would help in that regard, but even so, the station’s architecture made moving anything large really annoying. Especially alone.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings, but I still felt numb to it all. I headed to the docking port, ready to start the work. On the way there, I took note of all the issues I could detect. After all, there was nobody else to handle maintenance anymore.

Reaching my destination, I opened the pressurized hatch and found... nothing.

“What?”

In a rush of panic, I checked the port number again. It was correct.

‘Did they store the crates elsewhere? Where did they put them?’

The numbness was gone now. Hysteria threatened to take its place.

‘Fuck! fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...!’

I frantically went through all the nearby modules, but failed to find any supplies.

Out of options, I latched myself and mentally reached for the egregore. I made a ghost open communication with the ship, after the main radio dish turned to target it.

‘Eriol here,’ I sent. ‘I’m not finding the supplies you left me. Do you have any idea where they are?’

Not the tone of message I would have expected to send after that last farewell, but I was in no mood to care.

‘Nolvene here,’ the reply came. ‘I will enquire.’

I waited.

Minutes passed, each one feeding my anxiety.

Half an hour later, I finally got an answer.

‘I am sorry, Eriol,’ Nolvene sent. ‘Ewan just admitted he stole them.’

‘They’re on the ship?! But I need them!’

‘I know... I’m sorry.’

‘Can’t you turn the ship around?’

‘Not without burning through most of our reserves.’

‘You’ve just killed me!’

‘I know... I’m so sorry, Eriol.’

‘There has to be something you can do!’

But the ghost in charge of communications informed me the connection had been cut off.

‘Well? Reconnect, then!’ I ordered.

That failed. No signal.

I knew what that meant. The ship had turned off communications. I also knew Nolvene was right. The reserves did not allow for much more than the trip back home required. Some leeway, yes, depending on what gravity assists they used, but departure from the station was never done with fuel efficiency in mind. Time was the factor here. And reversing such a long full-throttle burn would indeed cost them their chance ever of returning home.

‘But fuck their Watcher-forsaken mission! They have to come back! They have to! They’re condemning me to a slow and painful death.’

I was hyperventilating.

‘Watcher damn it all! And to cut off communications after that? Afraid of facing the consequences of your own acts? Of even witnessing them?’

I banged my fist on the wall padding next to me. It completely cushioned the impact, making the move very unsatisfying.

“FUCK!”

I yelled a few more times, paused to catch my breath, then started again.

After the burst of the anger had passed, I reviewed my options. I had to calm down and not fall into despair. Chosen had a duty of staying optimistic. People would refer to them for guidance, so they had to remain the pillar of hope everybody else could rely on.

‘I am dead — or soon will be.’

So, I was not a perfect Chosen. Whatever.

There was no escaping the truth, short of a miracle, — and my divine neighbor had not proved so inclined — but there had to be ways to make my death painless and dignified.

Still under the shock, I found it hard to think of anything as I drifted all the way to the medical bay.

I should not have been surprised to find its reserves empty, but I was not really at my best. The crew had not taken everything: some containers could not be moved and opening them would degrade their content. Mainly temperature sensitive materials. Solutions that would activate upon being warmed up. I queried the egregore for the contents and uses of what remained. The first one held many types of microbes and viruses, a ghost informed me, most of them meant to try out any cure we had hoped the Watcher would give us. Another bay had the station’s reserves of cryogenic pods, to be used should some of the crew need healing beyond our abilities, with the same expectation that the Watcher may show mercy in the future. But then the ghost gave me hope: it pointed out an error in labeling. One of the containers could be indeed opened and closed safely, despite the warning indicating otherwise. It held sets of more mundane medicine, such as vaccines, insulin, antitoxins, and antibiotics.

Out of a strange combination of both morbid curiosity and self-interest, I started learning about the effects of the diseases I had access to.

‘Nothing pleasant. Nothing pleasant at all.’

Oh, some could have fit the bill, had I a supply of drugs to make things less painful. But if I had, then the disease itself would not have been needed.

As it finally understood the true nature of my query, the ghost revealed insulin to be a solution. But a jealous thought at my interlocutor’s ability to stay frozen in time without having to worry about eating or drinking gave me another idea.

‘Certain death or certainly death…’

Energy was not a concern — the Watcher provided much more power than the station would ever need — and I had access to cryogenic pods. They were designed to work in a vacuum. It would probably not be pleasant, but it offered hope, and that made it the only viable choice. In more senses than one.

To optimize my chances, I had to reduce the possible single points of failure between the Watcher and myself. The pod itself remained an inevitable one, but it had been built with durability and reliability in mind, so its internal systems featured plenty of redundancies. Likewise, while the power adapter could not be substituted, I could link multiple ports to ensure that even if some connections broke down, the pod remained functional. That meant taking apart critical pieces of the station, but I would not be in the station, anyway. No. I could not risk the station’s structure failing on me. I was going to place it all within one of the Watcher’s oratories.

‘And if I fail... well... there are worse places to die than the divine chambers.’

I moved everything to the station’s Watcher-facing hatch, equipped an EVA suit someone had misplaced in a lab, and set to work.

---

I was in the cryogenic pod, hungry and tired, waiting for it to pressurize before I could open my suit — and what a suit that turned out to be! It featured a tiny egregore. Something made from a small animal, I was sure, as there was no answer when I queried it. Still, it was smart enough that I could use it as a conduit to operate the systems, provided I handled everything myself. Definitely blasphemous, but, I had to admit, a clever design. It had to be some experimental prototype.

‘And I wouldn’t have succeeded without it. Thank the Watcher for that little miracle.’

Most of the suit’s attachments floated outside the pod, as I could not allow anything to disrupt the freezing process. A light signaled that the environment had finished pressurizing. Indeed, I could see some greenish liquid slowly pouring out of the holes surrounding me. The next step of the process had already begun. I made the egregore open the suit, which had been running out of air without its reserves. I breathed tentatively and noticed a strange but familiar smell.

“I know that smell!” I exclaimed.

‘Wait... is that an anesthetic?!’

My body answered by fainting within a few seconds.