The Vigil

A Sentinel Trilogy Story

By Brian Bullock

A Starborne Studios Production

EVERYONE KNOWS / X @EveryoneKnws1

This story takes place on the last night before Daedalus went to sleep.

It is the story of the last man awake, and what he wrote before he closed his eyes.

Chapter One: The Last Duty

The station had never been this quiet.

Oran sat at his desk in the commander's office and listened to it -- the unfamiliar stillness of Daedalus without people in it. Not silence exactly, but the absence of the frequencies people produced simply by existing. Footsteps. Voices. The low hum of thousands of bodies going about the business of being alive. He had commanded this station for eleven years and had never once stopped to notice how much of its texture came from the people inside it. He noticed now.

Three thousand and forty-one people were sleeping in the stasis bay.

He had walked through it one last time before coming here -- not to check the systems, but simply to be there once more in the blue light. To see the faces of people he had commanded and argued with and eaten meals beside, all of them still now, trusting without knowing they were trusting that the systems would hold and something on the other side of the sleep would be worth waking into. He had moved through the rows without touching anything, reading names on pods he had approved and authorized and filed paperwork for, and when he reached the end of the last row he had stood there for a while before walking back to the office.

He had come to this station as a junior administrator twenty-two years ago and had never left. He had been offered other postings and had declined them all. He had found the place that fit him and had not seen the point of leaving it.

What no one knew was that he came to the arboretum on the nights he couldn't sleep -- a small room on the tertiary ring, officially a botanical research station, used by almost no one. On the nights when command sat too heavily he would go there and stand among the growing things and let the smell of soil and green do what it reliably did. He could not have explained why it helped. It simply did. Someone had been tending the plants for years -- he didn't know who and had decided not to ask, because the not-knowing was part of what he liked about it. Someone cared about the plants. The plants were cared for.

He had gone there last night. Had stood for a long time with his hands at his sides and breathed the green air and said goodbye without saying anything at all.

The plague had killed one hundred and fourteen people in eight months. He wrote that number at the top of the log and looked at it for a moment. One hundred and fourteen. He had known every one of them -- by name and by record and by the way commanders know the people under their command, which is different from friendship but not entirely separate from it.

He wrote the formal opening of the log.

Station Daedalus. Final pre-suspension log. Commander Oran, commanding officer. Current date: the four hundred and twelfth day of the outbreak. Station population entering full stasis suspension: 3,041. Total personnel: 3,042. All essential systems confirmed operational. The station is prepared to sustain the suspension for the estimated duration.

He stopped.

For the estimated duration. He had written it with the automatic precision of a person who had written it a hundred times, and it was accurate in every formal sense and dishonest in every way that mattered. There was no estimated duration. They were going to sleep and they did not know when they would wake and the form had that field because it had been designed for scheduled suspensions of known length, not for this.

He drew a line through the last sentence. He had never drawn a line through anything in an official log in thirty years. He looked at the line for a moment -- the clean cancellation sitting across his own careful handwriting -- and felt the eight months of formal distance finally give way.

He picked up the stylus again and wrote below the line: There is no estimated duration. I do not know how long we will sleep. I do not know if the plague will be gone when we wake. I do not know if we will wake. What I know is that the station is prepared, and everyone I could protect is protected. That is what I can say honestly. Everything else is hope.

The format had lasted exactly two paragraphs.

Chapter Two: The Honest Hours

He had filled several pages with the technical record -- system states, personnel accounting, medical summaries, the sequence of decisions documented in the careful neutral language of official documentation. It was accurate. It was complete. It was also beside the point, because the technical record was already in the station's systems. The log he was writing was not really for them. He wasn't entirely sure who it was for.

He stood and walked to the viewport and looked at the Moon for a while -- grey and still and entirely indifferent to what was happening in the station above it. Then he came back and sat down and kept writing.

I am going to stop writing the official record now. What I want to write is something different. I am not certain it belongs in a commander's log. I am going to write it anyway, because I am the last person awake on this station and there is no one left to tell me what belongs in a commander's log.

I have been a commander for twenty-three years. In that time I have learned that the version of yourself you present to the people under your command is not the whole of you, and that this is not dishonesty but necessity. Tonight there is no one to present a version to. Tonight there is only the full version, which is considerably less steady than the one I have been showing people for the last eight months.

What I am feeling tonight is afraid. Not afraid of dying -- I have made what peace I can with that. What I am afraid of is the gap. The space between closing my eyes tonight and opening them again, which might be years or decades or never. I have spent twenty-three years as a commander and the entirety of my adult life as a person who was present and awake and doing the work, and the idea of simply not being present -- not dead, but suspended, neither here nor not here -- is something my mind keeps approaching and then shying away from like a person approaching a drop they cannot see the bottom of.

The drop has no visible bottom. We are all jumping. I was the last to the edge, and I am going to jump anyway, because the people I care about are already down there somewhere and that is where I need to be.

Chapter Three: What He Remembered

He wrote about them generally, and let the general contain the specific.

There is a researcher who argued with me about resource allocation for seven months before I admitted she was right. She was right from the beginning. I argued because the right answer required a restructuring I didn't want to do and because I had the authority to delay it. The morning I finally said so, she looked at me and said: I know. Not with satisfaction. With the exhaustion of someone who has been carrying a correct answer for a long time and is relieved, finally, to put it down somewhere it can be used. She is in pod seven-fourteen. I hope when she wakes up the first thing she does is argue with someone again, loudly, until they admit she's right.

There is a pilot who, on the day I had forgotten to eat for fourteen hours, came to my office, set food on my desk, and left without a word. Did not knock. Did not wait for acknowledgment. Just left the food and went back to the flight schedule. That pilot is in pod two-oh-three. I noticed. I noticed everything. I just didn't always say so -- a failure of character I dressed up as professionalism for long enough that I almost believed it myself. I intend to correct it. Starting with saying thank you for the food.

There is a medic who held the hand of every single person who died in the outbreak. Not one of them died alone. I asked why. The medic said: because no one should go through that alone. As if it were obvious. As if it were simply what you did. That medic is in pod eight-ninety-one. There is no category in the official record for sat with the dying so that no one died alone. But it will be in this log. And this log is a record too.

There is an engineer in the lower decks who kept the life support running through two system failures in the third month without telling anyone how close it came to going wrong. I found out from the maintenance records three weeks later. I called the engineer in and asked why I hadn't been informed. The answer was: you had enough to carry. That engineer is in pod four-seventy. I have thought about that answer for months. I still don't know if it was the right call. But I know it was made for the right reasons.

He wrote for a long time. Not all of them -- there were three thousand and forty-one of them and the night was not that long. But the ones who had stayed with him. The ones whose qualities he would carry into the sleep and hoped to carry out of it.

I don't know if any of them will read this. I don't know if I'll be alive to know whether they read it. But it felt necessary to write it down, and I have spent long enough as a commander to know that when something feels necessary, you do it, and you figure out why later.

Chapter Four: The Small Hours

He walked through the station for the last time. Not the stasis bay -- he had done that already. Just the station itself, letting his feet go where they knew to go.

The common mess. He stood in the doorway without going in. He had eaten here most mornings, usually early, usually alone -- the hour before the main meal shift had always been the best time to think. The tables were clean. The chairs were tucked in. Everything was as it should be, and there was no one in it, and he understood for the first time how much of what he had liked about those early mornings was the knowledge that they would be followed by the sound of people filling the room behind him.

The research wing. He walked its length slowly, reading the names on the doors. The work done behind those doors over twenty-two years was in the archive now, sealed and waiting. He thought about the researcher in pod seven-fourteen and hoped she would be among the first awake.

The arboretum. He had been there last night and hadn't planned to come back, but here he was. He didn't go in. He had used his last visit the night before. This was just looking. Saying yes to a fact about the world before the world changed.

Then the observation deck.

The stars were the same stars they had always been. Vast and patient and burning through their own fuel at a rate that made the entire span of Ketheri civilization look like a single breath. Oran looked at them and felt something somewhere between grief and gratitude and the feeling of caring very much about something you cannot control.

He loved this station. He said it out loud, to the empty deck, because he was the last person awake and the stars were not going to report him to anyone and it was true.

"I love this station," he said. "I love the people in it. I am going to do my best to wake up."

The stars continued doing what stars did. He nodded at them and went back to his desk.

Whoever reads this -- whenever you read this, however much time has passed -- I want you to know that the people in these pods are good people. Ordinary people who did their work and cared about each other and faced something terrible with more steadiness than I had any right to expect. They deserve to wake up. They deserve a future worth waking into.

Take care of them. That is all I ask.

Commander Oran. Station Daedalus. The last entry.

He closed the log, sealed it to the archive, and sat for a little while longer -- not because there was anything left to do but because he was not quite ready, and he had earned the right to be not quite ready for a few more minutes. The station breathed around him. The tick and settle of a structure maintaining itself in the cold of space, the low hum of systems running on automated cycles. He had trusted it with everything he had.

Then he stood up, straightened his coat, and walked to the stasis bay.

Chapter Five: The Vigil

The blue light. The rows of pods, each one sealed and steady, each one containing a life suspended at the precise moment of trust -- the moment after the choice and before the outcome.

He walked to his pod. Stood beside it for a moment. The readings were nominal. The preservation systems were running exactly as designed.

He thought about the log. About the researcher who had been right when he was wrong. About the pilot who had brought him food and not mentioned it. About the medic who had held the hands of the dying. About three thousand and forty other people sleeping in this room, trusting the station and each other and the long patience of waiting.

He climbed into the pod. Confirmed each prompt with care -- his biometrics, his command authorization, the final confirmation that this entry was voluntary and understood. Even here, even now, precision was a form of respect. The pod was warmer than he expected. It felt like being held, slightly, in a way that was not unpleasant.

He was afraid. He acknowledged this directly, without looking away from it. He was afraid of the drop with no visible bottom, the gap between closing his eyes and whatever came next. He was going to close them anyway -- because the people in this room needed him to, and because there was no alternative, and because this mattered as much as anything he had ever done.

The preservation cycle deepened. His thoughts took on the quality of things seen through water. He was aware of his own heartbeat. He was aware of three thousand and forty-one people sleeping around him and the station holding its breath above them all.

The last thing in his mind before the dark was not fear. It was the arboretum, and the pilot's consideration, and the medic's hand, and three thousand and forty-one lives in the dark around him, and the satisfaction of having done the work.

That was the last thing.

The pod sealed. Commander Oran, last awake, let his eyes close.

The blue light cycled. The stars burned outside, doing what stars had always done.

Eleven thousand years later, when the station woke, the log would still be there. Elana would find it on the first day. She would read every word and carry it quietly for a long time -- the researcher who had always been right, the pilot who had brought food and not mentioned it, the medic who had held the hands of the dying, the commander who had been afraid and climbed into the pod anyway.

She had known them all.

She had been keeping them while they slept.

Take care of them. That is all I ask.

She had.

END

The Vigil is a short story set in the world of THE SENTINEL OF CRATER DAEDALUS, Book 1.8 of The Sentinel Trilogy.

The full story is available in the Vault at brianbullockwriter.com

 by Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | @EveryoneKnws1