Narrow, in the vastness of space.

He orbited the sun in his city-sized spaceship. “My job is important, now more than ever,” he said, offering himself some consolation. He wanted to believe that it mattered, that his once-dream-job —now his title, earned, bought and paid for— was needed still.

“Fuck me. I haven’t heard from them in months.”

He had just woken up. Over the months after he lost communication with earth, his sense of time slowly faded. Day and night were mere arbitrary values guiding the way he spent his time.

He was the only crew and – at that time – the only human in millions of kilometres. He did not hold back when it came to food; he had no one to share his meals with, and thanks to the 2101 new century redesign of the ISS the ship rotated around its axis generating a constant g-force. Even better, he could slightly increase the angular velocity to keep himself in shape without having to exercise.

Many luxuries were provided to ensure that the person responsible for sustaining the ISS had everything needed to perform their duties while maintaining a healthy mental state. There was not only food, but also games, music, and movies of every kind —even pornography, ranging from the merely immoral to the outright monstrous and illegal, though such material was never publicly acknowledged.

He traversed a mile-long hall as a part of his morning run. For efficiency purposes, the halls were wide enough for only one person; more were never expected. The walls were made out of thick and black steel plates and a shell of thermal resistors that kept absurd masses of computer memory cooled to their superconducting temperatures.

Computations were streamed to the whole solar system, and sometimes other parts of the galaxy, all from this station.

He reached his office; a room that found its place within this giant supercomputer. There was a bathroom, a desk with a control panel and a couple of levers and buttons he had perfectly mapped out in his head. Having operated the ISS for two decades, the giant spaceship had become nothing but an extension to his body.

Speaking of body extensions, that day marked the beginning of a 350-hour-long yearly maintenance process. This task would require him to enter an induced state of slow metabolism, then continuously control a pair of mechanical arms as he scanned the outer shell of the station; a long and tedious process he learned to appreciate with time.

Identity: Confirmed

Good morning, Captain Nishida.

The voice was directly streamed into his brain. This technology, while seemingly overkill, proved essential in history. A critical error that cost humanity at least months’ worth of data had occurred twice up to that point, both because of deterioration in the senses of the operating astronaut. The solution was to get rid of their need for senses altogether.

“Well, if technology is that good, why need a human to maintain it in the first place?”, one might ask. The sad truth is that a human is by no means needed. In theory, the ISS could stand as a fully independent and functional self-sustaining system. However, heavy visual pattern recognition AI takes a lot of computing power; humans would simply rather have a person take care of such chores as the computers do what they do best. In that regard, Nishida is necessary.

His muscles relaxed on the chair as the gas mask fastened around his face, his vitals were kept track of, and he was injected with a transparent viscous liquid. His heart rate immediately slowed, and a fully cabled helmet relaxed on his cranium. Gradually and slowly, his vitals went down—all except his brain activity.

The arms untethered from the mothership. Following the protocol, Nishida moved the machine – which then was himself – around, back and forth a couple of times, up and down then left and right, from simple hand signs to complex sign language, all to ensure the absence of any mechanical inconveniences.

He then lunged into the conventional front of the ship to begin his examination.

Meticulous, precise and refined over the course of decades was his skill. Less like a scientist operating an instrument, and more of an artist flexing his expertise to an audience of absolute nothingness.

He would pick up any hexagonal plate he deemed worth checking, verify the temperature and safety of the memory underneath it, and make sure not even microscopic dust could penetrate the gaps between two plates. The same process for billions of plates. It wouldn’t have been possible if he were to check each individual plate, but thankfully, there was no need for that; his keen eye with the help of the high-resolution cameras adapted to the whole spectrum could easily spot any nonuniformity, however tiny.

Save for the shields, engines and communication parts, nothing special happened. It was just Nishida, maneuvering his limbs of steel for hundreds of hours.

His session was interrupted. Startled, he opened his eyes—real eyes. His heart pounding, he immediately removed the helmet and vomited on the floor, then reached out to a bucket for a second round. His eyes scanned the room, the monitor displayed numbers that spiked and dropped uncontrollably before finally stabilising.

Time spent: 112 hours.

Completion: 43%

“Why?” He said, “It’s too early for me to wake up.”

Nishida climbed up to the observatory and watched as the mechanical limbs floated motionless near the station.

“Why did I wake up?” he yelled.

You were manually forced out of the deep dive by a higher rank crew member.