Short Story: Coming Up

Roy hovered next to the terminal, dead still, the novelty of non-gravity acrobatics having faded long ago. He was there to operate the cargo door as this month’s supply package arrived. It was a nifty bit of tech, he thought: the package was only small, and was launched off from Earth, then magnets in the station drew it upward through space - he only had to open the door and get the supplies. He looked up at Ariel, who was fiddling the dials on her telescope - he knew she didn’t need to be in zero-gravity to work but she seemed to enjoying floating about. She was doing what she always did: letting the not-being-used lenses hover below her where she’d grip them between her legs if they started to get away. Roy thought of a funny innuendo but didn’t say it. It turns out being 20,000 miles from home and devoid of any other human contact isn’t enough to break through the too-politie formalities of social interaction, he thought; they’d had time to create a fun back-and-forth when first sent up here but they hadn’t, and, to Roy’s horror, neither had put in any effort to correcting this. It now appeared they would spend their remaining two months here on the fringe between sociopath politeness and total non-communication. Ariel looked down and saw Roy looking at her. They both looked away at the same time. The supplies - which would include some books she’d ordered and a pack of cards he’d asked for (cards being something he’d never gotten joy out of on Earth but had seen many films set in prison where people spent their time playing cards and felt space might work by the same logic) - wasn’t set to arrive for another ten minutes, he’d timed things badly, so he made himself look busy on the terminal, cycling through programs and occasionally typing random words, pretend-working with a gait he hoped looked purposeful.

Later on the two made tea at the same time, for the first time in weeks. They took turns using the kettle, Roy doing a gentlemanly pose signalling Ariel could use it first, and then both sat in adjacent chairs, with an empty chair between them, waiting for the boiling water to mush up their food - he was eating beef-steak flavoured, her mush was green which he guessed was salad flavoured. Neither got up to put the television on, possibly an unspoken symbolic move by both to show the other they weren’t bothered by the silence. In the bathrooms, bedrooms, select research rooms, the gym and here - the “living quarters” - oxygen was supplied, meaning they wore their own clothes; everywhere else - the hangar, emergency rooms, launch/landing pod and the airlock - oxygen suit and helmet were required. Ariel had brought mostly plain clothes for her stay, beiges and baby blues, the odd band top, mostly skimpy. Roy’s wardrobe was, by comparison, a freak show, filled mostly with brightly coloured, goofy-looking attire. He’d brought only one item of the simple-looking clothing his mother had bought him for the job, which he deeply regretted now. If he and Ariel had got along like he imagined two people alone for months in space got on - which he now felt may have been a too-whimsical of an imagining - he could’ve played on the jazzy clothes, it might have been a running gag between them, an endlessly reusable ice-breaker.  But the clothes had went unmentioned. And now, in moments like this, sat in silence, the Hawaiian top and red shorts he had on drew all his attention inward; he imagined himself sat in clown makeup, with a nose that honked when he touched it and a rubbery balloon ringed around his waist - he might as well be wearing that, he felt.

Roy remained seated after Ariel left the room. As she’d exited she’d said, “Okay I’ll see you tomorrow, enjoy the rest of your night, or well… rotation,” making full eye contact as she said it, her voice indicating nothing but sincerity. He couldn’t fault her for being awkward or hostile, she wasn’t, they simple hadn’t “clicked”, or maybe were both too awkward to do any clicking. Each of them was 50% to blame for the situation, a rational part of Roy’s brain told him, although he was actually 100% to blame said a louder, harder to identify brain region. He sat and looked out at the moon, the far wall being all window. He mentally said to himself the things he always said when faced with the moon, or a sheet of stars, or the Earth lit by the sun, it’s seas and clouds soothing him, anything beautiful really: that few people get opportunities like this, that that’s the freaking moon and it’s so close and bright and ethereal, that once he got back to Earth he’d wish he was back up here, that this was very likely the only time of his life he’d spend in space - but nothing managed to jolt his mind out of its hazey ennui. He went to his room, lay on his bed and started to masturbate, cycling through porn videos on the Smart TV opposite his bed, the volume on silent as his’ and Ariel’s rooms shared a wall, and despite the walls’ apparent thickness he sometimes heard her speaking, likely while video-calling. After, he cleaned himself up and put the tissues in the trash chute which led into the satellite’s rubbish container, which would be emptied when, in years, possibly decades, the satellite next touched down on Earth. The waste wasn’t, strangely he thought, released into space, but lay waiting to pollute the planet below. A thought equally embarrassing and hilarious crossed his mind: that tissues of that kind possibly made up the biggest share of rubbish in the container, he having produced most of them. He justified this by telling himself if a nuclear war wiped out all other humans before they got back to Earth, and if this still didn’t prompt Ariel to have sex with him, then they could still repopulate the Earth using the supply of his festering offspring in the trash. He then reminded himself he needed to stop thinking so much, then chuckled to himself although he didn’t quite know what was funny, then put the TV on and watched half an hour of a programme he was only partly interested in and drifted into sleep.

***

The tallest of the plants had grown to 17 centimeters. Roy felt like a proud parent. He was stood, unsuited, in the research station, looking into the biodome, where a variety of plants were being observed. Roy was testing how much the conditions of life could be reduced while still allowing the plants to grow. He had started, four months ago, with the strictest conditions - very little oxygen, little water, only an hour of sunlight a day - and worked upwards from there. These original settings, and the few after, had led to no results, no life. The biodome now featured all the sunlight the satellite’s position could give (factoring in that Earth sometimes hid the sun), a decent supply of water, but still only a fraction of the oxygen that would have been available to the plants on Earth, and no gravity. The growth was impressive. Roy stared in awe for a minute then started to chart down numbers on his tablet, noting a two centimeter growth since yesterday, the largest single-day-growth he’d recorded - it was the first time something he was observing outperformed the estimates of his fellow biologists back home.

He had already begun writing the report that would conclude his findings. The implications of his work were wide-reaching: it meant life was possible on planets far less atmospherically robust than Earth. He put down the tablet and walked frantically through the corridors towards Ariel’s room, hoping to share his present feeling with someone. As Roy approached her room he heard noise but it was muffled by the walls; he stopped walking and listened intently until it was audible: she was crying. He stood a few steps from her door and listened. Ariel’s crying sounded strong, uncontrollable, like a violent rain, not the tearful sob of having just watched a sad movie - she must have gotten bad news from home, he thought. Roy stood unmoved for a long time, listening, letting Ariel’s wails blur into one long repetitive noise ringing out to him amidst the total silence. Roy had often, he reflected while stood there, wished for the people around him to be crying or sad, especially people he liked, not out of malevolence, at least he didn’t think so, but because he liked to picture himself in such situations comforting the sad person, providing a shoulder to cry on. She cried for a long time although Roy was clueless as to generally how long, time often feeling paradoxically both shorter and longer than it actually was up here. The longer he stayed the more ashamed he felt, for listening and for not doing anything. He realised at that moment he had never, in the whole of his life, comforted another person while they cried - he had been comforted himself but had never been the comforter - and this made him feel like he might start to cry himself, but he held everything in and walked away, to his room, not even to the plants, walking carefully to make sure Ariel didn’t hear him and realise he’d been outside so long.

He bumped into Ariel a few hours later when he went to make food. She was on her way out, having already eaten, and they exchanged the usual pleasantries, he not mentioning the crying, despite the option of doing so mentally presenting itself like a large red button that said: DO NOT PUSH. Before leaving she stopped and said, “Oh I almost forgot, we’ve got a maintenance run tomorrow.”
“Wow that’s come around quick” he lied. “See you tomorrow.” He’d forgotten about maintenance, which needed to be done once a month and was the only time they spent up here not inside the satellite’s walls.

***

The air drained away, a sharp hissing noise signalling its depletion. It was carried back into the bowels of the satellite, being too precious to release into space. Then the airlock opened and they headed out. They were tethered to one another with a wire, with another wire tethering Roy to the airlock. They pushed themselves out, needing only to apply a little force to get themselves moving, and held the sides of the satellite to support themselves. The noise of each breath filled their helmets, every heartbeat bulged, and soon their bodies felt clammy and enmeshed with the suits. The silence of the total emptiness around them became a presence in itself. There was something, Roy felt, very real about being out in space - maybe it was the adrenaline - real in the way people on Earth often described “near death experiences”, when reality slowed down and every detail of the moment became clear, but in which events seems to happen at a crazily fast speed. They’d both, like anyone venturing to space, been given extensive training, and the largest share of their training had been in preparation for these maintenance runs, despite how little of their time up here they spent doing them. Focus was the most important thing, they were told. One didn’t have much time to admire the view, or do a brooding look out into space like in a sci-fi film - the astronaut must put all attention to the job. They floated from one terminal to the next, taking turns checking oxygen levels and making sure the emergency locks weren’t jammed, while the other floated behind making sure no space debris came near. Maintenance jobs like this took a minimum of five hours, seven or eight if they found problems that needed sorting, including an hour of decontamination before going back inside.

They’d been out around two hours, Ariel working on the terminal checking the wiring and oxygen pumps, when Roy began to lose focus and stare out at Earth. He tried to work out which country they would land on if they were to drop in a straight line from their present position, but he’d never been good at geography. It was somewhere in Europe they’d land - he could tell it was Europe despite it being upside-down from on a typical world map. Germany maybe? Or Poland? He let go of the satellite wall because the repetitive act of keeping hold was starting to hurt his arm, and he focused on the stars and the distant planets. A perfect night sky on Earth has nothing on this. He forgot about his body and his self, lost in it all. The usual tangle of thoughts and worries and projections were silent, the mind’s normal barriers and warnings non-existent - he remembered how he’d felt when he first came up here, the first time he’d saw the whole of the Earth in one glance. It was sobering. Nothing but blankness and tranquility. “Are you okay?” said Ariel, her voice coming through Roy’s headset, startling him.
“Huh?” said Roy.
“You’re breathing real heavy. You alright? I could finish maintenance off myself if you don’t feel up to it?”
“No, I’m okay, I didn’t realise I was breathing heavy, I was daydreaming, sorry.” He paused, then: “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”
“It took you this long to realise?” she said with a laugh.
“No, but I keep forgetting and remembering again” Roy said.
“Real deep” Ariel said with thick sarcasm, not looking up from the terminal. After a few seconds of silence, maybe fearing she’d upset him, she turned to Roy and said, “Just messing. I forget myself sometimes. It’s madness up here.”
“How’ve you been finding it, being up here away from everything?”
“Do you mind if we leave talking until we get back inside?” she said.
“Sure.”

***

A little over four hours later the decontamination finished and they were back inside. During those four hours the expectation of face-to-face communion with another human being had sent Roy into an almost manic state. The two of them, both drenched in sweat and smelling strongly of it, headed to the living quarters and started to make coffee. Ariel gave him a shy smile while the kettle boiled and the fact she was a real person, and not some abstract entity, who was probably equally as nervous and elated at talking as him, occured to Roy. He never seemed to realise people were people until they proved as much.
“Sorry I’ve been so quiet up here” she said. “When we got up here I said to myself: just focus on the work, that’s what you’re here for. I tend to do that wherever I am, school, university, here.”
“I’m just awkward” Roy said and they both laughed.
“Well hopefully we can have a less awkward last-few-months up here.”
Roy nodded. “So how you finding space?”
“Before we talk about that… what the fuck is up with your clothes?” Ariel asked.
“I, ermm, I thought it would give off a fun vibe. I mean I’ve read The Martian, I thought if you went up into space you were a bit eccentric, a bit goofy. Maybe I didn’t pull it off?” he chuckled. She chuckled too and said:
“No. The first time I saw you in them they didn’t scream Matt Damon, they sort of screamed ‘I’m gonna kill you and wear your skin before you can escape back to Earth.”
“I’ve got worse in my room, believe me. I spared you the most flowery tops.”
They both laughed again, and took turns pouring water into their mugs, then sat down. Roy felt things were going well - but reminded himself this wasn’t a date and he had no reason to be grading himself on how “well” he was doing.
“So how you finding space?” she said in a playful way.
“It’s… great and boring. Coming up here’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done but… I feel like there’s something missing, like I look out at all the stars and how huge it all is and I feel like I’m craving something. Like there should be something more to it. You ever feel like that?”
“Sometimes. That’s why I work so much. When I’m looking through a telescope, getting pictures, I distract myself... from myself”.
“Do you speak to your family much up here?” he asked.
“Not really, no, not as much as I thought I would” Ariel said then paused, giving a look like she was scanning her brain for the right words. “My parents are quite old, and they didn’t approve of me coming up here, I don’t think, I mean they weren’t very up front with their reaction whatever it was. And I’m an only child. And single.” She laughed, as if trying to make her words cheerier than they were. “I video call my parents about once a month but overall I’ve not been speaking to people much apart from my friend Hannah.”
“I heard you crying the other day” Roy said, the words coming out before his brain had time to question whether they should be coming out and why.
Ariel looked like someone taken aback but trying to hide it. “Yeah… I was crying the other day. Could you hear me from your room?”
“No I was in the hallway.”
“Listening?” Ariel said, her voice reaching a slightly higher pitch than Roy would have guessed she was capable of.
“No. I was going to your room, to tell you about the plants I’d been testing in my lab, but then I heard you crying. I listened but I wasn’t eavesdropping.” In effort to take the attention off himself he asked: “What were you crying about?” but immediately began to question if this had eased the situation or made it worse.
“We only started talking half an hour ago Roy, and it sounds like you were eavesdropping. Fuck am I gonna tell you what I was crying about.” Definitely worse.
She got up to leave. “Sorry” Roy said but she gave him an angry look as reply and walked in the direction of her room.

***

Ariel descended on the corridor, putting extra emphasis on every step, special gusto into each fall and rise of the arms, despite the fact she knew Roy could no longer see or hear her. She pressed the button beside her door so hard she feared, for a brief second, it might have broken, and straight-away felt embarrassed for getting so angry. She walked inside and sprawled out on the bed. She went over what had just happened, what was said, if he’d been weird, if she’d been reasonable. It felt as if there were two mini people inside her head having a debate, one saying she was being too harsh on the guy, the other saying he was a weirdo and the next few months were gonna be hella’ awkward. After five minutes of this Ariel took some deep breaths, got up off the bed and sat on the chair by her desk.

On the computer she opened the videolog. A psychologist, a quite unlucky one Ariel thought, would have to go through all of her videologs, write transcripts of them and analyse her behaviour - all space missions being double missions: a mission involving the astronaut’s area of expertise, and a mission observing how a human reacts when cut off from their planet of birth and when put in near-total (and self-agreed-upon) isolation. She’d never heard Roy talking in his room so was unsure if he kept up a videolog, or maybe he typed his up; Ariel had come to enjoy doing hers, in which she had acquired the habit of speaking in long stream-of-conscious-style rants. They were, along with strenuous exercise, what might pessimistically be called Ariel’s “coping mechanisms”. She clicked record and started:
“Hello. Today is April 15th. GMT time is 8:12 PM. I’m having a bad day. My crew mate Roy and I talked properly for the first time today. It’s taken us a while - as I already noted in a previous entry I find it hard to initiate social situations, so I was glad when he approached me to talk during our engineering run. He admitted to hearing and listening to me cry the other day, after I got the news my dog Lisa had died.” She paused, thinking of what to say next. “I guess you guys will want to know how that made me feel. I feel very lonely, which I’ve not felt much while up here. I’ve been alone but not lonely. I could feel very lonely on Earth - at university, if I found out the people in my dorm were going to a party and I wasn’t invited I’d feel lonely. But there’s no parties in space. Nothing to miss out on. Whatever I’m doing up here is the thing that’s happening. I got excited about talking to Roy because I intuited we’d be similar people, and I guess to a degree we must be to both sign up to come on a mission like this; I don’t think many people would be willing or have the skillset, not that I’m bragging, I just thought it must have meant we were alike. And now I feel like there’s something in space I’m missing out on, a connection to someone I could’ve had. Or maybe I’m being too sensitive. I don’t think he wanted to hurt me with what he said - we’re both pretty out-of-practice socially.” Ariel paused again realising her words were maybe drifting from what those who’d watch would likely be interested in. She felt restless, like there was something she needed to do, that until she did this unclear thing she’d feel incomplete. She looked out at space, dotted suns staring back at her, and felt if she could word things in a somewhat poetic way she might feel a little better:
“Space always feels so big, it dwarfs me usually. It’s so… humbling. Like I can see how distant and enormous everything is and I’m one small part of it all trying to observe other small parts of it. But days like this, when I feel low, it all feels so small. The universe becomes as tiny as I feel. Maybe that sounds ridiculous, I don’t know. The satellite feels like a body: it’s warm in here, and protects me from being out there, but it’s also a cage, a cage I can’t leave unless I’m tethered to it. I want to go somewhere else so I can think different thoughts, being stuck here is like being stuck inside my brain. It’s like the walls hold all my thoughts in so they can’t escape into the atmosphere.” She felt that would have to do. “I’m gonna try and get back to work. I’m sure if I give it time things will feel less sour. Ariel Summers signing off.” She clicked off the recording and went to suit up.

***

Ariel sat charting the coordinates of distant planets, part of a long process of noting how long it took for each to rotate, gravitate around its star, and how close it was to the other characters of its solar system. Her expertise was in observing direction and speed. The reasons she did this in space were plentiful: there were no clouds or changing weather conditions, no rotating planet, no Ozone, only direct contact with the cosmos. She’d been working for the past two hours but had struggled to concentrate and, early on, had started to sketch doodles of constellations the stars could be drawn into. So far - constellation #3 - she had drawn a very zigzaggy lizard-looking creature; she finished off the tail, a very pointed, unnatural looking tail, the only one she could drawn with the stars Yahweh provided her, then switched off the screen.

It had been five days since Ariel had stormed out on Roy. She felt restless, manic, “shot to shit” as her dad would say. The feeling that she had to do something, to put things right, still hung over her, but how? She’d told herself she’d focus on the work, avoid Roy, which had seemed do-able at the time. It now felt impossible. Their talking had created a rift which up til then hadn’t existed. No rift was fine. A broken rift was not. She stood up from the telescope and left her room and knocked on Roy’s door - no response - so headed down the corridor towards the biodome where she hoped he’d be. She didn’t quite know what Roy did - she knew he was a plant biologist but little of the finer details - which she thought was good because it could be a conversation starter.

She felt relief when she found Roy there - he was sat outside the biome closely examining a recently-dead plant, a purple one, which had begun to darken and curl tight into itself. He looked up and they both stared at one another, fixing eyes in attempt to read the expression of the other. Whatever the emotions were in the room they were emotions that had had five days to incubate and build, leaving the difficult question of how they were to be released. Ariel started:
“Sorry for how I reacted the other day, I-”
He interrupted: “That’s okay. I was being weird. Anyone has a right to be freaked out by a strange guy standing outside-”
She interrupted: “Don’t. You don’t need to apologise. I think we should speak. My mind’s been on the fritz. We can’t spend our time up here avoiding each other.”
“Agreed. I’ve not felt too hot myself.”
“Work not going well? Mine’s not.”
“No it’s going well,” Roy motioned to the plants behind the glass: they stood markedly higher than five days before. “I’ve just not felt like I’ve cared much about it.”
Ariel nodded like she was agreeing. She took a seat beside him and the two sat in silence for a short time, tens of seconds, not an awkward silence but one in which presence was shared even though words weren’t. Then she gave a flimsy finger-point towards the plants and asked, “So why don’t you tell me about all this, what you doing up here with the plants?”
“I’m testing what conditions they can live in.” He leapt out of his seat, elated, and pointed to the tallest of the plants - “look at that one” - Ariel stared intently, feeling its vibrancy as if it were a third person staying up in space with them. “There’s no gravity in the lab, but it’s still grown upwards from the floor. It’s not as strong as a plant from Earth, it’s flimsier, you can see there where it’s sagging, but it’s still growing. It’s drawn towards the sun even without the other things plants normally have to sustain them.” Roy stopped and seemed to tense up a little, looking for Ariel’s response to see if she wanted to hear more or if he’d subjected her with enough plant-talk.
She smiled and said, “That’s cool. Beats what I’ve been doing up here.”

Roy resumed, and talked for a while, going into detail on how differing genus of plants had fared by comparison - he talked fast, trying to fit months of work into one monologue. Ariel infrequently interrupted him to ask questions or clarify points and then let him get back to speaking. It was in the middle of one tangent when Ariel, who had been engrossed, became aware of herself again and decided, in a sure and final way, that she was going to have sex with Roy that night, possibly soon. From that point on she found it hard to concentrate on his words, the way a child gets restless when the school bell has rang but she’s not allowed to leave. She looked for any way to transform the conversation into a flirtatious one. And after ten minutes and a realisation on Ariel’s part that she didn’t know how to act seductively, she did something she imagined was common in porn films (which she felt a man isolated in space would surely appreciate): she waited til he’d finished speaking then said, in flat monotone like she was saying something about the plants, “Wanna fuck?”
Roy could barely hold the grin off his face. “Yes. Yeah I’d be up for doing that” he said like he was accepting something mundane.
“Okay” she said matter-of-factly and they both gave honest laughs, the tension leaving the room like pressure from an airlock.

***

After they finished he dismounted and lay on the bed, his bed, beside her. She wiped her chest and chucked the tissues - another batch of offspring - down the trash chute. They both laughed, at the situation and themselves, like they hadn’t quite realised they were naked or having sex until they’d finished. She felt self-conscious now - the woman who’d so forcefully said “Wanna fuck?” was now an oddity, a different person, replaced by a quieter person she was more well-acquainted with. She liked their laughter, was glad it filled the room, and, deciding she wanted the fire to burn a little longer, said: “God, you could tell we’ve been in space for three months.”

Roy responded with a laugh she could tell was fake, and a layer of tension bubbled around his body, and the two rested into silence. They remained supine, both waiting for the other to speak, and in this moment Ariel concluded, based on much evidence, that they weren’t a good match and if they’d met down on Earth they wouldn’t even have been friends, certainly not lovers. But this didn’t seem a bad thing to Ariel. They talked a little, basic stuff, the sort of conversation they’d’ve had a week ago, then decided to have sex again. It was unclear if it was prompted by Ariel’s remark but she thought Roy’s performance was a lot better this time.

After, Ariel went back to her room and resumed her pre-sex schedule: she called her mum, had food and then sat down to chart further planet movements, now in a much sharper psychic-state. Roy also soon continued his work, noting the day’s changes in the plants, and spent two hours in the gym, two hours being the lowest recommended gym-time for any astronaut to keep muscles and bones at the same strength gravity would have naturally kept them at. They didn’t see one another for the rest of the night.

Early into the next “day”, roughly two hours after their shared wake times, Ariel returned from the gym to rest on her bed for a moment. The glow she’d felt, after they’d done it, had lasted all of the previous day, up until sleep, but was gone when she woke up. She sat mulling over alternative ways she could get it back but her brain spat back nothing. Interrupting this moment of pondering came a knock at the door which Ariel lept up to answer. Roy, stood wielding a smile and an hand-against-the-wall pose she felt he wasn’t cool enough to pull off, said “hey” in a too-confident tone. She reasoned, mentally, that she’d normally have replied to this with sarcasm or a quick put-down, but what benefit would that be to her? She decided quickly on the part she’d play, that of the mostly-silent seductress, his intergalactic space woman, life being a stage and all that, and so grabbed him by the belt and led him inside.

This time the sex was dutiful, fun-dutiful, like a flamboyant marching band only partly focused on how well they were performing. This time it was something they both did for themselves, using the other’s body, an act of pure carnal pleasure, not the act of passion, directed at another being, their original sex had been. It went on longer this time. There was little small talk after. They said a bit about the sex, what they each liked doing best, and least, and he got his clothes and said he’d see her around. Like the day before they both re-entered routine, glow restored, although, like every cocaine addict can tell you, the second hit is not quite the first, and its sensations are shorter lasting.

They messaged each other a few hours later and arranged when they’d next have sex. Ariel initiated this method of virtual planning. She found the idea of it amusing, and absurd, but after the first few messages flung back-and-forth it felt natural, almost what is to be expected in such a situation. She said they should do it at a similar time the following day. He agreed and said they should do it in the living quarters, on one of the chairs, to which she sounded alarm at the cameras recording everywhere but the bathrooms and bedrooms. He reminded her the camera footage would only be checked if there was a legal dispute that needed to be settled and “so unless you plan on murdering me before we go back home I’m sure we’ll be fine :)”

***

Their sleeping together continued all week and into the next, their “appointments” usually scheduled in advance. It seemed to Ariel that Roy was living out the cliché fantasies of a masturbation-addicted teenage boy. They’d fucked against the windows facing the moon. And in pretty much every other room on the satellite, in every position. They’d had loud sex while pornography played on full volume behind them. And they had begun to walk around, work, make food, do everything, entirely naked.

He thought of their nakedness as bohemian, a ‘fuck you’ to formality and expectation, symbolising that they were constantly in the mood for sex; she saw little seductiveness in their nakedness, like it was the nakedness of children or of Adam and Eve, a thing that drew attention to itself but - if one thought about it, she felt - really shouldn’t do. Soon they stopped messaging or doing any form of planning ahead but would simply see one another walking through the ship or busy working and would initiate things. Neither ever turned the other down.

Days became no longer charted by their length or their workload but by how many times the two astronauts had buckarooed, split the atom, played adult twister, ordered screaming orgasms off the menu, (or Roy’s favourite phrase for it) until he’d bent her over and showed her all 50 states - whatever you want to call it. They discovered the joys of sex again, if indeed they had ever properly found them, like virgins reeling at their grand discovery. They worked less, messaged people at home less - they both felt more different from the people back home than they’d ever felt.

One might imagine boredom to slither into the situation, even after they started somewhat hardcore practices - made harder by the inconvenient lack of sex shops orbiting in space - but it didn’t. Further analysis, or any sort of analysis, of their situation never happened, at least not out loud between them. But they were both self-aware enough to understand what they were doing: sacrificing much of their work and their relations and even a fair bit of their sanity for the pleasures of the moment. And neither cared. They kept the fire burning, endlessly topping up the glow.

The Earth below them spun and spun but Ariel looked out at no uncharted galaxies, her glare hardly leaving the confines of the satellite. Roy’s plants went untended. They were watered, but their conditions went untampered and unobserved. Videologs went unrecorded, calls home went missed, communications from scientists back home went ignored. They were doing something both knew they couldn’t do on Earth - they could do it easily in a physical sense, but would struggle in a mental one. But up here, away from it all, they had permission to return to the primal urges. To devolve to chimps or baboons, to mock the grandeur of the technological feats around them.

One of the major broadcasters using the satellite phoned, leaving a message on the Smart TV in the living quarters, to say their network was down, and this was unacceptable, as signs of a network going down are usually dealt with in a few hours, but the two of them ignored it, preferring sex to suiting up and fixing the wiring. The living quarters had become a madhouse of noise with communication-lines constantly ringing. They could both picture the squabbling down on Earth, the businessmen scuttling around angrily, the families yelling at their TVs and phones. They would get in a lot of trouble for such a stupid, short-sighted play, but it didn’t stop them, if anything it egged them on to continue. He carried her through the quarters like a groom carrying his bride and placed her down in the position he wanted her. During these sessions they’d sweat, they’d feel almost numb, they’d become lost and disorientated; that there was a future was forgotten, indeed the whole concept was disregarded. And when they did think of the future they both landed on the same phrase, which they felt they might repeat in the years to come: we’ll always have space.