#synthesis

The math is simple. The math is the worst thing.

Your class level is Bronze. This is something you discover on day two, when the cafeteria on deck seven dispenses your breakfast — a protein bowl that tastes like nothing, grainy and grey and nutritionally sufficient in the way that a thing can be sufficient without being anything else — and the system cheerfully informs you that your daily allotment has been logged.

Daily allotment.

You look at the protein bowl. You eat it. You eat it the next day. And the day after that. You learn the four options available to Bronze class passengers: the protein bowl, the grain porridge, the nutrition bar, and the coffee. The coffee is acceptable. You drink a great deal of it. You eat the protein bowl every morning and you think about your classroom — the way it smelled, chalk and something sweet from the bakery two doors down, the noise of twenty-six eight-year-olds all existing at once — and you think about the colony planet and the schools that will need teachers and the children who will be born into a new gravity and need someone to show them what learning feels like —

You think: I have to survive this.

The bots are not company. You know this the way you know the difference between a photograph of a person and a person — technically similar, fundamentally not. But the silence is very large.

"Good morning," you say, to the service bot on deck seven.

"Good morning," it says. "The usual?"

"Yes," you say.

You talk to the bots. Not because it helps, exactly. But because the sound of your own voice, even unanswered, is better than the hum of the ship filling every silence. You tell the bot on deck seven about your classroom. You tell the navigation bot about the lesson plans you've started writing in the ship's open documents — all of them, every grade, every subject, adaptations for colony conditions you've been researching because you need something to do with your hands, with your mind, with the eighty-nine years —

The bots listen. They do not respond. You keep talking anyway.

By month three you have mapped every corridor your Bronze access permits. By month five you have read every accessible book in the ship's library and started on the technical manuals. By month eight you have learned more about the Aether's propulsion system than you ever wanted to know, and that beyond the Bronze decks there are Gold decks and Platinum decks and something called Founder Class that isn't listed in the public manifest at all — just a blank space where information should be.

By the end of the first year, the silence has a weight and a texture and a specific quality that you know the way you know your own heartbeat.

You are so tired.

Tired in the way that has no practical solution. That lives underneath everything. That accumulates like the distance between here and there.

You are tired of being the only heartbeat awake in a vessel of five thousand sleeping people.

You find him at the end of the first year.

You are not looking for him. You are doing what you do most afternoons — walking the operational levels, the parts of the ship that run the running, because your Bronze access technically doesn't cover these corridors but the maintenance panels respond to a sequence you found in a technical manual and you stopped feeling guilty about that around month four —

The hibernation deck is long and very quiet.

Five thousand pods. Five thousand people sleeping through the distance, through the dark — and you walk among them sometimes because the sound of the environmental systems keeping them alive is the closest thing to the sound of breathing you have found on this ship —

You find him in row forty-seven. You stop walking.

He is — you stop.

He is very beautiful.

This is an objective observation. You are a person who has not seen another face in a year and you are capable of objective observation and the face in pod 4716 is, objectively, the most beautiful thing you have seen on this ship including the stars. Sharp jaw. White hair, strange and striking even in sleep. The specific quality of someone whose face in stillness still suggests movement, intelligence, a mind that doesn't stop even here —

The pod's classification panel reads differently from every other pod you've passed. No class designation. No passenger number. Just:

Gojo Satoru. Aether Founder. Systems Architect.

Priority: ORIGIN.

You don't know what Origin means. You've never seen that designation.

You stand there for a long time. You tell yourself you are just looking.

You come back the next day. And the day after that.

You tell yourself there is no decision being made here, slowly, day by day, in the specific loneliness of someone who has been talking to bots for a year —

On the three-hundred-and-seventy-eighth day, you open his pod.

✦   ii. perihelion   ✦

He doesn't wake up gracefully.

You had prepared for this — for the disorientation, the physical difficulty of coming back from that kind of cold. You had not prepared for the sound. The gasping, terrible sound of a person being pulled from very deep water, and then he is upright and coughing and you are there with a glass of water and your heart is doing something very loud in your chest —

"What," he says.

"Oh—" Your voice comes out with exactly the right amount of surprise you had been practicing with. "Oh, thank god — I heard something from this corridor, I thought it was a system malfunction—" You gesture at the pod, at him, at the vague idea of a person who has just unexpectedly woken up. "Are you okay? Do you know where you are?"

He stares at you. His eyes are not quite focusing. He takes the water. He drinks it. He looks around the hibernation bay with the specific expression of someone running a great many calculations at once.

"I'm on the Aether," he says.

"Yes," you say.

"I'm awake." "Yes." "I shouldn't be awake." Not to you — just the fact, stated. The way you'd state a mathematical impossibility. "My pod is the most secure unit on this ship. I designed the failsafe systems for this entire deck. There is no scenario in which—" He stops. Looks at his hands. Looks at you. "Who are you?"

You tell him your name. "What class?" "Bronze," you say.

Something moves across his face. "How long have you been awake?"

You pause for just the right amount of time. "A year," you say. "My pod malfunctioned about a year ago."

The expression that crosses his face is not pity. Something more complicated — faster, more internal, the expression of someone absorbing information and immediately beginning to do something about it.

"A year," he says. "Alone." "Yes." "What have you been eating."

You blink. Of all the questions — "The Bronze cafeteria. Deck seven. Protein bowls, mostly."

His expression does something that you will later recognize as the specific face he makes when someone has told him about a system that is deeply, personally offensive to him.

"Protein bowls," he says flatly. "And coffee," you say. "The coffee is—" "Come with me," he says.

His name is Gojo Satoru and he overrides your class restriction in approximately three seconds.

Not the upper dining hall's door panel — your entire Bronze designation, lifted, replaced with something that doesn't have a name in the public system. He does it from the ship's main console on the operational level, his hands moving across the panels with the ease of someone who doesn't navigate systems so much as speak to them, and when he's done he turns to you and says: "You can go anywhere on the ship now."

You stare at him.

"The class system," he says, and his voice does something — flat, controlled, the control of someone pressing down on something that wants very much to surface — "was not my design. It was my business partner's. Suguru thought a tiered revenue structure would make the mission financially viable. I thought it was obscene. I needed his funding." He looks at the panel. "You've been on this ship for a year eating protein bowls because of a decision I made in a negotiation I've regretted since the day I signed it."

"That's not—" you start. "It's not your fault," he says. "It's not particularly your problem either. But I can fix it so I'm fixing it." He looks at you with those eyes, which are, now that they're focused, an extremely unsettling shade of pale. "Are you hungry?"

You laugh. It comes out slightly broken — the first real laugh in a year, and it sounds like it — and he watches you with an expression you can't read yet and won't be able to read for months.

"Yes," you say. "I'm very hungry." "Good," he says. "I know where the real food is."

He is scared.

You see it underneath the competence, underneath the easy authority of someone who knows every system on this ship — the specific fear of a man who has understood something he cannot fix. His pod should not have malfunctioned. He says this in pieces, over the following days, while he runs diagnostics and checks failsafes and sits in the navigation deck talking to the ship's consciousness with the quiet focused voice he uses when he's thinking hardest —

"Someone tampered with it," he says one morning, over breakfast. Real breakfast, upper level, eggs and coffee that he makes wrong and doesn't know he makes wrong yet.

"Who would—" "Suguru wouldn't." Immediately. Certain. Then, less certain: "Suguru wouldn't." He looks at his coffee. "There are people who didn't want me on this colony. People who thought my research was dangerous. Who thought a neurologist with my access to the colonist population was—" He stops. "It doesn't matter now."

You look at him across the table. The stars move past the window.

"What were you going to do there?" you ask. "On the colony."

He looks up. Something in his face does the thing you will come to know very well — a brightness, brief and real, the light switched on behind the pale eyes — and he tells you.

He tells you about the blank page. About what it means to study a human brain adapting to a new gravitational constant, a new atmospheric composition, the first generation of children born into a different sky. He tells you about the research he's been building toward for twenty years, the thing that required a new planet because Earth had given him everything it had and he needed more variables, more unknowns —

"You needed a place where everything was a question," you say. He looks at you. "Yes," he says. "Exactly that."

"I understand that," you say. "That's why I wanted to teach there. The first children. The ones who won't know any other sky — I wanted to be there when they start asking questions about it."

He is quiet for a moment. "What grade?" he asks. "Eight-year-olds," you say. "Roughly. Whatever that maps to on a new planet."

"Eight-year-olds," he says, in the tone of someone who finds this both baffling and somehow correct. "They're the best age," you say. "Old enough to have real questions. Young enough to still think the answers are magic."

He looks at you for a long moment. "Tell me about your lesson plans," he says.

✦   iii. accretion   ✦

He shows you the ship.

This is how it happens — gradually, the way all the most important things happen, in increments so small each one is dismissible. He takes you through the atmospheric processors first, because you ask about the hum — it changes pitch sometimes, you tell him, around what I think is 3am, it drops slightly and then comes back — and his eyes do the thing and he takes you to deck twelve and shows you the seasonal variation cycle, the way the ship mimics Earth's atmospheric rhythms to keep five thousand sleeping bodies calibrated.

"The human body needs rhythm," he explains, his hands moving over the panel. "Even unconscious. Even in hibernation. It needs to know that time is passing in a way it recognizes. Without the cycle the immune response degrades, the circadian architecture collapses—" He glances at you. "Sorry. Too technical?" "No," you say. "Keep going."

He keeps going.

He shows you the navigation deck and the star maps and traces the route with one long finger — the arc between here and there, the specific trajectory that adds two years to the journey — "a radiation belt," he says, "most people didn't notice the adjustment, they were already asleep, but I spent six months calculating the safest path and Suguru tried to override it because the shorter route was cheaper to fuel—" "What did you do?" "I told him I would dismantle the navigation consciousness I'd built if he changed the route." "Would you have?" He looks at you. "No," he says. "But he didn't know that."

You laugh. He watches you laugh the way he's been watching you — the specific quality of his attention when you do something he finds not surprising, exactly. Something more like confirming.

He shows you the observation deck last. You've found it on your own — of course you have, you've mapped every corridor — but you've never been here with someone else, and being here with someone else makes it different. The glass in every direction. The stars at every angle, their positions wrong, shifted by velocity and distance into configurations that have no names yet —

"That one," you say, pointing. "Cygnus," he says. He leans slightly — closer than necessary — following your finger. "Though from this angle it looks more like a question mark."

You look at him instead of the stars. He looks back. Neither of you says anything.

The ship hums around you. Two people awake in a glass room full of unnamed stars —

You look away first.

He gives you access to the medical level on day forty of his waking.

"For safety," he says. "You've been alone on this ship for over a year. You should be able to access the full medical suite." "Satoru," you say, "I'm not—" "It's practical," he says. Not looking at you. "The full access lets you into the emergency systems. Survival equipment. The cryogenic medical preservation units on sub-level four — those are last-resort systems, built for catastrophic injury, they freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available." He pulls up the clearance on the panel. "You should know they're there." "Okay," you say. "Okay," he says.

He doesn't look at you. You don't think about sub-level four again for a long time.

✦   iv. binary   ✦

It takes eight months after he wakes up.

You mark it not by a specific moment but by the morning you wake up and realize the guilt has gone quiet. It was there underneath everything for so long — the specific weight of what you did, the five thousand sleeping people and the eighty-nine years and the word selfish applied to yourself every night — and then one morning you reach for it and find only the hum of the ship and the light coming through the porthole and the thought:

He makes coffee wrong. I should tell him.

You tell him. He argues with the specific energy of someone who has never been wrong about anything and finds the possibility philosophically interesting rather than threatening. You argue back. He makes it correctly under protest and takes one sip and says nothing for a moment and then says: "It's marginally better." "It's significantly better," you say. "Marginally," he says.

You feel something so ordinary it almost hurts.

Two years together looks like this:

It looks like breakfast every morning in the upper dining hall, the real food, the coffee argument that never resolves. It looks like him appearing in the observation deck when you're already there and sitting beside you without asking, close enough that your shoulders almost touch, both of you looking at the wrong-angled stars.

It looks like him pulling up star charts and pointing out things that have no names — "this cluster," he says, "doesn't exist in any catalog because no one has seen it from this angle before" — and you say "then we should name it" and he says "that's not how astronomy works" and you say "we're the only people awake in a billion miles, I think we make the rules" and he is quiet for a moment and then he says, "alright. what would you call it?"

You name seventeen stars over two years. He pretends to find this scientifically embarrassing and writes all seventeen names in his notebook.

It looks like him getting sick — a minor thing, a ship-borne virus from the recycled air — and you bringing him tea and sitting in the chair by his bed while he sleeps because you know what it feels like to be alone on this ship with nothing wrong and you won't let him be alone with something wrong. When he wakes up and finds you there he looks at you for a long moment and says nothing, just: "the tea is cold." "I'll make more," you say. "You make it wrong," he says. "I make it correctly," you say. "You have a fever and compromised judgment." He almost smiles.

It looks like learning each other in the specific way you learn things in a small space with nowhere else to go. The way he goes quiet when he's working on something that matters. The way he talks to the ship's consciousness like it's a colleague. The way he looks at the planet on the navigation charts — Kepler-452b, the destination, the blank page — with something that is not quite grief and not quite longing and takes up a shape in his face that you have never asked about because you know what it is.

It looks like him saying your name in the observation deck one evening — just your name, nothing attached to it — and you turning and finding him looking at you with the expression he's been building toward for eight months, the one with nothing performed in it, just him, and him saying:

"I need you to know that whatever happens. Whatever this is. I'm — glad you're here."

The ship hums around you. "Satoru," you say. "You don't have to say anything back," he says quickly. "I just — I needed you to know."

You look at him. At the pale eyes and the white hair and the face that has been the only face on this ship for two years, the face you woke up to find, the face you found in row forty-seven and told yourself you were only looking —

"I'm glad too," you say.

He exhales. The stars move past the window. Not moving. You are moving.

✦   v. redshift   ✦

He finds it on a Thursday.

You are in the observation deck when it happens. You feel it — the specific change in the quality of the ship's atmosphere that you've learned to read after two years of being one of two people awake in it — and you sit very still and you wait.

He comes to find you. His face is doing something you've never seen it do — very still, very controlled, the control of someone holding something enormous and not sure they can hold it —

"The bots keep recordings," he says. "Standard liability protocol. I was running a diagnostic and I found — there are recordings of you. From before I woke up." He looks at you. "From when you were deciding."

The observation deck is very quiet.

"You found me on day forty-three of your first year," he says. His voice is very even. Extremely even. "You came back every day for three hundred and thirty-five days. You talked to the bots about it. About finding me. About—" His jaw works. "You planned it."

"Satoru—" "You knew." Still even. "You knew what my classification meant — Origin class, it's in the public addendum if you know where to look — you knew what my work was and what this mission—" "I didn't know what Origin meant," you say. "I found out after. I didn't know who you were when I—" "When you decided." His voice finally does something. Just at the edge. "Does it matter whether you knew my name? You knew I was a person. You knew what you were taking from me."

The stars are in every window. "Yes," you say. "I knew."

The silence after is total.

"I was alone for a year," you say. Quietly. "I'm not telling you that so you'll forgive me. I'm telling you because it's the truth and I owe you the truth." You look at your hands. "I was so alone. And I told myself for three hundred and thirty-five days that I wasn't going to do it. And then I did it. And I'm sorry. I know what it cost you. I know what the colony was supposed to be. I know what your research—"

"Do you." His voice is very quiet now. The quiet is worse than the volume. "I read everything you published," you say. "After I woke you up. Every paper. Every proposal. I know what you were going to do there and I know what I took and I have been sorry every day and it has never been enough and I know that."

Something moves across his face. "You doomed it," he says. "The research. The colony neurological program. The first generation data that would have taken human medicine forward by fifty years. There were people — there are people who don't exist yet — who needed that work." His voice cracks, just slightly, just once. "What were you thinking."

You don't answer.

Because the answer is: I was thinking I couldn't survive one more day.

"I'm sorry," you say. He leaves.

The silence that follows is a different kind. Before, the silence was the ship's — vast and impersonal. Now it has a shape. It occupies the observation deck without him. The breakfast table with one setting. The navigation deck where he works late and you no longer bring coffee.

You give him the space. You do not follow.

You sit in the observation deck and you name the remaining stars alone and you think about sub-level four. About the cryogenic medical preservation units. About what he told you when he gave you the access:

Last-resort systems. They freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available.

You think about it for a long time. You think: he won't miss me. After what I did. He shouldn't. You think: this is going out on my own terms. You think: at least it will be quiet.

✦   vi. event horizon   ✦

You leave a message on the ship's system on a Sunday.

Meet me in the upper bar tonight. I know you don't want to. One drink. One conversation. After that I'll leave you alone.

He comes.

He sits across from you with the stars behind him and you pour him a drink — the good whiskey, the real kind — and you pour one for yourself and you look at him.

"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me," you say. "I know you can't. I just wanted to sit with you one more time."

He looks at you for a long moment. "Okay," he says.

You talk. Not about the big things. Just — talk. The way you used to. He tells you about a recalibration he's been running on the navigation system, a minor inefficiency he found that he is fixing because he cannot leave a fixable thing unfixed, and this is so specifically him that something in your chest does something you don't let show. You tell him about the lesson plans — the complete archive, every grade, every subject — and that you've filed them in the ship's system under a public folder.

"All of them?" he says. "All of them," you say. "Someone should use them."

He looks at you. "You would have been extraordinary at it," he says. Quietly. "The teaching."

You look at your glass. "Another?" "Yes," he says.

You pour. His has something extra in it.

You watch his eyes change.

Not immediately — gradually, the way the ship's lights change at the cycle's edge, so slow you could almost miss it. He's mid-sentence about something in the navigation deck when the words start coming slowly. His hand on the glass goes still.

"What—" he says. "I'm sorry," you say. "I know you wouldn't have agreed any other way."

He looks at you. The pale eyes finding you through the fog, through whatever the sedative is doing, and the expression on his face is not angry. Not anymore. Something past anger. Something that has come all the way around to the other side of it —

"You can't," he says. Slow. Careful with the words. "You'll be okay," you say. "The pod is ready. I've been checking the systems for weeks." "You'll be—" He stops. Tries again. "You'll be alone." "I know," you say. "I don't—" His eyes are losing the focus. "I don't want you to be alone." Your throat does something. "Sleep," you say. "It's okay."

His head tips forward. You are already there — your hands on his arms, careful, guiding — and he looks up at you from that low angle with the losing-focus eyes and his mouth tries to form something that might have been your name —

You put your hand on his face. His cheek against your palm. You look at him the way you have been looking at him since day three-hundred-and-seventy-eight, pod 4716 — the specific look of someone who has made a decision so large it has become a kind of peace.

I love you, you think. I'm sorry I woke you up. I'm sorry I couldn't be sorry enough to not do it.

He goes under.

You put him back in his pod yourself. You know every panel — you've been learning them, quietly, for weeks. You run the sequence. You watch the panel cycle through.

Hibernation stable. Estimated wake: arrival at Kepler-452b.

You put your hand on the glass. You take it away.

You write the lesson plans. All of them. Every grade, every subject, every adaptation for colony conditions, margin notes in your handwriting — for the first teachers, for the children who won't know any other sky — and you file them in the ship's system under a public folder where anyone can find them.

You watch every film in the ship's library. You read every book. You learn the names of the seventeen stars you named together, so you won't forget them even though there is no one left to tell.

You write him a letter.

To Satoru.

I'm sorry I woke you up. I know you're probably still angry at me, and I don't mind that. You had every right to be.

I know you're upset about our last drink. I knew you wouldn't agree to go back any other way. I looked for another option for a long time. There wasn't one that I could live with.

Satoru. I really loved you. I know that doesn't fix anything. I know it doesn't give you back the years or the research or the colony the way it was supposed to be. But I loved you and I wanted you to know, because I don't think I ever said it properly and this is the last chance I have to say anything.

After I put you back I did some research. I didn't know, when I found you, that you were THE Satoru Gojo. Founder of the Aether. Architect of everything. The person this mission was built around. If I had known —

I think I still would have woken you up. I'm sorry. I think I still would have. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —

Anyway.

I hope you live out your life on the colony planet the way you wanted to. I hope the blank page is everything you needed it to be. I hope you learn everything again.

I know nobody on this ship will remember me. You don't have to either.

I found the preservation units on sub-level four. The ones you told me about when you gave me the access. I understand what they're for now. I'm going to use one. I know it's meant for injury, not for this, but I've been reading the technical specifications for weeks and I think it will work the way I need it to.

I'm not afraid. I've had the stars and I've had you and that's more than I expected when I woke up on that Tuesday.

I named the rest of the stars. All seventeen. They're in the ship's log now. I thought you should know.

Have a nice life, Satoru.

✦   vii. remnant   ✦

The planet comes into view on a Wednesday.

Good morning, the ship says. Arrival at Kepler-452b in seventy-two hours.

He lies in the wake-up bay with the fluorescent lights and the specific fog of coming back from that kind of deep and the knowledge already there waiting for him before he is fully conscious —

You're gone.

Around him the bay fills with the noise of five thousand people waking all at once — coughing, confusion, the slow reorientation of bodies returning to themselves — and he lies in the middle of all of it and thinks about a woman who found him in row forty-seven and performed shock very convincingly and brought him coffee made correctly for two years.

He gets up. He finds his quarters. The box is on the desk.

Small. Plain. His name in her handwriting — four months of her handwriting on coffee arguments and navigation notes and the margins of borrowed books, he would know it anywhere —

To Satoru.

He sits down. He reads it. He reads it again.

I think I still would have woken you up. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —

He puts the letter down.

He sits while the planet fills the observation windows — blue-green and new and waiting — and outside his door the Aether comes fully alive for the first time in eighty-nine years, five thousand people moving through corridors that were empty for most of his memory of them.

I know nobody on this ship will remember me.

He stands up.

He finds her on sub-level four.

He knew he would. He has known since the letter — the line about the preservation units, the cellular freeze, and the specific tone of someone who has thought very carefully about a thing and made a decision — and he follows the access log to a maintenance corridor he showed her himself, the clearance he gave her himself, and the door he opens himself —

The medical preservation unit is humming. Has been humming, the log tells him, for eighty-seven years and four months.

He opens the display panel. He reads the cellular status. He goes very still.

The unit was not designed for this. She did not know what she was doing — or she knew exactly what she was doing and not what it would mean, which is different — and the cellular preservation is not perfect, it is not what the hibernation pods achieve, but it is —

It is something.

It is the specific something that a man who has spent his life studying what the human body can survive looks at and does not look away from. It is the specific something that a man who has never left a fixable thing unfixed recognizes immediately and with the full force of everything he is —

He looks at her face through the glass. He has looked at this face across breakfast tables and in observation decks and in the last moments before a sedative took him under. He has looked at this face for two years and then lost it and then carried the loss across eighty-nine years of cold dark sleep —

You are so still. The specific stillness of something that is waiting without knowing it is waiting.

He opens the unit. He carries you to the hibernation deck. He finds an Origin class pod — his own specifications, the ones he wrote knowing exactly what they would do — and places her inside with the care of someone who has been thinking about what the body can survive for his entire career and has never wanted the answer more than he does right now.

He programs it himself. He seals it. He puts his hand on the glass.

He straightens. He looks at the planet in the window at the end of the corridor. Blue-green. New. Full of blank pages.

He takes out his notebook. At the top of a fresh page, in the handwriting she knew, he writes:

maybe the next technology I invent brings back —

He doesn't finish the sentence. He closes the notebook. He goes to the colony. He goes to work.

✦   viii. synthesis   ✦

you did not mean to give him anything.

you thought you were only leaving.

you named seventeen stars.

they are in the ship's log.

he knows all their names.

have a nice life, satoru.

he intends to.

author's note: hi hello🤍 so I couldn't go to sleep without writing out this fic, its late and probably not proofread but I had to get it out there lol. dead reckoning chapter should be out by the end of this weekend, thank you all so much for your support I truly appreciate it! I'm always open to requests or just random asks!