Thousand Nights

"... From the mountain to the sea," she said - that was how far the cerulean hairgrass and silverthorn pines had grown.

"And the star-marked primroses? Tell me about those!" Emilia leaned in, her expression alive with excitement.

Elder Marsa chuckled, a dry yet comforting sound like scattered papers skittering across the station's sterilised floors. "They bloomed only in shadow at the beginning of Witherend. They had palmate petals and trumpeted leaves, and they smelled of clean linen. I remember going down to the brook every Twinday with Elder Jynna. There were so many flowers then, we could pick whole bunches, then we'd take them back home to make soap. There'd be so many bubbles..." She sighed with a smile, a fleeting glimpse of her youth sparkling in her weary eyes as she shook her head. But soon her shoulders sank and her heart grew heavy. "The Brotherhood called them weeds..."

Emilia settled. She reached out, offering a comforting hand.

"Those days are long past us, child." Elder Marsa added, her eyes distant, fixed on a point far beyond the confines of the Day Room.

She knew too well. Since the day she was born, Emilia had only known the Dust. Grey mountains that carved through the grey sky, and grey pasture stretching almost endlessly, only giving way to grey waters. All choked by Dust. In her daydreams, she instead travelled the place the elders described - a land full of life and colour. They called it Sion Uskari, meaning 'Thousand Nights,' because their ancestors said it would take a thousand nights to walk from one shore to the other. By the Brotherhood's railships, it would only take ten.

"That's all for today."

"Not yet! Please!" She begged, her small, desperate fists gripping the fabric of her skirt.

"It's late, it's time to sleep now." Her tone was firm but not unkind. The Day Room was already growing dim.

"I don't want to! Don't make me!" Emilia's voice broke in protest.

She gently pried her hands away, then drew her in for a hug. Elder Marsa always smelled like the same reclaimed sterile soap they all used - one of the few scents she knew. Yet there was still something else that set her apart from the other elders, perhaps the artificial lemon she added to her tea. "You'll be awake again before you know it. And Elder Jynna will be waiting for you."

She scooped her up and took her out of the Day Room, carrying her down the long glass tunnels to Hibernation. The lights had been dimmed - the outside world shrouded by the veil of night, and a great storm scratched the Dust against the panes with a mournful howl.

Emilia held Elder Marsa tighter as they entered the room on the right - a hall with rows upon rows of cabins on either side where the other girls remained in their induced slumber.

Hers always felt too small. Elder Marsa pulled the hatch to Cabin X-42 ajar and laid Emilia upon the soft padding.

"Please..." Her begging weakened.

"It won't be for much longer, I promise. Deep breaths." She shut the door and began the hibernation process.

First, the cabin lit up in a warm amber glow, then the filtration system hissed awake, and a sickly aromatic odour filled the chamber. Emilia felt her arms and legs grow heavy, her vision blurred, and she collapsed on her side. The lights dimmed and died as she went to sleep.

***

The next time she'd wake up, another century would've passed. That was the plan - to wait out the Dust and the Brotherhood.

Emilia grew used to the routine, though she still hated it. An elder would appear to see her wake after a hundred years of sleep - as the cabins were designed to interrupt their hibernation cycle on cue. Perhaps an inefficient strategy, yet crucial nonetheless.

But the rest of the station required constant monitoring. The hibernation cycles, the life support, recycling, surface monitoring and the site structure all needed maintenance. The elders took shifts of ten years. Emilia lost track of how many times she'd been put back into hibernation, though she watched the elders age with a solemn curiosity. There were thirty in all; Elder Marsa, Elder Jynna, and Elder Briar were the ones scheduled to Emilia's cycle. They'd check her vitals, perform essential maintenance on the cabin while she played in the gym, then spend the rest of the day sharing stories.

All three had been in their twenties when she'd first been put into hibernation. Now they were each in their hundreds.

One day, they would wake everyone at the same time and welcome a new age of modhumans back to a thriving planet. That was the dream that sustained them through those long, lonely centuries.

Emilia awoke with a dull throbbing in her head. Her cabin's alarm blared to say another cycle had completed. Her limbs felt numb and heavy as concrete. She lay in place a while, waiting for her body to catch up and for the fog in her head to clear.

The cabin at the other side of the hall remained in darkness. All was quiet and cool as she watched her breaths shape into plumes of mist.

She counted the minutes in her head, waiting for Elder Jynna to arrive. The routine was familiar. One of her elders would appear to take her to the restroom, then the medical bay, the canteen, and off to the gym after a quick catch-up. When no one came, she pulled herself out of the cabin and looked about the hallway.

The other girls remained asleep. Every time she woke, she prayed they would too. That would be the sign that their wait was over - that Sion Uskari was habitable and the next phase of their re-colonisation would begin. Not this time, she mourned. She wanted to meet them, to share stories and play games, yet she'd never seen their faces.

Emilia was the last girl to be born - the youngest by three days. And by born, it meant the day she'd emerged from the incubation chamber at the age of five, spent her first day with Elder Jynna, then entered her first hibernation by nightfall. In her waking days, she expanded her physical capabilities. In her sleep, the cabin updated her brain with knowledge of language, mathematics, chemistry, history, and more.

But Elder Jynna hadn't appeared. She thought she may find her in the Day Room.

It was still before dawn, so the world beyond the glass in the tunnels remained shrouded, and her footsteps chased after her. The lights came on in the Day Room. Still, no one was around.

Emilia thought to check the Command Centre - perhaps Elder Jynna had gotten distracted checking the surface readings and analysing samples. When the doors parted with a swoosh, her heart juddered as her eye fell on black hair over the helm. Neither Elder Marsa, Jynna, nor Briar had black hair - not anymore at least.

"Um... Hello?" She muttered, her voice shaky and pitched.

The chair swivelled. Sat there was a woman much younger than her elders, with soft, cool rosy undertones to her tawny complexion, nursing a coffee.

"Oh, is it that time already?" She checked her screen. "Sorry, you must be Emilia, right?"

"Erm..." She shrank into herself. "Who are you? Where's Elder Jynna?"

Her expression shifted as she set her drink down and stood to full height. "I'm afraid Elder Jynna passed away six years ago. Her hibernation module malfunctioned - the age-suspension process failed. She didn't suffer, she'd have gone in her sleep." She didn't give Emilia a second to process it. "I'm Renaya, I don't go for all that 'elder' business, I'm not that old. I was made the replacement for Elder Yve. You know, I'm actually your older half-sister." She checked her screen again. "In any case, you'll need to replace Elder Jynna, so I've got two years to train you before I go back under, then you'll pick up the rest of her shift."

"Elder Jynna's... gone?"

She froze, actually looking at Emilia's expression for the first time. "Oh... Oh, I'm... Sorry, I..." She walked over to the little girl staring up at her with tears rolling off her cheeks and snot streaming from her nose. "Um..." She knelt down, awkwardly patting her shoulder. "There there." She returned to her upright stance again, wiping her palm at her thigh. "So... Yeah... Come on then, you're a supervisor... I mean 'elder' now, so we should get you into your new uniform."

Renaya escorted her to the elder's locker room - a place Emilia had never been inside for obvious reasons. Elders made a lot more laundry than the girls over their ten year shifts, so they kept spare and used uniforms in the lockers to be decontaminated and ready to wear again. The locker room was situated just a door away from the airlock. Emilia was closer to the outside world than she'd ever been.

The new elder opened Jynna's locker, pulling out a clean uniform. "You can wear Jynna's old things. Oh, and I'll update her badge so you can access her stuff. You'll need it to get into records, the canteen, medical, everything really." She held up Jynna's badge, swiped hers against it to open administrator mode, and typed Emilia's name and number into it. She reached for her hand. "Slight scratch." A tiny needle pushed into her finger, and she pulled away. "There, it's all set up with your DNA, so it knows you're a new admin." Finally, she handed her the badge on a lanyard. "Try not to lose it, won't you? I mean, you can get another one pretty easily, but it's a waste of resources."

She nervously accepted the badge, slipping it around her neck. "So this badge will let me access anything?"

"Not everything. You'll need a second admin badge to initiate the Colony protocol - that's for when the environment readings show suitable for surface colonisation..." She tried rephrasing it. "You know, when Sion Uskari is habitable again. In all likelihood, you'll never have to worry about that. Any idiot can see this planet is dead."

"No it's not!" She yelled, catching Renaya off guard. "It's recovering! Elder Marsa promised we'd see it someday!"

She rolled her eyes with a snort. "That's all just fairytales. Planets don't just recover on their own. The Dust killed everything on the surface. There's no life, no oxygen, and there's so much Dust now, if there was anything alive in the seed bed, it's buried deep. Our ancestors needed to make plans for terraformation, instead they decided it was a better idea to 'wait and see.'"

"But-"

"Let it go, kid. Honestly, the best we can hope for is aliens from another world coming to save us. Otherwise, there's not any point us doing this at all. The cycles, maintaining the station, all of it." She threw the uniform at her. "Get changed. I'll be waiting in the canteen. We'll need to start going through protocols after you've eaten."

"... It's too big." The uniform spilled onto the floor.

"Press the button on the neck, it'll shrink to fit you." She left, letting the door swoosh shut behind her.

Emilia wanted to cry again, but what use would that do? She set the uniform on a nearby bench, reaching for the buttons on her shirt when her eye shifted to the airlock. There were six suits on either side, each sealed behind glass, though accessible with a badge. She looked back in the direction of the door to check Renaya had really left...

The door beeped and slowly opened with a swipe of her card, and she went for the smallest suit of the set. She already knew how to put it together - that information had been uploaded during hibernation. She locked her helmet into place, sealing the suit and activating the filtration pack. With the lanyard of her badge wrapped tightly around her wrist, she pressed it towards the airlock door scanner.

An alarm sounded. The way in sealed behind her, though before the outer door could open, Renaya came rushing in, throwing herself at the glass and smacking her palm against it.

"Emilia!" She tried her badge against the scanner, but it wouldn't work until the outer door was properly shut. "What are you doing? Don't go out there!"

Emilia didn't listen. She focused on the early morning light filtering in through the opening ahead of her. As soon as it was wide enough to step through, she hurried out, her boots falling upon a thick bed of Dust.

Outside for the first time in all her life, she cast her gaze from the mountain to the sea. Just as Elder Marsa had said, everything was grey. Grey mountains, grey hills, grey valleys, grey plains, grey beaches, and grey waters. But there had to be something, just one small sign that Sion Uskari wasn't lost forever.

She started walking on the old road leading away from the station. She'd never been able to appreciate its size from the outside - built into a cliff face that carried on higher than she thought possible, and it was covered in Dust. Only the glass was clean, and from the outside, it reflected the world beyond, keeping the interior hidden from prying eyes.

From her uploads, she had a vague memory of studying a map of the surrounding region. The Brotherhood's railship line back to their habitat should have been less than a mile to the north, so she began down the hillside, leaving a clear trail of prints behind. The airlock took ten minutes to disinfect itself before the interior door would open, so she had some time to get ahead of Renaya.

She meandered down the slopes and found where the line should be, but there was nothing there. It must have been buried by Dust after so many centuries.

Whether she could see it or not, she knew exactly which direction it lead, so she trusted her instincts and kept going. Surely she'd find something on the way.

The sun was high overhead by the time she reached her destination. Thick, jagged grey poles reached to the sky, encrusted by layers of Dust and battered by the elements. They had of course once been silverthorn pines - the wood was probably still there underneath, yet it would have long since petrified. Inside her suit, Emilia could only hear her own breathing and beating heart. Outside, a gale was blowing in, crumbling the Dust and carrying it off towards the ocean.

She eventually found the brook. The water no longer flowed - centuries of Dust had practically turned it to cement. Still, there had to be something here. Anything.

While she looked, she heard something rushing through the trees in her direction. No, just a little more time, she thought. Renaya grabbed her by the shoulders - her voice received by the radio next to Emilia's ears.

"There you are! What were you thinking? You could get hurt out here!"

"No! Marsa said that-"

"Can it! I don't want to hear it. We are going back right now, and you are never coming out here again!"

"But-" Her eye drifted, taken by something beside Renaya's foot. "Stop! Don't move!"

She froze. "What-"

"Look!"

Renaya followed her eye to one of her footprints. Between the crevices left by her boots, two little pink leaves pushed up out of the ground. Emilia fell to the floor and immediately started scooping back the Dust, finding other sprouts at the side of the brook. "They're star-marked primroses! They're only small, but they're growing again!"

"That's not possible." Renaya crouched to her level, studying the plant against her hand. "No, it can't be. Star-marked primroses don't grow tall enough to break through the Dust."

"Don't you see? They've adapted! Over thousands of years!"

"No, the sensors showed no change in the atmosphere. If plants were growing, the oxygen would've gone up." She checked the screen on her sleeve. It showed the same as it always did.

"But the whole station is covered in Dust. It's probably interfered with the sensors."

"I... Maybe." She double-checked.

"So does this mean we can start the Colony protocol? Can we wake everyone up?"

"Whoa there, let's not get ahead of ourselves. A few plants springing up in one location doesn't mean the surface will be habitable anytime soon. It just means we're only a few centuries out now instead of millennia."

"Oh..." She mourned.

Renaya sighed, patting her on the shoulder. "Come on. We need to head back. Like I said, we've got to start your training. You're a supervisor now, you'll need to know what you're doing when it comes to the next round of maintenance."

"Could we come back, to check on the flowers?"

"Not a good idea..." She watched as the girl's expression fell once more, and she rolled her eyes. "I suppose I could pilot a drone over here so we can keep an eye on them."

Emilia beamed. "Okay!" She grabbed Renaya's hand, though she seized up when she did, and started walking back in the direction of the station.

"After that... I guess we'll just have to wait and see."