Rime

The base was silent and dark. With no crewmembers bustling about, it almost seemed abandoned. No Captain kicking her bootheels on the floor, no Dr Jordan flicking through her papers, and no Ecologist Tommy making a mess of the cryonics chambers and tripping over his own dirty mugs.

There was just you.

-

The cylinder lit up, a glass door sliding open—a wispy steam from the exhaust fumed in the chilled air. The biting air was the first thing you became aware of. It pricked the hair on your arm and stung your nose. It numbed your fingers and woke you like an ice bath. Fighting through the delirium of your slumber, you feel around for the casing of the cylinder and pull yourself out. The cold bites your feet when they touch the floor, and you hiss. A hot cup of coffee ought to warm you up. 

Making your way to the kitchen, you fumble for the kettle, fill it with water, and then boil it. You figured you might as well get a start on the new data sets too. The computer sits in the main lobby…dusty. Is that weird? Of course, you weren’t particular about dusting in this place. You don’t think any of the crewmembers were. Was this normal?

You wave a few fingers over the surface of the screen, and they face you with a sheen of grey. Yeah, that had to be normal. Suddenly, being an accredited scientist in climatology feels far off. But you wave it away and wipe your hands on your shirt. There were other matters to attend to. In the darkness of the room, the monitor lights up, casting blue on your face, and you put in the password. You should probably put a light on. You find the most recent data set and click on it.

Huh? “Is this encoded?” That’s not right. It wasn’t yesterday. We would have been told if it’d be turned into code. It wasn’t a part of the station, but it could be. When you took this job, there were terms set out. How long you’d be here, your contacts, your objectives, emergency information, but none of it had anything to do with a code. You’d have been told if there were changes. You reload the page; maybe this was just a fluke. Not likely, but maybe. 

The hell? It’s still coded. And not a word about the decipher. You exit out of the files and scroll. Why are there so many data sets? You keep scrolling. There are only supposed to be a few each day, and not this early. You were the only one up right now. You keep scrolling until reach the first one without a code in the entry. It was set a year ago. A year ago?

What the hell? You recognise this one from yesterday. You proofed it yourself before you went to bed. Why are there so many entries?

How long were you asleep? 

Leaning back, you cover your face with your hands. There’s no way this is real. You used cryonic chambers for emergencies during your stay. You would have been told if you needed to use them for longer, if the power started dropping or if you were running low on food. You slept every night, all night, and that’s it.

Your hands scrub your face a bit, and you look at the screen again. A year ago. You were asleep for a year? The station’s computer didn’t wake you with an alarm like usual. You’d get those alarms if you got any notifications too, like data entries or communication about changes, like the code. You got neither.

Where was your team? You never woke up first. 

Wait. 

You stand up, and the chair falls back. Blurs of grey and darkness rush by as you run for the cryo pods, and you freeze as you reach them. They’re all still closed, the lights off inside and the monitors still quiet. A moment goes by.

Nothing. Were they still asleep? You were the only one woken. That doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.

Slowly, you step closer to one of the pods. The Captain’s. The frosty air fogs the glass chamber. You reach for the door handle but pause. Something tells you to leave it alone. Why? Instead, you move to the side of the chamber and check the system. The power may have malfunctioned; you remember it did that sometimes. When you check the grid, you pause again. It turns on, but the heart monitor is flatlining.

You stand there for a minute, staring. For some reason, you can’t bring yourself to open the chamber. You don’t know what you’ll find. The steady beeping of the flatline fills your senses, from the stinging cold in your nostrils to your toes, to the pressure in your throat and the glow of the monitor in your eyes. You don’t want to see what’s inside. 

Instead, you take a step back. And another, and another, until your back hits the wall and you slide down. The cold is in you now, crawling into your spine. You cover your face again, and the darkness takes you.

-

“Cap, did you take my socks?” Tommy whines from his quarters. “That’s my nice pair!” Captain snorts, fiddling with the monitor. “That’s the point. I’m your Captain, anyway. Aren’t I supposed to have the best?” She used that excuse often, in jest, mind you. Jordan is still at the screen, scribbling down notes reverently. “Just give me one…more…minute.” She mumbles to herself. You stand at her shoulder, face dropping. “You’re not the only one that needs to ‘journal’, Doc. Cap wants us to go to bed now, so if I can’t do this, neither can you.” You wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull, and she pulls back. “I’m nearly done, just-” And she huffs. “-hah! There. We’ve got a minute, just finish up and turn it off.” She scurries off with her pages. You complete the last of your notes too, and then turn off the monitor. “All done, nerds? Do you need a lullaby before sleepytime?” Cap waits by the cryo room, shutting off the rest of the station’s lights. Tommy pushes past her, pointing at her sock-clad feet accusingly, and steps into his pod first. Cap laughs and claps Doc on the back as she walks past too, and then you. She gives you a strange look, one you can’t read. 

“Goodnight, you three.” The rest of you echo it back, and the room goes dark. The last sound you hear is your own breath in the closed cylinder before sleep takes you.

-

You don’t know what to expect when you crawl back to the monitor. The screen is still on, the rooms are still dark, and quiet with year-old memories, and the codes are still there, promising possible answers in an unknown language. So many codes.

The power must have malfunctioned and killed them, but why am I still alive? How? What am I supposed to do? Contact the authorities? Maybe they were warning me in these messages. You send out a signal, and it’s buffering, but it works. The response is almost immediate. 

Station #114201, requesting a status update. You don’t want to tell them what happened. You figured they’d send out someone to check if they’d been ghosted for so long. But clearly that didn’t happen. Your team is gone. You forgot why you did this at all, in a sense. You came to the station to study Antarctica’s warming, that’s right. It seems so small now. 

Back to the screen, you type out a small response. Basic. The response is quick again. Methodical and cold too. They’re sending a team to retrieve you. Compile the work you’ve done and store it. The research is cut short. You don’t bother to affirm them, professionalism be damned. But part of you, a shred, wants to answer to the code. Why the sudden change? You would have remembered it if you had gotten a decipher. You ask for a recall.

Strange, they don’t understand. No codes were stipulated. You weren’t in the wrong. But then who sent these messages if not your base’ contacts? Someone else? Higher-ups maybe. Boredly, you twist your head away from the monitor and turn your chair around. You feel no need to turn on any of the lights, who knows, maybe some of them don’t work anyway. You find yourself facing the living quarters. 

There’s a piece of paper on the Captain’s door. You almost didn’t notice it. Standing, you move to grab it, watching it from across the room. It’s too hard to read from here; just blurry black images. It almost looks like a code.

-

“If by chance any of you survive, just know that I’m sorry.”

It was written on the back of the paper, in Captain’s handwriting. 

-

The world was dying. The code the Captain left made it easy to decipher the messages, the other’s you could read without. The ones from your own monitors, that is. The whole reason you were here in the first place, studying global warming, and now it has spread to the rest of the world.

Why would she leave you a code if she thought you’d all die? Why would the Captain kill you, instead of trying to fix the problem? You all had a head start. You could have predicted this. You could have done something. Why would she do this? For the billionth time this morning, you don’t know what to make sense of. 

You find a litany of old messages hidden in the system; correspondence between the Captain and the higher-ups in code. They’ve warned her about their own predictions based on their own research in different areas. The new messages you got when you slept were addressed to all of you. 

Station: 114201. Request upped prediction in coordinates ########, ########, ########. Station: 114201. Request status update in coordinates ########, ########, ########. Station 114201. Request status prediction in-

This continued nearly 400 times. You stopped checking after a few. The most recent one was one for your department. It was written Station 114201. Climatological report: lowered pressure-improved oxygen and hydrology rates-

It was improving. At least, the Antarctic was improving. That was something. Right? Something could become more. 

What am I doing? 

This data can be used. You send it to the higher-ups with the rest of it. For a brief moment, you feel like you’ve done something. Something good. Something important. It’ll do for now. You check the other influx of data, and it shows steady results. Improvement, mostly. You don’t know what to make of the rest of the world yet, but it’s caused damage, based on what the Captain’s correspondence has shown. Droughts lead to poverty of humans, cropland and animals, heavy storms and floods, small tsunamis and heat sickness. You can only hope your work can help here.

You can only hope.

Isn’t that nice?

You're sure that you helped.

You step away from the screen. You’ve had enough for now. Walking back to the kitchen, you find the kettle and mug still out. And isn’t that an idea? After a minute in the kitchen, you walk out to the exit of the base. It’s an electric sliding door that goes up and overhead, separated by the wall into the lobby. You test your luck, using your old and dusty keycard to scan the door. It takes a couple of tries, but you hear the creak of heavy metal start to rumble through the walls and floor. The door lifts a little, then stalls, then lifts again steadily. You remember Jordan and Tommy coming back once, in their cold suits and huffing tiredly. You tell them they look like burnt marshmallows, and they scoff at you to make them hot cocoa. You did so and in their favourite mugs. 

The blistering cold wind instantly washes over you. You probably should put on your snowsuit. You don’t. No, you just stand in the wash of cold. There’s something peaceful in the snow, you think. Something calm in the storm. It’s grey and unyielding, with only a few feet of sight between the static of the snow. The world is sick with warming. You will be too if you stay out here. But you don’t move. 

For a brief, brief moment, you feel nothing. And you don’t mind a bit.

Inside, four cups of coffee sit on the table.