“Do you ever think about them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The ones we left there.”
I looked over at her, her long brown hair floating out around her. She was all freckles, hundreds of the little things dotted all over her cheeks and forehead. She wasn’t looking at me; she was still looking out the window, her right hand clutching the little handle attached to the wall that kept her from just drifting away. It was almost too easy, for those of us who had been here as long as I had, to forget how it felt at first. How she must be feeling now.
I turned back to the window, the small square through which we could see it. Earth. I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t have the right words to make this easier. I could see her eyes shining with the forming tears, and I wished, I wished more than anything, that I did have the right words for her. Instead, I stayed silent.
I had been on one of the first. Not the first, but pretty close to it.
The first was full of people who had been ready before the announcement was even made. Some of them for years. They’d been listening, watching, reading. Leaders all across the globe had been downplaying it, but they hadn’t been fooled. They’d looked past the press releases and international conferences. They’d seen what was really happening.
When the clouds had appeared that winter, nobody had blinked an eye. Just a grey time of year, nothing out of the ordinary. Even in the northern hemisphere, where things should have been sunny and warm, nobody really scratched their heads about it. Just a cool summer. The last few had been pretty hot, after all, so why should they complain about a bit of respite?
It was completely by chance that people realised something was really up. That kid went viral on TikTok with his scroll-through compilation of photos he’d taken out his bedroom window of the exact same cloud in the exact same spot for six months. At first, people laughed about it - I know I did. Then they began to look at the clouds outside their own windows, and that sense of familiarity had started to nibble away at their nerves.
A year later, the media were reporting it. The clouds that had rolled in that winter had never rolled out again, and people had begun to notice. It got cloudier and cloudier, and none of the clouds were heading anywhere. They just appeared. And stayed.
Eventually, the politicians had to mention it. Of course, they’d told everyone there was nothing to worry about. They were so reassuring - so firm in their reminders that they’d wake up one day and those clouds would disappear - and we wanted to believe them. That day never seemed to come, though, and eventually they were left with no choice but to turn to the very people they despised most. The scientists.
My sister had gotten all tangled up in it then. Jane had gotten her meteorology degree from one of those private universities. She’d been trying to talk to us all about those clouds for at least a year by then, and honestly? I sort of just thought she was a bit paranoid. She’d been a stresshead since we were kids, always worried about something. I’d always dismissed most of her concerns, telling her that everything was fine - and usually it did end up fine.
This time was different, though.
Looking down at Earth from up here, it seemed so tiny. Sometimes it was hard to recall how terrifyingly huge it had seemed when I was living on it. Looking over at her again, I thought about how fresh it must still feel for her.
“I do.”
I said it quietly. She didn’t look my way again, and I wondered if she’d even heard me, but I saw her sucking on her bottom lip to stop it from trembling, and I knew that she had.
Ellie was young. She’d told me she was 18, but I had the feeling she was probably younger. She’d only arrived a few weeks ago. She was one of the last. Maybe the last. Before her ship arrived, I could barely remember when we’d last had an arrival. Other stations were the same.
She didn’t say anything.
I could barely remember how long it had been since I’d arrived here. Time didn’t feel the same as it did on Earth. A lot of people had stopped tracking the weeks, or months, or years. If I had to guess, I’d say it had been a couple of years.
Looking at Ellie’s hand, wrapped around the handle with a white-knuckled grip, I wondered if everything felt as cold to her now as it had to me back then. When I’d first gotten here, the chill of everything I touched had amazed me. I’d learned quickly that the stations were all just air-conditioned really well, but it had been unnerving at first. The body suits, which were the standard daily dress on the stations, kept us pretty warm, so the concept of how cold it actually was had taken me a while to wrap my head around. It also made me laugh. Just a little. We’d left Earth because of how cold the clouds had made it, and then we’d come somewhere even colder.
“It gets easier, though,” I said.
Five years after the first clouds had appeared, global leaders all came together to make the announcement. While they’d been publicly downplaying the seriousness of the clouds, they’d been working in the background. Not on a solution, though. There was none. That’s what they told us. Their answer was for us to leave.
Things were getting colder. The cloud cover was so thick that some people had forgotten what sunshine on their skin even felt like. The agricultural industry was dying. Literally. Anything solar-powered was running on its last legs. Fossil fuels were the only thing keeping the world running, and we were burning through them quicker than ever before. So they had decided we’d leave.
While we’d all been continuing on as normal - trying to ignore the constancy of the clouds - they’d been working on their exit plan. The reveal had shocked most of us. Others, who’d had their ear closer to the ground like Jane, weren’t all that surprised.
They’d been building space stations. Space stations on steroids. Lots of them. I guess they didn’t have anywhere else to go - not after all that funding had been pulled from the Mars research efforts - and so they decided we’d just go nowhere. The theory was you’d travel to the space station closest to you at the time your ship left Earth, and from there you’d be able to travel between the stations.
That was the theory.
So the first ship had been full of those who had been listening. People like Jane. The handful of ships after them had been people like me. Lucky people. People who were loved enough by someone who had been listening that they’d been forced to go quickly. I wasn’t one of the first because I’d been paying particularly close attention, or because I was a scientist, or because I was qualified to be one of the first. I was just lucky. Lucky enough to be loved by someone like Jane.
She looked over at me then. The tears were still pooled in her eyes, though she blinked to try and fight them down, but there was something else too. I felt like it was the sense that she knew I was lying.
For a moment, the only sound was the quiet rumble of the air conditioning system. It was a constant up here, in this strange new home of ours.
“I don’t want it to get easier.” she said, turning her head away from me as soon as she’d spoken. “I don’t want to forget them.”
It had been messy here at first, despite the fact that the first had done an impressive job of setting up. By the time I arrived, communication with Earth was regular, but limited to official communications only, and no personal communications existed between here and home. Communication with the other stations was easy, despite the fact that you were never close enough to actually see one another. More people had complicated things, though.
Leaving from the same spot on Earth didn’t mean you ended up on the same station unless you were in the exact same ship. Families who’d been prepared made the journey together early on. But after that, the powers on Earth had been forced to make it a ballot system to keep things fair and to get people out as quickly as possible. It made sense, but it divided families, friends, and loved ones.
When they made it to a station, people wanted to reconnect with their people. The whole “travel between stations” concept wasn’t as easy as they’d made it out to be, though. Travelling between two stations meant that the stations had to momentarily come together, and that took planning and a lot of time. In the time since I’d left Earth, we’d only docked with another station once. It simply wasn’t that simple to see people up here.
Finding your loved ones was also difficult. And slow. You had to give the details of anyone you wanted to find to the station’s logistics team. They’d then send the info out en masse to the other stations, and eventually, if there was a hit, you’d hear from that station.
Private communications between stations were also difficult. Mobile phones and the internet didn’t exist in the same way up here. Eventually, a system was set up. Everyone received an allotted amount of time to use the station’s inter-station phones or email system. As more people came to the station, though, this meant more time between communications with anyone outside of your ship.
At first, I didn’t have anyone out there to talk to. Then, at some point, I’d gone in for my allocated comms time and found an email from an old friend from college. Things had changed a bit for me then.
I looked at Ellie, and she looked at Earth.
When I first got here, I’d expected Earth to look the way it did in all those images from space. Bright blues and greens. I expected it to look beautiful. I expected it to change my life. And it did, just not in the way I’d thought it would.
The truth was that from up here, Earth wasn’t all that blue and green anymore. There were small pockets of it, but mostly it was white. The clouds. They were everywhere now. It had been a shock to me when I first saw it. Had it been a shock to Ellie, too? I had this nagging doubt that images of Earth from up here had ever been shown down there.
I reached across the gap between us, putting my right hand on her left shoulder. At the touch, she looked up at me. This time, there was no blinking; the tears just fell. I wondered if this was the first time anyone had touched her since she left Earth.
After a while, communication with Earth had gotten hard. The scientists up here blamed it on the clouds. They said they were just too thick to get clear signals through now. When communication slowed down, so did the arrival of new ships. We kept sending the empty ships back, though, and after some time, we’d hear something from Earth and a ship would come back with more people.
Eventually, we didn’t hear anything from Earth.
We still sent messages to them regularly, but we had no way of knowing whether they were being received. If they were trying to send anything back, it wasn’t getting through. So the time between ship arrivals had stretched and stretched. Most of us had decided that there was no one else coming.
Then Ellie’s ship had arrived.
It had given a lot of people up here new hope; hope that people they hadn’t been able to locate on other stations were still coming. It was a hope that was hard to reconcile with the attitudes of the new arrivals. Most of them had been distraught, and it had been hard to get much out of them. Eventually, they’d started talking.
Stories of riots around the spaceports. Stories of violence over seats on ships. Stories of ships trying to get out and crashing back to Earth. Stories of a coldness that couldn’t be staved off. Stories of an Earth in turmoil.
A lot of people found it hard to hold on to their hope after that, and I can’t blame them for that. What good is hope in times like these? Hope, holding on to it or throwing it away, is, I think, the most personal choice we have up here.
“My family wasn’t with me.”
She’d cleared her throat before speaking, but her voice was still thick with emotion.
I figured, by the way she stared out at that little white Earth, that her family members were the “them” she didn’t want to forget. My hand rested a little heavier on her shoulder, squeezing it as if that would be enough to give her some comfort.
Did she know that she might be the last? I guess she did. Maybe she hadn’t said it aloud yet. Maybe she never would.
She looked up at me, as if she were begging me to say something that would make her feel less alone.
When I first got here, conversations like this didn’t happen. We all had hope back then. We all knew that more ships would be coming. We all thought our people, whoever they were, would be on them.
All my allocated communication time went roughly the same. After that first email from Nadia - the girl I’d shared a twin dorm with for three years while we “studied” - I sent her an email every chance I got. I hadn’t seen her since college, but it was nice to know that there was someone else out there, someone floating around in space, who knew me.
Our emails were long. I told her about the friends I was starting to make in my station. She told me that her boyfriend had been on her ship, so they were together. Her mother was a scientist, so the rest of her family had been on an earlier ship. They’d ended up on another station, but she got to call them during her comms time. Sometimes, hearing about that would make a lump form in my throat. I tried to ignore it.
Other than Nadia, there was little for me to do in my comms time. But there was always one other thing I did. Like clockwork. Every time.
“Mine weren’t either,” I told her.
Ellie’s mouth twitched a little. I figured it was as close as she could get to smiling at me. Without a word, she reached up and grabbed my hand, holding it in hers. Gently, she squeezed it, her eyes going back to Earth as she did.
Every comms session, I left a notice for the logistics team. A notice they would send to every other station.
The notice said that I was looking for someone. Her name was Jane. She was a meteorologist, and she would be nearly 33 now. She was my older sister. And if she was out there, I was on Station 20A301FK.
I squeezed Ellie’s hand back.
I looked at Earth. I looked at her. Then I looked back at Earth again.
I thought about Ellie. About this girl who might never see her family again, and I thought about how scared she must be. While I was thinking about Ellie, I thought about the notice I kept leaving for the logistics team during every comms session I had. About how it never got a hit. About how, despite this, I never kept hoping it would.
“I don’t want to forget them, either.”
The grief is quiet, but constant. That line 'I don’t want it to get easier' hit hard. It’s not just about loss, it’s about choosing to remember. The space station feels colder than Earth ever did.
Nicely done Emily.
I was immediately immersed in this, in a really rare way. It didn't feel like science fiction because it just felt *real*. Excellent work, thanks for sharing!