“Saucer,” Nathan said after a few moments of glaring at the door to the warp of where he was floating. “What do you think of us taking a closer look at one of those consoles? I’m nervous about bumping the window. Porthole? I don’t know what the name ought to be. Porthole is terrible, this thing is tens of feet wide and I very much do not want it to be a hole.”
In response, the inside of his helmet acquired some artificial color—though in defense of the rest of the colors in his line of sight they were, of course, equally artificial. The light was coming not from a sun but from the suit that Nathan was wearing, and as the photons struck the furnishings in his view they reflected off of or were absorbed by pigmentary molecules which, having been created synthetically by an advanced space-faring civilization and used to decorate the insides of a space station, were just as artificial as anything Saucer drew on the inside of his helmet.
And indeed, the helmet did now have two consoles outlight in green and one outlined in red. Separately, one of the unmarked consoles had a crew possibly-couch marked in red, and a half-dozen handholds near him which he might otherwise have used to maneuver were marked yellow.
“Nice,” he said, grinning. “Video game style UI. That’ll come in handy—I can work with this.”
Determine a suitable style of interface was momentarily written across Nathan’s HUD in italics. It developed a green checkmark next to it, was crossed out with a strikethrough, and then faded away.
Drifting carefully across the room from handhold to handhold, the spacesuit-clad man made his slow way from the ceiling hatch—and indeed, he remembered once he started moving that traditionally spaceships and stations in speculative fiction have their doors called hatches, unless they’re the doors to an office which for some reason breaks the standard; and also that rather than a porthole he could call the enormous window a viewport, which sounded appropriately science-fiction-y—to one of the six other doors. He assiduously avoided any handholds that were marked as dangerous or risky, or whatever else a yellow color might indicate, which is what necessitated his roundabout path, and chose a green-marked console at a station that did not have a red-marked seating element.
From the weftern hatch, he looked across the ceiling at—no, he told himself. He looked across the floor at the console near him, and with a mental effort his situational awareness flipped a hundred and eighty degrees, reflecting across the horizontal plane. The planet was now above him, past the enormous viewport that was the roof and ceiling; the crew stations were on the floor.
So: from the weftern hatch, he looked across the floor at the handholds, some of which he thought might possibly be also usable as footholds, though there was rather more room between the bar of metal and the floor… and they were all rather too narrow to be comfortable for his feet or for that matter his hands, with his fingers threatening to dig into his palms if he closed his hand around the holds. Conveniently, he had no need to do so, since he was moving so slow that he only needed the loosest and most cursory of grips or grasps, though he was careful to secure himself more thoroughly than that regardless; but it would be a potential problem, he noted to himself for later.
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“Saucer,” he said abruptly. “When I get to the crew station, is that couch-looking thing on the other side of the console going to fall apart if I touch it? Because it’s right in the way of where I’d be securing myself with the handholds if I were going to, like, interact with the console at all.”
By way of answer, his suited hands glowed blue briefly in his helmet’s HUD. A moment later, what was recognizably a probe of some sort extended from his left index finger. The blue glow dropped from the rest of his gloves, remaining on the probe, and the nearby crew couch blinked blue on and off three times.
“Touch the couch with the probe,” Nathan confirmed. “Got it.”
He considered for a moment what the best way to proceed was. Shrugging, he let his feet drift out behind him, pointing them weftwards as he swam hand-over-hand through the vacuum towards the couch.
“You know,” he said absently, “I never wondered about the vacuum. I just woke up like this in here, somehow already knowing that there wasn’t any air in the room. I wonder if that’s the improved situational awareness? But if so, how was I even going to tell? Must be something subliminal, because while I’m absolutely certain that there’s vacuum out there, I’ve got no idea why I’m so sure about that.”
There was no answer forthcoming, so Nathan continued to creep forward carefully, musing about the nature of aerobic exercise in microgravity as he maintained a perfect plank in the process—not for any particular purpose, but simply because it amused him to do so. In this manner he approached the couch, and he very gingerly, especially for a man with black hair, touched the tip of the probe to its… fabric, maybe, he thought to himself.
It was indeed fabric, and fabric which had decomposed over time. It started to crumble and Nathan could see a billow of dust starting to form, before it was interrupted by the probe opening up and starting to suck in everything from in front of him despite the hard vacuum it was operating in.
“So, are you just going to…”
The couch blinked blue again in his HUD, and then a green-on-black progress bar appeared underneath it. It was moving relatively quickly, and he could tell that when it was completed the couch would be entirely deconstructed and consumed by Saucer through the probe.
“Okay, that answers that question. So… what we are getting out of this?”
The progress bar gained some text underneath it, and Nathan smiled with a happiness that seemed bizarre to him but which was quite simply the joy of getting to mentally relax into a familiar context in times of confusion.
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The rest of the couches blinked blue, three slow times, and Nathan nodded. “We can eat the other couches, sure. Honestly, we should probably do that before we do anything else. It would be pretty ironic if we turned the air back on by interacting with the console and everything dissolved into dust.”
The console he’d gone past, which was just to his right and which he hadn’t examined at all other than to confirm that it wasn’t emitting any light and didn’t have any writing visible on it, went from green to a yellow-green in his HUD. It dimmed a moment later, and the couches developed a steady, mild blue glow.
“Same page. Great.” Nathan withdrew his hand as the couch in front of him finished dissolving into the probe. “Let’s get that done and then we’ll start looking for some answers!”