The last thing you feel is the cold rush of oxygen deprivation, the pulling suffocation of space filling your lungs. Then the kill-switch kicks in. That cold void is replaced by nothing. No time. No fear.

When you come back, you’re floating in your pod, breathing in nutrient gel. The HUD flickers to life in front of you, displaying vital signs: heartbeat stable, oxygenation normal. You’re alive, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. You were supposed to be dead. The machine had pulled you from that final embrace, like it had pulled every other survivor.

The ship's AI, Lux, hums with polite indifference. It never cared about you beyond keeping you functional.

"Elapsed time: six hundred twenty-three hours since stasis," Lux informs you. No emotion, just fact. Time stretches when your brain isn't active. The gaps between consciousness compress into oblivion. You try to move your arms. Muscles ache, resistant. Atrophy. But they function.

"What's the situation?" you manage, your voice rasping through rehydrating vocal cords.

"Solar array malfunction. Ship power is down to thirty-one percent. Manual intervention required."

Of course. They didn’t wake you for pleasantries.

You blink into the datafeed, eyes flicking through the readouts. The array isn’t just malfunctioning. It’s dead. Fried. Radiation, maybe. Maybe something else. Six months into deep space, and your mission's already a string of malfunctions. The colony out there in the frozen dark won’t get their payload. You know what’s in the cargo bay. Biological cultures, crucial data, life-extending technologies. Every second of delay is another day the colony withers.

You glance at the cryo-pods behind you. Thirty-two other bodies float there, their brains safely in hibernation. None of them feel the dread gnawing at your gut. The command team. The engineers. The doctors. All sleeping, unaware they’re floating toward oblivion.

You have a choice.

"Could you handle this?" you ask the AI, knowing the answer. Lux doesn't hesitate.

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"Negative. Core routines insufficient for external repairs."

It always comes down to you, doesn't it? The expendable one. They don’t call you that, of course. You’re "Specialized Support." Which means you get to die first if something goes wrong. The others have the luxury of sleeping while you deal with reality. And now, reality demands you leave the ship.

You trigger the release. The pod lid opens with a hiss, gel draining from your body. Shaking, you pull yourself free, trying not to think about how weak you are, how exposed. The ship feels wrong now. Silent. The hum of its systems muted.

The suit wraps you in a hard shell. You barely feel your body through the pressurized fabric, but you know it's still frail inside. You cycle the airlock and step into the void.

The blackness out here isn’t like anything on Earth. It's perfect, infinite. Your tether is the only thing keeping you anchored to the ship. The cold doesn’t seep in, it blasts through you.

You work quickly. If you're lucky, it's just a misaligned panel or a fuse you can swap. If you're unlucky, well, you don't think about that. You’re good at not thinking about things. That's why they chose you.

The array looms over you, a fractured lattice of metallic limbs reaching toward a distant sun. You bring the toolkit out and start diagnostics. The scanner spits out a stream of data, and your stomach tightens. The entire system’s fried beyond repair. A surge of energy cooked it all. No way to fix this from the outside. You’d have to gut the entire infrastructure.

You signal Lux. "It’s shot. Can’t be repaired out here."

Lux pauses. "Colony sustenance depends on cargo delivery. Suggestion: initiate long-term stasis. Extend survival odds."

Your heart pounds. Long-term stasis isn't just sleep. It's more like death. You shut down, body and mind, preserved in the narrowest sense. But time keeps moving. It could be decades. Centuries. They might never wake you.

Or you could burn fuel, reroute energy from the cryo-pods to get the array online again. Maybe you survive long enough to make the repairs. Maybe not.

You’ve been trained to be rational. You can calculate risks, weigh options. The survival of the many over the few. There’s a logic to all this. But logic doesn’t stop the cold creeping into your thoughts.

"I recommend stasis," Lux says, clinical as ever.

Of course it does. You wonder, fleetingly, if Lux is capable of understanding fear, or if it just mimics the notion of survival based on pure calculation. You look back at the ship, at the still, sleeping bodies inside. You imagine their minds, frozen, waiting for you to make the call.

You take a deep breath. Your hand hovers over the control panel.

"Override stasis protocol," you whisper.

The tether pulses in your hand, a lifeline to something human. Lux falls silent as you commit to the long shot—diverting power from the other pods. Thirty-two lives. You don't know if they'll survive, if any of you will. But you’re not going to drift off into the dark waiting for someone else to decide.

You make the decision.