Entering the cafeteria, it is dark, cold, and you can barely see the brown metal walls that used to seem so comforting and relaxing. The cold sheen of the void shines into the room, lighting up only a small part, creating a grey and cold world.

Stumbling forward, his body no more than skin and bones, he can feel he doesn’t have much energy left. Food? There is some on the table that he left...

After what felt like hours, but must have been only minutes of what should have been a 10 second walk, Evander arrives at the table. He looks down and sees the brown beans he used to devour with such vigour, the carrots that Freya always forced upon him, and the tomatoes that Maverick adored.

Suddenly, a splitting headache courses through Evander’s mind, as he supports his weak body with the table beneath. Breathing heavily, he knows what he must do.

Evander, doing his best, sits down on the bench to the table, and picks up the fork he left in the brown beans. The beans looked withered, pasty, and old. But that didn’t matter to Evander’s roaring stomach.

So taking the fork, he tried to use it like a spoon, getting as much of the brown gunk, that he used to swallow each day before, into his mouth. And with each bite, each forkful, his mind screeched, and it his stomach threatened to throw its contents out.

But he kept it in. He needed to keep it in. If he exploded, it would just waste more energy. Who would clean it up? Who would help him? No one. No one is here.

The beans that were cold, pasty, and old, the carrots that had gone somewhat brown, and the salad that that wilted, it had all entered Evander’s mouth.

Letting himself fall to the right, he laid on the cold, metal bench, staring at the gap of light that could be seen under the table and above the opposite bench, the stars enveloped by void peaking on him.

“Shut up...”

He closed his eyes, tears flowing down onto the bench, the taste of rotten food lingering in his mouth. Though that was the most rotten meal he had ever had, it was the one meal he needed most.

And looking back at the stars peaking at him, he glared. It was their fault this happened. It was this place’s fault it all happened.

“No...”

‘It was my fault... I should’ve been better, smarter. I should’ve realized sooner...’

Evander closed his eyes, letting the heaviness of them finally beat him, the exhaustion from eating having been too much. And naturally, his mind started to drift away as he saw the darkness transform into the shape of a what looked like smoke.

Hearing a beeping, one that he has heard many times, his body naturally goes towards the smoke, as he covers his mouth with his arms so that he would not inhale it.

His eyes look for the button, as he quickly pushes the release, and the module pops out of the brown wall that characterizes the ship. The walls were made like that to relax and help those on the ship to feel a more “earthly” vibe.

Looking at the module, it is a transmitter. A module that transports information across the ship, whatever it might be. Soon, he was already surrounded by several people with yellow vests. Though, their shirts had a hammer, unlike his eye.

“Officer, what’s going on?”

Turning his gaze, Evander looks over to find a man with short, greyish black hair and beard. Breathing in for a moment, Evander looks back at the module and scrutinizes it.

Then, using his hands, he takes out the part that is smoking, pain pumping through his hand suddenly, seeing that the part is hot.

“Overload, maybe.”

Gasps could be heard among the engineers, while the rest of the crew merely raised their eyes in confusion. The man with the white uniform and medals on his coat quickly coughed, as the rest of the crew became silent. He also had a eye on his coat.

Turning back to him, Evander breathed in for a moment, looking up at the ceiling, thinking, before looking back at him.

“Vice captain Wormfrey, the reason why we engineers are shocked is because an overload shouldn’t happen.”

Raising his eyebrow again, before narrowing, vice captain Wormfrey asked his second question.

“And what does this mean, officer?”

“That means, sir, that a lot of information passed through this module, enough to make the processer overload. It simply couldn’t handle that amount of information at once. Transmitters are made to handle large loads of information, but this exceeded that.”

Holding his chin, slightly stroking the greyish black beard, Wormfrey turns to the rest of those watching, the engineers not saying anything, nodding along with what Evander said. The rest merely looked at the vice captain, waiting for orders.

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“Right. Everyone, back to what they were doing. Officer...”

Turning his head back to Evander, his eyes narrowed, looking at the uniform and then the medal.

“...fix this. And if there is more, report to me immediately.”

“Yes, vice captain.”

Nodding, Evander quickly turned back to the module, stood up, and started carrying it through the halls to the workshop. Walking through the halls, his mind started moving as well, as it always did when something became broken, thinking about the hows and whys of how it broke.

As he reached his workstation, he placed the module and processer down, extracting the data that entered the thing at the last moment. There was a lot of junk, a lot of it corrupted. Some of it were private messages between colleagues, and others were orders made by farms, or documents sent to superiors.

‘It is a mix of data?’

The curious question was why this data was being poured through this one module, and how. Some of the data inside shouldn’t even be there, as it would be on the other side of the ship.

And so, noticing this, Evander rolled his chair over to his console, tapping on a few keys as a map showed up, making it possible to view the connections between transmitters. Looking at the data sent through the modules, a strange thing showed up.

Somehow, the data that should be on the other end of the ship, including all other sources of data on the ship, had been pouring through this transmitter for a while. It also reminded him that earlier today he was fixing another broken transmitter module.

‘Why did it get sent here?’

Tapping away at the keys, he found the notice for the transmitter module that he fixed before to find the reason for sending it here. Evander read through it for a moment and found it was removed because corrupted data was being sent to the farming module where the transmitter was.

He held his chin and leaned back in his chair, as the puzzle began giving itself away. The connections between the transmitters got scrambled somehow to go through one transmitter module, which overloaded it. The reason why is because transmitter modules are not set to have a max amount of data they process, as it wasn’t thought possible that it would ever be overloaded.

‘Was it done intentionally?’

Looking at the transmitter module in front of him, Evander’s eyes narrowed. The question was how the connections became so unoptimized. But maybe they were that way from the beginning? Transmitters are usually set up in a way that they ignore connections that are not part of the most optimized path for the data.

If someone messed with what points the data could and could not go through, then that fact would change, as the most optimized path would then be to go through this one transmitter module.

He went back to his computer and began looking into the past of transmitter modules that had been fixed, as images of the localized connections of transmitters began being shown through several different reports over time.

And from the picture Evander got, the problem began around 14 months ago, 4 months after Andromeda’s launch. At that time, the strain was okay, and the data shown was not as mixed as it became later, nor even corrupted.

‘So the connections started going through the one module over time?’

Evander pinched his nose out of frustration as he looked at the time. It was already midnight, and he had gone out to get lunch with Maverick at around 1 pm... It had been 11 hours already?

Letting out a sigh, Evander turned to his computer and began writing a report detailing the different problems found within the connections between transmitters. This included the different data found, the images of the connections, and possible reasons for the scrambling of data, including sabotage, as well as further investigation being needed to draw a more clear conclusion.

Yawning, Evander rubbed his heavy eyes donned with black bags, and saw that another three hours had gone by. The orange light in the workshop had at this point was already dimmed. The sound of clanging and whirring was gone, and the only thing left was his last soft taps on the keys of the computer that filled the silence of this room.

He got up from the chair, sending the report to the head of engineering, the head of operations, and the vice captain who said he wanted a report as well. Then, he walked out into the hallways of the ship, holding his arms as the cool air drifting through the halls hit him.

Strangely enough, the hallways are always active, even at night. Though, it was less active than the day. There was no real difference of night and day in space, meaning that waking up in the day had no meaning at all.

Yet still, there was something comforting about knowing that you stayed up to 3 am even though there is no 3 am in space.

‘My dad would probably yell at me right now that I am using too much power...’

Smiling to himself, Evander looked out the familiar windows of the outer rim of the ship, feeling the relaxed atmosphere of the ship.

‘How could someone on our ship ever sabotage us? That is just stupid...’

Eventually, reaching his cabin, Evander tapped on the keypad, which Freya opened ILLEGALLY with her key card. And shaking his head, Evander couldn’t help but chuckle a little at her antics.

Getting inside the cabin, Evander took of his clothes before walking into the bathroom and brushing his teeth. And done with his usual night routine, he walked to his bed and laid down, his eyes even heavier than this afternoon.

‘Was the last time I slept the day before yesterday? Well, now, the day before the day before yesterday.’

Evander, alone with his thoughts, eventually turned his mind towards Freya. It was the day before yesterday, the day when he got sleep, that she told him her feelings. He Still remembers her words.

“Evan, I want to know how you feel. You see, I, I like you...”

Those were her words. When she told him, she was nervously twirling her blond hair, and he stupidly just got up, face red, before running back to the workshop and volunteering to work on his day off.

Groaning into his pillow, Evander felt even worse because he couldn’t even speak to her today.

‘I am so useless. I really don’t deserve someone as good as her...’

With those last thoughts, Evander’s mind closed off to the darkness as he gradually fell asleep, his mind forever haunted by the confession of Freya.

In another place on the ship, that night, Wormfrey, his beard, uniform, and hair straight and proper as they always are, was reading a report created by officer Evander Smith.

‘An officer with remarkable results. During his stay here at the Andromeda he has solved many problems the ordinary engineers were unable to...’

Rubbing his chin, he let out a sigh as he read the end of the report that included solutions including setting a max amount of data that could be distributed, and that a possible reason for why this happened could be sabotage.

Turning his head, Wormfrey looked at a picture that stood on a shelf beside his console. It was filled with people with white uniforms, the top brass of Andromeda, right before it launched.

Looking at the person next to him in the picture, Wormfrey couldn’t help but sigh. Their captain, a man with a large beard and a goofy grin...

‘I really wish this won’t be sabotage. If it is,then...’