Abandoned World: The Awakening

— He did it two hours ago. You were in the next room at the time. You didn't hear anything?

— No. Absolutely not. And it's well soundproofed.

— Why do you think he did it?

— If I had any idea, Mr. Knight, I would have told you by now….

— Right. No word on that. We're treating it as a suicide for now, but we need to investigate.

Either way, we'll have to draw our own conclusions. Oh, and I hope you didn't need this lab too badly, as we need to seal it off for the time being.

— Do what you need to do. — Morgan replied. — You can count on my full cooperation Can we go now?

Tanner nodded his head. Despite his seeming confidence, he could see that he was going to have to report to his superiors in a little while about what had happened here, and he wasn't going to be able to use the words "suicide" and "insanity" with a videotape like this. He would have to find out at least the motives for this act, not to mention the origin of such a devilish ability to destroy himself without any hesitation.

***

— I never thought tonight would be like this," Natalie said, getting comfortable again on the couch in Morgan's guest room. — Did you see him do THIS? It was like it wasn't flesh and it wasn't his at all How is that even possible? How can you not feel anything to that degree?

Natalie was surprised by what she saw, but now she was also surprised by Morgan's high level of calm. It was as if he hadn't seen anything unusual today. As if he was called in late at night every day and shown corpses lying face down on the table covered in blood, and then found out that they had done it to themselves.

— I'm not surprised at anything on this station," Morgan said, and again, as he had half an hour ago, reached for the bar door where the bottles were hidden. — I've got some medicine here, too….

— I don't get you… Is this not the first time this has happened?

— No, not the first…

The last word started ringing in Natalie's ears, then traveled to her brain. Not the first? What do we have here, a suicide club that destroys itself for nothing, and we sit around and watch it?

Building ourselves reactors, mining what we need out of regolith while our society is sick in the head? Maybe we should get our heads straight before we let people into anything important. So the next person who works on the reactor will just push a few extra buttons, and what do we get?

— Not the first, Natalie," Morgan continued, seeing that Natalie had just stopped talking in surprise. — There were two others before him. All from the energy section. Not under my command, but I know about all the cases… They all cut themselves like that, and all on the left side only… You should know about it, because no one knows what it is… Maybe it's contagious, since more than one person has done it. And especially since it's so localized here. There's nothing like it in the rest of the station.

— Wow, what prizes are awarded for achievements… I thought there would be something good for this helium-3 discovery. And that's what it looked like… But this…" she didn't finish, figuring it was better to keep her mouth shut at a certain point. Morgan seemed to trust her with the secret, believing it would keep her safe, and she should start thinking to herself instead of saying it out loud, even in front of him. And yet, why is he so calm? He's not just holding himself together, he's exactly that, calm…

Morgan, pouring himself a glass again of whiskey and something else in there, nestled himself as before next to her:

— Natalie… I started by saying that everything around here is very strange. And our station in particular. The view out the window, which should be the Atlantic Ocean, is not. Elders who do their best to hide all information and only give out what they deem necessary. And for violations, they send them away and may never return them… And that's just the visible part. What we can't see is shown by these cases — people can kill themselves, as if they were not people at all… We just don't know anything about what is behind what. And even this version that we slept there for many years and then woke up, even that doesn't look real….

— Why doesn't this seem real to you? — She could feel herself starting to calm down, just from the fact that they were talking about something other than killing themselves.

— Dust. It's all about the dust.

— In the dust?

— Yes. Dust. How often do you see dust settling on your furniture, on things? How often do you have to wipe it off?

— Once every daylight hours, I guess… All in all, it works out to be an average of twice a month…..

— Yeah, I have the same thing Now imagine how much dust there must be if we've been

sleeping there for thousands or millions of years? A lot. Roughly speaking, there must be a lot of it…