His steps woke Marianna up. She had been falling back into a slumber. In the night she woke up about four times. Apparently everyone did. They just woke up for short enough, that they didn't remember it. People slept in cycles.

She was about to fall right back asleep but then...

They could smell the oil while trailing them. The assistant grew nervous. Once they caught up with the blue man. Would it be as easy as they had planned? They'd been on the road all week. It seemed to soon for it all to end. But there wasn't much to...

Look if you want to leave, you can't. I mean you technically could. But do you really want to go back to earth?

Keith could read the words from the nerdy skinny guy's face. What time was it now? Four am? What the hell were they still doing up? He looked...

Jazz didn't know what the hell she was doing at that bar. She should've stayed at home. She didn't even drink. But after her husband died she had felt so  lonely . So she had gone to the only place there was to go in town. Mack's. But now the...

When he couldn't sleep he went to the den. That's where the insomniacs hung out. Always a few  chess players. Few lively but soft spoken conversations. Even some crazy people drinking coffee . Maybe as some display of their eccentricity.

Each person hanging out in the den too long knew they...

There was a local bar still in town. That was one good thing about this middle of nowhere place. Without it what else would the people there have? Just depression and booze . But alone. At least at the local bar they could drink together. Not that it made their...

The car was now burning a quart of oil every 500 miles. A normal person would get that fixed as soon as they could afford to. They weren't planning on driving it back. So let it burn, let it god damn burn, the man in the expensive suit said while...

There was a smoking section in the ship. It was a chamber with a special air filtration unit. Keith wondered why they didn't have such air filtration in the rest of the station. He was told it wasn't needed. Apparently they had  engineers and  scientists who made sure everything was...

She had to imagine the soap. And the hot water. And the dish becoming progressively clean. The previously crusted ceramic surface turning a smooth white. It reminded of the few times she did  dishes in college. The lighting was good in that memory. The sun coming in through the kitchen...

The  smell was why used the machine. That and the hum of the machine as it poured the stream of the black extract.

The machine cost half the salary of an entry level watcher. When Keith first arrived this appalled him. Many coworkers quipped about it still. Now Keith understood...