I’m tired.
Another three hours until the ferry finishes charging, but Dr. Federman doesn’t want to leave without going to the Oasis, so that’s where we’re heading. It’s okay to have a slight delay. Bosses shouldn’t get too mad.
The distress signal still hasn’t repeated. We should hurry to find it, I know, but it feels so far away, so unreal, that urgency is hard to come by. If its sender has survived this long, months after everyone else has died, they can survive a little longer, right?
I know I’m just trying to convince myself. It’s unprofessional of me, I know. I know. But just once, just for a moment, I want to rest. I want to just sit without worry, without the fear of being found by something, without trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in my head. I want to stop thinking about aliens, about fungus, about pheromone storms and death. I want to stop thinking about POGE.
So we’re going.
The lights are still on. They’re not the yellow facility lights, painting everything the wrong color. These are sun lights, a pretty blue that reminds me of Earth’s dawn, and everything beneath them looks as it really is.
I wish I could keep any pictures I take, to remind me, if I make it home again, of what the Oasis looks like, but anything I put on the tablet will be taken from me when we return, added to the already countless files about POGE in our bosses’ archives. I hope I can describe it well enough to remember it by.
On three sides are mountains, their steeper edges facing us. There’s a thin, treacherous trail leading down the middle one that we arrived on, but it’s been walked so many times over the years that despite the steep drop on one side and the thinness of the ledge available to traverse, it’s fairly even and sturdy, with lights along the cliff walls above it to guide one’s way without needing to keep a hand free for a flashlight. Dr. Federman had a bit of trouble making it down in crutches, but not too much. The mountains are enormous from the pictures I’ve seen, over twice as large as those I used to camp in as a child, but the lights don’t even highlight a thirtieth of their size, and so I can only imagine what they look like in person.
The fourth side is the ocean, and this I can see. Stretching to infinity, the peace at its sight reminds me of my time at Facility D, the thoughtless trance I found myself in as all I could think of was the waves lapping at my boots. The beach is in a rough semicircle around this small port, mostly larger pebbles and rocks instead of fine sand, and petrified vegetation springs up through the gaps between the stones all around.
Washed up on the beach are long-dead, wilted sea plants that remind me of seaweed. I know I’m imagining their resemblance to living creatures — the plants of POGE already are more similar to animals than the plants back home. When reading journal entries of the Oasis by crew members, they’d come to the same conclusion, similar but not the same. No animal life.
Describing the place out loud like this makes me realize just how plain it actually is here. And it is plain. But at the same time, it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. Dr. Federman is nodding at this. After being here for so long, after all the bodies and the animals, after all that POGE has offered us and in the thought of what it still will — this is the most gorgeous place in all the universe.
Dr. Federman is pocketing a few of the smaller, more colorful pebbles. Most of this beach is gray and black, but there are some stripes of green, blue, red, and other colors on the stones around us. Says he’s going to make them into new bracelets for us, to replace the ones he’s already broken from stress.
We’ll have a piece of POGE to bring back home with us.
I tried to ask him again, why he’s here. He dodges the question every time. Sometimes, especially in the early days of our stay here, he just ignores me. I know now that that’s not a sign of rudeness from him. He just has a hard time with conversation. Now, later on, and, dare I say it, now that we’ve grown a bit closer, he does answer most of the time, but I know it’s not the truth. Not the full truth, at least. He tells me he’s here for discovery, for helping families find closure, for making POGE safe for humanity’s second chance.
That’s part of the reason. That’s part of my reason for being here, as well. But mostly, I’m here for my family. He’s here for someone as well, or multiple someones. That was the push our bosses gave for a mission that’s just shy of suicidal — that we’d be helping humanity, and, most importantly, that we’d be taking care of the people we left behind if we took this job.
He won’t tell me who those people are for him. I won’t push it. I want to know, but I won’t push it. If he wants his privacy, he more than deserves it.
As for me, I feel like I’ve come to trust him, and I share more than I should when I trust someone. He already basically knows my life story by now [laughs]. At least, the big events. Nothing deep. Not yet. He told me at the Oasis that he finds my chattering amusing. Not in a making fun of me kind of way, but in an enjoyable way. At first, I was just as closed off to him as he was to me, and now I’m sharing anything I can at the chance to make conversation with him.
I figure, if we can’t talk to each other, if we can’t trust each other after all this time, we’re never going to make it through this. I don’t mind being the first to extend that olive branch.
Stargazing
Dr. Eve Strauss, Research Facility F on Telle Island, assisted by Dr. Isaac Federman. Walls are intact and the life support system is running at optimal capacity. Food storage is clean, air supply is contaminated. Most of the research team was found in the med bay, with about a fourth of the team in their respective bedrooms and three people manning the control station. No areas show signs of struggle.
Examination review of Ada Meyers, ID number 424, details in file. Full autopsy report in temporary file, pending transfer when communication channels open again. They were found clothed in the control room, slumped over in their chair with their upper body and head resting on the life support control panel. A cervical lymph node on the left side of their neck is swollen.
Testing showed a virus in the body similar to influenza, but much more deadly, ravaging the system faster and to a harsher degree than the flu would. The team members had a similar idea as to the nature of the virus, as they say in their journals, and they used all the medicine for such an illness that they were supposed to during the times of the sickness. Despite the existence of those drugs in the system of the deceased, it seems they were not as effective as they needed to be. The virus is long-lived and systems show it is still in the air of the facility. All team members are deceased.
Telle Island was a haven for life. Like the Galapagos, the sheer number and diversity of the species of plants, land animals, and marine life found here are incredible and so different from anything on the rest of POGE. Still, only skeletons remain of the sentient life, but even those number far more than the ones excavated around Facility B. If there was any place on POGE where something still lived, I would have expected it to be here.
So far, we haven’t found anything.
Right now, for the first time in a long time, I feel calm. The boat ride was completely uneventful, and we’ve found nothing other than what’s expected. Human error before, and now, here, a sickness. Still bad, of course, but anything other than statues or weird, malicious aliens is amazing for me. I’m still riding on the high of the Oasis, honestly.
[laughs] I didn’t mean any play on words.
The people here may have been killed by a terrible virus, but from what they’ve logged, they were happy during it. Not happy to die, of course, but happy in the way that smoking pot makes you happy. Happy and calm.