The yellow bar appeared in the corner of my wall-screen three days before midnight. Just a thin line at first, easy to ignore while I was trimming the hydroponic lettuce in Unit 47-C, my fingers slick with nutrient solution, the chemical tang of it sharp under my nails. But by evening it had numbers: red digits counting oxygen differentials, water usage, the small accumulations that separated our cluster from the ones above and below us in the corridor. The numbers pulsed with each refresh, and I found myself timing my breathing to match their rhythm.
Kael made a joke about it at dinner. “Looks like we’re in the green this year,” he said, spooning reconstituted protein into his mouth. The stuff had the texture of wet cardboard, the faint aftertaste of whatever preservative kept it stable in zero-G storage. “All those cold showers paid off.”
I smiled, though my jaw felt tight. We’d been careful. I’d been especially careful, ever since Kael’s biometric went on the cluster contract eighteen months ago when his predecessor transferred to a mining rig. He was good about the numbers. Better than the last Head had been. He checked the dashboard every morning before his eyes were fully open, adjusted our quotas when the advertisements started playing their loop about oxygen upgrades and nutrient subscriptions. The thin air in the corridor didn’t bother him the way it bothered me—that faint dizziness when I walked too fast, the pressure behind my eyes that never quite went away.
“You working tomorrow?” I asked. My voice sounded normal. I was proud of that.
“Code maintenance. Full shift.” He pushed his tray aside. The plastic made a hollow scraping sound against the table. “You?”
“School modules in the morning. Observation blister after.”
He nodded. We didn’t talk about the Review. Nobody did, not really. It was like the rotation period or the sound of the pumps through the walls at night—the low, rhythmic thrum that you felt in your teeth before you heard it, that vibrated through the floor plating into the soles of your feet. When I was younger, I’d asked my mother why we had to do it. She’d looked at me with this strange, patient expression, her hand cool against my forehead, and said, “Because we’re still here.” As if that explained everything. As if survival justified anything that kept the numbers balanced.
The countdown bar turned amber the next morning. I watched it while brushing my teeth, the numbers recalculating in real time as clusters across the arc used their morning water allotment. The toothbrush vibrated against my molars, the mint paste foaming bitter at the back of my throat. We were still below average. Comfortable. I told myself that made a difference, though I’d never actually seen the selection algorithm. Nobody had, except maybe the Administrator. The screen’s glow reflected in the mirror, turning my face the color of old bruises.
At the observation blister, I helped a group of children identify constellations through the small, scratched viewport. They pressed their faces against the glass, leaving smudges, pointing at Earth rotating below us. One of them asked if I’d ever been down there. I said no. The words felt thin in my mouth, inadequate. My parents came up in the second wave, back when the corporate promises still sounded like opportunity instead of indenture, when the recruiting vids showed spacious modules and talked about frontier living. They talked about the Review the way people down there probably talked about taxes or jury duty—unfortunate but necessary, the price of living in a closed community where air and water had to be earned and accounted for, where every breath you took showed up eventually on someone’s spreadsheet.
Kael was already home when I got back. He’d pulled up the full cluster registry on his screen, studying it with the same focused attention he gave to debugging code. The blue light washed his face pale, made the hollows under his eyes look deeper. I could see our names listed there: his at the top with the primary account holder icon, mine below it with the dependent tag. Four units, four families, sixteen people total in our debt group. Sixteen names. Fifteen after tomorrow.
“Just checking,” he said when he noticed me watching. His voice had that careful neutrality I recognized from when he was trying not to worry me.
“We’re fine,” I said. “We’ve always been fine.” But my hands felt cold, and I shoved them into my pockets where he couldn’t see them trembling.
He nodded, but he didn’t turn off the screen. The glow painted his profile in geometric shadows.
The corridor felt different the day of the Review. Quieter. People moved more carefully, kept their doors sealed, spoke in lower voices that didn’t carry past the ducting. The advertisements stopped playing their usual loop. Instead, a blue corporate logo pulsed silently in the corners of every screen, waiting. The silence had weight to it, a pressure that built in my ears like descent in an atmospheric shuttle.
At midnight UTC, the chime sounded through the ducts. Long, hollow, sustained. A note that resonated in my sternum, that I felt as much as heard. The corridor lights dimmed to amber. I was lying in bed, not sleeping, staring at the ceiling panel where a water stain had spread over years into the shape of something that might have been a continent. When Kael’s wristband buzzed, the vibration was so soft I shouldn’t have heard it across the room. But I did. Time-stamped. Official. I didn’t need to see it to know what it said.
“You should sleep,” he said quietly. His weight shifted on the mattress, making it creak.
“I’ll wait.”
“Could be an hour. Could be three.”
But I stayed awake, listening to him dress—the whisper of fabric, the soft magnetic click of his boots sealing. Listening to his footsteps fade down the corridor toward the ladder-shafts, the sound swallowed by distance and ducting. I imagined him climbing inward, hand over hand in the reduced gravity, past sealed hatches where other people were not sleeping, past other Heads making the same journey. I’d never seen the Hub. Dependents weren’t summoned. We stayed in our units while the selection happened, while the numbers recalculated, while the carbon tags floated in their transparent sphere under artificial gravity.
I must have dozed because I woke to the sound of the door panel opening. The hiss of equalizing pressure. Kael stood in the threshold, backlit by the amber corridor light. His face looked strange. Not frightened exactly. More like he’d done a calculation and couldn’t believe the result. His mouth moved but no sound came out at first.
“It’s you,” he finally said.
The words didn’t make sense at first. They hung in the air between us, nonsensical. I sat up, my heart doing something complicated and arrhythmic in my chest, looking for context, looking for the rest of the sentence that would reframe those two syllables into something reasonable.
“The tag,” he said. “Your resident code. It came up.” His voice was very steady. Too steady. The kind of steady that meant he was forcing it.
I remember thinking: but we were careful. We were below average. We did everything right. My mouth had gone dry, my tongue thick against my teeth.
“They’re already on their way,” Kael said. “The technicians. I came ahead to—” He stopped. To what? To say goodbye? To explain how the retrieval arm had plucked my number from the sphere, how my code had flashed on the panel, how the cluster’s life-support quota had recalculated immediately, assuming one less body, one less mouth requiring air?
I stood. My legs worked. That surprised me. I’d expected them not to. The floor was cold through my socks, the chill radiating up through my ankles.
“There has to be something,” I said. “Someone we can talk to. The Administrator. We could—” My voice sounded thin, desperate. I hated the sound of it.
“I already asked.”
“What did they say?”
“That it’s done. That the quota’s already adjusted.” His voice was very calm, very factual. The same voice he used when explaining why a piece of code wouldn’t compile, why a variable couldn’t be changed once initialized. “That it’s better this way. Clean. Fair.”
Fair. The word sat in my mouth like metal. Like blood. I could taste it.
I wanted to ask him what he’d thought when he saw my number. If he’d tried to argue. If he’d even wanted to. But looking at his face—the way his jaw was set, the way his eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine—I realized he probably had. For about thirty seconds, maybe less, before the logic caught up with him. Before he remembered that every cluster sends someone to the Hub, that every Head spins the sphere, that the Review has been running since A-17’s first Administrator instituted it after the near-catastrophic overload forty years ago. Before he remembered that the arc is still here, still spinning, still breathing. That we’re all still here because of what happens in that room.
The knock came before I could ask. Two short raps, professional. Two technicians in blue maintenance harnesses, carrying nothing. They nodded to Kael with professional courtesy, the way you’d greet a colleague. One of them checked a handheld screen, the pale glow reflecting in his eyes, confirmed my resident code, asked me to confirm my biometric. I pressed my thumb to their reader. The scanner was warm against my skin. It beeped green. A sound I’d heard a thousand times—door access, equipment checkout, meal dispensary. Ordinary. Routine.
“We’ll need you to come with us now,” the first technician said. His voice was kind. Almost apologetic. As if he were asking me to step outside for a minor equipment check. As if this were something that happened every day. Which, I suppose, it did. Just not to me.
“Can I—” I looked around the unit. At the bed, the sheets still warm where I’d been lying. At the small desk where I’d prepared lesson plans for the children, where my handwriting was still visible on the edge of a notepad. At Kael standing very still by the door, his hands hanging at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them.
“It’s better if we go now,” the technician said. “Easier.” His hand hovered near my elbow, not quite touching. Not yet.
I walked into the corridor barefoot. I don’t remember deciding to. The floor was cold. Colder than I’d expected. The texture of the grating pressed into the soles of my feet, each ridge distinct. The amber light made everything look slightly unreal, like a scene from someone else’s life. Behind me, I heard our door seal with its familiar wheeze of equalizing pressure. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see if Kael was watching.
We walked past Unit 47-B, where Chen and his partner were probably asleep, or pretending to be. Past 47-A, where the elderly couple never turned off their wall-screen, where I could see the faint blue glow seeping under their door. The corridor was empty. Everyone knew to stay inside during collection. To let the technicians work. To trust that the Review, however harsh, however arbitrary it seemed, was keeping all of them alive. My breathing was too loud in my ears. I tried to quiet it, tried to match the technicians’ measured pace.
At the end of the corridor was a hatch I’d seen a thousand times but never opened. Never thought about opening. One of the technicians pressed his palm to the panel. It slid open with a hiss that I felt in my chest. Beyond it, a narrow passage led somewhere I couldn’t see. The air that leaked out was different—colder, drier. It smelled like ozone and recycled metal.
“Just through here,” he said.
I stepped forward. Heard the hatch seal behind me with a sound like a breath being cut off. Heard the pressure change, my ears popping, the air growing thinner. Each breath required more effort, as if the corridor itself was learning to do without me. Ahead, a second door. And beyond that, a third. Each one narrowing the space, each one bringing me closer to whatever happened in the final room, the one nobody talked about, the one that erased a resident code and credited the recycled mass to the arc’s maintenance account.
I thought about the children at the observation blister. How they’d ask where I went. How someone would explain that I’d transferred, or had a family emergency, or decided to take a contract on a different segment. How within a week, someone else would be teaching them constellations, pressing their small hands against the viewport, pointing at Earth turning below. How the lettuce in the hydroponics would keep growing, trimmed by different hands, the nutrient solution slick under someone else’s fingernails. How Kael would update the cluster registry, removing my dependent tag with a few keystrokes, his face illuminated by the same blue glow.
How life on A-17 would continue exactly as it always had.
The technician ahead of me stopped at the final door. He looked back once, met my eyes. There was something in his expression—not quite pity, not quite regret. Just a kind of tired recognition. He’d done this before. He’d do it again next year. And the year after that. His hand was steady on the control panel.
“For what it’s worth,” he said quietly, “we all think it’s horrible.”
Then he opened the door.
The room beyond was smaller than I’d imagined. Brighter. The walls were white, clinical. In the center, a chamber with a single transparent wall. Beyond it, the black. The actual black of space, not a screen, not a simulation. I could see stars.
They were very steady. They didn’t flicker the way they did in the vids. They just burned.
The technician’s hand on my elbow was gentle. Guiding. I could have pulled away. Could have run. But the corridor behind me was sealed, and there was nowhere to run to. My feet moved forward. One step. Another. The floor was smooth here, almost warm. Climate-controlled right up to the end.
“It’s fast,” the other technician said. “You won’t feel anything after the first few seconds.”
I wanted to ask how he knew. If he’d ever asked the previous subjects. If anyone had ever survived long enough to report back. But my throat had closed. I couldn’t speak.
They sealed me in with the same professional courtesy they’d shown throughout. The door’s magnetic locks engaged with a series of soft clicks I felt through my feet. Through the transparent wall, I could see them at the control panel. Their lips moved. They might have been counting. They might have been praying.
The outer door began to open.
I’d always thought the vacuum would pull me out violently. Tear the air from my lungs. But it wasn’t like that. It was quiet. Gentle, almost. The pressure dropped and my ears popped and there was a moment—just a moment—where I could still think clearly.
I thought: this is what fair looks like. This is what balance costs.
I thought: someone will trim the lettuce tomorrow.
I thought: Kael will forget the sound of my breathing at night.
And then I couldn’t think anymore because there was no air to think with, and my vision was going dark at the edges, and the stars were still there, burning, indifferent, beautiful—
Three hours later, the corridor lights brightened to their normal setting. The hum of the air recyclers returned to its usual pitch, that familiar vibration through the floor plating. The wall-screens resumed their advertisements: oxygen upgrades, nutrient subscriptions, a new entertainment package that promised eight hours of Earth footage for just fifteen minutes of extra work per week.
In Unit 47-C, Kael sat at the desk, staring at the updated cluster registry on his screen. Fifteen names now. The light from the display made his face look hollow. Exhausted. The debt column showed a small positive adjustment. Not enough to matter. Barely enough to notice. He touched the screen where her name had been, his finger leaving a smudge.
He closed the screen. Stood. His knees popped. Made himself a protein shake from the dispenser—the same breakfast he’d made yesterday, the same he’d make tomorrow. It tasted like wet cardboard. He swallowed it anyway.
Outside his window, which wasn’t really a window but a panel showing a feed from an external camera, the Earth turned below in its endless rotation. Beautiful. Indifferent. Exactly ninety-three minutes from horizon to horizon.
He finished his shake. Checked the time. Started getting ready for his shift. His hands moved through the routine automatically—boots, harness, ID badge. In the mirror, his face looked older. He didn’t look at it long.
The Review was over. Balance restored. Everything functioning as intended.
And in six days, when someone from Corporate sent the automated query about why Unit 47-C showed reduced occupancy, he’d reply with the standard form: critical systems recalibration, non-voluntary adjustment, capacity compliance maintained. He’d practiced the words already. They came easily now.
They’d log it. File it. Mark the segment as stable.
And A-17 would keep spinning through the black, its air and water carefully metered, its numbers carefully balanced, its annual ritual locked into the maintenance charter like a scheduled filter replacement. Fair. Clean. Necessary.
The way it had always been.
The way it would always be.
Until next year, when someone else’s code would flash on the panel, and someone else’s partner would walk home through amber light with a calculation they couldn’t believe, and someone else would learn what balance costs.
The stars would still be burning.
The corridor would still be cold.
And the arc would still be here.
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