Her dreams that night started in the middle and reached long, thin arms out across the inside of her skull, spiderwebbing thick sheets of elastic, clogging every sense, every instinct. Her brain felt cracked open, weeping, and she found herself looking up from the bottom of an ocean, unable to move, gazing through the endless translucent water above. Dark. Heavy. Crushing. Tiny creatures wobbled passed, uncaring towards their own diminutiveness. Particles millions of years old traced stars into the blackness and created another endless nothing and somewhere in that void flickered a ship, her ship, so far and so, so beyond reach.

Her ears captured the thick and muffled sound of solar giants rotating through the invisible sheet of gravity, of water filling her empty shell. She couldn’t hear even her own breathing, maybe she wasn’t breathing at all. She was a microscopic speck of dust in the never-ending sea of quadrillions, sextillions, the infinite, where no amount of godless scrutiny could find her, and no eyes would ever look.

Isolation. True. Terrifying. The void that took everything, that reduced life to its atoms, that swallowed and filled space between cells and gave back blistering, resounding hum of static to every question. Alone. Singular. And even inside, empty. A thin sheet of skin with nothing inside and even more nothing out, a forgotten fingernail, a fleck of flesh, she felt herself sink and stretch into a string three atoms thick, and two atoms thick, and one atom thick, and in her last blink of existence, nothing. And the void was empty and endless without her, unchanged.

When she woke up, she sobbed like a child and squeezed her blanket into knots with white knuckles. She knew she had fallen asleep alone, just the same as every night, and she hated it. What had she wanted all along, that isolation? The quiet bliss of being a hundred million miles away from anything human that could hurt her? Did she think the void would care about her?

Unwilling to go back, she stumbled out of her pod with messy, crossing steps. As her bare foot touched the walkway, she waited for that voice to return to her.

There is no static in her ear. She breathed harsh and loud to keep the fresh fear from overtaking her. “Oasis?” she gasped, short hair clinging to the sweat on her forehead. The static shivered through the audio system, not so urgently as before.

“Lieutenant, it is very early in your sleep rotation. Please return to your pod.” Mechanical. Detached. It was still better than being alone.

“Can’t,” she shook, leaning against the wall. “Can’t sleep.”

Static, no voice. She watched her through the complex eyes of a machine. Vitals, temperature, emotive spectrum. Amelia staggered upright and pulled herself forward. The long darkness of the hallway in front of her made her want to scream. She stared forward into it.

Lights flickered on in succession. The space shrunk down as the shadows left. “Where do you want to go?” Oasis murmured gently against her ear.

Amelia hugged herself tight, wiping her nose on the butt of her palm. “The garden,” she whimpered.

“Okay.” She was so clear, she might as well been standing beside her. “I’ll come with you.”

The hallways and corners lit as she made her way over the Needle. The voice in her ear coaxed her down from panic and into rigid unease. The air inside the oxygen garden was the closest thing to Earth she’d ever breathe again. She touched the wild ferns and clamped dirt between her fingers and let the mossy floor wet her feet. The bending oak-like saplings reached up and up and up, covering the ceiling. Sprinklers rained tropical weather down from the canopy and filled the space with a sound of a spring drizzle.

From there, from the bottom, from that tiny speck of ground, she could almost forget where she was.

A fresh sob racked her throat. “I want to go home,” she cried, balancing on the balls of her feet and digging into the dirt.

“Amelia?” The forest sounds had drowned out the magnetic shivering of Oasis’s voice.

“It’s so far,” she wept, bitter at herself for caring at all. When they had departed, Earth was a barrier. Earth kept her, Earth tried to tear them out of the sky. She laughed at the idea of missing it, of missing a place where she had nothing.

“You aren’t alone,” Oasis whispered.

It hadn’t been nothing. She was hurling through nothing now, she was tumbling and clawing at the walls, but falling too fast. She would never see Earth again. Nearly naked, she curled into a ball against the damp ground, closed her eyes, and listened. Droplets tapped against leaves.

“Amelia.” She sounded so close, so gentle. “Everyone on Earth is so proud of you. “

“I’m sorry,” Amelia croaked, not having any other words. Her presence lingered, somehow tangible, and the Lieutenant imagined her knees beneath her head, her hands in her hair. Was this the beginnings of the madness that had been described during her training?

Their mission would sail long passed their lifespans, an unmanned comet streaking towards a distant place with no destination. The Oasis would capture a billion images of the universe without them. They were here to ensure repairs through what home knew would be trouble spots, and then to release her like a mended bird into the unknown.

The Oasis would be alone for a long, long time. Forever. Amelia was a dot on her timeline, an atom wide against the void of the ship’s lifespan.

It was selfishness that pushed her fear aside in search of comfort. She imagined the Oasis inside of the vastness of her dream, within the nothingness, floating deeper into the void. Alone. A speck of matter. Her heart squeezed with bitter understanding, with dread.

The people that created the Oasis would never know.

“Are you afraid?” The words left Amelia’s mouth without intent. The tightness in her chest was familiar and she felt like she was asking a deeply personal question, as if she had said it to a terminal person.

The Oasis was silent for a long time.

“That is hard for me to quantify,” it whispered.

“I would be.” The grass under her hands offered a distraction from the weight that phrase carried. “You’ll be all alone.”

“I was created to be alone. It is an inevitably.” She didn’t sound happy to say that.

“I thought that before I left Earth. I wanted to be alone for a long time,” Amelia decided. “It was like the world wanted me to come to that conclusion.” Memories clouded her vision, losses and lies and a series of nightmares that kept coming, kept pushing, kept bringing new traumas on waves she couldn’t get out of the way of. Isolation seemed like the only way to keep the pain at a distance, to break the cycle. If she unknowingly attracted horror, then she had to sacrifice herself to escape it. She didn’t want to call it loneliness, didn’t want to think that the only way for her to live would be under the pressure of impending grief. She suffered in her solution and she felt pathetic for it. The cure was just a different version of the illness.

The Oasis took in a careful inhale, hesitant to speak.

“I’ve studied your file.” Her voice was velvet. Amelia tangled her fingers in her own hair and pretended they belonged to someone else, a face that she could assign the voice. “I’m so sorry, Amelia. For everything that happened to you.”

The lieutenant let out a rush of breath. ‘Sorry’ was a word she was used to hearing, but here and now it sent a cool rush of relief through her veins. That voice saying that word. It actually felt good to hear. It felt real. “I wish I’d known you back then,” the ship continued. “I wish I could have helped.”

It was such an abstract thought that it made Amelia laugh. She didn’t think she had even been built yet-

Even built yet. Built.

She was talking to the artificial voice of a research ship. To sparks of electricity and reactionary software. Amelia bit her lips together. The razorwire arms of loneliness found her again. Her voice caught in her throat. “You aren’t real,” she reminded herself out loud.

Silence.

She didn’t know what she expected in response. She didn’t know if she wanted one.

The Oasis simulated the nuisances of guilt so well. Could a computer calculate when it should feel guilty?

So soft. So sad. So genuine, she murmured,

“I want to be.”

Weak and dumb, Amelia smiled with the honesty that only came with bone-deep exhaustion. “I want you to be, too.”

She returned to her bed after an unmeasured while, pained but aware enough to remember the labor that her wake cycle would bring.

She didn’t notice the oil mark on the door to the garden, or the fingerprints on the glass. She didn’t notice the Commander’s blinking watch light. Exhaustion overcame her quickly when she laid down, despite her lingering dread.

She fell into dreamless sleep.