Observation

Lina opens her eyes.

Crowded walls meet her.

She finds herself in a compartment about two and a bit metres in each dimension. The sleep inertia of her prolonged torpor wears off quickly. Now entirely awake, she pulls herself out of her wall-mounted bunk and hangs in the space 'above' it for a moment. She blinks twice as her eyes adjust to the soft, but still cold, lighting.

Lina's eyes now search for the nearest handhold. Picking one out amongst the tightly packed myriad of storage lockers and bundled cables proves to be an easier task than she was expecting. Memory assists her somewhat, of course. She pushes off her abandoned bunk and glides over to the handhold, gripping it firmly.

Now she rotates so that the hatch of this compartment is directly above her head. She pushes off the handhold gently and silently glides toward the hatch. She reaches it, plants her feet on the opposite wall, and turns anticlockwise the wheel embedded in the hatch's centre. The resistance of the wheel tries to rotate her clockwise. Lina again wonders a thought that is now familiar to her, why put a manual lock in a weightless environment?

The hatch now open, Lina coasts into the adjacent compartment. It is a much larger space than her own cubby, which was barely large enough to house the bunk, plus enough personal space as not to seem crowded.

Hand/footholds dot the walls of the compartment. There are additional lockers built into the walls here, most larger than those in Lina's cubby. At the far end of the space, there are a pair of rugged-looking seats, served by wraparound displays. Lina's motor memory is returning. Still drifting toward the seats, she deftly catches the headrest of one in both hands, and in a manner she might share with a weightless ballerina, pulls herself down into it and engages the straps.

Lina sets her hands onto the cold, dark control interfaces. At her touch, they illuminate. A warm glow shines on Lina's face. The transparent, wraparound display behind the control interfaces also ignites in a flourish of colour. Information spontaneously organises into charts, tables and schematics before her eyes. Lina's left hand dances over a few controls.

Outside, on the hull of the tiny space station, a parabolic antenna blossoms, gently unfolding like a monochrome orchid, and pitches around to target Earth. It catches radio waves in its wake, already six and a half hours old by the time they get out this far, and channels them in to Lina.

Earth has been whispering while she slept.

Sounds now accompany the warm incandescence of the consoles. Overlapping voices, most human, some synthesised, are kindled before Lina. The trickle of voices feels therapeutic. The independent cadences and rhythms of each voice, in aggregate, form a soothing, organic pulse. The heartbeat of a distant Earth?

She picks out a few snippets in languages she understands:

...litigation over smart gels...diplomatic tensions rise with...

Her declarative memory is now completely intact. Lina Dalton, her brain says. Makemake observation outpost zero one, it follows up dutifully.

...a new leader for the new eastern bloc...

Lina's right hand now comes to life. Her fingers, navigating by touch and memory alone, find familiar controls and activate them. The walls above her console are peeling away. Five alloy shutters retract in synchrony, revealing a panorama of the outside universe to Lina. Printed diamond windows keep the air in. Lina is now sitting in a bubble, nothing but vacuum on three sides, with the body of the space station behind her.

...there are more things in heaven and...intellectual fortitude...east-west conflict...

Modest computer-driven graphics are overlaid on the perfectly transparent diamond windows. A few points of light - Alpha Centauri, Polaris, etcetera - are identified with unobtrusive labels. Earth is not identified. It is too small. At this distance, its angular diameter is smaller than what can be seen by the human eye.

...yankee zulu bravado...we small peop...

Lina receptively takes in the sounds of an invisible world. She can feel, almost viscerally, the steady heartbeat of Earth, expressed in the voices of its denizens. The concert of sounds pulses as one. Each individual voice melts smoothly into the others. Like a tranquil river, the voices flow into her. Lina feels the presence of a brilliant world, bathed in the light of intelligence, pulsing with the activity of billions, yet still acting as in singular.

...even more accurate than...actuarial escape vel...

Her heart almost beating in sync with Earth's.

...d signals over...the paragon of anima –

And then, in the space of an instant, the voices cease.

Echoes live for a moment longer before being struck mute themselves. A deep silence falls upon the compartment - total and absolute, yet far louder then the sounds had been. Lina jerks back to full awareness. The voices still ring in her mind, but are fading fast.

Lina examines the displays. No failures. What had happened?

Over the next few minutes, Lina uses every tool available to try and track down a malfunction. Every time she fails to find one, an uneasy eventuality grows in her consciousness. Nothing wrong with the antenna. Speakers perfect. Nothing in the line of sight. Earth had just stopped talking.

Finally, Lina works up the courage to test her final hypothesis. Her hands move deliberately over the controls, and come away almost shaking. She examines the records of her radiation counters, which, as part of the antenna assembly, had been trained on Earth. At the precise moment the voices choked and died, an unmistakable spike in gamma radiation was clearly evident. The presence of the spike confirms the horrid, unthinkable thought that has been looming since the Earth's heart stopped beating. It’s as if that same spike has been shot through her chest, for all the subtlety.

So it was nuclear weapons.

It was all just talk and politics; the what-if scenarios of the high-minded. No one had given any credence to the possibility that it might actually happen.

Light of any description - including radio waves and gamma radiation - takes six and a half hours to get out this far. Six and a half hours ago, the Earth died. Did they kill each other, or were they all murdered by one sadistic party? How complete was the destruction? Severe enough to plunge the planet into radio silence. What about EMP? Part of her doesn't care. Part is empty, stunned. The rest just wants to throw up.

What the fuck do we do now?