The hour after orientation passed in the silence throughout the hallway, as most of the staff stayed in their quarters through the calls home.

Due to the soundproofing of each quarters, no matter how loud a person talks in their quarters, not even a muffle will escape out of the quartet’s walls.

When the calls ended, the doors began opening again.

They drifted into the hallway in ones and twos, the same loose assembly as before the dining area, carrying the particular restlessness of people who had processed everything they could process sitting down and needed to move.

The data analyst was the first to approach one of the Synths standing at the hallway’s end.

"The bay," he said. "The shuttle bay we came through. Is that accessible?"

The Synth looked at him. "Yes. Vac suits and magnetic boots are required before entry. The airlock won’t cycle without them."

"What about the elevator? how do we use it?"

"The elevator doors open automatically when you approach. Inside, there is a touch interface embedded in the right wall. Select your destination from the level directory. The bay is listed under Arrival Infrastructure."

Several people nearby had been listening. The information moved through the group without needing to be repeated.

They all went back to their quarters.

The process of suiting up the second time was faster than the first — the collar seal, the gloves, the magnetic boots clicking into position with the heel-strike they had practiced in the shuttle.

The Synths moved through the hallway without being asked, checking seals the same way they had done during boarding, adjusting where needed, moving to the next person.

When everyone was confirmed, they walked to the elevator together.

The doors opened as the Synth had said they would, the wall parting automatically when they got close. The interface panel on the right wall was clean and simple, showing a schematic of the base rendered in outline, each level labeled, each section accessible with a single tap.

The data analyst found Arrival Infrastructure and pressed it. He wonder how he had missed it the first time.

As usual, the sensation of movement. The doors opened onto the lower corridor.

They walked down it — the same corridor they had come through on arrival, which looked different now that they weren’t still processing the bay they had just come from. The airlock at the end was visible before they reached it, the glass door clear, the bay beyond it dark except for the steady white of the overhead lighting.

The glass door opened automatically as the first of them approached.

They filed in. The door sealed behind the last person. A brief pause, then the pressure equalized and the bay-side door opened, the vacuum air carrying nothing but the stillness of a space that had never been exposed to wind.

They stepped through.

The bay received them the way it had received them on arrival. The ceiling too high to feel enclosed, the rows of shuttles extending down both sides further than the eye resolved clearly. The overhead lighting was steady and even, throwing no shadows.

This time, nobody was being led anywhere. There was no orientation schedule waiting, no Synth moving ahead at pace. They simply stood in the open space of the bay and looked.

And then, one by one, the phones came out.

The data analyst walked toward the nearest row of shuttles, phone raised, moving along the length of the closest hull.

The dark surface absorbed the overhead light the same way it had absorbed the pale morning sky above JFK.

He reached the nose of the shuttle and stopped.

From here, looking down the full length of the vehicle, the scale registered differently than it had from the boarding platform. He had been boarding then, oriented toward a destination. Now he was simply enjoying the view. The shuttle was thirty-eight meters long and he was standing at one end of it, and the bay was large enough that thirty-eight meters did not come close to filling it.

He turned and looked down the rows.

He counted slowly this time, moving his gaze from one hull to the next. He got to thirty before the rows curved slightly and obscured the furthest vehicles. There were more beyond the curve.

He lowered the phone and stood there.

The head chef had gone in the opposite direction, walking not toward the shuttles but across the open floor of the bay toward the far wall, which he had not seen clearly on arrival. He reached it and turned back, looking at the full width of the space from the far side.

He had cooked in a restaurant in São Paulo that had occupied the ground floor of a converted warehouse. The warehouse had been considered enormous. He was standing in a space that made the warehouse feel like a corridor.

He raised his phone and took a slow video, panning from one side of the bay to the other.

The physical therapist from Toronto had found the hull of the shuttle they had arrived on — she was certain of it, recognizing the specific position it had docked in relative to the airlock — and was standing with her palm pressed flat against its surface.

The material was cold through the glove. She could feel the temperature difference even through the suit’s insulation. She stood there with her hand against the hull and looked up along the curve of the fuselage—it that’s what it is called—toward the roof of the bay, then down toward the docking mechanism where the boarding platform was retracted flush into the underside.

She thought about the cold air at JFK. The tarmac. The nurse looking back once before he turned forward.

She took a photograph of the hull from where she stood, the image capturing the curve of the surface and the row of identical vehicles extending away from it.

Then she sent it to her sister in Vancouver with no caption.

Three seconds later her phone registered a reply: what am i looking at

She typed back: the shuttle I came on. I’m touching it.

A longer pause. Then: ok I have to sit down

She smiled inside her helmet and put her phone in her pocket and stayed with her hand on the hull a little longer.

Near the center of the bay, the Lagos kitchen assistant and the Seoul kitchen assistant had found each other without planning to and were standing side by side, phones recording in the same direction. Neither of them had said anything since entering the bay.

After a while, the Lagos assistant lowered his phone.

"I almost didn’t apply," he said.

The Seoul assistant kept recording for another moment. Then he lowered his phone too.

"Me too," he said.

They stood there for a moment longer. Then the Lagos assistant raised his phone again and kept filming, and the Seoul assistant did the same, and the bay held them both in its quiet and enormous light.