Three Years Alone Is a Maintenance Problem, Not a Loneliness One
After my second winter on the harvester line, I stopped counting days and started counting the parts I could still fix without a manual. That number is the only one that matters up here.
The contract said three years and a return seat. What it did not say was that the hardest thing about a one-person station is not the silence — it is the quiet, steady accumulation of small failures you have no one to hand off to. A loose conveyor roller on Harvester Three becomes your whole afternoon. You learn the building the way you learn a body that is getting older with you.
The Logic of Bounced Light
I spent a week last rotation just moving the work lamps. The original crew set them to throw straight down onto the panels, which read as efficient on paper and felt like an interrogation in practice. Tilting them into the white ceiling panels gave back an even, shadowless wash — the kind of light that does not argue with you at 0400. It is a small thing. Up here small things are the only things.
You do not befriend the station. You reach an arrangement with it, panel by panel, and you keep your end.
The assistant unit handles scheduling and prints my reminders on its little display. People back home assume that must be the company I keep. It is not. The company I keep is the harvester hum, the amber strip by the airlock that has not blinked out in 400 cycles, and the orange ladder I climb every morning because the lift servo was never worth the requisition.