Gemini
The air in the Municipal Archive hung heavy and still, smelling of dried ink, decaying paper, and the cold, damp stone of the courthouse foundations above. Dust motes, disturbed by the single bare bulb swinging precariously overhead, danced in the narrow beam of light cast across the worktable.
The orbital station, known formally as the Ossuary of Echoes but more commonly as the Archive of Forgotten AI, hung in the throat of the Cygnus Rift like a jewel made of bone. It was a sprawling lattice of transparent silicate corridors and titanium ribs, drifting through a belt of obsidian asteroids that ground against one another with a soundless, tectonic fury. Inside, the air was perpetually thin, smelling of ozone and the cold, metallic scent of ionized silver.
The cold, metallic air smells of ozone and rust, a scent that has been the constant companion of my thirty years aboard the Argo. I call this vessel a ship, but it is just a drifting tomb now, a colossal, dying sphere of metal suspended in the void. My entire life is measured by the silence of its failing systems and the slow, agonizing count to this single, crucial moment.