A/n- my first attempt at true Science Fiction. I think it turned out alright

Summary: When it's just you in the vastness of space, no one can hear you're distress call.

Tempered Glass

The ring around the back of my head slid neatly into place, its small rubber hooks arching over the tops of my ears to fit snugly against the canal. With barely my finger grazing the sleek white plastic, the ring turned on and a stream of electronica blasted into me. Barely a thought of thirst was picked up by the ring and my coffee I had magnetized onto the desk was whisked into the air and fit instantly against my palm. Sipping at it, I eventually let it float back into space as the Damphire recognized my intentions and guided the cup back to the desk. With another impulse of my brain, the windows to the Station were rolled back on their electronic sliders.

Beyond my desk, my computer monitors, lay the vast expanse of space; a black and endlessness I had only dreamt of a few years ago as a child, firmly rooted upon the green-grassed land far, far behind me. It was early morning, and the lights within Station XE remained off. It was a comforting ritual to let the natural, pure light filter in to the main observatory. It would be weeks before a new team arrived, and I loved that personal silence.

My shoulders twitching with enthusiasm at the music pumping around me, I kicked out my feet against the floor. The chair I was clicked in to slid back on its magnetized casters upon the steel floor; it was so much more efficient than simply floating around.

Before I reached the lockers stacked against the opposite wall, the Damphire remotely entered my combination and the locker door swung open, the folder and papers I needed floating down towards me.

That was the beauty of the Damphire; the small, finger-thin apparatus sitting against the back of my skull. It read and regulated your body, keeping your core at a perfect temperature, realizing all your thoughts and emotions remotely in huge computer banks in God-knows where. It was nearly a standard to own one; I mean, it contained your phone, your music; it was your life.

Ever since I was sent out here I had one of the new prototypes. It was smaller than those previous, more in tune with you in zero gravity, a point of particular struggle for the Damphire creators. It was easy enough for the Damphire to materialize your homework or for your front door to open as you drove down the street, but add the problem of space and weightlessness… although the version I was using was already being marketed to the public, I was particularly smug surrounding the fact that I was one of the first testers of the product.

Sighing, I flopped the folders down on the desk. Immediately, the microscopic holes in the table sucked the thin papers to the metal, eliminating the problem of them simply floating off.

I tapped upon the keyboard in front of me. The music in my speakers automatically dimmed as the computer bank booted up.

“Ezra, good morning.”

“Morning Amy,“ I smiled at the computer as she switched on her other monitors, powering up the station and finally switching on all the lights.

“How was your night, Ezra? The Damphire is telling me you had a slight disturbance at 0300. Were you dreaming again?”

“I’m fine Amy, thank you. Is there any mail?” There was a slight whirring noise from somewhere as she uploaded the information to me. As if a figment of my imagination, a nearly transparent screen materialized in front of my vision, a perfect image of my Mail Box. Simultaneously using my right hand to scroll through the junk in my Inbox mid-air, my left hand ran furiously over the key board as I brought up my charts on Amy’s monitors.

“Has there been any change?” I asked tentatively, hoping against hope that this time there had done something. Glancing over to the ceiling-high column of steel on the right side of the room, I felt a note of despair.

Amy’s voice was soft, comforting, “No, sorry Ezra. No change. Tell me, were you thinking of Alicia last night? The Damphire is computing that there were several daydreams-“

“Amy,” I said warningly. I did not particularly want to speak about Alicia. The last time I had seen her she had given the ring back and we had parted on bad terms. I twirled the gold band around my ring finger. Even after she had said no, I had kept mine.

“Sorry Ezra.”

“No problem, can we begin now?”

“Right away!”

The tall column in the corner of the room hummed and sang as the metal spiraled away into the floor, revealing what was- in my mind- a life-size test-tube riveted into the floor. The Damphire powered on the spotlight as I rolled over, my fingers hovering over the hovering notebook and its stylus.

There, suspended in a pale green liquid, was the body of the only other fleshy creature in the whole station. Amy’s monitors turned as she craned her pixels to glimpse the specimen.

“No change,” I sighed, making notes in my book with the stylus; each touch emanating a pleasant, watery sound. “Damn it.”

Behind her tempered glass, the body of a beautiful woman floated serenely, her hands splayed wide against her naked hips , her ankles tied together with cords that rooted her to the bottom of the tank. The illumination of the spotlight cast a green tinge of light on her black hair, thin face, white skin, breasts, chest, thighs, and every other inch of her perfect body.

She was nameless.

I thought that funny, for it seemed as if we can name every non-living electronic piece of crap we can come up with and yet, the most perfect embodiment of nature remains nameless.

Ashamed and contemplative, I tore my eyes away.

“Something wrong, Ezra?” The Damphire must have told Amy what I was feeling.

“No,” I lied.

We first found her, the nameless beauty, when we had first explored the region the Station and I am currently occupying. She was floating in a simple Ejection capsule, as if she had escaped a ship or some other Station. However, when Base had explored the records, no ship or Station was ever found. Ever since then I had been given the task, along with a rotating team of scientists, to study and to probe into where the woman had come from.

The problem was that, although her vital signs were strong and vibrant, she never woke.

It had been nearly a year.

“Ezra, there is a problem.”

Alarmed, I rolled back to the compute bank. “Amy? What? What is it?”

A number of documents popped up on the screen; the woman’s heart rate. It was through the roof, as if she was running a marathon.

“Oh shit.” Frantically, I put my computer wizardry to the test, copy codes and re-writing script as I tried to week out any malfunction that could have created this disturbance.

“Not working, Ezra.”

“I know, I know!”

I looked up, slamming my fist down onto the table.

The glass tube in the corner of the room made a terrible noise and a long crack split the glass from top to bottom, spider webbing out.

“Ezra!”

I wasn’t listening, but I could hear my heart beat within my ears, meshed with the trance music.

The glass shattered, sending sharp shards and globs of protein-water in every direction.

fin