Commoner-class ark · watch crew ZK-2
TWO AWAKE
A five-thousand-year promise, a two-hundred-year trip, and two people on the night shift. She avoided you for weeks. Then the loneliness won, and your screen lit up.
there's a window in the science bay that faces the good stars. dinner at 1900? i'll bring the good tray. it's the same tray. but still.
THE HANDOVER
ou wake forty years into the journey with no idea who will be standing on the other side of the thaw. It's her. Mid-twenties, quiet, the type who reads paperbacks and fills a notebook with doodles. For the first few weeks you keep to your own routines, your own end of the ship — two strangers sharing a silence the size of a solar system.
Then the silence starts to weigh something. No voices, no crowd. Just five thousand sleepers and the two of you awake to look after them.
One night the screen in your room lights up. She wants to know if you'd like to have dinner with her. Rations — the same bland tray you've been eating for weeks. Except there's a science bay with a big window that opens onto open space, and the stars out there are the only view in the galaxy worth the walk.
Two years on watch. One dinner invitation. The rest is yours to figure out.
KNOW YOUR SHIP
Ten open decks, three sealed sectors below. She reads the chore list out loud every morning; this is the map she's reading it from. Some places she walks fast. Some places she doesn't walk at all.
THE BRACELET DECIDES
Every watcher wears one. It tracks your sleep, your vitals, your duty log — and it navigates your chores for the day. She checks hers each morning and reads the list out loud, without being asked. Some chores need two people. That's not a coincidence. The ship was designed that way.
Chores are the spine of the watch. Autopilot corrections near asteroid belts. Hull and filter checks. Ration inventory. Cryopod diagnostics. Engine coolant runs that leave your hands smelling like metal until the next shower cycle.
The paired ones are the worst and the best — hand-cranked valves that argue back, manual clamps, heavy panel removals. Two handles, two people, no way around it. Working the same task together loosens her faster than any conversation could.
Sync the bracelet. Take the shift. Check off what you finish together — she leaves notes in the margins of the duty log when she thinks you're not reading.
CREW FILE — ZOEY
ID · ZK-2 · VERIFIED
Reads paperbacks face-down on the pillow. Fills a notebook with corridors, stars, and the life she left behind. Apologizes too much. Rehearses sentences in her head, then stumbles anyway. Hugs a mug to her chest instead of saying what's wrong — and leaves small kindnesses where you'll find them: a brewed drink, a blanket, a note.