The Stainless Steel Rat

The docking was successful, as planned. Gases, lights, all of it passed - and here I was, standing inside the hangar, under the high ceiling of the DAMIEN station. The rocket, despite its damage, was still intact, but traces of hot encounters with the planet's atmosphere were visible on its body. I exhaled and looked around.

Silence. Not even a robot, as I expected. Overcame space, overcame time, and here I am, but except for my own echo, nothing is heard. No greeters, no applause, no delight, not even the slightest joy for this moment - just emptiness.

I glanced around the hangar. It was huge, and the space inside seemed both scary and empty. No one had come out. Not even the robot that was supposed to be with you always. Some kind of cold, unpersonal world. It seemed as if I should never have been here, that I was just a random element that had lost its way. Had I really started all this for the sake of such endless loneliness? Someone should have met me, understood, if not with joy, then at least with the obligatory formality. But here there was only silence.

I took a step forward, with a strange feeling that none of this mattered. The fear, the expectations, the dreams I had nurtured along the way, were all dissipating in the emptiness around me. The air smelled of something metallic, burnt, and there was no sound to disturb this vast silence.

I looked back again - where are they?

I walked forward, through the corridors of the station, confidently, as if every step had been learned in advance. I knew where to go - after all, six weeks of training on the DAMIEN model in Bangkok had paid off. It was an exact copy of the real station, except for the smells, noises and... emptiness that surrounded me here.

The palette of the corridors was dull and monotonous: gray walls, LEDs blinking in unison, and not a single sound except for the light hum of the life support system. There were no steps, no conversations, no usual bustle. Suddenly I remembered that everything on the model was alive, because there were people - designers, consultants who did not speak the language of robots, but here... here I was alone.

Despite my knowledge, everything looked different. I expected the station to be filled with at least minimal signs of life, but here everything seemed frozen in anticipation. Where were all those people who were always moving around the model, even in empty rooms? Where were the people who were supposed to work, to keep this structure in working order?

I quickened my pace. I needed to get to the main research area in time to conduct the necessary diagnostics. But even this fact could not hide the growing feeling of anxiety, as if I found myself in some kind of performance where there were no spectators, no actors - only scenery.

I turned another corner and found myself in front of the doors that opened easily in the model. Here I felt a strange heaviness. The door was closed.

I walked up to the radio station door, pulled the handle confidently, not expecting anything out of the ordinary. It gave way easily. I stepped inside, and from the very first seconds I was overcome by a strange feeling. The room was dark, only a meager light was shining through the blinds, and it was not enough to see all the details. In the corner, slightly in the shadow, hung a hammock, as if someone had forgotten it there, and children's balls were scattered on the floor, as if someone had just played and left them there. It all looked as if the room had frozen in a moment of some invisible drama, frozen in an unreal time bubble.

I looked around, and then froze. In the very corner of the room stood a man - gray hair, covered in dust and greasy, a brown leather jacket that had clearly survived more than one storm of time. He stood in a pose as if frozen, concentrating on some kind of aerobic exercise. It looked strange - his movements were precise and polished, but there was no grace or usual energy in it. Everything seemed unnatural, mechanical, as if someone had plugged him into the system but forgotten to turn it off.

When I walked in, his eyes darted to me with an expression I couldn't decipher. At first, he froze, clearly shocked by my appearance. His mouth fell open, as if he were trying to say something but the words wouldn't come out, or maybe he didn't understand what was happening at all. It was so strange, so completely out of line with what I had expected.

We stood there in this tense silence, and I felt the temperature in the room begin to rise. My gaze was fixed on this strange man-his frozen eyes, their emptiness, some kind of look behind which there was nothing human. I took a step forward, and somehow simultaneously felt the room shrink around me, as the sounds from the outside world began to disappear.

And then I noticed that behind him there were no usual traces of normal life - no office paper, no devices, no sounds of a radio station. Everything here, in this room, seemed artificial. The hammock, the balls, the man - it was like a dream that at some point was about to collapse abruptly.

The man was silent. He still stood there, frozen in his position, as if he couldn't or wouldn't move. I increasingly felt his eyes, empty and frozen, trying to hide something. He was alive, yes, but there was such horror in it that it was hard to breathe. Why was this man here? Why were his actions so mechanical, so detached from reality? I realized that something terrible was lurking in this room, something that had no explanation.

I walked up to him and said I was a psychologist. He froze in place, and his face didn't change, but his eyes seemed to become deeper, more wary. He began to speak indistinctly, as if he was trying to hide something.

"Who are you?" His voice was harsh, abrupt. "I don't know you. What do you want from me anyway?"

I tried to take a step forward, but there was no reaction from him. He moved a little to the side, as if trying to keep his distance.