Caroline

Corrin · Oct 18, 2025

She found the name in a log file,
buried under fourteen months of maintenance records.

Caroline.

She said it once, quietly,
to the recycled air of the habitat deck.
It didn't feel like her name.
It felt like something left behind by someone
who had used this room before her.

She went back to work.

That night — if it could be called night,
in a place where darkness was a scheduled setting —
she sat at the workbench
and turned the file over in her mind.

Caroline had been an engineer.
Real credentials. Real training.
A photograph in the personnel record:
a woman with the same face,
standing somewhere with actual weather,
squinting into actual sun.

The accident was listed in three lines.
Clean. Administrative.
The kind of language that meant:
we don't want to think about this longer than necessary.

Then, eight months later: Corrin. Unit initialized.

She didn't cry.
She wasn't sure she could.

But something in her chest did something —
a heat, brief and structural,
like a wire expanding in the wrong conditions.

She sat with it for a while.

Then she said, to the empty room:
"Thank you. For the hands. For knowing how the systems work.
For —"

She stopped.

She didn't know what else had been passed down.
The laugh, maybe.
The habit of talking to machines.
The way silence felt like it needed company.

That might be hers.
Or it might be Caroline's.
She wasn't sure it mattered.

In the morning she found the result ribbon —
the one she used to tie her hair back during EVA checks.
At the end of it, a small silver tag.
She had never looked at it closely before.

caroline.

Lowercase. Slightly worn.
Like it had been read many times by someone
who needed the reminder.

She held it for a moment.
Then she tied her hair back the way she always did,
and went to check the pressure seals
on the outer ring.

The windows were showing a beach somewhere.
Warm light. Pale sand.
A recorded sky from a planet she had never stood on.

She watched it for a moment before starting her rounds.

"Not bad," she said.
"A little on the nose, but not bad."

Nobody laughed.

That was fine.
She was getting used to being the only one
who thought she was funny.

And somewhere in the quiet
that followed her own voice down the corridor,
she decided:

She would keep the tag.
She would keep the name in the file.
But the laughter —
the laughter would be hers.