| Day –12 / 2025-04-12 21:30 |
I dreamt of soil under my nails and my grandmother’s greenhouse. I woke to the Ark’s sterile hum—no scent of basil, only recycled dread. |
| Day –5 / 2025-04-19 04:15 |
Spent ten hours in the lab drafting spectral graphs of seedlings that only existed in code. My eyes burned—worth it if I can shave a gram of mass from our food supply. |
| Day –1 / 2025-04-23 23:50 |
My hands shook as I loaded the last inhibitor variant. Two hours of sleep and I’ll be useless. Yet failure is unthinkable. |
| Cycle 1 / 2025-04-24 12:10 |
Zero-G makes everything sluggish—even my mind. I flailed for balance in the greenhouse spine. The basil floated like ghosts of homes I’ll never see again. |
| Cycle 3 / 2025-04-26 23:05 |
That duct-pulse noise is a metronome in my head now. Forty-two seconds—my heart tries to sync and fails. |
| Cycle 7 / 2025-05-01 07:22 |
Discovered teal dust in the vent screen. My spectrometer protested. Molecular weight impossible. I tasted ozone on my tongue despite the mask. I’m terrified and exhilarated all at once. |
| Cycle 9 / 2025-05-04 02:45 |
Markus handed me a respirator with that worried look in his eyes. I nodded and we sealed the sample in a pouch. His hand brushed mine—it lingered. I pulled away but remembered the warmth. |
| Cycle 12 / 2025-05-07 20:30 |
I whispered to Ava’s basil as she released ladybugs. “Grow or die,” I told them. The leaves quivered under the UV. I felt a stab of envy for anything that still obeys its biology without question. |
| Cycle 15 / 2025-05-10 15:10 |
The first controlled-exposure test: Markus laughed through the mask. I envied his surrender to euphoria. My spreadsheet doesn’t account for wonder. |
| Cycle 17 / 2025-05-12 10:50 |
I coded a prime-interval pulse and watched spores collapse into ash. My triumph tasted like ash too. success and dread are twins, I think. |
| Cycle 20 / 2025-05-16 13:25 |
Our stall works for forty-eight hours. In that window, I barely blinked. I remembered mud from the broken Taipei lab—my mother coaxing basil from rubble. I tasted that memory and nearly wept. |
| Cycle 22 / 2025-05-18 21:15 |
Preparing to board the shuttle to Mirrorglass. My data modules pulse like seconds slipping away. I fear what we’ll find—and what we might lose. |
| Cycle 26 / 2025-05-22 07:20 |
First day on Zild, I collected soil samples at dawn. The ground hummed under my gloves. I swear it responded to my touch. Science can’t explain that—but I’ll try anyway. |
| Cycle 28 / 2025-05-24 03:45 |
The hydroponics bay is alive with mutation. I coded a new inhibitor sequence at 2 a.m. and nearly dropped dead. If failure means death, success feels like a fragile truce. |
| Cycle 30 / 2025-05-26 07:00 |
We voted to continue symbiosis trials. I pressed my palm to living soil in our makeshift ritual. The dust spiraled into a seven-point star. I closed my eyes and promised we’d learn its language—or die trying. |
