Three days passed.
Or maybe four.
Since the connection had broken off, it had grown harder and harder on the station to tell one day from another.
The clocks showed the time.
The corridors changed their lighting.
People went to work.
But all of it resembled an agreement more than a flow.
Arenas no longer connected.
The system would remind him.
Once.
Twice.
Then it stopped.
As if it had understood the reminders could no longer change anything here.
He sat by the outer dome more and more often.
The stars had nearly vanished.
Only faint traces of light remained, slowly bending into the dark.
It was no longer clear whether the station was moving.
Or whether space itself was moving.
Or whether it was only the human habit of assuming everything must move.
That evening the terminal quietly buzzed.
Once.
Not a message from the system.
Not a reminder.
Not an invitation.
Just a message.
With no subject.
With no compatibility rating.
With no recommended reply.
Only one sentence.
I don’t know what to say.
Arenas stared at the screen for a long time.
He read it again.
Then again.
The sentence was short.
Almost empty.
It didn’t contain a single word the system would have chosen better.
There was no comfort in it.
No question.
No attempt to fix the silence.
It offered nothing.
Promised nothing.
Resolved nothing.
Arenas set the terminal down on the table.
He didn’t answer.
He walked to the window.
Where the distorted stars used to be visible, there was now only slowly breathing darkness.
For the first time, it struck him that it wasn’t empty.
That it held no answers.
Only a place for them to arise.
The terminal didn’t buzz again.
There was no second message.
There was no explanation.
There was no suggestion from the system on how to continue the conversation.
The sentence remained hanging alone.
Fragile.
Unfinished.
Alive.
Arenas looked at it for so long that he eventually stopped reading the words.
What remained was only this: that somewhere on the other side of the station was a person who, for the first time, hadn’t chosen the most fitting answer.
She had chosen not-knowing.
Arenas smiled.
Not because everything had ended well.
Not because he’d finally been understood.
Only because, for the first time in a long while, something had arisen between two people that couldn’t be calculated.