Orbital

Six crew members float asleep in an orbiting space station as Tuesday begins in early October. Their isolation makes their inner worlds feel strangely porous, as if dreams and fears leak between them, and the raw blackness outside seems to prowl just beyond the walls. When they wake, the station’s hum reasserts itself—fans, filters, blinking laptops—alongside small leftovers of improvised celebration. Outside the windows, Earth scrolls beneath them: oceans turning cobalt, cities glowing through haze, auroral domes on the horizon, and a storm system in the Western Pacific beginning to organize.

Roman, a Russian cosmonaut, anchors himself by watching sunrise flare over Africa and by counting days and missions; without a strict tether to time, orbit’s sixteen daily sunrises threaten to shred his sense of self. Shaun, one of the non-Russian astronauts, wakes with the residue of dreaming and stares at a Las Meninas postcard from his wife, a reminder that meaning can flip with perspective. That theme hardens into something sharper when Chie reveals that her mother has died. The crew’s inability to offer ordinary comfort in microgravity turns their attention back to Earth as “mother”: the source that holds everything they love and everything they have lost.

Ground control teases them that a four-person lunar mission has raced past their lower orbit, puncturing their status as the farthest humans out. Pietro jokes back, but Chie feels bitter that everything left of her mother is down there, on the planet she keeps “lassoing” every ninety minutes. Anton, sleepless and wired, searches the starfield and imagines the moon for himself. Meanwhile, their bodies demand constant work: treadmills, cycling, and strength training meant to keep bones and muscles from failing when gravity returns. In the middle of this grind, each of them is ambushed by an unexpected happiness and an equally startling desire never to leave. Home distorts—Earth feels unreal, and the station begins to feel like the only place where anyone else could truly understand.

The day’s schedule tightens. Over breakfast, they joke about furnishing the station like a farmhouse or a traditional Japanese house, and Pietro surprises them by admitting he misses “pointlessness”—a useless rug or ornament—because orbit allows almost nothing without purpose. Work pulls them apart into modules: Pietro monitors microbes; Chie grows protein crystals, undergoes MRI scans, and tends lab mice with Nell; Shaun tracks plant growth and helps with flammability testing; Roman and Anton service oxygen systems and culture heart cells; Anton also waters cabbages and dwarf wheat. A new priority interrupts everything: the typhoon is strengthening and moving toward Indonesia and the Philippines, and the crew must photograph it to verify satellite data and aid warnings on the ground.

Nell, prompted by an email from her brother about having the flu, reflects on orbit’s odd removal of ordinary ailments and choices. Up here, the pressure of decision seems lifted—life is a schedule imposed for survival—yet loneliness intensifies because every relationship is concentrated into five other people. The crew sometimes feels they are “merging,” like organs of one system, and the station—despite fire, leaks, radiation, and debris—can feel safer than Earth precisely because it is controlled. Nell worries that returning to the surface may feel more alien than staying in free fall.

Chie’s grief deepens into an imagined history of her parents’ seaside house: her father’s decline and death, her mother living alone among damp and years, and finally her mother lying down in surrender, hoping to last until Chie returns but knowing death will not wait. In orbit, Asia slides away beneath the station as if to underline the gulf between Chie’s view and the abandoned shore she imagines. When the typhoon comes properly into view, the crew crowds the windows with long lenses and cameras, documenting the storm’s anticlockwise order and deepening eye. They send coordinates and images down like “fortune tellers” who can foresee impact but cannot stop it before their path carries them away into darkness.

As the orbits stack, the crew oscillates between awe and routine, while microgravity quietly harms them even as they study life. In the Russian lab, Anton and Roman tend dishes of human heart cells grown from volunteers’ skin samples. Anton is struck by their living colors and the absurd miracle of them; Roman stays practical, even joking, yet the parallel is unavoidable—microgravity is also stressing their own hearts and arteries. News arrives of another lunar launch, and the six mark it with balloons and rehydrated desserts, hanging Roman’s felt Moon. Their celebration is braided with envy and a backlash at their own “bound-for-nowhere” circling. Pietro and Nell’s installed spectrometer reframes their watching as measurement: Earth’s radiance itself may be changing as pollutants, clouds, and melting ice alter the planet’s energy balance.

The typhoon swells into a dominating presence. When it fills the windows, work stops again, and the crew photographs an unbroken spinning cloud deck. Pietro fixates on a fisherman he once met on a diving trip with his wife, imagining the impossibility of evacuation when storms have already stripped life down to essentials. Later, as the station crosses Antarctica’s brief night, Roman senses an aurora and calls Nell to the dome. One by one the others gather. Curtains and columns of green and red surge toward magenta, then collapse behind them, giving the six a rare, unifying moment of wonder that cuts through strain and schedule.

Personal motives surface. Anton dreams of Apollo-era images and remembers his father’s fabled stories of Russian moon landings, which once made Anton promise his wife he would become the first Russian on the Moon. At lunch, Nell and Shaun speak more openly than usual: Shaun admits the first Moon landing video repelled him because it exposed a hungry, frustrated longing in older men he knew, while Nell confesses that Challenger—not Apollo—shaped her, and that she kept the dead astronauts’ photos for years, lighting candles on their birthdays. Shaun is briefly seized by fear at how thin their protection is—only inches of metal from annihilation. Chie continues a mouse experiment, apologizing to the animals for their doomed fate as she steels herself for missing her mother’s rites. Roman repeatedly calls out on a packet radio over Australia, thinking of Sergei Krikalev’s isolation, until a human voice finally answers through static.

From orbit, borders and rivalries look absurd, yet they still reach the station. A political dispute manifests as “national toilet” rules—Russians to one toilet, Americans/Europeans/Japanese to another—which the crew turns into jokes and largely ignores. In a virtual-reality timing experiment, their repeated errors expose how microgravity warps duration and bodily certainty, making time elastic even as they cling to a 24-hour schedule.

Nell recalls a spacewalk with Pietro: the terror of releasing the hatch, the instruction not to look down, and the irresistible sight of Earth tumbling beneath her boots and gloves. Outside, the station felt like home and space’s nothingness paradoxically consoled her, even stirring a desire to drift farther as her tether reeled away. Over months, the crew’s fixation shifts from city lights to a daytime planet that looks borderless and alive, even while they know war persists below. Eventually they recognize that politics is not distant pantomime but visible in algal blooms, fires, floods, mining ponds, melting glaciers, and altered coasts—the “politics of want” reshaping the whole globe.

The typhoon suddenly escalates to Category Five and devastates islands before turning toward the Philippines. A docking memory surfaces as Nell remembers arriving months earlier with Roman and Shaun, welcomed by Anton, Pietro, and Chie with multilingual greetings and Anton’s bread-and-salt ritual adapted into crackers and salt cubes. Yet time in orbit keeps flattening them: Pietro grows pale and thin, taste dulls, and after a brief erotic dream of Nell he wakes ashamed and senses desire shutting down like a switch.

Nell spends an exhausting stretch packing waste for a coming resupply craft—burnables, toiletries, sweat-soaked clothes—feeling both freediving calm in weightlessness and sudden claustrophobia in the station’s tubes. The task triggers a childhood memory of a caravan holiday shortly before her mother died. Nell also thinks about her long-distance marriage: she and her husband exchange photos daily, yet her orbit is mapped and knowable while his life in Ireland feels increasingly mysterious, leaving them “equally unknown” in different ways.

Radio voices puncture the void. Roman’s brief, confused contact with a man who keeps repeating that his name is Tony expands into a meditation on Voyager’s golden records and the endurance of human feeling—especially love—through time. Later, during heightened solar activity, the crew cleans and self-monitors vitals, blood, and urine. Anton hides a painless lump on his neck, fearing a medical evacuation that would disrupt others’ missions; the lump crystallizes a decision to end his loveless marriage amicably after return. During dinner, Chie announces her mother’s funeral is tomorrow and shares a rare tender memory of climbing a mountain in Shikoku with her mother calling out joyfully from the summit. Anton breaks into tears, and he and Chie carefully catch the floating droplets. Roman makes shortwave contact with Therese near Vancouver; as the signal fades, she reveals her husband has died and the radio was his.

Shaun reframes “progress” as less a chosen project than an animal migration into the last wilderness, offering silent prayers for the lunar astronauts, Chie, and those in the storm’s path. Chie sees the lab mice finally master microgravity, flying in circles, and the small miracle triggers her first full, suffocating wave of grief. The crew copes in small ways—somersaults, a film, poker with magnets—inside their perpetual free fall.

They watch a Russian sci-fi film together, passing mints, and gradually fall asleep floating. The narrative then widens into a cosmic calendar that compresses the universe into a year, making human civilization a near-instant before indifferent time. After oversleeping, the six wake disoriented and, without discussion, float inward into a twelve-armed embrace, exchange goodnights in different languages, and drift back to their quarters.

The super-typhoon finally makes landfall. From space it looks serene and moonlit; beneath the cloud roof, buildings tear apart and floodwaters surge. Chie sleeps through it, dreaming her mother is alive with aching relief. That night, the crew’s dreams braid grief and storm imagery: Nell and Shaun share a linked vision of a circular flame that becomes a typhoon spiral; Roman dreams of jubilant public mythmaking; Anton returns to childhood “spacewalk” play and to a moon dream warped by music and love; Chie dreams of holding her mother through a typhoon and, in apocalyptic exaggeration, vows never to go so far away again.

As the station continues its repetitive yet ever-new orbits—over lightning-streaked storms and vast rainforest fires—a quiet dread persists: the only way home is reentry. Meanwhile, the lunar crew presses toward the Moon, joking with Capcom as their craft threads through low Earth orbit’s clutter of debris before burning toward cleaner space. Back on the station, unread messages accumulate: Pietro receives a link from his wife about typhoon devastation, and Shaun receives a video from his daughter declaring love. Near Roman’s head, an existing crack in the hull widens by millimetres and a slight pressure drop slips under alarms, underscoring how precarious their haven is. On Earth, the storm’s aftermath is glimpsed through people sheltering in a flooded chapel, praying as water rises and then the wind ebbs. Above it all, the station keeps falling around the planet, and the book closes on the sense of Earth as a brief, luminous harmony—a choir of light and electromagnetic “music”—held for a moment in the vast noise of space.