Over breakfast, the crew jokes about how a spaceship should be furnished like an old farmhouse or a traditional Japanese house. Shaun recalls staying in a Hiroshima guesthouse run by American Christians, Chie teases him, and the banter turns to what they miss about Earth: Pietro surprises the others by longing for “pointlessness,” like a useless ornament or a rug, and says he would lie on it and dream of space.

Daylight arrives suddenly as their tightly scheduled work begins. Each crew member moves to experiments and maintenance: Pietro monitors onboard microbes; Chie grows protein crystals and undergoes routine MRI scans; Shaun tracks plant growth in microgravity and later helps test flammability; Chie and Nell tend to the resident mice; Roman and Anton service the Russian oxygen generator and culture heart cells; Anton waters cabbages and dwarf wheat. They also handle endless station upkeep, guided by acronyms and checklists.

They receive an urgent observing priority: a typhoon in the Western Pacific strengthening as it heads toward Indonesia and the Philippines. The crew logs which upcoming orbits will bring them within view so they can photograph and verify satellite data as an early-warning system.

Nell reads an email from her brother saying he has the flu, which makes her realise how long it has been since she has been ill. She reflects that life in orbit feels like having the weight and pressure taken off body and mind: there are almost no choices, only an imposed schedule. When she replies, she struggles to describe station life—small details feel too mundane, and the rest too astonishing—so she sends love and attaches photos of Earth and of Chie and Anton at the observation windows.

Nell thinks about the crew’s unspoken rule—don’t encroach on one another’s internal lives—because privacy is scarce and the strain is constant. Although someone might call them a “floating family,” they are also substitutes for everything and everyone left on Earth, and they sometimes resent each other for not being the people they miss. At other times, looking at one another restores a graspable sense of humanity.

They have discussed a recurring feeling of “merging,” as if they are not distinct from each other or from the station itself, imagining each person as an organ of a single living system. The metaphor feels idiotic yet persistent, and it leads to another unsettling reversal: despite the risks of fire, leaks, radiation, or impact, the station can feel safer than Earth, because it is monitored, padded, and controlled. Nell ends with the thought that returning to the surface may make them feel like aliens in a dangerously unbounded world.