We found the rising columns on the ninety-first day. They came out of the seabed without disturbing it, pale formations carried inside a current too slow for any one of us to follow across the station's whole field. Linked, we could hold all six views together. A movement that looked random through one window became a turning structure when another body felt it approach.
We laughed from six throats. Nobody had to explain which part was beautiful.
The mesh carried vision, pressure, balance and a limited layer of bodily affect. It did not transmit sentences or private memories. We had to speak to exchange those. But pleasure moved across it readily enough that a familiar sight could arrive already carrying somebody else's delight. Disgust did the same. So did the calm of a colleague who knew what to do when your own hands began to shake.
We had chosen it for work. After three months, taking it off to sleep felt like putting most of the room outside a locked door.
The extension vote was scheduled for the following morning and required all six of us to agree. Another six months would let us observe the columns through a full local cycle. The station required six observers for the planned sampling pattern. We could operate with fewer, but the protocol would change and some work would have to stop while a replacement traveled down.
Everyone knew the delay. We discussed it often, usually while linked, with the pale columns turning through us.
During the vote, Ren disconnected.
The loss made us turn toward the same chair. He rubbed the place where the collar rested against his neck.
"I'm leaving."
Mott asked whether his interface was hurting him. It had done so the previous month. We had adjusted the contacts and shared the relief when they stopped catching his skin.
"I want to go," Ren said. "I don't want another six months."
We asked what had changed. He said nothing had changed. He had wanted to go for weeks.
That was difficult to reconcile with the pleasure we had felt through him. We remembered it more easily than we remembered the times he had tried to discuss departure. Somebody suggested fatigue. Somebody else proposed a day off before deciding anything final.
He asked for the transport request.
I disconnected too. My name is Dellis. I had to wait for the shrinking sensation to pass before I could read the request on the screen. Outside the mesh, the station smelled more strongly of warm seals and old clothes. I could hear one of the circulation pumps repeating a small uneven click.
Ren looked grateful. I did not yet know whether I deserved it.
I asked him the same question privately. Did he want to leave, understanding that we would lose some of the sampling cycle?
"Yes."
"Is there anything we could change?"
"Let me leave without making me give you a better reason."
I recorded the answer with his permission. I wanted us to hear it without the shared current of our own anticipation. We could keep working. We could accept a narrower study. We could wait for a replacement. None of the choices endangered the station.
I reconnected to explain that.
The columns entered me through Mott's window at the same moment. They were opening along their upper edges, showing a pattern we had never seen. The others had been waiting to share it with Ren. Their urgency reached me before their words did.
He needed to understand what he was leaving. That was how we put it. We were not asking him to forget the decision, only to feel the thing his decision would interrupt.
Ren stood when Mott approached with the collar. He said no. I remember that without ambiguity. He had not misunderstood the proposal and he did not need assistance locating a word.
Mott caught his wrist. I took the other one because he was reaching toward the collar's disconnect catch. The third contact required pressure against the base of his neck. He tried to twist away, and the chair scraped the floor hard enough for all of us to feel the vibration.
The channel opened.
His fear came through first, sharp and local. The rest of us answered with reassurance, with the widening columns, with five bodies certain he would be glad to have seen them. I kept his hand below the catch. He said he had already refused. We could all see the recording waiting on the screen. Nothing had been erased or disproved.
After a while he stopped pulling.
We asked whether the extension should proceed. Five voices answered immediately. His came later. It sounded small in the room, but on the mesh the relief made it difficult to hear the difference.
The voting record required six responses. Mott entered six. The separate recording of Ren asking to leave remained attached to the meeting file, where a later reviewer could listen to it if anyone decided the decision required review.
Beyond the windows the pale structures continued to open. We adjusted the sampling schedule together. Ren's hand rested inside ours, still below the collar, while the first new observations arrived.
