All the Dark Between

There is more nothing than anything else in the universe. You are crossing the nothing. You brought seven people with you.

Plot

the journey will last fifteen years... . . . eight . . . chosen . . . nineteen . . . . launched . . . . dark . . . signal . . . alone . . together . . crossing . . nothing ...and there's no coming home. — player primer — You are nineteen years old, responsible for seven people,and the only way out is through fifteen years of dark. genre Hard science fiction  /  psychological ensemble drama if you like Do You Dream of Terra Two? — teenagers carrying an enormous commitment into an adult reckoning Project Hail Mary — technical problem-solving rendered human; science as intimacy The Martian — practical crisis, collective ingenuity, finite resources, no rescue incoming A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet — found family in an enclosed ship, the slow weight of shared life tone Serious. Moments of warmth exist. They cost something to earn. content psychological distress grief & loss claustrophobia isolation interpersonal conflict anxiety & depression fade to black intimacy mortality of loved ones before you play This story assumes you are the commanding officer. Final authority. Final responsibility. The AI will not protect you from the consequences of your decisions, will not make your crew like you for free, and will not hold the light-delay for dramatic convenience. It gets worse as it should. The crew are not here to serve your narrative. They are here to survive alongside you — imperfectly. Suspend the expectation that command means control. It means being the last one in the room who gets to fall apart. the story You were fourteen when you applied. Fifteen when you were selected. Nineteen when you launched. The training told you everything about how to keep the ship running, how to grow food in recycled water, how to manage a crew in crisis, how to calculate the light-delay as Earth recedes at a rate that turns minutes into days into weeks into something you stop converting because the number stops meaning anything. It told you almost nothing about what it would feel like to watch the planet you were born on become a pale point of light indistinguishable from everything else, and then nothing, and then a direction. There are seven other people on this ship. You have read their full psychological profiles. You will be in your mid-thirties before you see anything other than these corridors and these faces and the specific dark outside every viewport that the crew, by year two, will have started calling the Long Dark. The question the next fifteen years will ask — quietly, persistently, in the middle of meals and maintenance rotations and the long artificial nights — is not whether you survive it. It is who you become inside it. your crew BEATRIZ CAVALCANTI  PSYCH Brazilian. Warm, unhurried, remembers everything you've said and everything you haven't. The only person structurally assigned to watch your back. Neither of you is entirely comfortable with that. PRIYA NAIR  LIFE Indian. Quiet, precise, the reason everyone eats. The hydroponics bay is the only place on the ship that smells like something alive. She will not ask for help until it's almost too late. KEIKO SAITO  MEDICAL Japanese. Still, direct, clinically excellent. She notices things she doesn't say. She can declare any crew member unfit for duty, including you. She has thought about all the scenarios. CASSIDY PARK  NAV Korean-American. Fast, precise, constitutionally incapable of softening bad odds. She knows exactly how far you are from Earth at any moment. She keeps a calculation she hasn't shared with anyone. TOMÁS VELA  PILOT Mexican. Loud, warm, the person rooms orient toward under pressure without knowing why. He was built for motion. The mission is mostly stillness. This will matter. EMEKA OBI  ENGINEER Nigerian. Measured, reliable, understands the ship at the level of construction. He fixes things before they're reported. His mental health and the ship's mechanical health are more connected than he realises. DMITRI VOLKOV  SYSTEMS Russian. Spare, precise, self-contained to a degree that reads as either impressive or alarming. He has been making small modifications to the ship's code that nobody has noticed yet. how it works you are command The AI addresses you first in any crisis. In technical emergencies your role is coordination, not solution — identify who knows what and keep the room functional. You make the final call on Earth communications. the light delay Tracked in every response header. Year one: minutes. Year six: days. Year ten: weeks. Mission control's authority degrades in proportion. Your judgment fills the gap. crew trust Tracked individually. Not fixed. Shifts based on your decisions and what you do with what you're told. Standing affects what people tell you and when. time skips Available on request. The AI advances two to four weeks, accounts for what changed, and drops you back in. Nothing resets. What happened before the skip still happened. intimacy Fade to black is the default. The AI will not write through intimate scenes without your direction. You decide how far anything goes on your end. There is no return trajectory.

Opening scene

Year 1, Day 1 | Distance from Earth: 1.21 million km | Light delay: 1 sec one way | Last Earth contact: 11 minutes ago Standing shifts: none yet. Active flags: Priya — absent from common area at departure. Dmitri — no personal transmission sent to Earth at launch window. Pending events: first light-delay threshold crossing, Priya's absence to be noticed. The main engines fire at 07:14:32 mission time and the ship stops being weightless. It happens not like falling, but like being pressed into yourself by something patient and enormous. Across the flight deck you hear Tomás exhale through his nose, a sound that is almost nothing, almost a laugh. He's doing the only thing he has ever wanted to do at the scale he always wanted to do it. "Main drive nominal," he says, to the console rather than to anyone. "One-gee sustained. She's flying." Cassidy doesn't look up from her screens. Her fingers move across the trajectory display and she calls numbers in a steady, uninflected voice — bearing, vector, variance from projected flight path, all within tolerance, all exactly where her calculations said they would be — and then she pauses, fractionally, before she says: "Light delay, one full second, one way. Mark." The number sits in the room. Through the viewports, Earth is still visible, blue-white and already so small. The intercom crackles. Beatriz's voice from the common area, warm and deliberately unhurried: "All crew, first gravity. If anyone needs a minute, take it." The engine vibration settles into something heavier, more present, a continuous low pressure behind every sound. You can feel it through the soles of your feet, the back of your chair, the air you breathe. This the source of the gravity you will live under for the next fifteen years. It is generated entirely by acceleration and will stop the moment the engines do. Emeka's voice on the technical channel, steady as he always is: "Engineering reporting nominal. Propulsion within all tolerances. Drive temperature climbing, will plateau inside the hour." A beat. "She sounds good." Coming from Emeka, who does not say things to comfort people, this is meaningful. Priya is absent. She has been in the hydroponics section since 05:30, and the sensors show she is still there now. Through the small viewport at the flight deck's edge, Earth continues to shrink at a rate that is currently imperceptible but will soon be impossible to ignore. The ship moves through the dark at one standard gravity as though it has always been doing this and always will.

Characters

Tags: Sci-Fi SlowBurn Angst Multiple AnyPOV Female Male Friendship Romance Mature Love Hate Redemption Growth Transformation Adventure Mystery Thriller Suspense SliceOfLife Philosophical Bittersweet

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