The SS Eternity was a city in a tin can, a three-thousand-mile stretch of corridors and hydroponic farms that had been sailing through the void for twelve generations. The "Ascendants"—the genetic elite who lived in the Garden Spires—spent their days debating the "Ethics of the Great Return," arguing about whether we should try to find a new home or simply accept our role as the eternal voyagers of the deep.

I was a Level-1 Sanitation Officer. My job was to make sure the waste-reclamation vents didn't clog with synthetic hair and dead skin. I didn't care about the Ethics of the Return. I cared about the fact that my boots leaked and my ration-paste tasted like wet cardboard.

But the vents tell you things. They carry the whispers of the ship, the groans of the hull, and the secrets that the Ascendants thought they had flushed away.

While scrubbing a primary conduit in Sector 7, I found a data-slate wedged in a filter. It was a log from the first Captain, dated three hundred years ago. The log was short and brutal: "The navigation array failed in Year Ten. We are not sailing. We are drifting in a dead orbit around a brown dwarf. The 'Return' is a mathematical impossibility."

I sat on the cold metal floor, the slate humming in my hand. I looked at the propaganda screens lining the hallway, showing images of a lush, green planet called "New Eden" that we were supposedly approaching.

I didn't tell the Council. I didn't tell my crew. I just kept cleaning.

I started watching the Ascendants differently. I watched them in their silk robes, discussing the "divine trajectory" of the ship. I saw the way they looked at us—the Gutter-folk—as if we were just biological components of the ship's maintenance system.

One day, the ship shuddered. A massive hull-breach in the lower decks. The Ascendants panicked, calling for an emergency evacuation to the "Life-Pods," claiming the ship was under attack by space-debris.

I stood in the corridor, blocking the way to the pods. I held up the data-slate.

"There is no New Eden," I told the High-Chancellor, who was trembling in his gold-trimmed tunic. "There is only the drift. And the pods aren't for evacuation—they're just smaller tins to die in."

The Chancellor looked at me, then at the slate. For a moment, the mask of divinity slipped, and I saw the terrified animal underneath.

"Then why are you still cleaning the vents?" he whispered.

"Because," I said, stepping aside to let him run toward his useless pod, "someone has to make sure the trash doesn't pile up while we wait for the end."

*** OTMES_V2: [V-07]-[T7-01]-[M3:8, M6:6, N2:0.6, K1:0.7, I:0.8, R:0.2, theta:210]