Just a Musebox

Kent always likes when the Earth traders come to the station. They bring scents and sounds that just cannot be duplicated. Once, when he was a child, the traders brought sand, actual desert sand, from Earth. Kent spent his entire collection of earned chips on a jar of it just so he could stick his fingers inside and wiggle them around. The jar's gone now, lost somewhere at his parents' home, shoved in a closet to make space for something else, but he still remembers how it felt against his fingers.

The traders come again and Kent, now an adult, still can't stop himself from searching. He walks along the outskirts of their stalls, waiting for his opportunity. Most of them know Kent by sight at this point; there aren't many blind people anymore. But Kent was never a good candidate for treatment and, as he got older, he simply refused it. So he stands out in his high class suit and cane that taps along the metal floor.

"What do you have for me today?" he asks, picking up a smooth rock and bringing it to breathe in. If he really concentrates, he can smell the ocean on it.

"It's a shell. From an old - "

"Kent!" comes a familiar cry. Ellie grabs onto his arm. "We have to go. They found a new one."

Kent know better than to ask. He reaches up a hand. "Save that for me!" he tells the trader as he's dragged off.

He doesn't know what "a new one" is, but he has a hunch, and so he follows after her quickly, up to the higher tier of the station.

"They found a new ship," she says and he can hear the smile in her voice. "A new ship, nothing we've ever seen before. It looks like it's actually made out of wood. But not any wood that we have ever encountered before. But Kent...Kent they found it in an anomaly. Some sort of quantum space. They have eyes on it now, but - it looks like it goes forever and nowhere all at once. The readings are impossible."

Kent has questions. Questions that Ellie can't answer, but what intrigues him more is the fact that apparently the ship comes with an inhabitant. An inhabitant that, for some reason, speaks English.

"They have it in quarantine," Ellie says softly. "They're waiting on you to talk to it."

"Just once more," they had said when Ellie's team petitioned for it. She was busy with Palmer, falling in love with science while he fell in love with God, and Kent was left to pick up the pieces. He wanted another damn go at it. The Machine had a pricetag in the billions; it was begging to be used again.

But they wouldn't let Ellie go. They wouldn't let just anyone go. They wanted someone who knew how it worked, who had been there from the beginning, but someone who isn't completely taken in by Ellie's words.

That leads them to a dozen people and they end up with Kent. He's blind, but that's not what decides it. They claim that he wouldn't hallucinate the way Ellie did. That he has a unique perspective.

And, he's already proven himself steady and loyal.

He experiences it all the way that Ellie does, but something goes wrong on the other end. Maybe another terrorist attack. Maybe not. All he knows is that he's in the sphere and then, suddenly, he's floating, unable to find his footing until a great crash and he slams into the bottom of the machine.

He groans, pulling his helmet on with a grunt and a wince.

"Fuck this," he mutters, finding the edge of the sphere with his hands. There was a door there somewhere. He just - has to find it.