"Thank you dad. I wouldn't be here, if it wasn't for you."

After they hugged, Christopher touched the screen on his arm, causing it to turn on.

"Hello Christopher Clarkson, I'm Una, Universal Navigation System, your guiding light through the dark."

"Una, lead me to my sleeping station."

The lines on Christopher's clothes began to glow in blue light, matching the lights along the inside of the rocket that began to illuminate as well, forming a path leading out of the steering room, and into the pods with the vertical beds.

Christopher pushed himself off the wall, allowing his body to float effortlessly through a compact tunnel.

"Follow me," were his words when all that was left to see were his feet.

Following the glowing lights, Finn made it to the sleeping station, where each crew member had their personal patted pod to sleep in. They provided only enough room to fit a single body, but in space, where the muscles didn't have to perform even the simplest tasks, a room as spatially as a closet was all that was necessary to find undisturbed rest.

Truth be told, sleep was possible wherever one chose it to be, the only issue would be the weightlessness, and the unconscious and aimless straying through the ship.

"It's nearly three in the morning," said Day to the team through Una's communication system.

His voice was carried to each astronaut on the rocket, and everyone was able to respond to it at any time.

"I admit, time hardly matters the same up here, but as your doctor, I must point out that we have all been awake for longer than it is healthy. Finish your task, and then let your brains rest until the morning."

"Are you feeling tired yet?" asked Christopher, while he opened the sliding door to his one-man bedroom.

"Yes," lied Finn intentionally while suspecting himself of having told the truth. It was plausible that after lacking days of sleep over the stretch of several months, he would have eventually reached the point of inescapable loss of consciousness.

"Then we should implement Day's advice," concluded Christopher.

"It wasn't advice. I wasn't asking you to sleep," said Day, sticking his head down from a hole in the ceiling. "It was more of a command."

"You can't give us commands," bickered Hajo from the same room Day was coming from. He gave Day a push and then let himself sink down, too, with his head leading the way.

Andy's hair levitated meanderingly in the air like seagrass underwater. She was at the bottom section of the rocket, checking oxygen pressures as her final assignment of the day.

"Fortem," crunched the voice of the capsule communicator located at the KSP main building, with white noise challenging its dominance, "this is Westlake, over."

"Roger, Westlake, this is Fortem, go ahead, over," answered Andy while checking some numbers displayed on the screens in front of her.

"Roger. We have a request for you, on the service module secondary propellant fuel pressurization valve. As a precautionary measure we'd like you to momentarily cycle the four switches to the close position and then release. We have no technical records on these valve positions and it's conceivable that one of them might have been moved into a different position by the shock of the acceleration during the second thrust. Over."

Kendra Bates, gave her a nod and moved over to the control levers.

"Good idea," was Andy's feedback to Westlake. "We'll do that now."

Kendra held her thumbs up, as a sign that she had heard and followed the request, and before moving her position over to the sleeping station as ordered by Day, she had confirmed that the switches hadn't changed positions.

Andy was alone now, ready to complete her work as last. "Westlake, Fortem here."

"Roger," rustled the speaker in her sleeve.

"The service module secondary propellant fuel pressurization valve is stable."

"That's good. Over."

Andy was confident and pressed the last two buttons to finalize the commission. She leisurely passed through the doors and kept in contact with the employees at Kepler Space Program.

"We didn't have much time, Westlake, to talk to you about our views out the window when we were preparing for VT repulsion, but up to that time we had the entire eastern part of the lighted hemisphere visible."

"Can you confirm that we will receive sunny weather tomorrow?"

Andy, laughed at her friend's unprofessional inquiry. "Affirmative. Take your kids to the park," she added.

"Negative. Always got to work," replied her friend from over forty-seven thousand nautical miles away.

The crew was preparing to sleep, and some had even closed their doors already by the time Andy's voice was increasingly audible from one of the nearest tunnels. "GCU is complete. Ready to sign off for the night. Over."

"Roger that," confirmed Westlake, "Over and out."

Christopher, explaining the usage of UNA to Finn by demonstrating its tools, blocked the door to the pod at the end of the chamber.

"Excuse me," said Andy to Christopher, "you are obstructing." As a hint to her means, she pointed at her name tag attached to velcro above the silver door.

Day, interrupting the process of his own door shutting, poked his head out of his pod and simpered. "I got some room for you in here," was Day's invitation for Andy, who couldn't access her own sleeping pod.

"I think you're dreaming," said Andy. She covered Day's smug face with her flat hand and squeezed his head back into his room.

"My bad, Andy," apologized Christopher and moved aside, so Andy could prepare to enter her own dream world.

Shortly after, Finn and his father closed their doors as well and shut their eyes at last. The only difference from Finn to the other astronauts was that they fell asleep, while he didn't. It wasn't that he didn't try, no, he wished he could have slept but he felt more incapable of it than ever

His toes curled up forcefully, and his eyelids compelled to be cramped. He hit his head against the cushioned wall behind him.

"Why can't I sleep?" cried the sound of his own voice inside his head.

By a touch on the screen, with his left pointy finger, Finn activated UNA to find out for how long he had been trying to rest. Since the beginning of his father's snoring, nearly an hour had withered, and to add a bow to the devil's impractical gift, one hour appeared as long as three.

Like the remaining hours of the night, Finn's patience slowly perished, too. He had come to make a decision, and so he soundlessly opened his door to leave the chamber and begin to explore.

The back of the rocket had its largest window, separating Finn and the endless space, entirely devoid of matter, with nothing more than two inches of glass. One split and his life could be over in the blink of a second, but he feared not. If anything, he related to the emptiness on the other side.

He himself felt the void inside of him, but the idea of carrying his own space deep inside, filled with galaxies and never-dying light, brought nothing but joy to his still-beating heart.

His fingers touched the glass with so much care, that even if it had had a million cracks, it still wouldn't have broken. Then, increasingly, his hand settled on the window's frigid surface.

As entertaining as it was to hover through the air like a fairy fly, Finn's sorrow was trapped in his body, as much as his body was trapped in this spacecraft. One couldn't escape the other, and despite the mission being Pluviam, Finn's focus was tied to his own mission only.

His grievous need to find Nitha alive had become his venomous obsession, and it was yet in the unknown, that Finn's course was leading him away from his intended destination, even further each time that he mistakenly believed that he had come closer.

The lights were dimmed, the ship nearly mute, and the view so calming that every thought became lost in its vastness. Zero gravity allowed Finn to relax every muscle of his body. Not even his head had to be held up by his neck, and so the fade to senselessness went unnoticed when his body and mind drowsed.

Everything was in the dark now, and no worry could have disturbed his sleep, for his every breath let him sink deeper into the untouchable tranquility.