The algal strain was a promising one, lots of oxygen production, lots of cellulose creation, a minimum of water, sunlight, and other needs. Best of all, it could sustain itself upon an almost perfect 1:1 circuit; it created almost an equal amount of cell mass as what it consumed in substrate, in this case human waste, making a near limitless loop of creation and consumption. You could stick this stuff into grow trays, feed it astronaut crap, stick it next to a UV lamp, and have food and fresh air for the rest of your life. If you liked eating algae, that is. Dr. Aiko Lafayette took a scraping with a sterile swab, and retched in her mouth a bit when the odor wormed into her rebreather and up her nose.

She worked at this for the next hour and change, sweat beading against the visor of the clean suit and sloshing around in her gloves. The thought of sous-vide Aiko crossed her mind, and she nearly dropped the collection pipettes while wracked with a fit of giggles. Then, this sample set collected, she locked down the lid of her bulky plastic workbox, set the shoulder strap in place across her chest, and began the long gymnastic climb back to the central lab.

Rung after rung she climbed. Hand over hand. Foot in place after the previous.

The Coriolis of the station tugged at her gut, her knees, her right elbow.

Her playlist buzzed in her earbuds, predictable as the station atmosphere circulation fans.

Long, long, long, up, up, up, through the hollow needle of the station arm, as it rotated around the central column.

Aiko was a granule of dust rolling down the spoke of a toy Ferris wheel, as it spun and tumbled and flew through absent creation, above an ocean of gravity.

She entered the laboratory. She clipped the tips of each swab, and deposited them into their own tube, before filling them with an approved volume of salient fluid. She weighed and noted the weights of each tube, and created a counterweight for each, an identical tube filled to weight with salient solution. She placed each tube and counterweight within the cradle of an awaiting centrifuge, and once full up, set the machine’s RPMs and duration of spin.

Her eyes tracked one tube each time she did this, watching it make precise circles before it built up into a greasy gray smear. It was not soothing, but rather agitating, a rousing sensation. The most exciting thing in the entirety of space that she had seen. As those tubes blended together into a near-pefect ring, she felt the prickles of electric intent jitter down her scalp and flee through her toes.

She set seven such machines, and waited for full spin-up before moving to the next. And with each she felt it; something moving, doing, acting in this giant, slow moving ring.

With that Aiko set her workbox in her locker, after properly inspecting it for absentee samples or other contaminants of course, and she set off for the clean room.

Rung after rung. Hand over hand. Foot in place after the previous.

She stepped through the clean room aperture, and laid out another cleansuit, set of gloves, and booties for herself. She walked through the next aperture, and stood in the harsh UV light for the allotted time, arms spread out to her sides, like she did when pretending to fly as a child. Then she walked through the final aperture.

Aiko had, earlier in her time on the station, thought about how the station was effectively a dichotomy of positive and negative, two poles of entropic states. Here, clean, sanitary, negative. There, well, not dirty. Space stations are dangerous when they are dirty. But not clean. Sullied. Positive. And Aiko occupied her tme thinking of how she was one of a handful of solitary electrons that moved back and forth between these poles, and were expected to change their states before entering each. Then were there effectively three states? Positive, negative, and transition?

Aiko thought about that for a handful of hours before losing interest, her own internal monologue boring her even when she was almost entirely alone. Even when living in an incredibly isolated area, doing necessarily repetitive tasks, the human mind can still isolate the interesting from the boring.

Nowadays she mainly remembered movies from her childhood in vivid detail, and half-whispered the lines to herself while scraping algal trays.

Aiko stripped herself of her old, now contaminated, clean suit. The tape holding the openings of her cuffs to her wrists chafed her skin as she pulled it free, her gloves stuck to her palms like too-moist lunchmeat and flipped inside out along her fingertips. Twelve hours of hydroponic BO dripped from her elbows, knees, thighs and chin. Her interior singlet was at peak saturation, she slopped it off as well and climbed into the station shower. After a solid fifteen minute diagonal shower she dried herself vigorously and applied talcum before exiting the shower pod and setting it to clean itself; being dry was the single greatest sensation she experienced on the entire station.

Aiko dressed, and climbed again.

Rung after rung. Hand over hand. Foot in place after the previous.

She reached her quarters, contemplated rewatching something, and instead decided to sleep until her next shift was to begin.

But first, she thumbed on her personal tablet, and checked her messages. She checked and marked for junk most, but one she read over in silence, biting her lip, before turning the tablet off and laying down in her sleeping creche. She felt it, the electric prickles jangling from scalp to toes. Something was moving now, was building up a small amount of speed.

She reconsidered, and thumbed the tablet back on, before brushing her hair over her ears and holding it at arms length. She took the picture, and sent it as an attachment to her reply. Then, still jangly and buzzing, she laid down and tried to sleep.

The Ferris wheel kept tumbling, swinging through emptiness. And in the great ocean below it, someone stirred, sending ripples underground. They downloaded the photo, and printed it out, and with a careful touch they set it onto corkboard with a thumbtack.