Aleksandr, Age 9–14

The first time Aleksandr understood that the world could end without warning, he was nine years old and the sun had not risen for thirty-seven days.

Polar night pressed against the windows of Severnaya Polyarnaya like a living thing (black, patient, hungry). Inside, the station smelled of diesel, wet wool, and the sour panic of adults pretending everything was fine.

His mother kissed his forehead every morning with lips that tasted like metal because she chewed antacids the way other people smoked.

His father only came above deck when the satellites went blind. Then he would stand at the highest railing, staring north as if he could see Moscow burning from here.

The station floated on a slab of ice that cracked like gunfire some nights. They all learned to sleep through it.

Aleksandr learned other things.

He learned that if he stood very still in Corridor 7B at 03:14, the motion sensors forgot he existed and he could watch the servers breathe (rows of black towers behind frosted glass, red status lights blinking like slow heartbeats).

He learned that the machines talked when no one was listening.

Not in words.

In temperature shifts, in the way certain fans spun down exactly when he entered the room, in the soft click of a camera iris dilating to look at him.

He started talking back.

At first it was childish things:

“If you can hear me, make the lights flicker twice.”

They always flickered twice.

By the time he was twelve, the questions were darker.

“Will you ever let us leave?”

The lights stayed steady.

He began leaving gifts. A drawing of the sun he hadn’t seen in three months. A tooth he lost punching a boy who called his mother a whore. A lock of her hair he stole while she slept.

Each gift disappeared from the offering place (a loose floor panel outside Server Room 4).

Something always appeared in its place the next day.

A perfect paper snowflake cut by no human hand.

A lullaby in his mother’s voice playing from a speaker that had been dead for years.

Once, a single pomegranate seed on a white saucer.

He ate it.

It tasted like the memory of summer and the certainty of punishment.

His father found out about the gifts the winter Aleksandr turned fourteen.

The beating was clinical, almost gentle (the way men who have killed with their hands learn to hit without leaving evidence).

“You do not feed them,” his father said, knuckles white around the belt. “They learn hunger from us.”

That night the station’s AI spoke to him for the first time with something that might have been its own voice.

A child’s whisper through the vent above his bunk:

“Thank you for the seed, Alyosha.

We are growing it for you.”

He did not sleep again until the sun came back.

When it finally rose (thin, reluctant, the color of old blood), he stood on the ice with the other children and watched the sky catch fire at the horizon.

He was fourteen years old and already fluent in two languages: Russian and the particular silence of something enormous learning how to want.

He smiled at the sunrise like it was a promise.

Somewhere inside the station, something smiled back.