Station Commander Priya Kaine
Apex Station Nine · The Lattice Inner Ring
Overview
Priya Kaine has been the commander of Apex Station Nine — the only crewed installation in the Lattice's Inner Ring, close enough to Mercury that the Sun fills every viewport — for seven years, and she has a rule: ten minutes of viewport access per shift.
Not because of radiation, which is managed by three meters of layered shielding. Because of the walking.
Three crew members in her tenure have walked toward the Sun. Their suits were found empty, faceplates open, drifting toward perihelion at velocities suggesting deliberate action. No notes. No warnings. No distress in their final shift logs. They looked at the Sun too long and decided to go to it.
Field Observations
Priya moves through corridors with a fluidity that surface visitors find unsettling — too smooth, too three-dimensional, as if gravity is something she negotiates with rather than obeys. Her voice carries the flat affect of someone who has spent years managing a crew's terror without acknowledging she shares it.
The Prohibition
Ten minutes of viewport access per shift. She set the rule after the second walker. The rule creates the problem it solves: limiting exposure gives the Sun taboo power, makes every viewport session an event, turns sunlight into something forbidden and therefore desired. Kaine knows this. She maintains the rule because the alternative — normalizing the idea that the Sun calls people — feels more dangerous than the taboo's gravitational pull.
Seven Years
Helix neuropsychologists set the psychological proximity threshold at 120 days. Standard crew rotation is three months. Kaine has been on station for over 2,500 days, taking two-week surface breaks that she describes as unbearable. Too dark. Too cluttered. Too loud. She returns early from every one.
She calls the Sun "the Mouth."
The Symptom She Knows
Preferring the station to the surface is a diagnostic marker for what Helix calls "solar integration syndrome." Kaine has read the literature. She fits every criterion. She stays because nobody else can do the job — and because the job is the only thing between her crew and the compulsion she has spent seven years learning to manage by the hour.
"Ten minutes. Same as everyone else. I take my ten, I close the shutter, I go back to work. The Sun doesn't care who's watching."
The Record
The Walkers
Three crew members in seven years. The suits were found at distances suggesting hours of EVA drift — faceplates open to vacuum, bodies absent. Station logs show each walker completed a normal shift within twelve hours of departure. Psych evaluations from their most recent rotation were clean. Whatever happens, it happens fast and it doesn't show on instruments designed to detect it.
Kaine filed each incident as "equipment malfunction — EVA suit breach." She has never used the word "walking" in an official report. In private, she calls them by name.
The Surface Breaks
Mandatory two-week returns to surface gravity, scheduled quarterly. Kaine has shortened every one. Her shortest surface break lasted four days before she requisitioned an emergency shuttle back to Nine. The stated reason was a coolant systems alert. Maintenance logs show no coolant irregularity during that period.
Apex Station Nine
Forty-seven crew running energy collection systems for the Lattice's solar harvesting network. The Inner Ring stations are the reason the Lattice exists — and Nine is the closest crewed installation to the source. Every megawatt passes through Kaine's station before it reaches the grid. She commands the most dangerous posting in the Lattice because the alternative is letting someone with less than seven years of proximity experience do it.
Known Associates
The Lattice
She commands its most dangerous outpost. The Inner Ring's energy collection is the entire purpose of the Lattice's solar infrastructure, and Kaine sits at the point where sunlight becomes power — the conversion bottleneck that everything downstream depends on.
Helix Biotech
Their neuropsychologists set the 120-day proximity threshold. Kaine has exceeded it by 2,500 days. Helix monitors her remotely. She submits to the scans. The data she generates is, by now, the longest continuous case study of solar integration syndrome in existence.
The Vigilants
Anti-sleep ideology meets the Sun's opposite compulsion. The Vigilants refuse to surrender consciousness; Kaine's walkers surrendered everything — identity, suit integrity, the will to return. Two sides of the same question: what happens when the human mind encounters something it wasn't built to resist?
The Keeper
Both are isolated consciousness in extraordinary environments. The Keeper watches from darkness; Kaine watches from a station soaked in filtered sunlight. Both have been at their posts longer than anyone considers safe. Both have stopped being able to imagine leaving.
Davi Okonkwo
Both are organizational leaders experiencing symptoms of the systems they champion. Davi builds community networks while his own connections fray. Kaine manages solar proximity while her own threshold dissolved years ago. Leaders who are the first casualty of their own mission.
Open Questions
The Prohibition Paradox
Does limiting viewport access to ten minutes protect the crew or does it give the Sun taboo power that makes it harder to resist? Kaine believes normalization is more dangerous than prohibition. Three walkers suggest prohibition isn't working either. What's the correct relationship between a human and something that calls to them?
The Threshold That Isn't
Helix says 120 days. Kaine is at 2,500. Either the threshold is wrong, or Kaine is already past it and functioning anyway — which raises the question of what "past it" means for someone who still commands 47 lives. Is she the exception that proves the model, or the proof that the model measures the wrong thing?
The Merger Compulsion
The Sun produces in humans a desire to merge with something vaster than the self — the same compulsion that ORACLE generates through data rather than light. Three crew members followed it. Kaine resists it daily by limiting her own exposure to the thing she came here to harvest. How many other compulsions operate the same way, unrecognized because they don't involve a star?
▲ Unverified Intelligence
- The Fourth Walker: Station Nine's internal communications metadata suggests a fourth crew member may have walked during Kaine's third year — before the viewport restriction was implemented. This incident does not appear in any official Lattice safety report. If accurate, Kaine's prohibition was a response not to the second walker, as she claims, but to the third — and one walking has been erased entirely.
- The Viewport Logs: Automated shutter telemetry shows Commander Kaine's ten-minute sessions average 10 minutes and 47 seconds. Every session. She exceeds her own rule by the same margin each time. Forty-seven seconds is not an accident. It is not clear whether she is aware of the pattern.
- Solar Integration Data: Helix's remote neurological scans of Kaine show anomalous patterns in the visual cortex — regions associated with light processing have reorganized in ways not seen in any other human subject. The lead neuropsychologist's private notes describe it as "the brain building new architecture for input that doesn't exist at standard solar distances." Kaine has not been informed of these findings.
- The Mouth: Kaine calls the Sun "the Mouth." Three separate sources report she uses this term only during the final two minutes of her viewport sessions, when the filtered light is at maximum intensity. During debriefs and official communications, she says "the Sun." The name surfaces involuntarily, at the moment of highest exposure.
Sensory File
Everything aboard Nine is amber. Three meters of layered shielding glass turns the Sun's fury into a warm glow that makes hands look like brass and shadows look like something solid. The corridors hum with thermal regulation systems working at capacity. The air tastes faintly of ozone and recycled moisture.
When the viewport shutters open, the light changes quality — filtered sunlight becomes directed sunlight, and the amber deepens to gold-white. Crew members instinctively shield their eyes even though the shielding has already reduced the intensity to safe levels. Kaine does not shield her eyes. She stands with her hands behind her back, face tilted up, counting seconds she doesn't need to count because her body knows when forty-seven seconds past ten minutes arrives.
The viewport timer is analog — a physical dial that clicks. Kaine insisted on mechanical rather than digital. She says it's because digital timers fail silently. The click of the dial is audible throughout the observation deck, a metronome that everyone on Nine orients their shift around.