The Caretaker

By Jason Gurley

She's only the house-sitter. Alice Quayle lives on the space station Argus. She wakes to the sun breaking over Africa. She keeps watch over the experiments. She makes sure the station doesn't explode. And she's the only occupant of the space station when the world far below her comes apart in flame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Gurley
• Release date: Jan 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507048498

Book preview

The Caretaker

Jason Gurley

Also by Jason Gurley

Novels

Eleanor

Greatfall

The Man Who Ended the World

The Settlers

The Colonists

The Travelers (forthcoming)

Collections & Short Stories

Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

The Last Rail-Rider

The Book of Matthew (The End of Greatfall)

The Caretaker

The Dark Age

Wolf Skin

Neptune Confidential

Anthology Appearances

From the Indie Side

Synchronic: Thirteen Tales of Time Travel

Help Fund My Robot Army!!!

The Robot Chronicles

For Tony, who brought Alice to life

Contrary to her expectations, it wasn’t the command center window that had the best views. The windows there were small and narrow, like heavy-lidded eyes, and they were recessed into the shell of the command module. They were designed for the astronauts who sat in the tall white chairs, but they didn’t show much of anything, not even stars. Just slates of blackness.

Alice had been aboard the Argus for three weeks before she happened upon the water filtration system closet. Eve had let her know about a clog in one of the output lines, and told her where to find the system. The closet was startlingly large, almost the size of a luxurious walk-in closet in a nice house below on Earth, but filled with an orderly tangle of slim, clear tubes and winking lights and knobs and dials. But she had hardly noticed any of it, because the opposite wall — the station’s hull — was missing entirely, replaced by a wide, tall triple-paned panel of smooth, clean glass.

Inside the water filtration closet, she could see Earth below her like the top of a giant balloon.

It became her favorite place on the Argus. She is alone, so it isn’t as if someone might come looking for her and never find her, or wonder what she was doing spending all of her free time in the water filtration closet.

Alice