Titan’s Dollhouse

Percy didn’t sleep much anymore. 

It wasn’t so much a problem of adjusting to Titan’s day length, equivalent to 15.9 Earth days, or that Percy had spent almost seven years in deep space hibernation traveling to Saturn’s moon.

        It was the constant nightmares.

At least, Percy told himself they were nightmares.

        He knew he should talk to the base doctor, ask for meds that would knock him out, or maybe even a psych consult.

        But he was afraid that if he opened up to anyone, they would stuff him on the first shuttle back to Earth.

        And he’d given up everything for Titan. 

Everything. 

        Restless, Percy sat up on his cot. The space was narrow and windowless, with only enough room for a bed, dresser, and desk. On the desk sat the single personal item he’d brought from Earth.

        A 3D printed dollhouse.

He’d made it for a high school project, an exact miniature replica of his grandmother’s two hundred-year-old farmhouse, furniture and light fixtures and all. The house his mother had grown up in, and the house he’d grown up in. Percy had kept the dollhouse these nearly twenty years, eventually gifting it to his own daughter on her third birthday.

She’d played with it every day.

Until she got sick.

        Knock, knock, knock.

        Percy’s head snapped right. Next to the dresser, the closet door stood slightly ajar.

        Scratch, scratch, scratch.

        “W-who’s there?” Percy asked. What a stupid question, he thought. Of course no one’s there. I’d better call about those sleeping pills.

He was about to lie back down when he heard more scratching, followed by shuffling inside the closet.

“Daddy?” said a small, frightened voice. “Daddy, where are you? It’s dark and I don’t know where I am!”

Leaping out of bed, Percy threw open the closet door.

“Opal?”

There was no one there, only the hanging, lifeless form of his exposure suit and respirator.

Then, behind him, on the desk, the dollhouse lit up, throwing dancing fragments of light, like stars, on the walls and ceiling. First every light in each room at once, then alternating, blinking on and off as if in a coded message Percy could not translate.

“Opal, baby,” he said, voice strained. “Is that you?”

A strong, invisible force collided with him, like a gust of wind.

“Daddy!”

The dollhouse went dark.

Percy tugged on his exposure suit before fleeing the room.

_______________________

ORB 23 was the second-largest Oil Rig Base on Titan, a giant domed structure just offshore of Kraken Mane, the moon’s largest liquid methane lake. Percy had been instrumental in its construction, built entirely from 3D printed components using tholin, an organic material that covered the landscape in sand-like dunes.

Percy moved through the faceless crowd, passing the cafeteria, gym, and rec area, until he reached an elevator.

        “Hey, Sites!” Percy looked over and saw Lee, another design engineer. “Rig 11 is busted, just a heads up. I expect they’ll be calling you soon.”

For a fleeting minute, he considered asking Lee how he was sleeping. If he had nightmares, too, saw and heard things that weren’t there, but the moment passed.

“Thanks,” Percy mumbled, hitting the elevator button.

“Going up for a flight?” Lee’s eyebrows drew together. “Looks like a storm coming in.”

“I’ll make it quick,” Percy replied and stepped into the elevator.

_______________________

At the top of the ORB, Percy entered an airlock filled with dozens of lockers. He punched in a security code and removed a pair of long, slender wings. Percy shrugged them on, locking the wings in place, and approached the door. Using another code, he exited the chamber and walked out onto a platform.

Titan’s landscape was awash in eerie orange light. In the distance, Kraken Mane’s chemical waves lapped at the shore. Giant turbines turned steadily, providing electricity to the base. The ORB was lined with silos on the west side and drilling rigs on the east, like nodding, giant monsters on this alien moon.

Percy leapt off the platform and the wings opened. He dropped for a moment, then his wings caught the thick atmosphere, and he soared over the oil fields and around the ORB.

While he flew, Percy forgot the nightmares, his closet, and the dollhouse for a little while, but kept one bloodshot eye on the clouds gathering over the lake.

The turbine blades started to turn more quickly. 

Lee was right. A storm was coming.

Static crackled in his headset, and he assumed it was Base, calling him back to look at the broken rig. 

Percy turned toward Number 11. 

But it wasn’t the dispatcher he heard.

Instead, a child’s voice filled his ears.

“Daddy…”

And he saw her. Opal, his little girl. The healthy glow draining from her face as blood cancer slowly claimed, then extinguished, her short life.

He’d run then, because you couldn’t fly like this on Earth. The last time he saw her, tiny and frightened in a hospital bed, hooked up to equipment barely keeping her alive, she’d pleaded with him.

“Can we have a picnic by the lake?”

Lake Erie, less than fifteen miles from his grandmother’s farmhouse.

“Sure, honey,” he’d lied. And gone back to work. Building an Oil Rig Base on Titan seemed a more achievable task than watching his child die.

_______________________

Methane rained from the sky.

Percy loaded the dollhouse and a small bundle of food into a dune buggy. Base had called him to check out the broken rig, multiple times, but he’d eventually turned his headset off.

The terrain was rugged and bumpy. Wind blew dust into the windshield, making visibility low, but Percy followed his daughter’s voice, emitting through the dead headset.

“Can we have a picnic by the lake?”

He pulled up to the shore of the Kraken Mane, laid out the picnic and placed the dollhouse on the ground.

“I’m here, Opal,” he said, and felt a small hand take his.