Swipe Right
Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 29: A Place That Breathes
ARK-1 did not feel like a station anymore.
That realization came to Darius one quiet cycle as he walked without purpose—no briefing to attend, no decision pressing at his back. Just movement. Just observation.
The corridors had softened.
Not structurally—those remained precise, load-balanced, intentional—but aesthetically. Lines curved where they once cut. Light diffused instead of reflecting. The station no longer announced efficiency; it invited presence.
Residential districts had grown in clusters rather than stacks. Buildings leaned into one another the way neighborhoods did on Earth, oriented toward shared courtyards instead of corridors. No one had wanted endless verticality. Too many people associated that with hierarchy.
Here, doors opened onto green.
Actual green.
Park spaces spread organically, not symmetrically. Paths meandered. Benches were placed where people naturally slowed down, not where planners thought they should. Water features threaded through it all—streams that recycled endlessly, shallow enough to touch, deep enough to reflect.
Children splashed there sometimes. Quietly. As if aware they were somewhere fragile and rare.
Amina had insisted on water early.
“Life needs motion,” she had said. “Stillness teaches stagnation.”
The Semaian engineers had agreed—not philosophically, but empirically.
Animals had come next.
Not zoos.
Liberations.
Species that had outgrown Earth’s shrinking margins—pollinators first, then small mammals, birds, reptiles. Creatures that did not require explanation or ownership. They were introduced carefully, with ecosystems built outward from necessity rather than aesthetics.
Nothing ornamental.
Everything purposeful.
Biologists walked ARK-1’s green zones daily, studying interactions no one had ever been able to observe before. Lunar gravity altered gait, flight, growth. Some species adapted quickly. Others required adjustment. Failures were recorded. Successes protected.
For the first time in human history, ecosystems were not discovered or destroyed.
They were designed with restraint.
Darius paused near a shallow pond where something that looked like a frog—though slightly wrong in proportion—rested on a stone warmed by artificial sun.
It croaked.
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