From the Pod Window

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. David's window was in the pod. David and Anastasia were part of the second generation that had been on the Space Station. It was part of experiment to see what happens when children were born and raised in space. Budget costs and wars caused the surviving members of the space station to return home. Not everyone was returning home, David for one was not. He died on a space walk, and the memory of that haunted Ana.

There were over thirty people returning to earth. Returning to Kazakstan to be exact. In Ana's pod, there were eight people. Her parents were Leon and Carla. David's parents were also on board. Then there was Allen and his parents. The pod had food for forty days for all eight people. Everyone was already weak and thin, due to the limited number of supplies that had been coming to the Space Station. Gravity was also shocking for Ana and Allen who had never been on Earth before. All the parents, were also not used to the feel of it.

Ana's team hadn't been able to contact anyone, not anyone in the other pods or the people from ISA (the International Space Agency). Regulations required them to remain in their pods until evaluated by the doctors and researchers. This is especially important for Ana's generation who had never been on Earth before. The team experienced some dizziness and some members were experiencing differences with their eyesight. The younger members kept commenting on how heavy their arms and legs felt.

The problem with leaving the pods is that they didn't have the clothing warm enough to survive in the wilderness. From their pod window, Ana couldn't even see the other pods. It seemed for now they were stuck waiting for help.

Ana spent her time looking out David's window. Part of her wanted to just break out of their pod. She wanted to smell the fresh air and feel the grass. She wanted to stick her toes in the freezing water of the nearby lake that she could see from the window. In the distance, she could see the mountains. Ana wanted to touch snow for the first time. Ana wanted to taste it. Her mother said that when she walked across it, the snow would crunch beneath her feet. Occasionally they would see birds. When that happened, Ana would race to look them up in a book that her father had brought with them.

Every family was allowed to request three items from home to be sent with the supplies each year. Ana's father always used the family requests to be three books. Ana's mother thought that a waste. She'd say they could look up that information on the computers, but her father always said there was nothing like an actual book in your hands. Ana loved her books, but she always had to return them at the end of the year in order to get the new ones. The space station had limited space, so it couldn't be bogged down with every families collections. Last year, her father requested a book of a mammals, one of plant life, and one on birds. Ana used this book now to fill her time.

The waiting seemed endless as the days passed by without contact. There were debates back and forth between the three families on the pod. There had been wars on earth recently. Nobody on the pod had identification papers. They didn't have weapons to protect themselves from enemies or animals. Staying on the pod had food and shelter. The heater was working, but nobody knew if the seal was broken if it would shutdown the computers. So everyone waited for a rescue.