Living in the present

Living in the present is a practice of attention that helps the isolated crew endure what they cannot change. Thebes describes it as concentrating on one small action or human exchange at a time. Sully tries to follow that example aboard Aether, where routine can bring her back from memories of home and where, after Devi’s death, work becomes both a refuge and a way to remain connected to the surviving crew. The practice offers no cure for grief: its value lies in making the next moment bearable enough to inhabit.

Thebes’s Practice of Attention

When Sully asks how Thebes has managed to keep going, he does not claim to be whole. He explains that he has learned to keep the pieces of himself separate, one at a time, because he has nowhere else to go. His method is deliberately modest: while brushing his teeth, he thinks only about brushing his teeth; while replacing an air filter, only about that task. When loneliness rises, he starts a conversation with another crew member, an act that helps both of them. His advice is not that the crew can repair the situation on Earth by thinking about it, but that they must live in the moment they actually occupy.

Thebes notices that Sully is already moving in and out of the present. She can seem far away, then return to ask him questions. His account gives her a concrete discipline rather than a promise that sorrow will pass. Presence is something practiced through ordinary tasks and contact with other people, not a permanent state of calm.

Sully’s Return to Aether

Sully increasingly uses Thebes’s approach when memories pull her away from the spacecraft. She tries to stop rebuilding the details of her former home in Vancouver: Jack’s cologne, Lucy in the bath, and the laundry she used to fold. When she catches herself living in another year and place, she counts to ten and reminds herself that she is still aboard Aether, in the asteroid belt, travelling toward a silent Earth. That return to the present is physical as well as mental. She goes back to Little Earth, feels gravity in her muscles and food settling in her stomach, and recognizes the spacecraft as the home that matters to her then.

The routine does not require her to be alone. Sully finds Harper at the kitchen table, where they play cards; elsewhere, she listens to probes with him, reads scientific papers aloud while he exercises, and shares his company. Their time together gives the present a social texture, even as thoughts of home remain a weight that can pull hope back toward fear. The game and conversation do not resolve that uncertainty, but they give Sully something immediate to do with another person.

Loss, Memory, and Repetition

The contrast between presence and painful memory appears in Devi’s recurring dream of her family in Kolkata. In the dream, she sits with her parents and brothers at the family table; then the scene fades and she wakes to the knowledge that they are gone and that she is alone. Its repetition makes the past feel briefly present, only for the return to waking life to renew the loss. Sully cannot offer certainty that everything will be all right. She stays beside Devi, and when she later wakes to find her crewmate crying, moves closer and weeps with her. Their shared grief is a form of company, not an answer to the dream.

After Devi dies during a spacewalk, Sully’s effort to stay in the present is overwhelmed by the event’s repeated return. She imagines alternate versions in which she might have brought Devi back in time or noticed the failing carbon-dioxide scrubber sooner, but these imagined endings offer no relief. She has followed Harper’s instruction to put aside her thoughts and install the bolts one by one; afterward she returns to the compartment and cannot escape the memory of Devi drifting away. The vacuum surrounding Aether becomes inseparable from the terror she has experienced. Rather than finding safety in attention, Sully eventually lets the ache settle into her breathing and heartbeat, acknowledging that she will not feel safe again.

Work as a Way Forward

In the immediate aftermath, Sully withdraws from her crewmates. When Harper and Thebes visit, she can manage only a promise of tomorrow: she needs to get beyond the day on which Devi died. The word marks a limit to what she can face, not a dismissal of her friends’ concern. The next day, exhaustion notwithstanding, she gets up to configure the communications dish, the work connected to the events that led to the spacewalk.

Working beside Thebes in the communications pod gives Sully relief because they can attend to the task without discussing the death. She fears that an expression of sympathy might send her back into hiding, yet the shared work also makes her recognize that Devi’s death belongs to the whole crew: the others witnessed it through the helmet cameras. At lunch, the surviving crew gathers around the last prepared dish of shepherd’s pie, eats in silence, and joins hands. The ordinary meal becomes a collective acknowledgment of grief.

Sully continues calibrating the communications system, testing its gain and adjusting its settings with Thebes. When he leaves, she stays to listen. She cannot call the feeling connection in any simple sense, since no one is yet answering, but the work has made her feel less alone. She has done what she can to make contact possible and is prepared to see what comes next. In this movement from intrusive memory, through focused labor, toward a cautious readiness, living in the present becomes neither forgetfulness nor recovery completed. It is the means by which Sully carries loss forward while continuing to act.