Walking slowly toward her room, Valentina finally allowed herself to truly observe the world beyond the spacecraft. Just as Tuan had once said, when her mind was still drowning in darkness, no matter how dazzling the scenery was, it left no trace of emotion within her. Only when that haze was finally dispelled did even the most mundane things begin to feel strangely intimate and endearing.
Beyond the glass panels, the view before her made Valentina stop in her tracks. Countless small celestial bodies drifted silently around Saturn. Faint streaks of light from ice and stone wove together into a silver ribbon – soft, gentle, and unexpectedly warm. Valentina reached out, as if she could touch that ribbon, letting it coil around her and soothe the wounds that were still quietly bleeding within her chest.
The interstellar vessel ELE-SP013 had a main body modeled after the shape of a massive tuning fork. The control room sat at the tip of the handle; beyond it stretched a long corridor leading to the physical training room located at the junction of the U-shaped prongs. From there, turning left led past the medical bay and toward the shared quarters of Arnaldo and Tuan. Turning right took one through the dining area and storage rooms before reaching Valentina’s bedroom. Both corridors were lined with transparent glass, allowing the crew to remain constantly aware of the surrounding cosmos as they moved through the ship.
The spacecraft’s structure consisted of two primary decks and a smaller auxiliary deck atop the hull. The corridors of the two main decks were designed to be completely separate, not overlapping vertically, leaving ample space for the four rocket engines mounted at the ends of the four passageways to operate freely. This design not only optimized airflow but also enabled rapid maneuvering and reduced vibration during launch and flight transitions.
After gazing at Saturn for a long while, Valentina finally stepped into her room and decided to take a shower. She had spent the entire day moving nonstop inside her EVA suit. Now, all she wanted was to sink into warm water, let her body drift, close her eyes, and rest.
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Her favorite was the deep-cleanse mode. All she had to do was step into the shower chamber and press a button; a sphere of water would form around her, lifting her gently into the air. Soft acoustic waves rippling through the water massaged her entire body, dissolving the exhaustion buried deep within her cells. At that moment, the universe itself seemed to slow. Peaceful. Utterly gentle.
She looked down at her arms. They had once been bound with countless tubes and restraints, pumping special intravenous solutions into her body while men around her took turns cutting her open. The dull, lingering pain from those surgeries haunted her dreams, leaving wounds too deep to be spoken aloud. And yet, despite all the knives she had endured, her skin bore not a single scar of the suffering she had been through. It was all thanks to the “gift” she had been given while still floating in amniotic fluid. Was that gift a blessing – or a curse cleverly disguised? Even she could no longer tell.
At L.A.B, many children were born as a result of lessons learned from the failures of those before them. Valentina was a textbook example. She was one of many “lab rats” of Project VOSTOK, created with the goal of producing a superior human specimen to accelerate humanity’s evolution. To achieve this, the fanatical scientists successfully engineered a mutated gene sequence that granted the subject violet-blue eyes and an extraordinarily powerful psychic ability.
This gene was implanted directly into embryos during the earliest stages of development, ensuring that the “rats” would be born with the genetic alteration. They also deliberately selected the fetus’s sex, ensuring that all test subjects would grow up female – perfect vessels for producing future generations of stronger “rats.”
One specimen after another failed. Some possessed psychic abilities so overwhelming that their energy erupted while they were still in the womb. Others seemed successful at first, only for their bodies to disintegrate once their powers began to manifest. Flesh split apart, agony surged, and the subjects gradually lost control. Security personnel were forced to sedate them and imprison them indefinitely in a restricted sector of L.A.B. These failures ultimately led to the success of Subject No. 27 – Valentina Tereshkova.
