"You erased a ship." Dennis Knowles didn't phrase it as a question because questions implied uncertainty, and there was nothing uncertain about what he'd witnessed four hours ago in docking bay three. He sat across from Haroon in the station cafeteria, the morning shift beginning around them with the usual shuffle of personnel grabbing breakfast and caffeine before heading to their assignments. Nobody sat within three tables of them. Nobody ever did when Haroon was present.
Haroon was drinking coffee. The same terrible station coffee that everyone complained about but continued to consume because the alternative was facing a twelve-hour shift without chemical assistance. He took a sip, set the cup down with precise care, and met Dennis's eyes with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. "I resolved the situation. That's what you called me for."
"I called you because the ship shouldn't have existed." Dennis kept his voice low, aware that even though nobody was sitting close, sound carried in the cafeteria's acoustic nightmare of hard surfaces and poor design. "No drive signature. No power source. No crew. It was just there, like someone had copied and pasted a three-dimensional object into our docking bay without bothering with the underlying physics that should have made it possible."
"And now it's not there." Haroon took another sip of coffee. "Problem solved."
Dennis wanted to argue, wanted to demand explanations, wanted to grab Haroon by the shoulders and shake him until he showed some emotional response to the fact that he'd casually deleted an entire vessel from reality like someone hitting backspace on a typo. But Dennis had worked with Haroon for three years. He'd learned that demanding explanations was pointless. Haroon did what needed to be done, and the methods he used existed somewhere beyond Dennis's ability to comprehend or question. That was the unspoken arrangement. Dennis identified problems. Haroon made them stop being problems. The space between those two events was a black box that nobody was allowed to open.
"Harry deleted the security footage," Dennis said instead. "Logged it as a sensor malfunction. Commander Reeves won't see anything unusual in the overnight reports."
"Good." Haroon's tone suggested this was exactly what should have happened, the natural and obvious response to witnessing something impossible.
"Sean's team saw you walk into that ship. They saw it disappear. You can't ask them to pretend that didn't happen." Dennis leaned forward, elbows on the table, trying to read something in Haroon's expression and failing completely. "They're going to talk. People always talk."
"They'll talk to each other. They won't talk to anyone else." Haroon set down his coffee cup with that same precise care, like he was performing a ritual that required exact movements. "People who witness things they can't explain have two choices. They can try to share that experience with others and be dismissed as unreliable or delusional, or they can find the handful of people who were there with them and create a small circle of shared understanding. Sean's team will choose the second option. They always do."
The casual certainty in his voice suggested this wasn't speculation. This was pattern recognition based on previous incidents, previous moments when Haroon had done something that violated the fundamental rules of how reality was supposed to work. Dennis wondered how many times it had happened before he'd arrived at Station Theta-7. How many impossible things had Haroon casually accomplished in the three years before Dennis's transfer? How many people on this station carried memories of witnessing the man in the cyan suit make the universe bend to his will?
"What was that ship?" Dennis asked, even though he knew the question was probably pointless. "Where did it come from?"
Haroon was quiet for a long moment, and Dennis felt a flicker of hope that maybe, just this once, he might get an actual answer. Then Haroon said, "It doesn't matter anymore. It's not here. It can't hurt anyone. That's sufficient."
"Sufficient for what?"
"For you to go back to your normal duties and forget this happened." Haroon stood, picking up his empty coffee cup. "You have maintenance scheduled in Sector 6 today. Coolant line inspections. That's where your attention should be."
Dennis watched him walk away, the cyan suit catching the cafeteria's harsh lighting, making him visible even after he'd left the room. The conversation was over. The incident was closed. Dennis was expected to file it away in whatever mental folder he kept for "things Haroon did that I'm not supposed to think about" and move on with his life. Three years of this. Three years of watching a man casually violate physics and then act like it was equivalent to changing a light bulb. Three years of being simultaneously grateful that Haroon was here to handle impossible problems and terrified of what it meant that such problems kept occurring.
Dennis finished his own coffee, threw the cup in the recycling chute, and headed toward Sector 6. Coolant line inspections. Normal work. Predictable tasks with predictable outcomes. He could do that. He could pretend that four hours ago he hadn't watched reality itself bend around Haroon Dwelight like a story being edited by an author who'd decided certain plot points were no longer necessary.
Across the cafeteria, at a table near the observation window, three people were having a very different conversation.
Harold Osborne had been joined by Tobias Mcconnell and Sean Osborn, the three men who'd been most directly involved in the previous night's incident. They spoke in voices barely above whispers, leaning close, eyes occasionally flicking toward the entrance as if expecting Haroon to reappear and overhear them. They'd been talking for twenty minutes, going over the same points repeatedly, trying to construct a shared understanding of what they'd witnessed.
"I've seen him fix things before," Tobias said, stirring his coffee without drinking it. "We all have. The hull breach last week. That power conduit failure three months ago. He shows up, the problem disappears. But this was different. This wasn't maintenance. This was—" He struggled for the right word. "—deletion. Like he just reached into reality and pulled that ship out of existence."
"I watched it happen on the security feed," Harry added, keeping his voice even lower than Tobias's. "One frame it was there. Next frame it was gone. No transition. No explosion or teleport effect. Just gone. And he walked out like he'd finished a routine inspection."
Sean hadn't said much during the conversation. He'd spent most of the twenty minutes staring at his hands, occasionally flexing his fingers like he was checking to make sure they still worked properly. Now he looked up at the other two men and said, "We need to talk about what he is."
The table went silent. It was one thing to discuss what Haroon could do, the impossible feats they'd witnessed over months or years of working alongside him. It was another thing entirely to voice the question that nobody wanted to ask because asking it meant confronting implications that made sleep difficult and sanity questionable.
"We don't know what he is," Harry said carefully. "We know what he does. We know he works maintenance. We know he solves problems. Beyond that—"
"Beyond that, he's not human." Sean's voice was flat, stating what he believed was an obvious fact. "Humans can't do what he does. Humans can't erase ships from existence. Humans can't fix hull breaches by looking at them. Whatever Haroon Dwelight is, it's not one of us."
Tobias shifted uncomfortably. "That's a hell of an accusation to make without evidence."
"I have evidence. I watched him walk into an impossible ship and make it stop existing. What more evidence do you need?" Sean's frustration was bleeding through his attempt at controlled volume. "We're all dancing around this because acknowledging it feels insane, but keeping quiet about it doesn't change what's true. That man—that thing—in the cyan suit is something beyond human comprehension, and we're all just pretending it's normal because the alternative is admitting we work alongside something we can't understand or predict."
Harry took a slow breath. "Let's say you're right. Let's say Haroon isn't human. What do you want to do about it? Report him to Commander Reeves? Tell her we think the station's most effective maintenance worker is actually some kind of incomprehensible entity? She'll laugh us out of her office."
"Maybe she already knows," Tobias suggested quietly. "Maybe everyone in command knows. Maybe that's why he's here. Not because Station Theta-7 needed another maintenance worker, but because this station needed him specifically."
That possibility hung in the air between them, heavy and uncomfortable. The idea that Haroon's presence wasn't random chance or standard personnel assignment, but deliberate placement by people who understood what he was and what he could do. It made a certain horrible sense. Station Theta-7 wasn't particularly important by galactic standards. It was a resupply depot and research outpost, handling moderate traffic and conducting scientific studies that were interesting but not groundbreaking. Why would such a facility have someone like Haroon unless his presence served a specific purpose?
"We should leave it alone," Harry said finally. "Whatever he is, whatever he's really doing here, it's not our business. He hasn't hurt anyone. He solves problems. That's enough."
"Is it?" Sean looked between the two other men. "Is it really enough to just accept that we work alongside something that can rewrite reality, and we're supposed to pretend that's normal? What happens when whatever he's really here for becomes relevant? What happens when the facade drops and we see what he actually is?"
Nobody had an answer for that. They sat in silence for another minute, then dispersed to their respective duties, carrying their questions and fears with them. The conversation was over, but the concerns remained, settling into their minds like sediment at the bottom of a lake. Eventually they would talk again, share more observations, build more theories. But for now, they had work to do, and work was a convenient distraction from thinking too hard about the man in the cyan suit.
Haroon, meanwhile, had reached Sector 6 and was beginning his coolant line inspection. The work was genuinely routine, requiring him to check pressure readings, look for signs of corrosion or stress, and confirm that the automated monitoring systems were functioning correctly. It was the kind of task that any competent technician could handle, and it occupied perhaps ten percent of his attention. The remaining ninety percent was dedicated to monitoring the seventeen other situations occurring simultaneously across Station Theta-7, none of which required his direct intervention but all of which he was aware of with perfect clarity.
In Sector 3, a medical technician was running diagnostic tests on equipment that would fail in approximately four days if left unaddressed. Haroon made a note to schedule maintenance before the failure occurred. In the residential modules, two personnel were having an argument about shift assignments that would escalate to physical confrontation in six hours unless one of them was reassigned to different duties. Haroon accessed the duty roster and made a minor adjustment, ensuring their schedules wouldn't overlap. In the command center, Commander Reeves was reviewing budget reports and noticing discrepancies that would lead her to question supply chain management within the week. Haroon had already identified the source of those discrepancies—a logistics officer skimming resources for personal profit—and had quietly ensured that evidence of the theft would surface naturally without requiring his direct involvement.
He saw all of it. Knew all of it. Managed all of it with the same casual efficiency he applied to checking coolant lines. This was his function. Not the maintenance work, though he performed it adequately. Not the problem-solving, though he solved problems constantly. His function was to ensure Station Theta-7 continued operating smoothly, to prevent crises before they developed, to maintain the illusion of normalcy even as he quietly edited reality to preserve that illusion.
The ship in docking bay three had been an anomaly. A probe sent by something that shouldn't have been able to reach this far into stabilized space. Its appearance had been a test, an attempt to measure the station's defenses and identify vulnerabilities. Haroon had responded by ensuring the probe no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Not destroyed. Not repelled. Simply removed from the equation entirely, excised from reality like a surgeon removing a tumor. The entities that had sent the probe would notice its disappearance, would recognize that something had intercepted their test, but they wouldn't know what. They would hesitate. Reconsider. Choose different targets. The station was safe, at least for now.
Haroon finished his coolant line inspection and logged the results. All systems nominal. No maintenance required. He moved on to his next scheduled task, a routine that would continue until his shift ended and he returned to his quarters to sleep or pretend to sleep or whatever approximation of rest his physiology required. Tomorrow would bring new problems, new situations requiring adjustment, new moments where he would need to quietly intervene to maintain the carefully constructed normality that kept two hundred people living and working in deep space without realizing how precarious their existence actually was.
He didn't mind the work. Didn't resent the necessity of constant vigilance. This was what he was. This was what he did. The man in the cyan suit who made problems disappear. It was sufficient. It had to be.
In his quarters, folded carefully in the locker where he stored his suit each night, The Absolute Void waited silently. It had no thoughts, no desires, no awareness beyond its fundamental nature as a tool for erasing things from existence. But if it could have spoken, it might have noted that it had been used seventeen times in the past month, each activation so subtle and controlled that nobody except Haroon himself had noticed. Small corrections. Minor adjustments. The deletion of possibilities before they could manifest as actual problems.
Reality was messy. Existence was chaotic. Haroon's job was to edit both with precision and restraint, maintaining the narrative of normalcy even as he quietly removed the elements that threatened to destabilize that narrative. It was delicate work. Invisible work. The kind of work that nobody appreciated because if he did it correctly, nobody would ever know it had been necessary.
He was good at his job. He had been doing it for a very long time. And he would continue doing it for as long as Station Theta-7 required his presence, or until the entities that had sent that probe decided to try again with different methods. Whichever came first.
The cyan suit hung in his locker, waiting for tomorrow. Reality continued existing, unaware of how close it had come to being edited tonight. And Station Theta-7 slept peacefully, protected by a man whose very existence was a contradiction that nobody was quite ready to confront.
Ordinary days. Ordinary work. Ordinary problems with extraordinary solutions that nobody wanted to examine too closely. That was life aboard Station Theta-7. That was life in the proximity of Haroon Dwelight. And for most people, that was exactly how they preferred to keep it.