On the Horizon
	There used to be galaxies. There still are, but the golden age of astronomy is long behind us now. If they still lay out there, in the infinite distance away beyond the horizon, their light can never reach us no matter how hard we look. There are those who claim that the Galaxy is all that exists, and all that ever has or will. They’re wrong, of course, but nobody has the heart to tell them. It makes them happy and well, isn’t that what matters? 
	The night’s sky is bright enough anyway, in most places at least. Here, there are no real nights or days. Rotations causing light to shift along a planet’s surface from a nearby star are far too irregular. There isn’t a nearby star to name this place, apart from the artificial one sitting deep in its core giving power to the station. 
Much in the way that every society, cut off from interstellar culture, calls their local star(s) some variation on the same theme of “sun”, the galaxy is just that; the Galaxy. There’s nothing else to compare it to, or name it against. Oh, in the countless tongues of those who see it nightly rise over the crest of the horizon it has names, but names are what you need when something is foreign. 
	The ramp of the passenger ship extended down in front of me, onto the hardened metal spaceport which comprised the primary port of entry on Ermina Escaparsi, the station at the edge of the universe. Its population of twenty six million made it quite the tourist town. It sat at the edge of the Aulgask region, a sparse line of stars extending out at seventy degrees from the rest of the local Galactic disc. For most of the people who arrived here, it was a place of wonder and amazement, and basically the only spectacle in the universe that felt different up close and in person. 
	I wasn’t here for tourism exactly. Well, I wasn’t here for any reason apart from it felt like an interesting place to die someday. Oh, and live before that too. I grabbed my suitcase from the baggage claim area, easing my way through the crowds of various spectacular shapes, sizes, and colors. You wouldn’t believe they could all be traced back to one tiny little piece of chemistry that had figured out that self replicating was a pretty neat idea some trillion years ago. 
The long elevators from the spaceport to the central hub tunnel of the station were mobbed. I examined a massive diagram hovering in the air beside the elevator departure areas. Discs One and Two housed the right atmosphere, and Ring Three on Disc Two spun to the right gravity, eight meters per second per second outwards. It was a bit light for what I was used to, but it wouldn’t crush me or cause too many health defects. I followed the thronging crowd towards shaft two, express travel on the blue line across the whole station. I slipped in, and the doors to the room shut.
	People grabbed onto the railings along the center and edges of it as it slowly lifted us up from the edge of gravity on the slower transport ring. The room moved along to a shuttle point between the blue and amber lines, where I crossed over to another room which took me down Disc Two. Ring Three was packed floor to distant ceiling with decorated, patched, and repaired buildings, each taking up a large block, with avenues between them and interconnected balcony complexes every ten stories or so. There were about ten of those to a building across its whole height, and they could be seen to the artificial horizon where the floor lifted up and curved behind the ceiling. The walls of Ermina Escaparsi were far too thick to ever allow for something as pointless as viewports to be installed. It would be like looking down a long tunnel at a black sheet for half a rotation. Of course, that was the reason people came to the edge of the galaxy, but the minds of infrastructural designers are inscrutable. 

	I got a job as a hull repair worker. Any ship, no matter its size, needs people to fill the holes and patch the cracks accumulated over generations of wear and tear. It was enough to qualify me for a small accommodation close to my place of work. The main perk, however, was the job itself. I met my supervisor the next day. They told me that the outer hull of this ring had a small hole, nothing complex, just a routine maintenance job, so they’d be taking me out on it with them. I followed them on the short walk down to the maintenance hall, one of the few places on the ring that had an airlock. Ghali, as they informed me their name was, handed me a suit in the right size and shape. The maintenance crews stocked extra all the time, and we looked about the same size, so they let me borrow one of theirs. I’d get my own within the week, once I had proper measurements done. 
	I slipped on the familiar second skin of a space suit, and slipped on the helmet. By the time I was slipping my helmet on, Ghali was finished suiting up. They connected up the air tubes on my suit, and handed me a safety tether. We entered the airlock, clasping our tethers to a bar which ran along the side of the airlock. The lines on them were short, intended to be released and moved via a system of rails and handgrips along the side of the station. The outer airlock doors opened, exposing a view of the whole galaxy, spread out at a slight angle.
	“Where’s the hole?” I asked in what I’d picked up of the local language.  I followed Ghali out of the airlock, moving hand over hand along the ship’s exterior. 
	“It’s up there. Spinwards,” they responded in my own tongue. I got the message loud and clear and followed their arm’s direction upwards from us. The hole was just visible as a pock of darker material on the hull, where the faint glow of the running lights illuminated it. Ghali drifted over to a panel on the outer hull and flipped it open. Brighter lights flared to life around the affected region. “Come on. Let’s get up to it. We’ll fill it up and then call in a replacement.”  
	I followed them up the surface of the ring, the galaxy slowly rotating behind us. They handed me a hand-held machine, affixed to their suit. It was roughly hand sized, with a grip, a nozzle, and a small metal compartment containing some unseen solution. “Here.” Ghali held a second one up to the edge of the hole and squeezed the handle. A thin jet of silvery material affixed to the edge of the hole and rapidly expanded outwards. “Is an aluminum foam. Now you try.” The time passed quickly as we took turns patching the hole up with the metal foam, Ghali passing the nozzle quickly over the jagged metal, then me copying their movements inexpertly. As the hole was sealed, they explained to me that our job was just to patch holes, and that central mechanics would place an order for a new hull panel within a few hours. Eventually this panel would be removed and replaced entirely, and the damaged material recycled for new hull or some other use. 
	They paused and pointed out behind us. "Don't look yet. This view is worth traveling for. Wait... now!" I turned away from the hull and looked out to the space beyond. The space beyond... everything. I stared into the infinite nothing of true emptyness. There used to be galaxies. Now, there is a galaxy, and never, never in my entire life had I truly understood what that meant more than in that single instant. The artists of old were inspired by the breathtaking vista of stars beyond their atmosphere, some moved to tears by the sheer enormity and scale of the Galaxy laid bare before them. This total nothingness bored into the mind and expanded to fill it. Nothing was deeper than that complete emptyness in person. Everything I had ever known, ever done, ever loved, amounted to huddling at the edge of a campfire. And I stared in its face and laughed. Laughed at the absurdity of it, laughed at the meaninglessness, laughed at the horizonless horizon swallowing the Galaxy whole in its inky tendrils, and I knew that this was the place where I wanted to live.