Tor.com

Decompression. Not a dangerous one. More like old air leaving a vault that’s just been opened. An asteroid. A meteor? No, a comet! Hurtling through space. Empty space? An empty patch. But the kind of empty patch that makes the rest of it feel just as empty. Empty, except for this one thing. A ship. Where’d it come from?

Oh! Another thing! A space station.

Sheepishly entering the screen as if it’s the first day of class. It dares to be there. Under the brass and the strings emboldening its existence. A space station, the titular one, as you’re soon informed by text. The last holdout of something in nothing. It’s a pebble, and not a particularly smooth one, that wants to skim across an ocean but, aware of its breccia-like composition, says not “I’m doing this!” but, “I’m doing this?,” and only when it can eke out the affirmative does it earn the jump cut that proves, in its details, it is not an “I” but a “we,” tirelessly working to make sure the pebble can make, if not all its skips, then at least the next one.

Since it first aired, I have regularly taken a strange comfort in the first thirty seconds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s opening credits.

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