Let me spread awareness for Voices of the Void!

You are Dr. Kellin, freshly graduated Astronomist and you are pretty desperate for money, a job that'll turn into money or both. There's this observatorium in Dunkeltaler Forest in Switzerland — Alpen Signal Observatorium. Their recruiter looked you up and after a brief and positive online interview, you find yourself at the security booth to this fenced-off piece of nature...at night.

It's a little weird that there's no guard stationed, but you chalk it up to the Swiss being weird or something. You shrug, put down the suitcase, grab the flashlight and trot through the forest towards your home for the next few weeks. The walk takes a few minutes, so you go through the job description in your head one more time:

1. Use the satellite dishes to pick up any outstanding signals from space
2. Download the audiovisual data
3. Process said data
4. (optional) Give the data a listen
5. Send the data back to the others at the headquarters
6. Maintain the transformers, servers and radio towers
7. Collect your six-figure paycheck
8. Use an arbitrary "points" currency to pay for even the most basic things in the meantime

One of the very few pictures they sent to you of the base. This is where you'll sleep.

It isn't quite as nice-looking as in the pictures the company sent you. Someone had written "poop" on the wall of a toilet stall. Other than that and the weird mannequins standing around, it's alright. You've been in worse flats during your studies. For now, you unpack your suitcase — taking a long, proud, look at your graduation certificate — and rest for the night.

Very shortly after sunrise, you're awoken from your slumber by a blaring beeping noise. It's not your clock alarm, you hadn't set one. Frantically, you run down the stairs to see what's goi—THUNK the door didn't open as fast as your body tried to pass through it. Great, now your ears ring from the alarm and you're bleeding from your nose on top. You open the door and limp towards the alarm, towards the garage. By the time you reach it, the alarm has quieted down and was replaced with a constant whirring; could be a small plane? A drone? It takes a bit but you finally remember that Dr. Bao emailed you something about a supply drone arriving every day. The drone-bag contained two rolls of recording tape, a drive for storing signals, a zip drive for storing something else Dr. Bao probably also emailed you about and finally a pack of military rations. It's a little wild that you're not given proper food for your first day at work, but whatever.

After that, you head to the base's main control room. There's a large console with knobs and dials and displays everywhere. Frankly, it's a little bit overwhelming and you have the feeling that it would be overwhelming even if you had paid better attention during your internship at the observatory. You experiment around for a while and you finally picked up some signal! It's from an asteroid; how...whelming. You make sure to make good use of your notepad and write down how everything works — at least from what you think to understand. Additionally, you take your very modern digital camera to take pictures of things, it always helped you memorise things better when they were accompanied by a picture.

It's been a day or two of you looking for and downloading signals. In between waiting for the very slow processing, you do a little bit of cleaning up. Might as well, since you'll be here for a while anyway, no? You're trying to find anything to praise, but there's very little that could even possibly qualify.

• The food? It hasn't even been a week and you're already sick of the MREs. Sometimes they're not even fully stocked and there are soooo many cracker packs. You thought you liked yourself some good crackers, but you wouldn't even wanna chomp down on proper TUC brand right now with how many you've had.
• The colleagues? What colleagues? You only have contact to them via email and not even properly. Your computer can only receive mail and not send any, what the fuck? Ena and Max are cool, but they also seem very far away, given how — due to company protocol, you suppose — their mails are almost indistinguishable from those of Dr. Bao or Dr....you already forgot the other's name.
• At least the area itself is beautiful. The birds are singing for almost the entire day and watching the satellite dishes pitch and yaw toward their target fills you with awe every time.

With a loud BANG, you're sitting in complete darkness. For a moment, you're not sure if someone snuck up on you and this is just what it sounds and feels like to be knocked out, but quickly you notice that you still have control over yourself and the only thing that's wrong is that the power seems to be completely out. Right...there was something about you needing to maintain the power transformers. The entire site has been here for decades and probably runs on thoughts, prayers, duct tape and some percussive maintenance. You fumble and knock against your keyboard when you look for your flashlight. You were so smart to change its batteries early and not, as you would normally, shortly before it runs completely dark. In the dark, you follow the weirdly-sparking power line to the broken transformer...fuuuuuck, the ATV is out of gas and you forgot to order more...has the night always been this dark? It's not fog...you think...