Plot
The story opens aboard the multi-national space station Observation in orbit above Earth in the year 2026. An unknown event has crippled 'Observation', leaving it without power and spinning. Dr. Emma Fisher, the stations medical officer, tries to restore contact with Houston as well as other five members of the crew to ascertain what has happened, without success.
She manages to reboot the stations integrated AI, SAM (Systems Administration and Maintenance) which controls the station's systems and functions, and is the role the player assumes.
After performing basic diagnostics to find out what happened, SAM receives a transmission of unknown origin, containing co-ordinates to an unknown location. The station then begins to tremor violently with a deafening sound. SAM becomes unresponsive to Emma while being influenced by the signal, causing strange glyphs to flicker on his interface, and with instructions to 'BRING HER' appearing.
SAM recovers after an unspecified period of time has passed, to the sight of Emma having been rendered unconscious following the second event. She eventually comes to, and immediately instructs SAM to run a self-diagnostic. SAM tells Emma the event has caused him to lose most of his core data, and to be disconnected from most of the stations subsystems. He is also unable to locate the other crew members, who are missing and cannot be contacted.
As Emma restores limited functionality back to SAM, he attempts to re-interface with the rest of the space station and reconnect to his own components. Shortly after recovering some mobility, a station alarm goes off which Fisher instructs SAM to investigate. SAM discovers a fire in one of the modules.
After extinguishing the fire, they discover an unidentified substance on a blank plate that is like a dark red oil. Before she can speculate what it is, another alarm goes off. SAM informs her that module 12 has become dislodged, and severe stress is being applied to the station, prompting recommendation for her to eject it.
They eject the loose module, and the station stabilizes. Concerned there might be extended damage, Emma instructs SAM to check external cameras for other potential risks, and learns that Observation, through unknown means, is now in orbit over Saturn. Asking how they got there, SAM checks the station Black Box, which reveals he was the cause but doesn't know how.
Once more, SAM receives interference from an unknown entity and blacks out.
Emma reboots SAM again to effect repairs, saying "You weren't making any sense". She sets about working with SAM to access the other parts of the station. They find the bodies of the crew, including Jim, the mission commander. Discovering another crew member, Mae, to be alive in one of the sealed modules, Emma has SAM help with a space walk to get her to safety, but the station suddenly moves closer to Saturn and Mae is lost. A strange hexagonal object appears to both Sam and Emma and tries to communicate to them in a geographic glyph language before disappearing. Continuing repairs, they see a man-made object near Saturn's orbit. Initially thinking that Earth may have sent a rescue mission to them, they soon find it is an exact duplicate of Observation.
Emma uses SAM to jump to the other station, which has lost nearly all power. They find Jim is still alive, and learn this station also had the same weird events that brought them to Saturn. As SAM goes to try to restore basic life support, he interacts with this station's SAM, learning that there was a secret mission that Jim was to follow, based on the discovery that embedded in various star patterns was a specific DNA code and a point in space to be at. Jim had been directed by Earth to make sure Observation was at that point with Emma aboard at a specific time. Continuing on, Sam encounters another crew member, Josh, who has been hiding from Jim, as Jim has also killed his doppelgänger. Before Josh can reveal more, Jim grabs SAM and Emma, and makes them jump back to Emma's Observation. Jim locks Emma out of the station, leaving her on little life support. As she clings to life, several other identical Observation stations appear to start gathering around the storm.
