| Director | Jakub Kroner, William Eubank |
|---|---|
| Budget | $500,000 |
| Box office | $1.5 million |
During an 1864 battle of the American Civil War, a lone Union soldier, Captain Lee Briggs (Bradley Horne), is dispatched on a mission to investigate a mysterious object reported to Union forces. He leaves to venture on the mission.
Fast forward to 2039, United States Astronaut Lee Miller (Gunner Wright) is dispatched to the International Space Station (ISS) as a one-man skeleton crew to determine its safety and make any required adjustments, after it had been left unattended for two decades due to unspecified reasons. Shortly after his arrival, significant disturbances transpire on Earth, eventually leading Miller to lose contact with CAPCOM and finding himself stranded in orbit alone, forced to helplessly watch events on Earth from portholes 200 miles above his home planet. Miller struggles to maintain his sanity while in isolation by interacting with Polaroid pictures of former ISS crew members left aboard the ship.
Experiencing power issues, Miller moves into an unpressurised module of the space station to perform repairs and discovers the 1864 journal of Briggs. Miller reads Briggs's account of the war and becomes enthralled by the mysterious object he is searching for, not realizing he will soon become more familiar with the very same object, and not by accident.
By 2045, after six years without CAPCOM contact and a deteriorating oxygen system in the ISS, Miller puts on a space suit and goes for a spacewalk, deciding that it would be easier for him to detach his tether and slowly drift towards Earth and to burn in the atmosphere than slowly suffocate to death on board the ISS. He finds, however, that he is unable to go through with his suicide.
Miller is seen still aboard the ISS, presumably much later: his hair has grown extremely long, and he is extensively tattooed. He has drawn sketches of people and battles of the Civil War from the journal all over the interior of the ISS. The cramped quarters of the space station have become a rat's nest symbolic of his diminished sanity. He then seems to be contacted from outside the ISS, and to receive instructions to dock and transfer over. He does so, and seems to arrive in a giant uninhabited structure of distinctly human making. It is unclear whether this is real or imagined by Miller, who is now insane.
Miller wanders around until he happens upon a server mainframe where he finds a book titled "'A Love Story' As Told by 'You'". Inside this book, he finds pictures of Captain Lee Briggs with his discovery, a gigantic cube-like alien object that may have helped advance human society. In the index of the book, Miller finds a reference to himself and types it into the computer prompt. He then finds himself inside a generic hotel room, where a disembodied voice says:
During the speech, we see the same cube-like object in space in the year 2045. The viewer is left to assume that this object has 'obtained' Lee Miller and is speaking directly to him. The film ends with the voice of a computer speaking of human connections and love.