“You’re the guy admin was so excited about? Well, you don’t look like much to me.”
The old man’s chuckle was rusted metal hinges. Neil had hardly entered the room before being insulted. His older colleague, Stefano, appeared out of place in front of the monitor tracing pale blue lines across space. He wore a fraying wool coat stained with grease, and his eyelids drooped over lapis pupils.
“I don’t plan on staying long,” Neil replied.
“We joke around here. Not sure how it was at — hmm — remind me where you’re from?”
“StarCo.”
The old man slapped his knee.
“So you’re to blame for the whole mess! HA! Good. The party’s over and Mom and Dad are on their way home,” when he laughed he revealed a toothless smile. “You prove a theory of mine. We all become trashmen in the end. The bankers, the bakers, the candlestick makers: one day it’ll find all of us. Some longer than others I suppose. But look at you, a trashman by your own doing. A prison made of junk, imagine!”
For decades, StarCo. and other corporations pumped satellites and rockets, boosters and landers and failed construction projects into the atmosphere. What they were all good for, no one person could possibly know. The exosphere had become so clogged up with orbiting detritus, any mission to space was rendered impossible. Humanity had locked itself in an empyrean landfill.
“Better get to it, I suppose. Do you know how it works?” Stefano asked.
“I helped design the thing.”
“Oh-ho, well, well. They only taught me the basic operations.”
“Well,” Neil began, “the science is simple. The sphere itself is made of a nearly indestructible alloy. It flies around Earth’s satellite zone, using AI to match a target’s velocity. Otherwise, it would crash into the thing and shatter it, and we’d have even more debris on our hands. Then, when sufficient material is collected, it signals us to initiate the boosters. The sphere, and all the junk with it, then achieves escape velocity and hurdles out to space, and our waste is adrift forever. That’s the gist of it,” Neil spoke with excitement.
“And you know how to initiate the acceleration sequence?” Stefano asked.
“They showed me yesterday. I got to practice on a few simulations.”
As Stefano and Neil watched the night sky through their monitor, they were joined by hundreds of other trashmen, just like them, across the planet. Their lone device carefully shifted between the orbits of metal debris traveling at over 7,000 miles per hour. As it approached its target, the reflective orb would match the speed of the object and attach itself, whether it be shattered pieces of a satellite or remnants of an attempted space elevator. On the monitor, the device appeared to move slowly, but Neil was aware everything was flying at close to two miles per second.
“StarCo. sent you here?” the old man asked, breaking their tension.
“I was let go. What use is a rocket scientist if there are to be no more rockets?” He grinned.
Stefano’s laughter resolved in a fleshy cough.
“So you are a joker!” Stefano said.
The sphere’s surface had become covered in rigid metal, giving the illusion of thorny flesh. A green light indicated it was time to initiate the boosters. Neil acted, typing a few codes into the keyboard and, after a brief hesitation, pressed the final button to jettison the device and its gathered refuse.
“Only a few thousand repetitions, and you’ll be back at StarCo. before you know it.”
An alarm flashed in their little room followed by what sounded like a fire bell. The two turned to the monitor and watched as the orb sank closer to Earth.
“Oh, you’ve timed it wrong — the device is more massive, you must get the timing right. It’s trapped in the gravity well.”
The device and its gatherings began to plummet toward Earth. Neil looked to Stefano with wide eyes, unable to move. He stammered and collapsed in his chair.
“It’s alright, it’s what I’m good for,” Stefano assured Neil. He pulled his chair to the keyboard and went to work. “We just need to find a safe landing zone… well, look at that. It’s right overhead.”
The device rotated, and four thrusters ignited with conic blue flames.
“There, small mistake, my boy. Consider its course corrected. It’ll crash in the ocean a few dozen miles from here. Shall we watch the show?” Stefano asked.
“You mean the junk?” Neil asked, shaking.
“Funny, metals so valuable our ancestors fought wars over them are now considered waste. Have you seen a meteor shower? Or a shooting star?”
“A comet once when I was a kid, outside the city.”
“Junk or stars, it all looks the same from down here. Well, come along.” Stefano buttoned his old coat and walked outside; Neil followed. They came to a semicircular deck poised above rocky cliffs dotted with scrub. To the west lay a city, its bright lights like a pillar to the heavens.
To the south was a bay with turbid waters, darker than the night sky. The two features seemed opposed, opulence holding a light to desolation. The old man pointed upward.
“There!”
The twinkling object grew brighter, soon outshining even the stars and Moon.
Then it split into hundreds of smaller fragments, and each of those split into more. They all moved at uniform speed, terminal velocity. To Neil, they appeared as a clouded sky beast with thousands of luminous white eyes, coming home to the sea. The pair stood in awe of the sight, armed with the knowledge they were watching a flock of massive metal fireballs hurtle homeward.
The mass disappeared below the horizon and the night was dark again. Neither spoke for fear of shattering the delicate moment.
“Wow,” Neil whispered to himself in wonder.
Silence filled the space between them.
“Well,” the old man said at last, “try again?”
Ethan Campbell is an emerging writer from Brooklyn, New York. Working in the environmental sector, most of his writing focuses on the shifting tide between humanity and an ever changing climate. He has previously been published in Emerging Worlds and is currently working on his first full length novel.
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