Fourteen years on the job.
Orbital courier work. Low Earth orbit to lunar base, sometimes all the way out to L2. Cargo: equipment, rations, lab hardware. Occasionally a letter. Letters are the only ones that feel like something.
That day’s order was wrong. The destination field was blank.
The sender was the International Space Logistics Authority — a legitimate requisition. The package was a small box, twenty centimeters square, almost weightless. The manifest read: Contents: data storage medium. The destination line was empty. One line in the notes field.
“As far as possible.”
Kiryu called mission control. “Follow the order as written.” Flat. End of conversation.
He offloaded the rest of his cargo, swung around the far side of the moon, and flew straight out in the direction away from Earth. Three days. Not a single craft passed him. Somewhere around the point where transmissions cut out, the view through the window changed — or rather, stopped being anything. Stars were visible, but stars are the same as nothing.
When the fuel gauge hit the turnaround margin, Kiryu opened the box. No destination meant he had to verify the contents and log delivery complete.
A golden disc. He’d seen one in a history lesson. Loaded onto a probe launched in 1977 — music, voices, images, everything humanity wanted to say to whoever was out there. But the engraving on the back read 2026 Edition.
There was a note inside.
“Last time, we were so focused on sending it far that we never found out if it arrived. This time, we still won’t know. But we’ve come to understand, forty-eight years on, that the act of sending is itself the point.”
Kiryu put the disc back in the box, locked it to the exterior hull, and let inertia take over from there. Delivery complete. He flipped the engine and headed home.
He returned to low Earth orbit six days later.
Mission control’s first message wasn’t a thank-you. While he’d been gone, the traffic regulations in the orbital belt had changed. The collision avoidance list had been updated. Three thousand new objects registered as debris.
“Where from?”
“Fragments of a communications satellite constellation decommissioned last week. Altitude band 480 kilometers. Crosses your standard routes.”
Kiryu pulled up the orbital chart. His usual delivery corridors were shaded red. The detour would burn 1.4 times the fuel. Whether the margins still worked was anybody’s guess.
“Why were the satellites decommissioned?”
“The operating company went bankrupt. No legal entity remains to assume retrieval obligations, so they stay where they are.”
Kiryu closed the monitor.
Six days ago, humanity had sent a forty-eight-year update to the stars. In the time it took him to do that, the orbit right outside his window had filled with garbage, and one of his standard routes was gone.
The dream of reaching far is a fine thing. Kiryu even understood it a little. But his job wasn’t far. It was close. Low orbit to the lunar surface, same routes every day, packages delivered. Those routes now had three thousand pieces of junk in the way.
He downloaded the revised orbital chart and started calculating fuel for the detour.
The golden disc, coasting outward through the dark, at least had nothing to worry about. It had passed through altitude bands well above this mess without so much as a scratch.
A new delivery request came in from control. The destination was filled in properly this time. Supply depot, lunar base. Kiryu entered the detour route and fired the engine.