I.

The work was simple. Scrape the mirror. Document the damage. Pack up.

Tom Riley had been doing simple work for twenty-three years. He had scraped solar panels on geostationary satellites, patched insulation on orbital habitats, replaced air filters on a space station that had been in orbit longer than he had been alive. The mirror station was just another simple job, and he treated it like one: show up, do the work, collect the paycheck, go home.

Home was a bunk in the crew quarters, a mess hall that served food that was edible but not appetizing, and a cheap bottle of whiskey that he drank in thirty-minute increments between shifts. He played cards with the other crew members on his off hours. He complained about the food. He did not talk about his ex-wife. He did not talk about his daughter.

The mirror was three thousand square kilometers of silvered composite, pitted by micrometeoroids and degraded by solar wind. It had been the largest man-made object in history when it was commissioned in the 2020s, designed to reflect sunlight onto the American Southwest to combat drought. It had worked for fifteen years. Now it was being retired, and Tom's job was to clean it one last time before it was towed to a lunar recycling facility.

He scraped the same quadrant every day. Quadrant 7-B, to be precise, which covered approximately 0.0003 percent of the total surface area. He moved across it at a rate of approximately two meters per minute, using a handheld scraper that vibrated at a frequency designed to remove micrometeoroid impact sites without damaging the underlying coating. The work was repetitive. It was also, Tom had calculated, the only thing in his life that was predictable.

II.

Three weeks in. The monotony had settled into Tom's bones like rust.

He began to notice things, though not in a poetic way. He noticed that the micrometeoroid impacts were random but denser near the edges of the mirror, as though the perimeter were taking a beating that the center did not. He noticed that the orientation thrusters fired in sequences that almost looked deliberate—three short bursts, a pause, two longer bursts, a longer pause, as though the mirror were trying to communicate something in a language it did not fully understand. He noticed that one of his crew members, a young woman named Priya Desai who had joined the station three months before him, cried silently every Thursday evening in the airlock between shifts, and that nobody asked why and nobody mentioned it and Thursday became the day that everyone avoided the airlock.

Tom did not cry in the airlock. He did not cry at all. He had not cried in eight months, since the last time his daughter had called, which was also the last time she had spoken to him at all. She had said "Dad" and he had said "hey kiddo" and she had said "I'm not coming home for Christmas" and he had said "that's okay" and she had said "okay" and then there had been silence, and the silence had become eight months, and the eight months had become a number that Tom did not think about because thinking about it was a form of crying and he had stopped crying.

He scraped the mirror. He documented the damage in a tablet that recorded each impact site's coordinates and depth and estimated age. He packed up his personal effects at the end of each shift—a toothbrush, a photograph of a house he no longer owned, a book he had started three rotations ago and would not finish. He drank whiskey. He played cards. He complained about the food.

On day twenty-four, he was working near the mirror's central joint when the safety line snapped.

It was not a dramatic event. The line was old. It had been fraying for weeks, and Tom had reported it twice, and both times the report had been logged and nothing had happened. On day twenty-four, the line snapped, and Tom fell, and his harness caught him, and the impact dislocated his shoulder and cracked two ribs.

He hung there for approximately four minutes, suspended by the harness three meters below the mirror surface, looking down at the silver plain that stretched away in every direction until it curved out of sight. The Earth was visible in the distance, a blue-and-white sphere that looked, from this height, no different than it did from any other height. It was just a ball. A big ball. But it was his ball, and he had spent twenty-three years working on objects that orbited it, and he had never, in twenty-three years, looked out a window and thought about the stars.

The rescue took two hours. Priya found him. She did not cry. She pressed the emergency button and radioed the station and waited. When they pulled him into the airlock, she looked at him and said "you're alright" and he said "yeah" and she said "let's go" and they walked back to the quarters together.

III.

The station's medical bay was staffed by a single medic named Chen, who was also overworked and underqualified. Chen examined Tom's shoulder, set the dislocation (which was worse than Tom had expected, and which Tom did not express), and told him he would need to see a proper doctor on Earth.

"The next medical evacuation is in six weeks," Chen said. "You'll be fine until then."

"Fine" was a relative term. Tom's shoulder hurt constantly. His ribs hurt when he breathed deeply. He could not lift anything heavier than a water bottle. He could not scrape the mirror. He could not play cards. He spent most of his time in the bunk, staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing and everything in equal measure.

Six weeks passed. The medical evacuation arrived. Tom was loaded onto the shuttle, sedated, and transported to Earth.

The classification process took three weeks. Tom was classified as permanently disabled, partially service-related, partially pre-existing (his knee had been bad for years, and the insurance adjuster decided that the shoulder injury had been exacerbated by pre-existing conditions, which reduced his pension by approximately eighteen percent). The pension would cover exactly half of what he needed. He would need to find additional income. Or not. The pension would arrive on the first of every month and would disappear by the fifteenth, as pensions do.

He moved back into a small apartment in Toledo, three blocks from the Denny's where he had cooked before he enlisted in the Space Operations Corps. The apartment was small and beige and smelled faintly of the previous tenant, who had moved to Florida and left behind a residue of lavender air freshener and regret. Tom did not mind. It was a roof. It was walls. It was a place to sleep.

His knee hurt. His shoulder hurt. The pension check arrived on the first of every month and disappeared by the fifteenth. He applied for a job at a warehouse on the edge of town and was hired on the spot. The work was heavy, which was good for his knee, and repetitive, which was good for his mind. He lifted boxes from one conveyor belt and placed them on another. He did not think about the mirror. He did not think about space. He did not think about his daughter.

IV.

One morning, six months after his return to Earth, Tom woke up and looked out the window.

The sky was blue. Not the black sky of space with its sharp stars and sharp contrasts. Not the blue of the Earth as seen from orbit, which was a deep, saturated blue that looked almost artificial. This was the blue of Toledo in June, a pale, slightly hazy blue that looked like it had been diluted with water. It was an ordinary blue. It was a beautiful blue.

Tom looked at it for a long time. He thought about the mirror, three thousand square kilometers of silver, slowly being ground into raw material for something nobody would remember. He thought about how he had spent twenty-three years of his life cleaning things that other people had built and other people would replace and other people would forget. He thought about the safety line that had snapped and the harness that had caught him and the four minutes he had hung there looking at the Earth, which was just a ball.

He got up. He made coffee. The coffee was weak and tasted slightly of the previous tenant's lavender air freshener, which had seeped through the walls. He drank it anyway. He put on his work boots. He walked three blocks to the warehouse. He lifted boxes from one conveyor belt and placed them on another.

He did not look up again.

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