Ray's shift started at eleven and ended at seven, which meant he spent the hours between seven and eleven either asleep or pretending to be asleep, depending on who was asking. The factory floor was quiet at night, a cathedral of rust and abandoned conveyer belts, the kind of place where you could hear your own breathing if you stopped moving long enough.

He didn't stop moving. He walked the perimeter of the building once per hour, flashlight clicking on and off, checking windows, checking doors, checking nothing in particular. It was security work in the same way that breathing was living: necessary, automatic, and barely worth noticing.

The Mars mission had been cancelled two years ago. Officially, it was 'budget reallocation.' Unofficially, Ray knew, it was because nobody cared anymore. The public had moved on to the next scandal, the next election, the next thing that would make them angry for exactly eleven days before something else took its place. Space was boring. Space was expensive. Space was other people's problem.

Ray had worked on the Mars program for four years before he was laid off. He wasn't an engineer or a scientist—just a technician, one of the hundreds of invisible hands that kept the machine running. He had calibrated sensors, tested seals, run diagnostics on equipment that would one day fly through space carrying people who would one day stand on a planet that Ray would never see.

He thought about that sometimes, on night walks through the empty factory, when the fluorescent lights buzzed like trapped insects and the shadows moved with a life of their own. What had it all been for? What was the point of building something that would outlive you, that would carry other people to places you would never go?

The answer, he supposed, was that you didn't build things for yourself. You built them for the people who came after. For the people who would stand on Mars and look back at Earth the way you had once looked at Mars, through a telescope, wondering if anyone was there.

Ray clicked off his flashlight. The darkness was total, the kind of darkness that felt like a physical weight. He stood there for a moment, listening to the silence, and then clicked the light back on and continued his walk.

The factory was quiet. The city was quiet. The world was quiet. And tomorrow night, at eleven, Ray would come back and do it all again.

--- OTMES-v2-3A5B1C-075-M0-270-7R4810-0F56 E_total: 7.5 | Dominant: M0 | Angle: 270-deg | Rank: 7 M_vector: [3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 4] | N: [0.3, 0.7] | K: [0.6, 0.4]