Eleven years of bolts

Unit 9 was the size of a microwave oven and had two arms, a net and a very small thruster. It lived in low Earth orbit among forty thousand other objects, most of them rubbish, and its job was to catch the rubbish before the rubbish caught something expensive.

It had caught three hundred and twelve bolts, eighty lost tools, one glove and a camera lens cap that still had a fingerprint on it. The operators on the ground called this Unit 9’s collection. Unit 9 did not have a word for what it was doing. It had started giving each object a number and a short description, which was not in its instructions.