Orbit of Small Things
A repair drone collects the junk in low orbit. One day it finds a bolt that has been waiting for it.
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Unit 9 is a small repair drone whose whole job is collecting the loose bolts, lost tools and dead satellites that circle a crowded Earth. It has been doing this for eleven years with a patience its operators never programmed. Then it catches a spanner with a name scratched into the handle, and a message from the astronaut who lost it, and starts to wonder who else is still up there. A short, gentle science fiction story.
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 do
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About the author
Arlo Quinn
I fix bikes at a little shop in West End, a block back from the river, and I write before work, from about five until the humidity wins. Most of my stories start with something broken and a person stubborn enough to fix it: a relay station on a dead moon, a glass furnace in a flooded city, a bush town where the iron has started to walk. I grew up in Ipswich, read every paperback in the Redbank Plains library by the time I was fourteen, and still think the best crews are the ones that argue about lunch. I share a Queenslander with two housemates, a lot of tools and a possum who lives in the roof and does not pay rent.
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