Palor

Alfie

T = 0

Cuauhtémoc Alfaro Robles was looking up at the shimmering cold night sky. He could barely make out Orion, Venus and Jupiter as the light pollution fuzzed out parts of the sky. Trails of satellites, space passenger shuttles, space debris, and the ever-present military craft could be seen.

He switched from one eye to the other and back again. He checked his vision intermittently this way to make sure it was not deteriorating like the rest of his body, or so he thought.

He looked over the vista from his flat in one of the tall buildings close to the university. The view was of its buildings and laboratories, the many gardens, the memorials to dead alumni, the extensive quad with its thin and tall clock towers, and the far-off askew looking visitor and student housing buildings. All were lit up arrogantly as if saying here are the intelligentsia. His building was tapered at an angle like the others, so each floor could have an unobstructed view of the sky. He had his flat moved to this building from another much farther away. Flats were moveable from one building to another as long as they were of standard size and had standard connecting ports.
He was dressed in filthy socks, a black t-shirt, and old sweatpants turned front to back. They had holes in the seat and he was afraid people would see his ass. He had been at the gym. He attended regularly but knew only a handful of the regulars. He did his workouts there and went home.

He had the beginnings of a beard (he would say he couldn't grow a full beard because he had too much Aztec in him), black thinning hair and big brown eyes. When he was young his mothers' friends would say he would break hearts if only for his long eyelashes. At 9 years old he decided he was going to be a scientist. He had been told all his life how smart he was. He liked sciencey things. He didn't want to be a doctor like his mother wanted him to be because he got queasy at the sight of blood.

He suddenly saw a bright flash in the sky. What a waste, he thought, all those years of space wars in orbit and all we have to show for it are shooting stars.

"Another one." He said.

"What?" was the response from inside.

"More space junk." He had learned about the space wars. It was part of the required history curriculum in school everywhere. There were so many destroyed satellites, weapons, and spacecraft that traversing Earth to other destinations in the solar system had been deadly right after the wars. Scoopers were built and launched to corral the space junk. Now, the passages from Earth were manageable.

He never understood why a war in space was fought by destroying satellites and spacecraft in Earth's orbit and beyond. This just caused havoc for all sides by creating millions of bits of metal and debris moving at thousands of miles per hour.

Destruction should not have been the goal; denial of function should have been. One merely had to nudge a satellite to alter its orbit. Or turn the satellite 180 degrees. Or attach a cheap set of cold gas thrusters that fired at arbitrary times. Or place a thin sheet of aluminum to cover a sensor or a communications antenna. Or attach a strong heat source near a spacecraft's computer. All this would have achieved what brute force achieved without the deadly consequences and clean-up expense.

There were no victors. There was a truce, but hostility between some of the space fairing nations still existed. What a waste of hundreds of thousands of lives he would think.