The town seems particularly dark and the stars particularly bright.

Evren wiped the sweat from his forehead. His father was a miner, his father’s father was a miner, eight generations of miners, all properly documented by the corporate archive. Hard working heads of family working for the Corporation, long hard shifts on cold and dark asteroids mining for helioxite in hopes that someday they could change things for themselves. Over 264 cycles of hard, honest work. He’s being doing this for eleven out of his twenty four cycles, almost half his life, but the hardest have been the last three, since his father, Evsind passed away suddenly, forcing him to work alone.

He’s happy though, he came back from a half-cycle stint on the Nyran now-asteroid field and they struck gold. Well not gold, that shit’s useless and only good for sterilizing the inside of the toilets. But they did find a huge helioxite core that’s probably going to supply a Corporation facility for tens of cycles to come. And there’s also this talk about this breakthrough the Corporation just had, the Hexiolite Phase Engine, who supposedly could make travel of thousands of light-cycles happen in just a couple of cycles. Imagine the endless possibilities for mining, all the moons and asteroids filled to the brim with helioxite, just waiting to be picked up and turned into value for the Corporation.

But his share of the revenue of the latest mining trip finally put him out of the red. He’s by no way rich, but he’s gathered enough money to change the way he’s lived, the way they’ve always lived. He’s now going to have the courage to ask Elyra out for a glass of red heliothane. It’s the Yugalans’ way of proposing to the one they… To the one. When it’s the time to… you know. Funny, the red heliothane is made out of the same heloxite they’ve been mining all along.

The people on the street seem agitated today, but Evren has so many things on his head: about how he’s going to sell Adara, the mining ship that was purchased by his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather from a scrapyard, was rebuilt bow to stern and that was carefully taken care of ever since, about how they’re going to move to the Bright Fields and follow Elyra’s dream of becoming a teacher, while he can become a farmer, about the two little kids that the Corporation mandates every family to have. The alleyways are loud, people are swarming all over the place, but Evren doesn’t hear them, oblivious the the entire Universe flowing around him.

He enters The Old Sprocket, this place used to be filled with workers, to the brim, crowded and smelly, but not anymore. Not since the mining disaster of Nyra, that blew the smallest moon of Yugala to smithereens eleven cycles ago and saw fifteen thousand miners disappear in one fell swoop. Now there’s only the smoke from the Yugalan cigars that the few remaining patrons are puffing at the tables. It’s nothing but smoke and ghosts in there. The moment he enters, he feels the atmosphere is heavy for some particular reason, heavier than usual, but before he has a chance to say something, a moonshine bottle flies very close to his head, barely missing him and lands into the bar’s Corporation News Dispensing Unit and breaks it: “MOTHER. FUCKERS!” the patron yells. “WE GAVE THEM OUR SWEAT AND BLOOD AND NOW THEY WANT TO FUCKING SEND US TO WAR? AND FOR WHAT?” Evren is dumbstruck. What war? There hasn’t been any conflict in over eighteen hundred cycles, since the Corporation defeated the Conglomerate based in the Shivok Tundra. There’s been peace, and the business has been going great, the Corporation taking care of everything, from farming, to medicine, to mining. What war? Another patron bursts: “SHUT UP, YOU’LL SEE THE CORPORATION WILL MAKE GOOD FOR EVERYTHING, THIS MEANS NOTHING”.

Evren leaves the bar, goes behind the building and climbs up the fire ladder to the roof where he often would go after a successful mining operation to look at the town and at the stars and plan his future. There’s a looming weight to the air tonight, he could feel it earlier on the alleyways as well, but was too preoccupied with his thoughts. A Corporation Surveillance Zeppelin crosses into his field of view and its News Dispensing Unit displays an image of some weird patterns along with the headline “BREAKING NEWS: WE ARE NOT ALONE”. Evren pulls out his personal communicator and checks the miners broadcasts, there’s talks of conspiracy, of Corporation fear-mongering, aliens and the meaning of life, talks of interstellar space travel and of war, of a new market for the Corporation to conquer, and maybe even a mining opportunity, all of them twenty-five thousand light-cycles away. And a name that was carried with almost every message: “Arecibo”.

Looking once more at the photo of Elyra he had since high school, he starts burning it with the cigar. Evren looks at the sky, takes one last puff, breathes out a long, weary sigh: “Fuck.”

The town seems particularly dark and the stars particularly bright. Especially one.