Zara floated in the void, tethered to her orbital skiff as she guided her gripper arm toward yet another hunk of space junk. Most of her days involved clearing shards of dead satellites, forgotten wrenches, or stray bolts—remnants of humanity’s careless ascent to the stars. It was monotonous but necessary work. A stray bolt traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour could cripple a station.

“Just another Tuesday,” she muttered, nudging a chunk of solar panel into her collection net.

Her suit’s scanner pinged. Something was drifting nearby, an irregular shape. The display read unidentified material.

Zara frowned. Her scanner rarely failed to categorize an object. Even fragments no bigger than a fingernail had traceable origins. She maneuvered the skiff closer.

The object glinted as it spun, catching the distant sunlight. It was smooth, cylindrical, and iridescent, shifting colors in a way that didn’t seem entirely natural.

“Control, I’ve got something weird here,” Zara said, opening a channel.

“Define ‘weird,’” Control replied, their voice crackling.

“Unknown object. No registry data. Doesn’t match any materials in the database.”

“Proceed with caution. Could be debris from an unregistered launch.”

Zara reached out with the gripper arm, her fingers trembling slightly inside her gloves. The object seemed almost... alive, its surface pulsing faintly, as if it were breathing.

As soon as the gripper touched it, her entire display went dark.

“Control? I’ve lost visuals,” Zara said, her voice tight.

No response.

For a moment, there was silence. Then her helmet filled with a low hum, followed by a whisper—soft, layered, incomprehensible.

And then she felt it. Not in her hands, but in her mind. Images, memories not her own, flooded her thoughts: vast alien cities, endless starlit voids, and a sense of profound loss.

When her display blinked back to life, the object was gone. No trace on her scanner. Just the familiar, endless debris field.

“Control, are you there?” she asked, her voice shaky.

“Copy, Zara. We lost you for a second. Did you secure the object?”

She hesitated, staring at the empty net. “Negative. It... it’s gone.”

Control sighed. “Alright, keep moving. Plenty more junk to clean up.”

But Zara didn’t move. Her hands gripped the controls, her mind racing. That thing—whatever it was—wasn’t junk. It wasn’t human.

And for the first time in her career, she wondered if cleaning up the remnants of space was erasing more than just humanity’s mistakes.