My Caleb, he used to talk about a mining robot he worked with, back on the asteroid. Caleb thought the robot’s name was Detroit, because that was etched into its steel chest plate. Caleb liked the way Detroit powered through two full shifts without complaint. The way it performed its own maintenance on the downshift.
Here’s the thing. That robot? We used to find it at the habitat perimeter, gazing at an empty spot in space. Not a star, not a moon. Just a smear of nothing out past the horizon.
It kinda bothered Caleb, wondering what Detroit kept looking at, so he dug up an old handheld and did the math. You know what he found? Yeah. Earth. That crazy robot was staring at the void where the Earth had supposedly sparkled blue and green, once upon a time.
The grannies used to tell bedtime stories about it; a rock big enough to make its own gravity, hold its air close. Most of us couldn’t imagine it, but the tales made Caleb smile. He said he couldn’t blame Detroit for wanting a glimpse of the place he was manufactured. Such a romantic, my Caleb.
’Course, that was before the corporate retrieval ship came. Five generations of miners—or at least the remaining descendants—and a cargo hold full of raw silicon. They declared our families’ debts were finally paid, that they were taking us back to Earth. They called it home, this place of wheezing blue atmo and gravity-aching bones.
We never knew what happened to Detroit. But your Grandpa Caleb? This is where I found him, out here in the dark, eyes fixed on an empty smear in the sky. Do you see it, our asteroid? I can. I don't even need to do the math.
Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books, 2023). Her writing has been selected for W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, the Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. Find her at MynaChang.com, and on Twitter & Bluesky at @MynaChang.
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