Please Delete the Moon
A software janitor receives a routine deletion request for the moon.
ImagineYourBook writes a fresh draft from this idea.
How it begins
The moon was in the deletion queue between an obsolete printer and a duplicate lunch menu.
Dee assumed somebody had named a server badly.
She opened the ticket.
Asset: Moon.
Location: Earth orbit.
Dependencies: See attached.
The attachment was four million pages long.
She took another sip of coffee.
In twenty-three years of systems maintenance, she had learned that panic was usually a poor substitute for reading the next field.
Authorized by: Lunar Infrastructure Holdings.
Approval status: Complete.
Appeal status: Pending.
That was better. Pending appeals stopped deletion automatically. At least, they were supposed to. Dee checked the execution timer.
Eleven minutes.
"Of course," she said.
Outside the station window, the moon hung in the blackness with its usual air of having survived worse management.
Dee opened the appeal.
There was no formal submission. No lawyer's name. Only a sequence of maintenance notes, some more than a century old.
A technician describing her first lunar sunrise.
A pilot recording the route that brought a damaged ship home.
A cleaner asking that the corridor lights remain on because darkness made the new arrivals nervous.
At the bottom, in a field limited to two hundred characters, someone had written:
I am still being used.
Dee put down the coffee.
The terminal offered three options.
Approve deletion.
Request clarification.
Mark appeal as noncompliant.
She selected clarification.
A warning appeared.
This action may affect your performance rating.
She selected it again.
The station's night supervisor called immediately.
"Dee. Why have you paused a routine cleanup?"
"Because the moon has objected."
"The asset cannot object."
"Then someone should update the form."
Across the screen, a fourth option appeared.
Contact appellant.
Dee had never seen it before.
The execution timer continued counting down.
She clicked.
For several seconds there was only static.
Then a tired man's voice answered from somewhere beneath the bright crater at the center of the window.
"Please tell me you read the attachment."
Your idea. Your book.
Keep the spark. Change anything.
Create my bookCreated with ImagineYourBook. Free to use as inspiration.
Outline and characters
- Dee receives a valid lunar deletion ticket.
- She pauses execution under the appeals procedure.
- Omar finds records identifying the moon as leased infrastructure.
- The supposed deletion would erase navigation rights rather than rock.
- Colonies dependent on those routes face isolation.
- Dee discovers the appeal was assembled from generations of maintenance logs.
- Management orders her to classify the intelligence as faulty software.
- She distributes evidence to crews who would lose access.
- Workers collectively revoke the deletion authority.
- The moon's archive becomes a public navigation trust.
Characters
- Dee Park, 46. An orbital software custodian
- Omar Finch, 51. A lunar archivist defending an unexpected appeal
Series possibilities
- An asteroid requests asylum from the same maintenance department.
