The Moon Looks Different from My Kitchen

How it begins

Ada Moss noticed the mark on the moon while waiting for the kettle.

The kitchen clock was three minutes slow. She had meant to correct it and was suddenly grateful for a smaller problem.

A narrow dark crescent crossed the familiar face, too straight to be a shadow and too large to be something she could reasonably ignore before breakfast.

She had spent eleven months in orbit looking at that moon.

It had not been there.

Her phone displayed a photograph from five years earlier. The mark crossed that image too.

Ada set the phone on the counter.

Outside, the city was waking. A bus sighed at the stop. Someone upstairs dropped a shoe. After nearly a year of filtered air and scheduled sunlight, she had expected ordinary sounds to make her feel returned to the world.

Instead the sky appeared to have been revised during the night.

She called Emil Solano.

He answered on the fourth ring. "If this concerns the welcome-home speech, I maintain it was shorter than the first draft."

"Look at the moon."

A pause. Curtains moving.

"I'm looking."

"The line."

Another pause, longer this time.

"Ada, that line has always been there."

She closed her eyes.

"Say that again after you open the folder I sent you from the station. The one you complained was too large."

While he searched, she watched steam begin rising from the kettle. A small, unnecessary domestic miracle. Water warming because she wanted tea, not because a mission schedule said it was time.

Emil stopped making keyboard noises.

"The file has changed," he said.

"What?"

"The image hasn't. The checksum has."

Ada looked at the moon again.

At the lower end of the mark, a small point of light blinked once.

On her counter, the kettle clicked off.

For several seconds, she couldn't tell which sound belonged to the more distant world.