World file
A spoiler-safe field guide to the century, the work, and the mystery surrounding Unit 402.
Water has become infrastructure, leverage, and survival. Drought has emptied towns, automation has changed work, and governments have fractured into systems that promise stability in very different ways. This is recognizable Earth after a century of hard choices—not an alien future.
Humanity spent more than a century placing satellites, stations, habitats, ships, and industrial platforms into orbit. Eventually much of it stopped working. None of it went away.
Junkers are orbital recovery crews and the ugly industrial ships that keep Earth’s crowded orbit usable. They are not glamorous explorers or warships. They are garbage collectors traveling seventeen thousand miles per hour.
Something happened aboard Unit 402 decades ago. Benton Jacobs discovered part of it. Other people are still looking for the rest.
An awkward attendant, an autonomous Dallas bus, and the passengers who interrupt his reading.
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