Pompt Pomodoro

The masive ships that ferry people and equipment and ideas from star to star, across the immesurably infinite emptiness

The shipyards around Earth a swarm of machinery and robotics, massive metal pillars of construction, sprouting spikes from their depths which pooled around L4 and L5, high above the Kessler Divide, which separated the suffering masses on Earth from the riches of the proverbial diamond mine that glittered in the night sky.

Gaia looked up at them through a pair of binoculars; twinkling, shimmering lights against the navy night sky swam in her view as she tried to hold the pair steady against the listing and yawing of her father’s little rowboat. out at sea was the only way to view the night sky at all. Lately At night, after the day’s work had been done, he would take her out on the rowboat, away from the noise and lights and smell of the main ship, with its engines and sweaty men and salvage and seaweed, and they would look up at the twinkling night sky together — most of it was satelites, not starlight, but it didn’t matter to her, because it was beautiful all the same, and she was 6, and didn’t understand why they couldn’t visit, or how those glittering diamonds were a million metal bullets shooting around the Earth, cutting a dangerous path through any route to orbit, obliterating the courageous and desperate who attempted the journey and creating more deadly bullets from their remains.

While she watched the light show, father would tell her stories, sometimes fables he had grown up with, or memories from before she was born, or stories of her mother While he was speaking, she would imagine his stories taking place before her eyes, her wild imagination taking her deep below the waves, back to where father said her mother was, where she had been born. While he talked, the whales and dolphins would come to listen, she thought. They would swim with them alongside the boat, or splash off on the horizon.