powered down

powered down the fucking array because it kept insisting we were approaching something named for a dead fucking billionaire (the only good kind), and I refuse to drift toward fucking monuments to men who thought ownership extended beyond their precious pulse, so we killed the lights and coasted blind through a region without satellites the charts label as stable (though nothing out here is stable, not gravity, not memory, not the radio commercials and stories that reach us in fragments claiming the oceans were always this warm and the forests were always ornamental, a “nice-to-have”), and I keep thinking about the moment the sky changed color back home, how everyone pretended it was an upgrade, a free firmware patch for weather, and now every signal that reaches us carries the same undertone of compliance, a polite suggestion that we return, that we dock, that we submit our logs for “harmonization,” which is a word that feels like a hand over the mouth, in reality, is much worse, and Sylvania hasn’t spoken in three rotations except to say the stars are rearranging themselves in a pattern that looks less like chaos and more like rehearsal, like something enormous is clearing its throat before it speaks. Fuck. We have to get this beer can where it can really be space worthy for long periods, no more of this two day sneaking around bullshit.