It had always been a punishment, litter-picking. The task was assigned to disobedient pupils, the rebels of my school, a taste of hard work to make up for their laziness in class. I'd always thought it chosen well: for those students who cared, it would hardly be a chore. In fact, I often cleaned the halls myself, of a lunchtime, motivated only by civic duty, a desire to work in a pleasant place.
To the apathetic, though, such manual labour must grind, even more than their classwork. The more deserving of the punishment they were, the lazier they were, the more they would feel its effects. The worst pupils would be most motivated to study harder, whilst any wrongly convicted would not much mind.
Of course, I'd never found myself amongst the sentenced. I had always listened to my teachers, absorbed their knowledge, and excelled in my exams. No-one had ever made me pick up litter: in all respects, I was a model student. Despite that, though, I was doing this now. If anything, my good grades had put me here.
I had specialised in sciences, physics, and joined the space programme. Working as part of the European Space Agency, I had completed all the necessary training, waiting for my chance to take the plunge. The romance of space had always appealed to me, its enigmatic vastness. I had been happy to help conserve it. This might still be litter-picking, in a technical sense, but it was also so much more.
Instead of latex gloves and a plastic bag, I had magnets, a net, clamping arms, even a harpoon. In place of the playing fields, behind the science block, my beat was the Earth's lower orbit. Most importantly, I wasn't after yesterday's banana skins and yoghurt pots; I was targeting lethal threats to my colleagues, and to future space-flight as a whole.
Space debris is estimated in the hundreds of thousands: there are about 300,000 pieces larger than 1cm, and one tenth of that over 5cm, in a couple of megametres up from the ground. The smaller ones cost us plenty, wearing down telescopes and solar panels like a constant sandblaster. Some of them almost cost us more: mere flecks of paint had almost broken our windows, and we were fortunate to have avoided worse.
The larger pieces were even more lethal, real hazards that few spacecraft could survive. With the amount of pollution here growing, as it was on Earth below, the agencies had agreed to act. The greatest fear was not that of individual disasters, tragic though they would surely be, but of a Kessler syndrome: a chain reaction where one collision creates more debris, creating more collisions, until a whole area becomes unnavigable. In fact, the whole lower orbit could become treacherous, preventing us from launching anything at all. Nobody wanted that.
With support from their colleagues abroad, the ESA had sent us up. Their Clean Space programme had initially used remote operated craft, but trials had shown that pilots did it best. A Roomba might clean up the dust, but it couldn't make decisions like a woman on the spot. That was what we were, really: vacuum cleaners. We cleaned the largest vacuum of them all.
It wasn't what I'd dreamt of, during my studies and training: I'd also longed for a more exciting mission, exploring new worlds, not just tidying after others' mess. Now that I was out here, though, being in space was enough. Orbit suited me, more than a voyage might. The chance to look down on the world, seeming clean and clear from so far, was worth it all.
I even came to enjoy the task, feeling the same sense of pride as I had when I'd cleaned up the halls. It wasn't that I was a neat freak: I just cared about respecting public places, and felt satisfied to do my part. At university, for instance, the floor of my room had been covered in clothes, whereas my kitchen counter was spotless. With that room communal, I had made sure to do my washing up as soon as I could. It was about keeping things nice for others.
Throwing your litter on the ground, metres from a bin, was the ultimate sign of disrespect. I remembered an upstairs neighbour had once dropped some from their window, straight onto mine. That was inexcusable. Pollute your own home, by all means, but public spaces were not your dump. To use them as such was to deny your civic duty: if everybody littered like that, our streets would be filled with cans and rotting food.
If everyone did their part, though, with minimal effort, we could all live in a pleasant world. I didn't ask that everyone helped clean up up, only that they didn't actively pollute. Those who refused that smallest of responsibilities, to me, could have no sense of dignity. I was happy to clean up the universe, even if it wasn't the excitement I'd dreamt about. Unlike such adventures, it was work that needed to be done. I was clearing the way so that others could dream in the future.
As it turned out, I got to do both.
When the alien contact came, our team was the only one out here. The generals and politicians back home didn't want the visitors on Earth, not until they knew they weren't a threat. We would meet them, instead, out in orbit. It was our job to work out whether they came in peace, or should be blasted from the skies. The future of the world, and certainly of our guests, was firmly in our hands.
