You are reading part 3 of a serialized story in 9 parts. Go here to start at the beginning.
Of course: an object in orbit doesn’t stay in orbit.
On the problem of space junk, the first billionaire had said, “It will burn up upon re-entry.” He conveniently discounted the problem of the depleted layers, all the holes poked in the atmosphere, so when the outdated electric car, still cherry red after sixteen years, five months, and twenty-seven days, fell out of orbit, it found a hole and fell through, unburnt.
It landed on a freeway, on top of a bus carrying thirty-two undocumented immigrants from Texas into Mexico. They were North American immigrants, born in Seattle, Fresno, Salt Lake City, Taos, San Francisco, Portland, and the like, traveling south for work, to send money home to their families in North America.
Okay, most were traveling south for work in order to send money home to their families in North America. One of the migrants, however, might have been traveling south after his wife had kicked him out. He might have wanted to blend in, to be a part of the mass of human misery making its way toward more promising territory, to see what that was like.
Aside from the marital discord, this one migrant might not have qualified as miserable, what with his cryptocurrency stored across the world, on millions of computers, vast quantities of cryptocurrency, so that he would never have to work again, not that he ever had, nor would his estranged wife have to work, nor would his sons and daughters after him or their sons and daughters after them, on and on into generations.
Thank you for reading my author newsletter. “An Object in Orbit” originally appeared in Boulevard in 2019.