Earth Station

The spacecraft docked with a shake and a crunch, one that was entirely superfluous – as the silent magnetic locks were more than sufficient to keep the craft in place. It was deemed necessary though, as most passengers were loath to even get out of their seats without some tactile reassurance that the craft was safely linked to the station.

One man sighed at the extra wear and tear that little exercise took, as he was already standing by the airlock waiting to disembark. He was thankful his trip to the Earth Station was an infrequent one, the routine he was used to was much more efficient – as it had to be in the outer planets. Soon he would be able to simply send the data via the communication channels, but currently the sheer volume of it made it impractical. Stray bits of comets and asteroids tended to corrupt the signal making the usual compression algorithms nearly useless.

It was also a requirement to visit the Earth Station at least every five years as the equipment and software upgrades were rolled out their first, then only later to the outlying stations.

The space tourist ship that picked him up was nearly empty of passengers now, only the equipment was left. He waited patiently, as he knew his stuff would be offloaded last – the belongings of the tourists would be priority. As they paid a premium for every kilogram of stuff they brought, his stuff was ferried basically free of charge. If they saw how much stuff he had, they would likely be quite upset.

Still, it was a symbiotic relationship. Their resource spending supplied the materials for the trip, but it was his equipment that made the trip less frivolous.

He had skimmed the 'patch notes' for the last few years of upgrades during the trip back to Earth, but failed to see any coherent pattern to them until he stepped into the main part of the station. “All the way back here for this?” he cursed to himself. The changes were, as he should have realized, mostly cosmetic in nature.

The wait times for the more obscure areas of the program were reduced, as the divergent parts were finally re-written to be part of a more cohesive whole, rather then a separate subroutine. He was pleased that nearly all of his suggestions were implemented, if not exactly how he imagined they would be.