One of the kids asked yesterday, "wouldn't it be cool to be a space junk collector, like have your own space ship and gather space junk?"
Gabe turned his ship around and headed back toward the inner Solar System. He had finished his rounds near the gas giants his debris hold was full. One of only a few adventurous ship captains who took the extra risk of gathering space junk while transporting humans and cargo to their destinations either moon, asteroid or planetary, Gabe did his job well and had a fine reputation as any in the space industry.
In the early days of space exploration, space junk was allowed to burn up in the atmosphere of the planet that it was orbiting. That was until resources became scarce on several planets that had big manufacturing facilities and the call went out for volunteers to gather up the bits and pieces of old satellites, abandoned space homes and even tiny nuts and bolts that fell off of or were dropped by construction crews as they built or repaired space homes and stations.
Though he did not volunteer, Gabe knew a profitable idea when he saw one and quickly chose to clean out a section of the cargo hold in his ship to store space junk picked up in his travels and sell to the highest bidder. Other space ship captains had done this as well and the extra income had helped all of them plan for their eventual retirements on one of the more hospitable planets in the Solar System.
With his extra money, Gabe had upgraded the gravity controls of his ship. This allowed for him to adjust the gravity onboard for his passengers as they travel from one planet to another. He would set the gravity for the planet that they were leaving and gradually throughout the trip adjust the gravity to that of the planet that they were headed for. By the time that they reached their destination passengers had physically adjusted to the new gravity and needed far less time acclimating upon arrival. Word had gotten out that Gabe's ship had this feature and the number of passengers on each flight had increased quite a bit recently, which was good for his retirement fund.
On this run, out near the gas giants, Gabe had picked up an old Earth space probe that had stopped functioning over 400 years ago. It had been launched on August 5, 2011 and began orbiting Jupiter on July 4, 2016. After its mission to orbit and gather data was completed, the space probe was to be crashed into the Jovian atmosphere to gather data prior to its destruction to learn as much as possible about the atmosphere of the planet. Unfortunately, the space probe stopped transmitting information back to Earth just prior to receiving the program to end is mission and had not been heard from again. A recent sweep of the moons of Jupiter by a telescope orbiting Mars had spotted the defunct space probe near the moon Ganymede. The Inner Planetary Space Agency, the modern name for the founding organization NASA, had hired Gabe to retrieve the space probe and to bring it to Mars for analysis.
Curious about his cargo, but careful enough not to mess with the very old and delicate machine, Gabe had carefully stored the space probe in his debris cargo hold. He set the gravity and atmosphere in the hold to match that outside in space to protect the fragile cargo from damage due to sudden pressure and gravity changes after having been orbiting in space for so long. Earlier today as he sealed the hatch to the debris hold, Gabe thought he had heard a faint, but continuous. hum coming from the space probe that had been silent for so many years. He thought to himself that he was imagining things, he had been in space long enough to know that the mind would play tricks on him at odd times, this seemed to be one of them. He was happy that he would be heading home soon to a long awaited vacation on Mars with his growing family.
He was thinking about the space probe as he turned his space craft toward home, he wondered what would be learned from the long missing relic. Little did he know, but indeed the space probe was humming in the debris hold, now that it had been in contact with a human it was beginning to wake up. It had a message stored in its data banks, an important message that would change humanity forever.
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