🌌
Perhaps “city” was overgenerous. It was hardly even a town, and it wasn’t even supposed to be that.
Once it was only an asteroid, known only by a series of numbers and dashes and colloquially called ‘Amatorculist,’ because space is vast and the people who name such things had most certainly been running out of words by the time this asteroid was brought to their attention.
Amatorculist would have been of no interest to anyone at all if it weren’t the closest thing to a habitable point along the migration route of the Euclidean space whales known as Ø-pod. Euclidean space whales were vanishingly rare, and seldom seen in the wild, and certain astrobiologists would have gladly given an organ or two for the chance to see them up close.
(Not necessarily their own organs, it must be noted. Several academics received considerable injuries from formerly affable colleagues during the deliberation process picking out the lucky few who would make up the inaugural crew to Amatorculist.)
So first came the scientists, the lucky few, who watched in awe as the space whales swam by with constellations flashing in their bellies. They spent weeks camped out waiting for a sighting that lasted seven and a half minutes, and when it was done they returned to their universities to publish their findings in a haze of rapturuous excitement.
When researchers arrived the following year, they were surprised to find that they were not alone. Pilgrims had made the same journey, hoping to find answers in the whales’ stars and and songs.
(“What answers?” the lead researcher asked.)
(“Oh,” said one of the pilgrims, surprised that it wasn’t obvious. “Any of them, really. We’re not fussy.”)
The two groups warmed to one another in their weeks of waiting. They broke figurative bread, and shared their literal nutrient paste and calorie bars. When the Euclidean space whales came they watched together, scribbling down notes and sketches that were distorted by tears of joy.
In the years that followed their numbers grew, swollen by the tourists who started to arrive seeking answers to a very particular questions: how much attention will a picture of a space whale garner me online? The tourists were less willing to live on nutrient paste than the former devotees, so opportunists came in their wake: Amatorculist gained its first ramshackle canteens, oxygen bars, and hostels.
The newcomers were met with some suspicion at first, but when the moment came all were united in their awe. As the lights of Ø-pod danced across their faces, you never could have guessed who had arrived for what reason.
