The Manifest

I finally pulled Boll's service history at a public terminal. Took an hour to crack the format. Most of it was routine, route logs, charge cycles. The last owner field had a name in it, a Dr. Hessel, registered to the planetary survey office, and the tasking history was not courier work at all. Boll had been a field survey unit. For eleven years Boll's entire job had been to walk slowly across the surface of Mars and stop and look at things and record them, the dust and the frost and the way the light fell, because that was the science, that was the whole point of the unit. Then Dr. Hessel's project lost its funding and the survey office sold its field units for scrap and a courier with no imagination bought one for two-eighty and told it to stop looking at things. I sat at that terminal for a while. Boll stood behind me, patient, the way it is always patient. I did not feel good.