Stationary Orbits and Litter Tray Days

The first thing you notice at Dilation Outpost Echo-Twelve isn’t the hum of relativity engines or the vertigo when you check your wrist and realize it’s 1997 again. No, it’s the smell—or rather, the lack of one. The scent of antiseptic recedes under a blanket of something oddly domestic, as if time warps can be tamed by a whiff of clean clay.

I blame Lydia for that. Or thank her. She’s been here longest, aside from the cat.

We call him Schrödy. He may not be alive or dead—quantum humor never gets old when eternity drags on—but he always needs his box cleaned. The cat litter they shipped us last resupply is a forty-pound bag of almost mythical quality. Even after decades (or was it hours?) in the outpost, I still marvel at how it clumps like magic and how dust doesn’t choke out our recycled air.

“Maintenance rotation,” Lydia announces, her voice echoing through the empty galley. “That means you too, Ben.”

I groan theatrically. “Why do I always get litter duty?”

Lydia shrugs with a bureaucratic grace born from centuries (or maybe just minutes) of protocol. “You’re new. Initiation.”

Schrödy stares at me with his ancient eyes as I approach his domain. He’s seen more rotations than any of us. Some say he’s become part of the local spacetime fabric—he certainly never ages, no matter how slow or fast we go.

As I scoop perfectly formed clumps from the tray—no foul odors, no dust cloud in zero-G—I feel a faint sense of normalcy. In a place where clocks don’t make sense, being able to keep something reliably clean is almost religious.

*

Time dilation work is supposed to be an honor; that’s what the government pamphlets said back in ‘56 (any ‘56 will do). But there are days when existential dread seeps in with recycled oxygen: What if you never leave? What if your real self is already dead outside this bubble? What if all you’re left with is Schrödy, eternal and unchanged?

Between shifts monitoring the relativity fields (which mostly involve arguing with sentient spreadsheets about paradoxes), we fill out paperwork to explain why our paperwork is late due to temporal anomalies.

“Do you think headquarters reads any of this?” I ask Lydia as I sign my third ‘Temporal Incident Report’ today.

She snorts. “HQ? They think we’re still waiting for Y2K.”

Suddenly, the gravity fluctuates—a common hiccup during time storms—and a crate topples off a shelf in storage bay two. Cat litter spills everywhere.

Lydia curses and grabs her vacuum mask. “If that were regular stuff, we’d be hacking up clay dust for weeks.”

But this batch is nearly dustless. We sweep it up with minimal effort—a small mercy amid cosmic absurdity.

*

Nights are worst. Not because it’s dark (the lights never change), but because your mind insists on rehashing every possible timeline where you aren’t stuck cleaning after an unaging feline while reality hiccups around you like a broken sitcom.

I find myself lingering by Schrödy’s box, scooping just to feel purposeful as he purrs against my leg.

“What if none of this matters?” I whisper to him once while refilling his box from that bottomless bag. “What if we’ve always been here?”

Schrödy blinks slowly, inscrutable as ever. Maybe cats understand eternity better than people—maybe they’re built for it.

A red light blinks on my comm panel: "Time anomaly detected." We hustle to stations as protocols demand—except for Schrödy, who remains supremely unconcerned.

"Ben," Lydia calls as spacetime buckles around us, "Don’t forget to check Schrödy before lockdown!"

Priorities, I think wryly—cat first, then reality collapse.

As I top off his tray again (no odor even now), I wonder if maybe this is what keeps us sane: a ritual older than any government or physics breakthrough. If everything else falls away—identity, memory, even time itself—we can still tend to Schrödy and his impossibly fresh-smelling box.

The outpost shudders and groans as the anomaly passes through like a bad mood. When it’s over, we’re all alive (for now).

I check my wrist; it says 1997 again—or perhaps still.

In this place where nothing changes except our growing dread that nothing ever will, all that really grounds us is a cat and a clumpable miracle from Earth’s past or future (it hardly matters).

Maybe Lydia’s right: In the grand design of things far bigger than us—cosmic scales beyond comprehension—all anyone ever needed was something small to take care of.

As Schrödy curls up beside me and purrs in infinite contentment, I scoop the litter one more time and hope tomorrow brings at least one thing new—even if it’s just another clump.