I spent two weeks last winter below the dome ribs, listening to the fans drag warm air across orange trees that had no business surviving in orbit. Every instruction plate said the same thing in beige paint and clipped verbs: inspect, calibrate, report. None of them said to kneel in the soil and notice when the moss stopped shining.
Care is slower than command
The fleet calls the forest a payload because payloads can be numbered, fueled, and jettisoned. But a grove is not cargo; it is a set of debts. The first drone learned that before the officers did, pausing beside a broken fern with one arm raised as if the whole ship had become too loud.
On February 3, I rewired the north irrigation panel and found a child's paper label tucked behind the relay bank: maple, rain, September. That small inventory was more accurate than the manifest. It named what the dome was for, not what it weighed.