I Hadn't Intended to Get the Data....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 17, 2025

I hadn’t intended to get the data from the probe, but it was in one of the boxes of material I received from the archives. Danny sent it over because of what was written on the label. I don’t think he even looked in the boxes. I think he just sent me all the boxes that had Pisces IV or Pisces V written on the side.

They were cardboard foldout boxes that lawyers use to put papers in for storage, the kind that has a lid and a place to write whatever is in the box on the end. I was working the night the truck brought them over to the lab. We all have to take our turn on the rotating night shift, and that week, it was my turn.

About eight o’clock at night, the light flashed above the wall displays and that meant that someone had picked up the phone at the gate and pressed the button below it. The button is marked with a sign that says Press Button for Entry; most people press the button. Some people just start talking into the phone, but if they do it that way, nothing happens. Until they press the button and make the light flash, we don’t know to pick up the phone.

The light flashed, and I wheeled my chair over and picked up the phone. “Teldar,” I said. Teldar–that’s the name of the company I work for. The logo is painted on the side of the building.

“Harry, It’s Anson from the archives,” the voice on the phone said.

“Hey, Anson, it’s Lew. Harry was on last week.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Okay, well, I’ve got a delivery from Danny for you. Eighteen boxes.”

“Eighteen? Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah, eighteen of them. Buzz the door and my guys will bring them up.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” I pressed the button and watched through the feed from the camera pointed at the door as Anson opened the door and propped it with a rock put there for that purpose. The guys weren’t supposed to prop open the door–in theory, we were a secure facility– but it was late and the truck was sitting right there and the guys would have the boxes up here and stacked in just a few minutes.

As I watched, the backs of his crew moved into view and then disappeared into the door, and I could hear them clunking up the eleven stairs to the lab entryway. Eleven stairs. Not ten and not twelve. I counted them every time I went up them, and it was always eleven.

Then, from behind me: “Hey, were do you want these?”

I got up and pointed to where the boxes should be placed. The college kid–or maybe he was a high-schooler, he looked young enough–put the box he was carrying down and them moved back toward the stairs without a word, dodging his partner who was coming up the stairs with his own box. The partner looked at me and I gestured over to where the first box was. He put it down and went back for another. Each of the three crew members made several trips, and soon, all eighteen boxes were stacked there neatly against the wall.

Anson had not carried any boxes–for one thing, he was getting older, and for another, he was the crew boss, he drove the truck, and he directed the activities of the much younger crew. Young enough to be his own sons, certainly–maybe that one was young enough to be his grandson. “These were the only ones in the warehouse for Pee-Four and Five,” he said. “I would have thought there’d be more than just these. Wasn’t that a pretty big project?”

“Yeah, I guess it was,” I said noncommittally. In fact, it had been a big project. I had studied it generally, as most aerospace engineers had, and I knew in broad strokes what it was, what it tried to do, and what it achieved. I knew, as almost everyone does, or should, anyway, that Pisces was the name of a series of unmanned probes that we sent to Triton, Neptune’s weird, large, retrograde moon. I knew that Pisces I blew up on the launch pad and almost caused the scrapping of the whole series which had been planned.

Pisces II also blew up, a victim of a terrorist bomb planted in its main launch stage and programmed to go off forty-five seconds after launch, which it did. The idea had been to damage Teldar’s image by making it look like we couldn’t launch anything right, but the source of the bomb had been found easily enough, and it wasn't us. Pisces III launched successfully and completed its mission to precisely measure the masses and distances in the system and to prepare the groundwork for Pisces IV, which was planned to actually land on the surface of Triton. That was a successful mission too.

Pee-IV launched, landed, sampled, and sent back data that pretty much conclusively proved that Triton was made of the same stuff that our own Moon is made of. This suggested to everyone that the Moon–the one that ended up around Earth–was the third of the three-body interaction that had long been suspected of putting Triton in that backwards orbit in the first place.

Once we had the evidence to point to the third body, we could use its mass and position to work out what must have happened. Here’s what we worked out: About two billion years ago, a large object came flying into the Solar System. It interacted with several other large bodies and ended up whipping around Jupiter in an orbit fast enough and close enough to tear it in to pieces, then those pieces sling-shotted towards an unusual alignment of Saturn and Neptune. About one-third of the pieces were launched into the inner Solar System, and the rest out towards Neptune. These pieces formed a wide ring around Neptune, like the one Saturn has, but because there were no shepherd moons to keep it from collapsing into a solid body, it did just that–and became what we now call Triton.

The pieces that were launched toward the sun were captured by the Earth and collapsed into what we today call the Moon.