A Starlit Scrapbook

In the Scrap Galaxy, abandoned satellites drift like mausoleums through fields of frozen metal, their forgotten machines traded for heat, food, and passage to somewhere better. Astoria Vask makes her living alone among them, stripping wrecks and restoring obsolete electronics that no one else considers worth saving. Her latest find is an old-model AI robot, corroded, half-erased, and meant to shut down permanently once its remaining energy runs out. Yet beneath its damaged systems, something impossible still answers her: an intact emotional module, capable of attachment, tenderness, and a growing imitation of a heartbeat. As Astoria repairs the machine day after day, their companionship becomes the one warm thing in a universe built from discarded lives. Between the brutal loneliness of the outer system and the glittering promise of the central planets, an unlikely love begins—fragile, earnest, and threatened by the limits of metal, memory, and time.