Lin Zhaozhao picked up a mint with the number of the spacecraft wreckage engraved in the gear gap of the century-old planetarium.
Transfer student Ji Huainan, whose silver-gray highlights are always stained with turpentine, said that the bronze gears in the planetarium hide evidence of the murder of time, that her palm prints are the mirror image of Crater 317 on the far side of the moon, and that each mint candy crystal is a mourning poem for a certain cosmic accident.
Ten years later, on a rainy night in the space city, Zhao Zhao, who had become a satellite orbit engineer, saw a familiar fluorescent formula on the data screen of the docking module. Through the mist of coffee, the genius spacecraft designer who was expelled from NASA leaned against the hatch, the scars on his wrists winding into a new star map.
"I said it wrong back then," the mints on his fingertips reflected the cold light of the space station, "not the stars, but the probability of meeting you -"
The robotic arm suddenly shifted seventeen degrees, locking the two people into the simulation cabin.
"It is we who have screwed ourselves into the screws of destiny."
Purpose: To explore how human beings use chaotic variables of emotion to decipher the codes of the universe in the gears of fate that are as precise as machinery. Using astronomy and aerospace engineering as metaphors, it writes about a self-salvation that spans time and space - when a teenager hides time errors with gears, when rusty spacecraft parts hide love letters, when lunar dust and blood stains show the same crystal lattice under a microscope, all rationally constructed orbits will eventually succumb to irrational gravitational disturbances.