On a generation ship three hundred years from anywhere, the missing rations have an official name: spoilage. Every quarter the census office writes off a few thousand people's worth of water and oats, stamps the box, and goes home to bed.

Then one census officer finds a man in a gray work shirt who has let himself into a family's quarters at the same minute every night for eleven years. His own files show he has found this stranger thirty-one times, closed every case as spoilage, and signed each one himself. He remembers none of them.

Now the forgetting is coming for him. His name lifts off his own marriage certificate. Men he has worked beside for years welcome him to the department. His wife of twelve years opens their door on the chain and looks at him like a stranger. By morning she has signed a declaration that he does not exist, and Housing's bailiffs are coming to rivet the door shut.

In the ship's hidden spaces, the people nobody sees still light the galley kettles and raise the newborns their mothers forgot. There may be one way to make his wife see him again. The chapel rail is hung with the locked belts of couples who tried it.

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Disclosure: This episode includes AI-generated elements.

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