Excerpt:

The jetty was much the same as it had been when he'd left it. He bent over to examine his equipment once again, more out of some pedantic urge than any real concern. The onboard computer chirped happily. It remained focused on the little blob of color on the horizon.

Joe pulled a small external computer from his bag. It was about the size and shape of a paperback book, and opened in a simple clamshell. On one side was a simple touchscreen display that extended to the very edge of the device. On the other was a flexible touchscreen -- it functioned as a keyboard much of the time, and the flexibility meant that it had the tactile bounce of a traditional mechanical keyboard, but it had a visual display built-in, so that the device could be sold in literally every language imaginable, to the exact specifications the buyer wished. The manufacturer bragged in its brochures that it had sold two hundred in Klingon alone, and a dozen more in single-setting runs where the buyer had asked for a specific constructed language's alphabet on the keyboard.

He made a vague gesture in the void between his face and the device, and the small computer and the camera on the tripod connected to each other. A moment later, the view out his camera's lens appeared on the screen.

The Dolly Mae sat like an enormous albatross on its tiny perch, ten miles distant. She was not a craft designed to win a prize for aesthetics; if she had been painted grey, she would have appeared to be some sort of modernist architectural fantasy run amok, a giant blob of concrete towering into the sky. She was instead painted in a glistening, scintillating white, and appeared to glow in the dim afternoon sun. Vast clouds of moisture rose from her super-cooled fuel tanks, condensing in the warm, humid air.

A hundred thousand souls slept within her bulbous carcass, medically hibernated for the difficult launch period. They were all volunteers for the biggest experiment that the world had ever seen: the systematic and near-complete de-population of the planet Earth.