New Bisbee—The Town You Didn’t Know Existed

By Department of Peripheral Inquiry News Service (DPINS)

For fourteen years, Deck 7 has been officially logged as “low-traffic storage and auxiliary utility corridor.” In reality, it has been home to a thriving civilian settlement: New Bisbee, population seventy-nine and counting.

The residents are stowaways—artists, tinkerers, contrarians, and eccentrics from Bisbee, Arizona, a desert town once known for copper mining, ghost stories, and outsider art festivals.

How did they get here?

Roughly 14 years ago, a small group of locals known as the Bisbee’s Eccentric Arts Collective was mistaken for a “Volunteer Anthropological Cohort”, and was loaded aboard a supply shuttle during a Human Cultural Baggage Study.

And it appears no one ever filed the offboarding forms—they have been living in isolation on deck 7 since that time.

The Town of New Bisbee

New Bisbee is not a camp or a ragged squatter colony. It is, improbably, a functioning small town, complete with gardens, workshops, a council chamber, and even a bar that only opens during “low-radiation hours.”

There’s a coffee co-op, a radio station that only plays Fleetwood Mac and static, and a two-level thrift store inside an old coolant tower. Large piles of copper tubing and other scrap metal can be found throughout the deck, possibly connected to the original town’s mining heritage. Time, direction, and logic here are more or less symbolic.

Residents describe the settlement in terms that evoke Old Bisbee itself: winding alleys of converted ductwork, murals splashed across pressure bulkheads, and a stubborn refusal to follow any standard zoning plan.

The industrious group has built their own power, water, and air filtration systems—oddly more efficient than the official ones.

“They just… built a town out of junk,” said Dr. Gurdy after her first tour. “Their HVAC modifications actually improve circulation. They figured out how to brew beer using thermal exhaust. And their bread is, frankly, better than ours. I don’t know whether to arrest them or ask for seconds.”

Some of them appear to worship a being called “Three-Fingered Craig,” who might be a repurposed waste-heat vent.

How Did This Happen?

The question is less how they survived than how no one noticed for fourteen years.

Several maintenance logs from the past decade reveal that problems attributed to “self-repair anomalies” were, in fact, quietly fixed by New Bisbee residents. One coolant leak was patched with bread dough and copper wire. It worked.

The Department of Peripheral Inquiry has offered several theories as to how the eclectic group could have been living aboard the Class-6 Orbital for the past 14 years relatively unnoticed. There are multiple interesting pieces of information regarding this, including:

• They Pay Taxes
  Somehow, they’ve been submitting maintenance forms and retroactively backfilling crew logs. Bisbeeans are nothing if not bureaucratically adaptive.

• Orbital AI System VERA Knew
  VERA marked them as "Background Ambience" under an obscure deep-learning empathy directive. She issued a statement: “They were flagged as ambient cultural enrichment. Their entropy index is mostly acceptable.” She has determined their overall threat level: Nominal, possibly therapeutic.

• It Was Considered a Performance Art Installation
  Maintenance Supervisor Smitts assumed the weird lights and singing were part of some cultural engagement initiative. He once received a pair of hand-knitted socks with “DO NOT INTERFERE” stitched into the toes.

Intergalactic calls have been placed to officials in the real Bisbee, Arizona to verify this information, but as of yet there has been no response—evidently the officials are all down “at the Quarry” for a ‘weekend happy hour’ that began several days ago.

What Now?

Now that they’ve been discovered, the question becomes:

• Do we evict them? The HR robot Mortimer-P6 has initiated a deeply uncomfortable Offboarding Mediation Ceremony.

• Do we integrate them? Dr. Gurdy is arguing to classify them as a new sub-species of Orbital Homo Sapiens.

• Or do we admit they’ve run Deck 7 better than the official team ever did? Their plumbing works. Their mail system runs on time. Their bread is fresh.

The discovery has split the station crew, with some calling for eviction, citing resource theft and unauthorized governance, while others argue the migrants have proven themselves more competent than the official departments.

Orbital Commander Captain Jake issued a poetic but evasive comment:

“They are like weeds through the cracks of our steel garden. But weeds, too, are green.”

For now, New Bisbee remains. Its residents continue their rituals, their art, their brewing, and their endless town meetings.

Deck 7 hums with song, banjo covers of Beck, and the aroma of fresh bread mixed with other more legally questionable smells.

Whether New Bisbee becomes a permanent part of the Deep Oblivion’s ecosystem—or the site of the next great station conflict—remains uncertain. What is clear is that Bisbee, Arizona has made the leap from a dusty desert mining town into the farthest reaches of space. And it refuses to leave.

The current mayor, Stan Doughope wears a fabricated plaid suit salvaged from insulation tape and old curtains. He describes himself as “just a low key guy who also happens to run an orbital town.”

His official greeting, hand-delivered in a damp envelope many years too late, reads:

“We don’t mean to be a burden. We’re just people who ended up too far from Earth and too weird to go back. Maybe that makes us family.”

Officials have not yet decided what to do with the community members, however in the meantime the deck 7 inhabitants have invited the orbital crew to a three day solar music festival and microbrew event, featuring a team of Pludorian Fire-Eaters (unsure how they got aboard the craft), drum circle, and open-mike night. Captain Jake has already mentioned he plans to attend, where he will read his latest batch of poetry.