An explosion of white gas propelled the swarm of nanosats into the void. The spent launch vehicle tumbled away as hundreds of advanced processors broke into rhythmic radio chatter, saturating the local space region with a cacophony of digital packets establishing handshake protocols among the cluster. Thousands more already deployed satellites pinged their acceptance of the new members as the network reestablished itself in response to the bustling packet negotiation. Soon enough, the aggregate navigational data formed an actionable set, guiding the mass of tiny new satellites much like a flock of starlets into a predefined constellation pattern, moving toward the final gap left in this phase of the MarsLink project. 

A muted cheer rang out from the leftmost window of Michael Thompson’s screen. The three other flight controllers awake at this late hour monitoring the maneuver sent out their congratulations. Michael leaned back, stretching the kinks out of his back. He had been at this for six hours, his only companions the nearly silent engineer colleagues and Gustav, his customized Artificial Intelligent Agent. 

Michael considered the mission. It marked the culmination of phase one for the decades long MarsLink space project. The goal of the project was to establish a web of nanosatellite nodes throughout the inner Solar System for a variable-delay tolerant communications network. With all the major nations forming alliances in the new space race gearing up for Mars colonization, the communication network would be of paramount importance for maintaining contact with future Mars colonists. Currently, the US-European coalition was in the lead thanks to TymeCorp, though the Russo-Sino Aerospace Consortium composed of a forced alliance of Russia and China was nipping at the West’s heels. This was the fifth time that Michael had managed flight paths and final positioning of satellites for this region of space. More precisely, he managed technical support for the Quirinus AI guiding the satellite disbursement. Mike had rarely needed to adjust any settings of the AI since their third mission. The launch schedules had seen aggressive acceleration each year with the advent of the next generation rockets with engines developed by his employer, TymeCorp.

“Constellation is 96% intact. Orbital flight paths are within accepted limits. Michael, go grab a coffee... this is my aircraft now.” A window popped up on Michael’s screen of a mustachioed man in a World War I pilot’s hat and goggles sat behind a control stick, smoke from the half-burned cigarette curling around his confident smirk. Gustav was a marvel of the latest in AI tech. As lead programmer for the Quirinus project, Michael had “borrowed” a copy of the code and put a lot of work into his pet project. The results were surprising, even for him. With the addition of Michael’s innovative code, Gustav had gained the ability to learn and grow well beyond the capabilities of modern AI Agents, forming a nascent unique personality all on its own. Michael had shepherded his creation for more than a year, teaching and guiding the AI to become more than an experiment in advanced artificial intelligence, and instead into something new, with capabilities that Michael instinctively and closely guarded. 

“Your aircraft.” Michael stood up from the bank of monitors and headed for the lounge. His lanky six-foot, three-inch frame unbent from the confines of his station to an audible pop and crackle, complaints of knees far too stiff for a twenty-six-year-old. He ran his hands through dark curls of hair, exhausted from the long hours of intense focus. 

Michael walked up to the coffee maker and reached for his steaming cup. Gustav had already interfaced with the tiny brain of the machine and initiated the making of his favorite French roast. 

As he lifted the brew to his mouth, he caught his own dim reflection in the window overlooking the control room, amazed that he couldn’t find the pudgy man from a year ago. Nights of consuming highly caffeinated, sugary soda and anything that was orange, crunchy and edible to keep him awake and either gaming or programming had left him out of shape.

Of course, it all changed that day in the coffee shop almost a year ago. She had come up beside him and introduced herself as Lara Chandler, offered a handshake, then started into hard negotiations for the last of his order of scones. Their conversation warmed and spread into the early afternoon, where Michael found himself exhaustively discussing his background and career. The technical side of his work fascinated her as much as the inevitable ethical discussion it entailed. Her intense curiosity with the subject of sentient software and his work brought him out of his normal introversion, but he never felt as if he were bragging about his achievements. When they departed, the remaining scones long forgotten, he’d already arranged a first date with her, with their live-in love affair following a few months after.

Michael’s lithe frame lacked muscle, but Lara’s running regimen and strict vegetarian diet had reduced the paunch at his belly to a manageable lanky lean. His once puffy jowls were now replaced with cheekbones to match his sharp nose and ridged brow. The overhead floods in the break room were casting him in a harsh light. Within the contrast of the window glass, his pale skin was glowing, and pools of shadow hid his grey eyes, turning him into the visage of a vampire elf. If elves or undead wore ripped Levi’s jeans and geeky t-shirts emblazoned with the image of a caffeine molecule.

A leftover strawberry-frosted donut was tempting him from a box on the countertop when Gustav’s voice chirped over his dermal communications circuit. “Mike, we have a problem.”

“What is it, Gus?”

“Quirinus is reporting telemetry from our navigational markers in the direction of the M13 Globular Cluster is off by 0.3 degrees right ascension, 0.2 degrees declination and is causing misalignment of our current constellation with the network. I am calculating a new ephemeris for the corrections.”

“How could that have happened? We were getting good data from those just hours ago.”

“Unknown. Positional satellites have moved.”

“Come on, Gustav, those things don’t just move.”

“Indeed.”

“Work with Quirinus to create a 3D mapping of all the sats we have out there, I’m on my way back.”

Michael returned to the launch command room with the door silently unlocking as the building security AI evaluated and approved his biometrics, including facial structure, cardiac rhythm, and his stride through the hall back from the lounge. He slid into his seat, barely away so long for the chair to lose the warmth of his body heat. TymeCorp kept the remote launch offices on the cool side of Michael’s temperature preference. He supposed some corporate study, flawless in execution, had long since determined the optimal thermal operating range for programmers, astrophysicists, and engineers. Someone had to be the outlier though.

He sent an urgent meeting request to the other on-call engineers. Riley and Mickelson responded immediately. Janes didn’t answer from his desk. 

“Gus”, he began.

“Preliminary mapping is complete,” the AI responded. His face appeared in the corner of Michael’s screen. The frivolous uniform and cigarette gone, though the mustache remained. Gustav rubbed his virtual chin absentmindedly. He appeared thoughtfully perturbed. 

“Put it on the big screen. Offshore engineers will be joining us.” 

The back wall of the command room transformed from a light grey textured appearance to a bright active display, the work-lights in the room simultaneously dimmed instantly by the lab’s housekeeping AI. The projected image of Gustav’s map glowed to life on the enormous screen. 

“Ho Mike,” Riley said, his voice clear over the array of speakers built into the acoustic tiles. He was a small man, grey at the temples, and Michael’s initial mentor in the satellite launch business. 

“What do you make of it, Jack?” Michael responded. 

“It’s very strange. If Quirinus is right, we have a half-dozen satellites with shifted positioning, on the Mars side of the constellation.” 

“Station keeping error?” Michael inquired. 

“All of them at once? That aside, their current displacement is median 50k. They’d have burned a significant portion of their total fuel payload to get so far off course.” 

“Gustav?” Michael asked. 

“They have not initiated thrust, Michael. I requested full diagnostics from Quirinus, including fuel levels, 13 minutes ago. It has gathered the data and reported just now.” 

“Anything in the diagnostics?” Michael asked. 

“The satellites are very confused. The onboard agents are rudimentary AI pilots. Anything beyond Newtonian physics with a pinch of special relativity, and they don’t understand much,” Gustav responded. 

“Neither do I,” Michael muttered to himself. 

“How about the Watcher Grid?” Mickelson asked. 

“Good idea. Gustav, send an urgent message to the 14th Air Force at Vandenberg. Give them a dump of what we’re seeing. High encrypt.” 

“Done,” Gustav responded. 

“What about the RSAC?” Riley asked. 

“The Russians and Chinese?” Michael stifled a laugh. “I doubt that Alliance would be willing to share anything with us. They haven’t so far. They’ve had a grudge with us ever since Elaina’s company agreed to work exclusively with the West on the colonization project.”

“Should we let them know what we are seeing?” 

“Absolutely not,” Michael responded then thought, for all we know this is their doing. 

 “I suppose,” Michael said, “we should go ahead and tell the boss. Riley, start prepping a summary. Mickelson, make the call.” 

“Gustav, return the map to the last recorded correct positions of the satellites from a few hours ago. Then play back telemetry from station-keeping signals that were received by unaffected satellites.”

“Working. Stable satellites are marked green, the affected satellites are rendered red.” 

Michael looked up to the looping animation projected onto the screen. He watched as the green satellites slowly turned red one by one, then started pushing into the body of the constellation like a knife wound. He stood transfixed, not believing his eyes.

“Gus, what are we looking at?”

“Hard to tell, the satellites started moving 3.4 hours ago, not under their own power. Update. Two more satellites have now moved.”

Michael saw two more satellites wink to ruby at the tip of the constellations figurative blade. The longer he watched, the more he recognized he had seen something like this before. 

A memory came to Michael, as a small child, fishing on a lake in Ohio with his father, heading home at dusk. He remembered sitting on a cooler at the stern of the small open boat to the side of the thrumming outboard motor. His father’s hand on the tiller, moving slowly a few degrees from side to side as they navigated to the dock. The running light above them cast a white light into the water off the side of the boat, and Michael watched the bits of matter, small clumps of algae and mud drawn from the shallow bottom, moving, some spinning and tumbling in the wake of the hull. The movement of the displacing satellites reminded him of it, though what boat passed through this sky unnoticed? 

Michael had a thought. “Gustav, can you send messages to Pan-STARRS and the other observatories to get some scopes on that area of the sky? If something is passing through there, they should be able to see it fairly quickly,” he requested. 

“And send Lara a message from me, tell her we have a crisis at work. Tell her I probably won’t be able to see her today. Maybe tonight.” 

“Done, Michael. I doubt that she will be happy about that. I will notify you of any responses.”

“I’ll try to call her later. In the meantime, we need to get these runaways repositioned if possible. Quirinus wasn't built for this scenario,” he was thinking out loud, “the AI controlling the satellites will need an update to its guidance module to repair these misalignments in the network.”

 “Gus, please create a branch for the Quirinus code off main in a virtualized development environment and input the current positions of satellites as we know them. I will need to run some scenarios for repositioning based on current fuel levels. Inform the rest of the team that we will need a hot patch ASAP.”

He glanced down at the time in the corner of his monitor, 4:43 am. Michael frowned. With the time delay in communication, his team’s updates, and any debugging necessary, it looked like a long day ahead.