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The Pattern

by Avery Parks


Alex Farmakis checked her incoming requests once more, idly clicking through on her interface. Nothing. She had finished her assignments for the day—monitor the newest crop of microsats for proper integration into the orbital network, clear the queue of potential collisions marked by the AI.

Hours left on the clock, she leaned back in her seat and groaned, stretching her shoulders before reaching for her mug of instacoffee and popping the heating tab. She hated idleness, and in the eleven months since the AI had finished being trained for, well, her job, she had been idle more often than not.

Maybe it was time for a new career. She had wanted to be involved with space without actually going there, but providing the human overwatch for an AI was not what she had envisioned when she applied to the International Space Surveillance and Coordination Center five years ago.

She blew on the now-steaming surface of her coffee and chewed her lip reflectively. It would be easier if she didn’t love what she did so much, love managing the ordered complexity of thousands of satellites all spinning around the planet, love searching for the anomalies that might disrupt that balanced system.

Oh well. Working, even made-up busywork to pass the time, was better than stewing over career paths and her future. She reentered her interface and pulled up the data for the satellites in low Earth orbit over the past month to review. She typically worked in much shorter time frames for LEO; so close to Earth, the satellites orbited the planet over a dozen times each day and required close monitoring. Even minute changes could have large impacts when the satellites were moving over 25,000 kilometers per hour.

She reviewed the data over the course of an hour, the visualization of the orbits solid lines at such artificially rapid speeds. She wasn’t sure why she bothered. The AI had already reviewed and flagged anything of note. But she welcomed sinking into the data and letting it wash over her, too vast to track things individually.

But as the satellites spun, a pattern began to emerge. She frowned, twitching her fingers to click back, slow things down, and then forward once more. At smaller intervals—a week, instead of a month—the pattern faded, lost in the noise.

She sped back up and found it again, then went back further, adding more data to her simulation. The web of satellites was like a living thing, constantly pulsing and changing as satellites were added, deorbited, or routed around the odd bit of debris.

Lost in the data, she went backward and forward over the past six months, chasing the pattern as it emerged and tagging satellites as they joined it, one after another. Individually, their behavior was perfectly normal.

But together . . . . . . . . . something was wrong.

“Alex, what are you still doing here?” a voice piped up behind her, and she jumped, fumbling at the interface clipped over her ear. Finally untangling it from her hair, she set both it and the rings that tracked her finger movements on the desk before turning to her boss.

Siavash Kazemirad, head of what remained of the Satellite Behavior Tracking department at ISSCC, was a perpetually rumpled and easygoing man, his casual T-shirt just beginning to stretch across his growing waistline.

“I lost track of time,” she replied as her eyes finally refocused on the room around her. How long had it been? She rubbed at her temples and grimaced at the cold coffee on her desk.

“That’s not like you,” he pointed out, settling into the chair next to hers. “Something come up?”

“Yes,” she said immediately, then stopped. How to explain? “Can I show you?”

At his nod, she put her interface back on and started compiling a new simulation of the past three months, but without her tags, curious if he would spot the pattern as well. She dropped it into the network for him, and waited.

He watched in silence on his interface. Finally, he spoke up. “What am I looking at here?”

“Don’t you see it?” she blurted out, then stopped. Obviously not, if he was asking. “I mean, does anything stand out to you?”

“No, not really. Just a bajillion satellites spinning, like always,” he said lightly.

“There’s a pattern. Can you watch again?”

Obligingly, he went through the simulation once more. “Sorry. Nothing.”

She pursed her lips, then overlaid her tags onto his simulation, marking the satellites in the pattern. “How about now?”

He watched again, then removed his interface. “Why did you mark those satellites?”

“Because of the pattern,” she said impatiently. “Can you not see it?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. They’re just random satellites. Did the AI flag this?”

At the mention of the AI, her temper flared. “No, I did. The human, with a brain.”

He sighed. “I know it’s been hard this past year. But you’re not being replaced by the AI, it’s just keeping an eye on things as the satellite network continues to grow.”

“I know that,” she said with a frown. Why was he telling her what she already knew?

“Your job is safe. You don’t need to go looking for things that . . . . . . . . . may not be there,” he said.

“Siavash, there is a pattern,” she insisted. “I’m not making it up.”

“Of course not,” he said quickly. “But the human brain is sometimes too good at pattern recognition. My nephew loves to find animals in the clouds, for example.”

She scoffed. Was he being condescending? Or trying to be kind? She had always been better at reading satellites than people.

“It’s late. How about you go home and get some rest, and we’ll talk about it more tomorrow.”

“Fine.” She quickly gathered her things and slung her messenger bag over her shoulder. She could analyze the pattern at home just as easily, after all.

“And let’s leave work at work,” he called after her. He clearly had no trouble reading her, which just stoked her annoyance further. She waved a hand behind her noncommittally and left. Once she had a more solid analysis put together, he would see it. He had to.


Alex tilted her head back as she walked down an empty stretch of sidewalk toward home, letting the expanse of night sky fill her vision. It was her favorite time of year—late autumn, when the days grew shorter but before the nights became too bitterly cold.

She didn’t understand why Siavash hadn’t been able to see the pattern. But she was more concerned about how it might disrupt the entire network.

She made mental notes as she walked, letting the rhythm of her steps mark them in her memory: What commonalities did the satellites in the pattern share? Who owned them, who made them, their age? Where had they launched from? What tied them together?

She wished she could simply ask their operators why they had moved their satellites, but every satellite was at least partially controlled by an onboard AI, a requirement of the treaty following the Kessler Incident of 2036. It had taken decades to clean up low Earth orbit after that catastrophic cascade of space debris—decades and international cooperation and unimaginable amounts of money.

She glanced down long enough to not miss her turn, then looked up again, watching for glimpses of the lowest satellites, tiny points of light steadily tracking across the sky. She loved seeing them with her own eyes rather than an interface, tying reality to the office she spent most of her waking hours inside.

A larger point caught her eye, and she squinted her eyes enough to make out a minute circle, all that was visible with the naked eye of the Hub’s enormous spinning wheel. She smiled.

The Hub was Earth’s largest space station by far, dwarfing anything else humanity had built by orders of magnitude. It was the launch point for missions further into the solar system, a transit hub for the Moon base, even a tourist destination. At any point in time, hundreds of people lived, worked, or passed through there.

As a child, she had dreamed of going up; as an adult, she admired it from afar. It was part of what had inspired her career, and even with the office AI leaving her less work to do, she had to admit she still loved what she did.

She continued toward home, the sight of the Hub almost enough to chase away her worries about what the pattern might mean.


“Alex, I’m sorry, but it’s time to move on from this.” Siavash leaned against the desk next to hers and raised his hands apologetically. “It’s been a week, and . . .”

And nothing. There wasn’t a single common thread amongst the satellites in the pattern, beyond that she saw them there.

“I just need access to their onboard programming,” she insisted. It was the next logical step, but Siavash had dug his heels in.

“We’ve been over this. To get that, I need approval from my boss, and I can’t send something up the chain if I can’t even see it.” He stopped, sighing. “I’m trying here, Alex. You’ve been exemplary in your work here, and you’ve never given me a reason to doubt you. Have you found anyone else yet who can see the pattern?”

She shook her head mutely. None of her colleagues could see it, at least not with enough certainty to back her on it.

Why was it just her? She refused to doubt herself, and it was incredibly frustrating that no one else could see it. Was her brain just that different?

She had to admit, patterns soothed her, the same way the complexity of the satellite network did. To pick them out, follow them, predict where they might go next . . . . . . . . . 

She groaned, and only years of practice controlling unexpected hand motions while wearing the interface rings stopped her from slapping her forehead. Siavash looked down at her, eyebrows drawn together.

“What?”

“I’m an idiot,” she said. She had been so wrapped up in finding evidence that the satellites in the pattern were connected and prove the pattern was there that she had overlooked the easiest way to actually do so.

“Well, that’s not true. What’s up?” he asked.

She didn’t answer right away, already buried back in the data to see if her theory was right. The network was vast, so it would take time to find them all, but . . . . . . . . . yes. That one. She began to explain, still half-distracted as she searched.

“The pattern. I can predict it. I’ll prove it.”

“How?”

She found another, and marked it as well. Confident now that she could do this, she reluctantly removed the interface and turned to Siavash. “By the end of today, I’ll send you a list of satellites that are most likely to join the pattern next. If I’m right, will you talk to your boss on Monday and get me the access I need?”

“Sounds fair. But if you’re wrong, you agree to let this go?”

She nodded once. She wasn’t wrong, and she knew it.


Alex watched Siavash as he sat back in his chair and reviewed her list of satellites and her predictions for their movements over the weekend. He snorted and shook his head, then flipped up his interface.

“Are you . . . . . . . . . surprised?” she ventured, and he opened his mouth a few times before speaking.

“Honestly, yeah. I didn’t doubt your intellect, but this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“And my access?”

“Yeah, yeah. But even if that gives us the how, I’m more interested in the why,” he said, and something she hadn’t realized was clenched tight inside her relaxed. He had said us. She was no longer alone in this; Siavash’s backing meant more resources, enough to find actual answers. To protect everything and everyone in orbit. Or so she hoped.

But maybe it was more than that. Being the only person to see the pattern hadn’t set well, and the uneasiness that had lingered in the back of her mind finally dissipated.

“The why seems more like your question to answer than mine,” she said.

“How so?”

“I mean . . . . . . . . . I don’t understand why people do what they do, how could I possibly figure this out? I’d rather focus on the programming data.” She shrugged self-consciously.

“So you think someone is behind this?” he asked, settling back in his chair, and she shrugged again.

“It has to be someone hacking them. It can’t be natural, and there isn’t an AI who can handle enough data to be responsible.” AIs had their limitations, for which she was secretly grateful. She would have been without the job she loved otherwise.

“Fair point,” he said, then clapped his hands together. “All right. Access for you, brainstorming for me.”

She turned to go back to her desk, but he called after her.

“Hey, Alex. Well done on finding this.”

She nodded in awkward thanks and went back to work.


Alex ripped her interface off in frustration and slapped her hands flat against her desk.

It was another dead end.

After waiting nearly two weeks for ISSCC’s lawyers to jump through the hoops required to give her access to a dozen of the satellites in the pattern, their code wasn’t providing the answers she had hoped for. It was still being reviewed by other departments that had more expertise in that area, but she was losing hope.

The onboard AIs were cataloging routine course corrections, nothing more. Whoever was doing this was covering their tracks exceedingly well. And it was pissing her off.

More of her department was assigned to the pattern now, as well, and as the person who had discovered it, she was required to attend all the meetings. Which also wasn’t helping her mood. If she had to waste another hour listening to people discuss the same things over and over again, she was going to scream.

So now, after exhausting all avenues to figure out how it was happening, she was going to have to shift to why. And what the end goal may be. If there even was one.

True to his word, Siavash had been working on it, but he only had unsubstantiated theories, unbacked by data. Useless.

But regardless of his theories, he was certain that whoever was doing this had a goal. If that was true, she didn’t need to figure out why they were doing this, only what the endpoint of the pattern might be. And that felt far more doable.

She reentered her interface and pulled up her most recent simulation, programming it further into the future. As long as a satellite’s velocity didn’t change, its position in orbit was easy to extrapolate, based on time. Which satellites would be joining the pattern next, and how the entire network would react to that, was more difficult.

An endpoint. Would they all come together at some point, like one of Siavash’s theories? Yes. Some would, small groups that condensed and then split back apart. But no matter the timeline or how she adjusted the variables, never all at once.

She worked for hours, until the smell of someone’s lunch made her stomach grumble uncomfortably. She downed a granola bar and an instacoffee, then dove back in.

Continuing to look forward, she decided to focus on one of the largest groups that came together on this coming Thursday. They wouldn’t be close enough to collide—another of Siavash’s theories—and they separated quickly.

Well, if she was going to focus on this group, she was going to do so properly. None were in the sample they had gotten access to, so she shot Siavash a request for access to whichever of this group that he could quickly get. If any belonged to the same corporation or country that had given access to the others, it should be relatively straightforward.

Was there a resource, something of import that orbited at a similar distance above Earth? This group was in the upper ranges of LEO, above the Hub and other stations. But, no. It didn’t share an orbit with anything.

Putting that group aside for a moment, she looked at other smaller groups that came together around the same time. One met a dozen kilometers below the initial group, a minute or two later, on the other side of the planet.

Then, below that, another, this one close enough together to trigger each AI’s collision avoidance. Alex swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. There was another group, again minutes later, below.

Was it just a random coincidence of the pattern? Groups had come together before; it was almost impossible not to, with so many satellites in orbit. She looked back at the highest group, then higher still, to middle Earth orbit.

Then back down, to the lowest group, orbiting at the same height as the Hub.

No amount of practice staying still while using the interface could prevent her from jumping to her feet in alarm. The visuals from the interface swirled drunkenly around her, and she stumbled, clawing it off and yelling for Siavash.

He popped into sight, eyes wide.

She took a deep breath, heart pounding. “I know what they’re going to do.”


Alex had barely begun to explain before Siavash spun, gesturing for her to follow him. Jogging together down the corridor toward the elevator to top management’s office, she continued.

“It’s XB-20675. It’s being decommissioned out of MEO, and its transfer orbit down puts it square in the first group. If their AIs are disabled, they’ll obliterate it.” She panted, catching her breath as Siavash jiggled the elevator call button. “It’s the Kessler Incident all over again.”

XB-20675 was one of the oldest and largest satellites, scheduled to safely deorbit into the Pacific in two days. But if it were hit with enough force—say, over a dozen microsats—it would disintegrate into millions of pieces. The Earth’s gravity would pull some into the orbit below, where those pieces would overwhelm the satellites’ AIs. Too much data to track, too impossible to avoid a collision.

And down. And down. Each group Alex had identified would hit and add to the shrapnel, forming a cascade ultimately large enough to take out nearly everything in LEO.

Including the Hub.

Even if they started now, there might not be enough time to evacuate the station—there were hundreds of lives in danger. But not just there, she realized with a shock. There were hundreds more on the Moon who relied on the Hub for support, and people surveying Mars and Titan as well.

Alex tried to control the fine trembling that emanated from her core as she followed Siavash into the elevator; she needed to remain calm, to work the problem.

“Are you sure?” Siavash glanced at her, as if hoping for her to say no, then shook his head. “Of course you’re sure.”

She clenched her hands tight as the trembling reached her fingertips, and tried to concentrate on breathing stillness through her body as they went up. The doors opened onto the top floor, and Siavash quickly explained to the assistant at the front desk that it was an emergency relating to the pattern their department had been studying. She overheard the words Kessler and Hub, and the assistant’s face went blank even as his fingers rapidly twitched through a message on his interface.

After a few moments, they were waved through, and she followed Siavash into the head of the ISSCC’s office. She had never been here before, and even the panic of the situation didn’t prevent her from noticing the view across the city, unspoiled by any breaks in the enormous wall of glass.

“Mr. Kazemirad, yes? And Dr. Farmakis? Please, come in. The other department heads are on their way.” Ingrid Klein, the head of ISSCC, was a petite woman, but no less intimidating for her lack of height. “Care to sit?”

Alex shook her head quickly, resisting the urge to look back for the others. There was enough time, wasn’t there? Nearly forty hours until the first collision.

Thankfully, they began to file in, a half dozen men and women. Were they annoyed at being called at such short notice? She wondered. Not that it mattered.

Ingrid motioned for them to join her, and they followed her to the large conference table in front of the window. “Dr. Farmakis. Please, begin.”

This was too important to be nervous, so she wiped her clammy palms on her pants and spoke to the air above their heads. No one was going to give her a hard time about maintaining eye contact when she was warning about the potential loss of hundreds of lives and the end of humanity in space for decades to come.

She explained what she had discovered as concisely as she could, then gratefully stepped back as Siavash fielded some of their questions. But then, Ingrid turned back to her.

“But the satellites are programmed to avoid collision. This system has worked for nearly a decade. Why is this different?”

Alex wished she had had time to put together a cleaned-up simulation to present, but she had only her words. She could come back later, with her data, but . . . . . . . . . no time.

“Whoever is doing this has been laying the groundwork for a long time, and I believe they are exploiting an inherent weakness in the system,” she said, looking firmly out the window at the city below.

“Yes, the satellites avoid collisions, but that’s because we so effectively cleaned LEO of space debris. They have a limited number of objects to track, the vast majority of which are other functioning satellites. If you introduce millions, if not billions of pieces of debris to that system . . .” She trailed off, shivering. Everything she loved about the space above Earth, the beautiful intricacy of thousands of satellites moving in concert, would be destroyed.

“It collapses,” Siavash finished. “The number of objects will overload each AI’s processing power, not to mention there will be too many things to maneuver around. We have to stop that first domino from falling, or we lose it all. Including the Hub.”

A hush fell over the room, and Alex watched Ingrid and the others carefully. Did they believe her?

“Well. Even if there is only a small probability of this doomsday scenario, that is still enough to act. We will discover who is behind this at a later date. The priority now is prevention.” Ingrid turned to the head of the Eastern European branch. “I understand there have been some issues concerning XB-20675. Can its decommission be rescheduled?”

He shook his head, and Alex went cold. “I can’t guarantee that. They’ve already lost most control of it, and had to move the date up to get it down safely. They’re not likely to agree to a reschedule request.”

“Even with what’s at stake?” Alex blurted out, then shrank back as every head in the room swiveled her way.

“We believe you, Dr. Farmakis. That does not mean everyone will, and as an international group, sometimes we must tread carefully,” Ingrid said calmly.

Alex scowled, but relented as Siavash spoke quietly. “We’ll fix this, Alex. There’s time.”

She took a deep breath. He was right. Ignoring the conversation between the department heads for a moment, she saw that the sun had nearly set and the first stars were visible through the crystal-clear window. She wished the sight calmed her, as it usually did.

No one made mention of the time, and Alex realized with relief that everyone was staying until this was sorted out. As the hours passed, others came and went, Ingrid’s enormous office becoming the control center of their efforts to find a solution.

The data came in from two of the satellites in the group that would hit the decommissioned satellite, and Alex had been right—those satellites, and likely all the rest in that group, had disabled onboard AIs. The programmers were scrambling to get them back online for manual course corrections, but with the amount of time they had left, it wasn’t promising.

A dozen solutions were being thrown around the room, alongside damage control measures if their efforts didn’t prevent the first impact. Alex had never seen the ISSCC so busy, a chaotic scramble of people desperate to prevent a tragedy.

She considered joining one of the brainstorming teams, but she knew she did her best work on her own. She stayed buried in the data for hours, until she yawned so hard it felt like her jaw would unhinge. She clumsily removed her interface and stumbled off to find caffeine. Someone had placed a cart of instacoffee near the door, and she glanced up at the clock as she cracked the heating tab on one.

Nearly six in the morning, she realized with a shock. They had worked through the night, losing all track of time.

Time. Alex stared at the clock, the seconds ticking past. Something nagged at the back of her brain, fuzzy with fatigue. She let the room fade away, eyes on the clock as she quickly sipped her coffee.

It was too hot, and the shock of it burning her tongue jolted the thought forward. Clocks!

She elbowed her way into the knot of programmers working on the first group’s AIs.

“Clocks. Change their clocks,” she said, and watched as realization slowly dawned on one of the men’s faces.

“Oh my God. You’re right,” he said, quickly sitting down to pull on an interface. One of the women turned questioningly to Alex, who collapsed into another chair.

“The onboard clocks are separate from the AIs. Basic hardware. We can access them, change the time by a few seconds. They’ll automatically adjust their course to where they should be at that time. And miss XB-20675.”

The stately dance of satellites in orbit, all governed by time. She had moved time forward and backward, watching the pattern, predicting the pattern. They were trapped by the amount of time left until the collision. But if they tricked the satellites into thinking it was a different time . . . . . . . . . 

The rest of the programmers were urgently talking, and Alex noticed one leave to report to Ingrid. She let their words wash over her as she mechanically finished her coffee, slumped down in her chair. She knew they would all keep working on other solutions, and was glad of it—too much was at stake to let it all hinge on one idea. But this would work.

They would stop the first domino from falling and save the Hub, along with everything else. She looked out the window to watch the sun rise, too overwhelmed with relief to do anything else.


As the preparations that morning had turned to evacuating the Hub, reprogramming satellites to protect them from further hacking, and searching for who was responsible, Alex had staggered home for a few hours sleep.

Back at the office, she joined the crowd crammed into Ingrid’s office to monitor the skies as the clock ticked down to zero.

The onboard clocks in the most critical group of satellites had been successfully changed, and their orbits monitored to insure that the change wouldn’t lead to any unexpected collisions.

She joined the crowd around Ingrid’s conference table, where a 3D projector had been set up to display what was happening far above. XB-20675’s orbit had been slowly degrading for years, the defunct reconnaissance satellite moving from the upper ranges of MEO to skimming above LEO.

As they watched, the satellite used the last of its fuel to slow its velocity, right on time. Alex clenched her fists as the room went deadly silent and shifted her attention to the microsats. One by one, their staggered clocks brought them under and around the larger satellite as it began its graceful fall toward Earth. And missed it completely.

Everyone erupted into cheers, laughing and hugging in general pandemonium. Alex smiled but kept watching, eyes still glued to the satellite network. The pattern that had dominated her life for the past month disintegrated, each grouping of satellites spreading apart and rejoining the overall network.

Only once she could no longer spot any traces of the pattern did Alex truly relax. Siavash found her in the crowd, offering a fist bump in celebration. She grinned and tapped his fist with hers, then looked back at the display.

Someone pulled up XB-20675’s charted path; it was on target to crash into the Pacific. The Hub still orbited, its stately wheel spinning. Safe.

“Did they figure out who did it?” she asked, still watching the satellites. Siavash hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, tilting back on his heels.

“Yup,” he said, drawing the word out in satisfaction. “Hackers, but we knew that. Anti-AI ones. They apparently thought this would be the best way to protest AIs replacing jobs.”

“I don’t think we should over-rely on them either, but . . .” Alex trailed off, flabbergasted. They would kill everyone on the Hub and destroy the satellite network, just to take out the satellites’ AIs? They were just a tool.

But hadn’t she herself been frustrated with the AI at the office? She hadn’t expected to have anything at all in common with the people who attacked the network, and the connection made her uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I didn’t say they were smart. Brilliant hackers, though.”

“Do you admire them?” she asked, affronted.

He barked out a laugh. “Not at all. I admire you,” he admitted with a grin. “You did a hell of a good job.”

She flushed, not looking at him. “Thanks.”

“So what now? We still have the network, not to mention the Hub, because of you. Time to celebrate? Go lay on the beach for a month? After what you did, I think we can make pretty much any vacation happen.”

She snorted. A vacation did sound nice, just not on the beach. She looked past the projector into the sky outside.

There was the Hub . . . . . . . . . 

She should be more afraid of going into space now, not less. But somehow her newfound knowledge of the station’s fragility inspired her to go there, not to stay on Earth where it was safe.

It might not always be there, after all. What if she never went? For the first time in her life, that scared her even more than going up did.

“Yes, I think I’ll take some time. But not to stay on the ground.”

***

Avery Parks is a science fiction writer with stories at Cossmass Infinities, MetaStellar Magazine, and Infinite Worlds, among others. She has also placed in multiple contests, most recently winning second place for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award. She lives in Texas with her family, a variety of pets, and (according to some) too many books.

You can find her online at averyparkswrites.com.


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