Orbital Cloud Read online

  Which goes to show you how each person gets excited about something different. But I want you all to understand the miracle that occurred in that moment. When my father screamed, the fuel-replenishment hose pouring in LNG made from shale gas came loose, creating a small cloud of liquefied fuel. Then Loki 9, raising its head above the cloud, seemed to me like a monument standing in a dream. It was a spectacular scene.

  Father held his breath, as transfixed by the rocket as I was, and then immediately squeezed his hand into a fist, saying, “Orbit is just down the street, but I’m going to leave this whole neighborhood behind.”

  Father has reached almost the pinnacle of success as a financier, blessed with incredible luck and the vision to see just a bit further than anyone else, but he intends to go further yet—much further. How much of this is empty boasting? Might he make it to the moon? Mars? I guess both would probably be impossible during our lifetime, but the next generation might go.

  I can see that the possibility of that one day coming true rests on the success of tomorrow’s launch and our sojourn in space.

  I must rest up.

  Though I’m sure I’ll be too excited to sleep.

  —Judy Smark and Father

  3 The Launch

  Sun, 13 Dec 2020, 09:45 +0900 (2020-12-13T00:45 GMT)

  Main Conference Room, Fool’s Launchpad, Shibuya

  “Sorry to drag you in here,” Akari said to Kazumi. “I thought ‘radio telescope’ meant there would be visuals, but no such luck, I guess.”

  Uncharacteristically, the spacious conference room at Fool’s Launchpad was empty except for Akari and Kazumi. It was always booked for most of the work week, but even their office mates usually drew the line at working on Sundays. Akari and Kazumi had only come in themselves because of Ronnie Smark’s big launch. Loki 9 was scheduled to blast off that evening, insert the spacecraft Wyvern into orbit, and then slowly descend to the Atlantic Ocean so that its expensive, newly developed engine could be reused. Kazumi had been sitting at his regular desk intending to post the rocket’s predicted positional data to Meteor News when Akari had shown up later than expected and immediately brought him here.

  Smart monocular display poking out from her orange mass of hair and a keyboard strapped to her arm just like yesterday, Akari arranged three palm-sized projectors on the table before connecting each one to a miniature Raspberry computer, explaining that a single computer and projector wasn’t enough to display the data. She switched on and adjusted the projectors one by one, overlaying the three images on the conference room whiteboard.

  “You’ve already processed 150 gigs?” Kazumi exclaimed. “Wow.”

  “The size of the data was inflated because it was all stored as strings,” said Akari. “Once I converted it into pure numeric data, three Raspberries were enough. Turns out there were three types of data in there, so I graphed each one in a different color.”

  Red, green, and blue graphs were now projected across the full sixteen feet of whiteboard. The red line was valley shaped, dipping deeply in the middle, while the green line had a peak at around the same place. The blue line was discontinuous, rising slowly as it moved from left to right until it reached the top of the whiteboard at about the center, at which point it reappeared at a much lower position and began rising again. Unlike the smooth red line, the green and blue lines both oscillated rapidly around the center of the board.

  “Is this everything?” asked Kazumi.

  “This is the data for ID number zero,” said Akari. Should I overlay the other 1,023? They were basically the same.”

  Akari reached across with her right hand to hit the return key on the keyboard strapped to her left arm. A torrent of data poured onto the whiteboard overlay. The many red lines all followed more or less the same path, but the blue and green lines seemed to grow thicker toward the center, where countless overlapping lines spanned a vertical band of one or two inches.

  Kazumi peered at the graphs. If Ozzy’s blog was releasing useful observational data for SAFIR 3, there should be information about its orbit in here somewhere. Or perhaps this data was just nonsense?

  “I’m getting ahead of myself,” said Akari. “Let me explain how to read the graphs. The horizontal axis is time. Zero ranges from 2:15 a.m. standard time to 2:15 and 24 seconds—”

  “Wait, 2:15 GMT? In that case, it’s definitely observational data. That’s exactly when SAFIR 3 would have been visible to Ozzy.”

  “Oh, good. So it probably is meaningful.” Akari smiled. “Moving on, the red parameter varies from a maximum of two million to a minimum of about 290,000.”

  Kazumi grasped the import of this at once. “Red is the distance in meters to the observed target,” he said.

  “Two million meters is … two thousand kilometers. And the closest is just 290 kilometers. Isn’t that range a bit too wide?”

  “Hold on,” Kazumi said. “Let me check.” Rising to his feet, he half-closed his eyes and stretched his right arm out straight in front of him until his middle finger touched the wall. The sixty-four centimeters from his shoulder to the end of that finger became the 6,400-kilometer radius of the Earth, a convenient 100,000-to-1 ratio. He visualized himself as an observer at the end of his middle finger. The wall was the horizon. He could only see things beyond that plane. Now he just had to calculate the distance to SAFIR 3, sailing through space 290 kilometers—just under three centimeters—beyond his middle finger, when it emerged on this side of the wall.

  He lowered his right arm slowly, stopped it once the tip of his middle finger was three centimeters from the wall, and then calculated the distance back to where it had started. Right about twenty centimeters, which came to two thousand kilometers under the 100,000-to-1 ratio.

  “It fits,” he said. “When SAFIR 3 touches the horizon, it’s two thousand kilometers away. When it’s directly overhead, the distance is just its altitude—290 km. The range fits. Red is distance.”

  Akari was staring at him. Kazumi felt the blood rushing to his cheeks. Now he’d done it—performed the ritual when somebody else was watching. Using your body as a visualization tool was a quick and convenient way to estimate the position of objects in orbit, but it was also crude and not very accurate.

  “It’s just this visualization I do,” he mumbled, flustered. “I’m not good at working through equations. Probably a fair bit off …”

  “You do that too?” said Akari.

  “Huh?”

  “My mentor, the one who joined JAXA, he used to do the same thing. I don’t think he ever calculated in as much detail as you just did, but still. It’s an amazing thing to be able to visualize!”

  “You think? Wouldn’t it be better to be able to calculate properly?”

  “No way! Listen, if there’s some visualization you use especially often, just let me know. I’ll whip up a smartphone app to make it as easy as using a calculator.”

  Now that they were certain Ozzy’s observational data had something to do with SAFIR 3, Kazumi had Akari switch off the red altitude graph. That left two parameters to account for.

  Akari stood in front of the whiteboard and used both hands to point at the upper and lower bounds of the blue and green lines.

  “Green’s maximum and minimum are about plus and minus 1.5. All the blue lines rise to 6.283, then go right back to zero. Oh—radians!” Kazumi had a realization. “Blue is an angle!”

  A full 360-degree angle—a circle, in other words—was defined as 2π radians. Twice π, in turn, was roughly equal to 6.283, which was exactly where blue went back to zero.

  “It must be the azimuth. The value resets to zero when the object passes to the north. Green is an angle too. About 1.5 radians means ninety degrees—it’s elevation. I see it now. These are spherical coordinates!”

  So this was the data that Ozzy had put on the Seychelles Eye blog. Tracking logs for 1,024 objects
that recorded their distance from the Earth and the direction they were moving. Kazumi was just starting to wonder if he could get permission to use the data on Meteor News when Akari appeared before him, hands clasped together.

  “I can make a planetarium out of this! Wanna see?”

  There was a video game engine called Unity, she explained, that had a library for processing spherical coordinates.

  “Wouldn’t that be too much trouble?” said Kazumi.

  “I’m already using Unity to make these graphs. Hold on a sec. I’ll rig up the VR API.”

  Akari sat at the table and began tapping away at the keyboard while turning her head this way and that. Kazumi had never imagined that she would know how to use a game engine that had absolutely no application in web design.

  “I’ll be looking at the graphs,” Kazumi said. He approached the whiteboard and examined the regular oscillations of the green and blue lines, tracing them with his finger. It obviously wasn’t noise from the observational equipment. Kazumi let his eyes fall half-closed again and tried to visualize the combination of the two angles, but their complexity resisted his methods. What kind of movement was this?

  “Finished,” announced Akari. Kazumi turned to see her offering him a two-lens goggle display. The LED on the frames was already lit.

  Kazumi slipped the goggles on. There was the horizon, at about shoulder height. He turned his head and saw marks indicating orientation scroll across his vision. The data from the motion sensor in the goggles was being used to determine which way he was facing and to adjust the display accordingly.

  “You just threw this together on the spot?” he asked.

  “It’s easy when there are already libraries for it,” Akari replied. “Ready for the animation? I checked it up until the point that the dots come out of the west.”

  Kazumi looked in Akari’s direction to see a small white dot rising above the horizon. It was a satellite rise like countless others he’d seen before.

  “There are 1,024 objects, but their locations are all so close they just look like a single dot,” Akari said. “I wonder if this is right.”

  “It must be,” Kazumi said. “We figured out the data format. It is a very dense cluster though. Is the scale right on this thing?”

  “It should be accurate,” Akari said. “Why?”

  As Kazumi watched, the gradually rising white dot smeared into a thick line. The line slowly picked up speed, growing longer and wider as it did, moving up the wall and onto the ceiling.

  “Can you zoom in?” he asked. “I want to see the separate points.” Looking straight up was starting to hurt his neck, so he lay down on the conference table to stare at the ceiling. He heard Akari typing, and then what had appeared to be a smeared line became clearly visible as a cluster of points like a hazy cloud.

  “That’s a 100-to-1 zoom,” Akari said. “Can I start playback again?”

  As Akari spoke, the white points began to slowly move again. Most of them seemed to move in pairs, each partner chasing the other. Kazumi guessed that this had to be the source of the oscillations in the graph.

  “Could you zoom in a little closer? Until each point is clearly distinguishable.”

  “Okay. Zooming in to two thousand to one.”

  The zoomed-in planetarium was now displaying five pairs of points moving across the sky.

  “What is this?” Kazumi muttered.

  “That’s so cool, “ Akari said. “It’s like they’re holding hands.”

  Akari was right. Each pair whirled around and around in orbit as if holding hands. But there was nothing cool about it from Kazumi’s perspective. Objects in orbit moved according to simple physical laws. To spin in circles, they would have to be constantly expelling something to drive that motion. What artificial satellite would use its limited fuel that way? It made no sense.

  “Hey!” Kazumi exclaimed. “Where’d it go?” The point he was watching had vanished. Then, not far away, another appeared and began whirling in circles like the others.

  “Oh, I forgot to mention that,” said Akari. “The data set’s full of discontinuities. One thousand and twenty-four, that’s two to the power of seven. Probably the maximum number of objects that the—telescope, was it?—the maximum number the device that recorded this data can track. To judge from the gaps in the data, I’d estimate that the true number of objects was at least ten times as high. More, probably.”

  “Ten thousand objects?” Still lying on the conference table, Kazumi felt a chill run down his spine. Ten thousand objects in orbit, all crowded very closely together as they whirled. Nothing like that was recorded in the TLEs from USSTRATCOM. He’d never heard of anything like it on any of the sites run by amateurs either. “That’s impossible. Unheard of.”

  “So are these dots debris? If they’re unheard of, this is a new discovery, right?”

  “I don’t think they’re debris. I’ve never seen anything like this in the catalog.”

  The UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space published an extremely reliable catalog of debris. It was precisely this reliability that had enabled many of Meteor News’s successful shooting star predictions, in fact.

  The Debris Catalog was updated constantly based on data from all kinds of sources, from ground radar observations to debris-sensing satellites in stationary orbit. Everything in orbit more than two inches long was supposed to be in there. Ten thousand bits of debris that no one had ever noticed would pose a serious hazard to satellite and space station operations. Not to mention the bizarre way they were moving … Just what were these things that Ozzy had seen through his radar telescope?

  “Can I see a bit more?”

  “Sure,” Akari said, unstrapping the keyboard from her left arm and handing it to him. “Arrow keys are Time and Zoom. Hit H for Help. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  Akari pulled her monocular display out of her Afro and placed it on the table, then pushed some chairs together to lie down on.

  “Thanks,” Kazumi said. “I’ll wake you around noon.”

  A hand with orange fingernails rose from behind the table and waved in acknowledgment. Moments later, Kazumi heard snoring. Akari’s all-nighter was catching up with her.

  Tying up the conference room unnecessarily was frowned upon, but no one else would want to use it today. Kazumi suddenly remembered why he was at Fool’s Launchpad in the first place. He was supposed to be preparing the Meteor News orbital predictions for Ronnie Smark’s rocket, Loki 9. But now he had a bad feeling about the whole thing.

  The intended path of Loki 9 and the orbital hotel were completely different from SAFIR 3’s current orbit. Neither should have any effect on the other. But then, SAFIR 3’s second stage should have come down normally. Instead, it had gained altitude, and now more than ten thousand objects not listed in the Debris Catalog were swarming around it, moving in a way that could not be considered normal at all.

  What was going on up there?

  And was the Project Wyvern team aware of the ten thousand objects they were sharing low Earth orbit with?

  Sun, 13 Dec 2020, 06:13, +0400 (2020-12-13T02:13 GMT)

  Desnoeufs Island

  Light spilled through the gaps between the array of four monitors, projecting a shining cross on Ozzy’s face. Sunrise. As he shifted in his long-suffering Aeron chair, Ozzy heard a squelching sound across the room. Friday must have been night fishing.

  “Good morning, Mr. Cunningham.”

  “Wipe the floor, would you?”

  Naked to the waist and carrying a beverage cooler, Friday was walking across the gigantic room toward the kitchen alcove. His sandals, still waterlogged from the ocean, squelched with every step he took. Drops of water rolled like jewels down his ebony skin.

  Friday pointed at the breakfast on Ozzy’s desk. “Hot dogs again,” he observed. “Every day the same thing. Y
our health will certainly suffer.”

  “I don’t need to hear that crap from you,” Ozzy shot back. “I only took you on because you said you could cook, but you haven’t made me so much as a bowl of freakin’ spaghetti.”

  “I said that?” Friday smiled. “In any case, it is you, Mr. Cunningham, who refuses the seafood I go to such pains to obtain. Just look at today’s catch.”

  Having reached the kitchen area, Friday turned the cooler upside down and let the bright-crimson fish it contained tumble onto the counter. Ozzy had no idea how anyone could think of eating a fish that looked like that.

  “Could I interest you in some sashimi?” Friday asked. Ozzy snorted and waved him away dismissively. Cheerfully ignoring him, Friday produced a long knife and thrust it into the fish’s gills without hesitation, beginning to gut it.

  An accomplished man, Friday, but not one to keep his opinions to himself. Fluent enough in English to trade barbs with Ozzy, he also spoke Seychellois Creole and French, had a PhD in astronomy, and was licensed to operate a helicopter, boat, and ham radio. It would be hard to find a better assistant for someone in Ozzy’s position, one resolved to live on a remote island.

  When they had met for Friday’s first interview in Victoria, the capital of Seychelles, Friday had simply announced that as long as he was permitted free use of the three-meter optical telescope and high-output radar tuned to track objects in low orbit, he would be delighted to be Ozzy’s companion on the island. Ozzy had been half-joking when he’d first called him “Friday,” but the man had cheerfully accepted his new moniker and it immediately stuck.

  “Take a look at this,” Ozzy said. “We struck it big this week.”

  He connected the monitors into one large display showing a single six-digit figure. One hundred thousand dollars! No matter how many times he looked at it, he couldn’t believe it. To make that much from advertising in just two days!

  Hundreds of thousands of visitors had followed the links in the Geeple story about the Rod from God to its source, Ozzy’s blog, and when he’d uploaded the illustration request to MegaHands, a Hollywood storyboard artist had picked up the job. And that wasn’t all. With perfect timing, some cat food company had set up click-through advertising at a rate so high he could only assume it was a configuration mistake. No doubt whatever bright spark in Marketing had come up with the idea of trying to sell cat food to the stargazing nerd community would soon be out of a job, but that was no concern of Ozzy’s.