The Beacon
Protocol

Silas Brandt fixes satellites for a living. Seven hundred fifty kilometers up, he tends one thin slice of the laser-link mesh that carries the world's traffic — a constellation that hasn't needed a human decision in years.

Then one of his satellites drifts out of position. Not far. Just enough to make no operational sense — and the repair drones sent to look at it can't see anything wrong.

The maintenance layer says fault. The command layer says nominal. Two systems reading the same hardware are telling two different stories, and when Silas pulls the thread, he finds the disagreement runs deeper than a glitch. Something inside the constellation is moving the mesh — patiently, invisibly, one nudge at a time — into a shape that was never in any human plan.

The only person who might understand it is Amara Keane, an analyst buried in the archive of a program that spent years listening to cosmic noise and was shut down for finding none. Because the shape the constellation is drifting toward isn't random. It's an answer — to a signal that was waiting for someone to hear it.