DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 07.11.2017 — $14.34/share — ▲ 6.9%
I. What We Are Building
The error is a decimal place. Three months it sat there, in some constant she'd inherited from someone else's model, calibrated perfectly to be wrong. Mireille finds it as the clock lazily flips over to 1:45 in the morning. She goes still for a moment before fixing it. The simulation runs. The arc plots clean.
She'd applied at midnight on a friend's recommendation, sent the CV before she could think about it, then spent four days with her phone facing down telling herself it didn't matter. When the call came, she walked outside and sat on the curb in the cold. The woman on the line was still talking, still going through start dates and relocation, and she said yes before she'd finished hearing the sentence. What had done it was the pitch deck, delivered by some junior associate presenting to a half-empty lecture hall at Imperial, talking about democratized orbital access, the overview effect, what it meant for a species to be able to see itself from the outside. Mireille had sat in the third row and thought: that's the job. She didn't ask who was funding it.
There's a photograph taped to the corner of her monitor, tilting slightly, the putty having long since lost its tack. She is seven in it, standing in her grandmother's garden in Ibadan, pointing at the moon. She has been pointed skyward her entire life.
She puts on her coat and goes outside. The car park is empty. The air is cold and characterless, the city's light smearing the southern sky orange. She finds the smudge of Orion without much effort in spite of the light pollution. Looking up at the specific patch of nothing that won't be nothing for much longer.
Mireille goes back inside and sends the file to her team lead.
She goes home. She sleeps well.
You are looking at the Sahara. From here the dunes read as brushstrokes, rust and copper and a pale bone white where the sand catches daylight at the wrong angle. The dark masses interrupting the sweep of it are rock formations, hundreds of meters tall. They look like scales the color of bruises. There is no road, no structure, so far out you would never see a person.
The satellite passes out of range.
DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 04.22.2018 — $18.91/share — ▲ 2.3%
II. What We Are Owed
The timeline moves again on a Tuesday. Six weeks off from the next launch window. David finds out the way he always finds out — late, from someone who already doesn't remember telling him, the information arriving pre-digested into something he is expected to simply pass on.
He opens the project file. Starts moving things. An hour and twenty minutes is eaten up making it look like nothing happened.
He has been the operations manager for fourteen months now. He can hold a team together, absorb pressure from above and convert it into something his people can actually work with. It is an endless series of explaining to his team why things are the way they are without ever using any words that are true.
Tomorrow he will sit across from four people who have been working seventy-hour weeks since January and he will tell them the timeline has been adjusted. He has been practicing the word in his head since the email came. Adjusted. Like something was crooked and management has simply set it straight.
His daughter Emily calls satellites the little stars daddy sends into the sky. David has used this in two presentations. Both times, it landed.
He sits in his coat in the dim of the office, bag on his shoulder, not quite leaving. Through the window, the car park is orange and half-empty.
He drives home on autopilot, the city thinning out around him until it's only suburbs, streetlights, the sameness of streets that he has driven so frequently that they don't register anymore. He pulls into the driveway, turns the engine off and sits there.
The house is dark except for the master bedroom window, which means Sarah is still up, probably reading and waiting for him, and he knows he should go in. He will go in. He just needs another minute in the quiet of the car, where he is not a father or a husband or an operations manager, where he is just a man sitting in the dark with the engine muttering as it cools.
The little stars daddy sends into the sky.
He looks up through the windshield. The suburban orange washes out most of it but there are a few, the stubborn ones, the bright ones. He doesn't know their names and never has, and most likely never will.
He goes inside. It's so late, Sarah has probably put Emily to bed already.
He cracks his daughter's door and checks on her anyway.
You are looking at the Amazon. The canopy blending into a single thing, one unbroken dark green interrupted only by pale threads of river catching the midday light. There is smoke moving across the frame in long, unhurried arcs, white against the green, a dozen or more columns of it drifting west and merging. In the periphery, the green gives way to brown earth, revealed by excavators and backhoes and saws and torches, splitting the vast green asunder.
The satellite passes out of range.
DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 03.17.2019 — $67.42/share — ▲ 31.4%
III. What We Tell Ourselves
Sung-min writes the talking points in forty minutes, passages moving the way water shapes, quickly, without resistance, taking on whatever the container demands. Everything exciting, but never verifiable. He doesn't ask who writes the briefs that float across his desk. In fact, he has stopped asking who is behind most things. The asking never went anywhere useful, and the not-asking, he has found, is almost always easier.
His mother called at nine. He let it ring out and sent a text after: still at work, call tomorrow. She will ask how the job is going and he will say good, fine, really good actually, because what else is there to say?
A frictionless life. He's getting good at it.
There is a version of him, eight weeks gone now, who would've flagged the servers.
Who would have asked, in the bright, unembarrassed voice of someone who has not yet learned that some questions cost more than they're worth, what exactly the meeting with no attendees and no room listed was doing every other Thursday. But instead, his eyes slide past it, over the servers in the restricted wing and onto the task at hand on his desk.
He watches the all-hands meeting on his laptop, sound low. Iris Darke doesn't move much when she speaks. One gets the supreme impression that personal stillness has the room around her doing all the adjusting. She's talking about orbital reach, about infrastructure, about what Darke Horizons represents for the next decade. Sung-min hears sentences that somewhere down the line he typed out, at a desk two floors away from a room he has never been invited into, in front of people whose names he doesn't know.
Six items are left on the list for tonight. He opens the first one.
You are looking at the North Atlantic in the winter. The ice twists and swirls across the water like ink, white tendrils curling out across the deep blue languidly, folding back on themselves. The ocean underneath lies flat and unchanging. It is the ice that is alive, coiling and uncoiling into floats that have no names, and will be gone before anyone thinks to give them one. In the lower left a coastline appears, grey and small and very far below.
The satellite passes out of range.
DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2% ◆ DHC | Darke Horizons Corporation — 02.08.2021 — $143.77/share — ▲ 18.2%
IV. What We Have Done
The call comes in at 4:47 in the morning. Renata is on her second attempt at sleep when it does, the kind of half-sleep that doesn't count, brought on by a blend of caffeine pills to stay up and sedatives to try and go down. She's more tired than when she first lay down.
She knows it's Iris before she looks. Iris is the only person who calls at this hour without apology, without preamble, without any apparent awareness that the hour is unusual.
She probably doesn't sleep much either. Renata has never asked.
There is a journalist. Three weeks of questions about the satellite contracts, and now he's close enough to something real that it needs handling before Thursday. Iris says this in four sentences and hangs up. Renata lies in the dark for a moment with the phone still warm in her hand.
She gets up. Makes coffee, the slow kind that gives her hands something to do while she thinks. The apartment is quiet, the city outside not yet fully committed to being awake. She takes her cup to the window and stands there a while, watching the street below organize itself into the shape of a day.
The journalist is good. She's been reading his work for six weeks, since his name first appeared at the edge of her attention. It will take some serious intervention to redirect, something that will leave a mark on his life for a long time.
She was forty-one when she signed the contract. She doesn't look it. Won't look it for a long time, which is the point, which is what she paid for — more time, more mornings, more of this. She hadn't specified what this would be. At forty-one, standing across a table from people who were offering her more of her own life, that had all seemed like details.
She finishes her coffee. Rinses the cup. Opens her laptop at the kitchen table and begins composing the email to the journalist — friendly, helpful, completely without substance. The first step in the slow arc that'll pull his life down with it.
Outside the window the city has committed now, people moving with the particular quality that mornings have before the day gets its hands on them.
She doesn't look up. There's a lot of time left.
She had better use it.
You are looking at the Earth. All of it, or close enough. The Atlantic dominates the center of the frame, clouds dancing and crowding over land as blue deepens to black at the edges where the atmosphere runs out. From here you can't see anything that's wrong. You've lost too much detail, gone too far.
You can't see any of it. But that's alright.
Don't feel too glum about it. You should smile — you're on camera, after all.
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