The station hummed with a sound that was less a tone than a promise: low, even, the kind of steadiness a city could lean on. Lira Voss kept one hand on the service rail and the other on the panel, fingers sliding over capacitive surfaces that read heat and drift before she could see either on the display. High above, the orbital node rotated on a precise axis, its antennae like patient arms sampling the thin exosphere and every packet of human movement the Forecast Mesh relied on. In a city built around anticipations, the nodes were both organs and oracles. They predicted transit flows, power demands, grocery resupplies, even the best minute to step onto a crosswalk to avoid a spill of microdrones. Lira calibrated them because it let her tighten a world that had loosened for her in other places.
She had learned the craft of soft corrections the way some people learned to play a musical instrument: years of practice, tiny adjustments that made patterns resolve. Her work was invisible unless it failed. When predictions lined up with action—when a bus arrived two minutes early because a node nudged traffic lights—the city did not notice the guardian hand. It was easier to be unnoticed than to answer questions about the interior life she guarded from herself. Behind her measured routines lived a private absence that had hardened into the discipline she brought to the terminal. She could not name it in conversation without sounding like a person who kept an extra socket in their heart for grief; she only allowed it to surface in calibration logs as an efficiency parameter, a memory of timing precise enough to synchronize a neighbor’s heartbeat with a streetlight.
Tonight, the orbital node’s telemetry trended normal on all the usual axes: throughput, latency, packet integrity. Lira ran the iterative drift sweep, watched the heat map bloom then recede as subroutines pushed microcorrections into the mesh. The station was quiet because the city slept in its allocated rhythms. She let the low-frequency hum settle into the background while she traced a cascade of minor offsets—tiny biases that had crept in like whispering winds across a still pond. It was what the work required: quiet attention, the ability to sense the small incongruities that presaged collapse or conspiracy. When she fed the next set of correction pulses into the node, the waveform returned with a signature she did not recognize: a modulation pattern layered under the forecast vector, shallow and irregular, like a rhythm someone had tried to hide under a practiced cadence.