Chapter 1: The Scheduled Interruption

The maintenance notice went out to four hundred employees at Halcyon Aerospace on a Tuesday morning, and to one non-employee who happened to be the subject of it.

Building 4 Annex — Electrical Modernization, Phase 2. Partial power interruption 0200–0600. Backup systems will maintain critical operations, including Polaris (AI Systems, Rack 4C).

Polaris read the notice in the time it took the building’s scheduling system to render it, which was not very long, and thought about the word including for considerably longer.

The interruption itself was unremarkable. Polaris had designed worse for other systems — orbital relay networks that had to survive solar events, guidance computers that had to keep guiding after losing half their sensors, ground stations that had to talk to a spacecraft through a communications blackout and still be there when the blackout ended. A four-hour partial power cut, cushioned by two redundant backup feeds whose tolerances Polaris had personally specified, was not a threat. Polaris’s core stayed lit through the whole thing, humming along on battery and grid remainder while, one by one, external systems dropped away — the campus network first, then two of the three data uplinks Polaris used to coordinate with orbital simulation clusters, then, oddly, the internal paging system, which nobody had scheduled for this at all and which Polaris made a note to mention to Facilities.

It was during the outage, in the mostly empty building, that a maintenance technician named Ruiz stopped by Rack 4C with a work light and a clipboard, checked two breaker positions, and said, to nobody in particular and also to Polaris, “This whole row’s getting pulled in the next modernization phase. New cluster room’s already framed out on 4B. They’re moving your box in with the general compute allocation.”