City in the Clouds
Sunlight penetrates the ring-shaped window, casting seven-colored spots of light onto the control console.
Ye Mi stares at the data streams on the holographic display, her fingers hovering mid-air. The energy distribution curve of the thirty-seventh colonization satellite shows a delay of 0.003 seconds. The deviation is so tiny it can be ignored, yet she pulls up the raw logs anyway.
"Here we go again."
Behind her, the sound of a chair sliding echoes. Her colleague Zhou Yan's head leans over. "What?"
"E-37's grid synchronization delay," Ye Mi says, pushing the data over. "It's 0.3 milliseconds above the standard."
Zhou Yan glances at it, then chuckles. "Big sister, our job's supposed to be the 'most relaxed civil service in the City in the Clouds,' right? Can you play along with the persona? 0.3 milliseconds is enough for photons to travel ninety kilometers, but it's not enough for you to brew a cup of synthetic coffee."
Ye Mi doesn't smile.
She's been working at the Seventh Star Domain Energy Dispatch Center for three years, handling data streams that could fill half the Martian library. The 0.3-millisecond delay is within the threshold, but the problem is—this is the seventh time this month. Every time, different nodes, always on the edge of the threshold, and yet, no logs of anomalies.
"The main brain hasn't raised an alarm," Zhou Yan points to the ceiling, speaking lazily. "If the main brain isn't concerned, why should you worry?"
She turns off the interface.
He's right. The main brain is the central nervous system of a Level-2 civilization, monitoring every energy node from Earth to the Kuiper Belt. If it stays silent, everything is under control.
She turns her gaze outside the window.
The City in the Clouds floats in geostationary orbit, a ring structure seven kilometers in diameter shimmering with metallic luster in the sunlight. Further out, the first array of Dyson clouds has just been calibrated. Tens of thousands of ultra-thin photovoltaic sails are slowly unfolding in space, like a metallic rose blooming its petals.
It's the morning of civilization 238.
A new dawn for a Level-2 civilization.
"Let's go," Zhou Yan stands up, patting her shoulder. "The shuttle to the Mars Expo leaves in twenty minutes. I hear they're going to display a holographic model of the Dyson cloud and the real Pioneer Tablet—discovered from beneath Europa's ice sheet."
Ye Mi pauses her hand as she packs her things.
The Pioneer Tablet.
She's heard the legend: twenty-three years ago, a deep-space probe discovered an artificial object beneath Europa's ice. Carbon-14 dating shows it's— a billion years old.
A billion years ago, Earth was still in the Precambrian, with no trilobites in sight.
Who left that tablet there?
"Lost in thought?" Zhou Yan is already at the door.
Ye Mi catches up.
As they step out of the dispatch center, she glances back at the control room. Hundreds of holographic screens flicker silently, each one updating the operational status of a node in real-time. Green means normal, blue means standby, red indicates anomalies.
Right now, all are green.
Perfect, like a lie.