Mojave PrimePad, 34° 55′ N
The desert night felt engineered for rocket fire—air crisp, stars sharp, no wind to snatch away possibility. Thirty metres tall, the Prime Voyager stood on its mobile erector like a glass needle banded with matte-black cloak panels. At the tip, beneath a composite fairing, sat Dawn-Core's little sister: a one-kilogram clear-thread sphere the team had nicknamed Minuet.
Aiden paced the launch deck with a checklist tablet that pinged every eighty-three seconds, the prime pulse baked into its metronome. Each ping steadied him: heartbeat of the mission, echo of the Loom's new language. Yet another rhythm tugged beneath—an irregular flutter from Dawn-Core in his chest, as if the older crystal worried about sending its child beyond gravity's reach.
Maya knelt by the payload access hatch, soldering a stubborn feedthrough. "Telemetry bus jittering," she muttered. "The sphere's transparency eats signal like candy." She slapped a fiber-optic patch. "Talk to me, Minuet."
The sphere brightened—a shy flicker—then settled. Data flowed across Maya's visor. She exhaled. "Handshake stable."
Lin Xi, robed in lightweight flight coveralls, painted a last Qi ward on the rocket skin: a spiral broken in two deliberate places, ensuring the launch's perfection would always contain room for chance. "Thirteen breaths," he said, signing the rune, "and the sky learns a new note."
Cassie secured the nose-cone umbilical, lantern set to clear-halo mode to minimise dream bleed into waking engineers. She smiled at the tech crew, most of them volunteers who still thought the Guardians were eccentric physicists rather than stewards of a cosmic weaving. "All lights imperfect," she quipped. The crew chuckled, tension eased.
High on the gantry Nephis draped his cloak over the fairing seams, letting its indigo threads pulse along the rocket's composite skin. The cloak's heartbeat cancelled stray electromagnetic noise—an organic Faraday cage.
Echoes in the Sand
Twenty kilometres beyond the pad, seismic instruments buzzed. The prime pulse rippled back from bedrock every cycle, amplified by desert strata. A field geologist radioed launch control: "Sub-threshold tremors in prime sequence. Never seen symmetrical micro-quakes."
Maya frowned at the report. "Clear-thread's call is burrowing into stone now."
Aiden checked his tablet—error ticks on ground sensors but no structural risk. "Stone can hum," he said, "let it."
Saboteur in Harmony
T-Minus five hours: final guidance upload. A lanky blockchain volunteer—Kiro Ono, coder from Tokyo—climbed the service ladder holding a reusable data drive. He slid it into the nav-bay, flashed a nervous grin at Cassie, and descended. Routine.
But Nephis caught a whisper of too-perfect rhythm in Kiro's footfalls: seven beats, prime-silent pause, seven beats—Council lullaby meter. His cloak tensed.
Below, Maya watched the new software compile. Lines of code scrolled pristine, no comments, no random offset—flawless. Too flawless. She froze compilation. Hex diff revealed a dormant subroutine named Hush-Root—trigger at 120 km altitude, overwrite Minuet's entropy tables, convert its antenna into wide-band lull caster.
"Ghost code," she hissed.
Aiden sprinted to the ladder, met Kiro halfway. The coder's eyes glowed faint amber. Council. Before Aiden could speak, Kiro's body spasmed; a wave of prime-meter static jumped along the handrail, knocking Aiden back.
Nephis dropped like a shadow, cloak wrapping the saboteur. His own indigo pattern fought the amber glow—imperfection against false perfection. Cassie's lantern flashed mismatched pulses, aiding Nephis. The amber light guttered; Kiro collapsed, ordinary eyes returning, confused. He'd been a puppet, memory blank.
Re-randomise
Maya purged Hush-Root, re-injected noise, rewrote the tables with three typos Lin deliberately composed. Compilation passed; Minuet chimed, acknowledging the chaos as authentic.
Aiden stood, shoulder numb but mind clear. "The Council left sleeper shards in people, not code. They'll echo whenever we draw new threads."
Lin Xi dabbed salve on Aiden's wrist. "Echoes remind the melody to stay awake."
They reset the countdown.
Prime Rising
T-Minus thirty seconds. Desert animals fell silent. The volunteer ground crew stepped back to a safe perimeter, unaware of how narrowly catastrophe had skirted them.
Zero.
Engines lit with a roar that fractured the prime pulse into joyous disarray. The rocket climbed, cloak panels dark against flame. At 110 km, fairing separation: cameras caught Minuet tumbling free, petals of clear-thread unfolding into a spiral dish. Its first transmission reached the hub six milliseconds later—a burst of silence framed by twin prime beats.
The world below felt nothing but awe at another small satellite deployed. Yet in the Loom, dreamers everywhere blinked at a sudden space between breaths—as though the night sky had winked a secret.
On the pad, Maya whooped, Cassie cried, Lin Xi bowed, Nephis allowed a half-smile. Aiden watched Minuet's beacon flatten into steady noise, then fray into thousands of imperfect harmonics.
"Prime Voyager lives," he whispered. "Let's see what answers."
Above the ionosphere, a translucent spindle flickered just beyond the cameras' range—clear-thread observers, listening to the newborn cadence. The dialogue had begun.