Glasswake Relay
A transit beacon whose ceramic memory now answers questions nobody has asked.
Glasswake does not move ships instantly. It coordinates the navigation windows that make interstellar passages survivable. Its ceramic heart retains a physical trace of previous signals, allowing engineers to compare a digital record against a material one. The trace was once considered a useful manufacturing defect.
Eleven hours of apparent foreknowledge may be an interaction between that trace, biological additives and an external archive. The relay cannot yet predict arbitrary events. It produces incomplete messages associated with a narrow family of transit schedules, and even those have changed after crews altered their plans.
Rainward received a distress message from an unbuilt ferry.
Investigate a prediction without sacrificing the people asked to live inside it.
Five inhabited systems share a network that has begun receiving tomorrow’s distress calls.
A member system of the Glasswake Circuit with 4 charted worlds.
A terraced ocean city whose public transport timetable doubles as its constitution.
A new district learning to negotiate with a city that calls it temporary.