Space Quidditch 2077

Rated: 18+ · Short Story · Sci-fi · #2360801

The Space Quidditch Finals are disrupted by a major power outage.

When the Space Station stopped turning, the rooms atmosphere evacuated and the man died shortly after, unable to breathe. The body had been taken but his room still needed cleaning so that it could be resold. This was Suite 1407. A tourist suite. Premium tier.

Sarah sealed the door behind her. She was more than a maid. She had a PhD in astrophysics from CalTech and a fellowship working in a station lab on solar storm research. The rules were everyone had to pull their weight round here. Her fellowship was not enough to secure the permanent residence she needed to live with her husband, the military commander on site. Commander Jack Jones was also the captain of the Space Quidditch team fielded by the Marines. An appointment based on talent, five straight wins in the Cosmic finals and the fact that he and three other Marines had invented the game. He and these three were a permanent fixture in the seven wizard team and undisputed masters of the game. They had adapted drones used to help transport space-suited Marines on patrol, initially for a training exercise. But after a few years, the exercise developed into a game - Space Quidditch. It was so visually compelling that, it was only a matter of time, before one of the Corporate CEOs caught wind of it and monetized it into a regular tournament.

“Thirty dead,” said the voice in her ear. Calm. Military calm. It was Jack.

She closed her eyes for half a second. “All asphyxiation?”

“Yeah. When the lights went out. Life support reversed in that whole section.”

A few compartments. A few people. Statistics already.

Sarah walked to the porthole looking out on the station. As the view rotated she observed the extensive arrays of space industry. Docking arms, solar arrays, semi-conductor crystal-growing labs, server spines glowing faintly with residual heat. Beyond it, the void and the arena, a glittering sphere of lights, now all back on, where the Space Marines had been defending their title.

Space Quidditch. She almost laughed at the idea, it sounded so preposterous in the circumstances.

“Jack,” she said quietly, “you were out there.”

“Yeah. Mid-play. Lights go out, comms glitch, half the drones desync. Thought it was a training failure until…” He paused. “Until we saw the station go dark.”

Sarah swallowed. “This wasn’t an accident.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

The station had two languages and two main groups of people.

There was the language used for tourists, clean, polite, scripted. “Hospitality professionals.” “Guest experience.” “Your comfort is our priority.” This was the language mainly spoken by the temps, people on contracts often for less than a year.

Then there were the spacers, some of them thirty-year ghosts of orbit, who had their own way of speaking. The spacers were the long term residents of the station Sarah though officially resident as a maid, something that was usually a temporary contract, was married to Jack who'd been on station for ten years now and was also the main military commander. So she was regarded as a spacer by relationship and was therefore allowed into their bars.

“Temps screwed the airlock sequencing again,” someone muttered as Sarah drifted into the bar at Junction C.

“Wasn’t temps,” came the reply. “System-wide. Smells like mats.”

Mats. Matahari. Spies. Usually Chinese. Sometimes just anyone who asked too many questions.

When the systems went down, hard down, lights-out, dead network, the official recovery protocols had stalled. Locked out. Corrupted.

So the spacers had brought things back the old way. A simple reboot but with all the spacer tricks. Manual overrides. Physical relays. Back-channel firmware the original engineers had left undocumented. Tricks passed down like folklore.

Hoovers knew them best. The garbage men of space. The ones who kept the station from drowning in its own debris. They cleaned the infrastructure and knew what not to touch.

“Systems are like people,” one of them had told her once. “You gotta know where to kick ‘em.”

They got the station back in less than three minutes. The lights went back on, rotation restarted, the Quidditch Arena lit up like a Christmas tree.

Five minutes after that they knew something was deeply wrong with the system as alarms starting going off. But the change was too deep to identify straight away. The server farms, petabytes of AI infrastructure humming in vacuum-cooled silence, were compromised. Not destroyed. Changed.

“They didn’t steal anything,” said the regulator, pacing in the observation deck. “No exfiltration. No ransom demand. No political statement.”

“Yet,” said Jack.

Jack had Sarah in the room serving drinks and refreshments, she was the only one he really trusted right now. She stood arms folded by a wall. Below them, the server arrays pulsed like a second city.

The IT guy in the room added, “It’s not a hack in the usual sense.”

The regulator frowned. “Explain.”

He hesitated. “It’s… selective.”

“Selective how?”

He pulled up a projection. Data streams, model outputs, training logs. “These systems, your AI clusters, they rely on bias correction layers. Filters. Weighting systems. They shape outputs. Control narratives. Suppress certain correlations.”

“Yes,” the regulator said carefully. “To ensure safety and compliance. that is why I am here, to ensure that.”

Sarah understood the IT guys meaning before Jack did. “Those layers have been.. Not removed. Exposed.”

Jack leaned in. “Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Sarah said, “the system is now showing us exactly how it was shaping information before.”

The IT man nodded at Sarah. Silence.

The regulator went pale. “That’s not possible. I mean we would have known about manipulations like this.”

“Clearly not," said Jack.

The usual suspect list was extensively discussed by all and sundry and the global media played its own game of finger pointing while it waited for the facts.

It could have been Chinese interference. They had their own sovereign stack which was in competition with the corporately owned American also used by the Europeans. The consensus was that the Europeans did not have the know how to pull off a hack like this but boy did they know how to legislate. The Russians were no newbies when it came to cyber warfare. They’d been testing orbital leverage in quieter ways for decades. Knowledge terrorists - activists who believed information should be free, unfiltered were also a possibility. Or corporate sabotage? Rival firms leveraging their own advantage. However most of the big ones were already invested in the major space platforms and had no interest in any kind of sabotage..

So none of them really fitted.

“No external breach,” Jack said later, sitting across from Sarah in a dim service bar. A spacers’ place. No tourists. No cameras they didn’t know about. “Everything points inward.”

Sarah sipped her drink. Something synthetic. Bitter. “Then it’s one of ours.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone in mind?”

Jack hesitated as a text came in on his mobile. “We have a name. he's a friend of yours.”

Oswald lived in Section K. No viewport. No luxury. Just a cramped cabin filled wall to wall with books. Actual books. Paper.

Sarah spent a lot of time with Oswald, he was one of the few brains on station that could keep up with her. He'd read everything and they talked politics, religion, and literature in a spacer bar and were firm friends. She had even been to his place several times to borrow books. Oswald boasted the biggest off world library in the solar system, was how he described it.

He looked up as they entered. Calm. Almost relieved. He smiled at Sarah and nodded at Jack whom he also knew personally.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

Jack stayed by the door. “Oswald, you need to come with us.”

Oswald smiled faintly. “Of course I do.”

Sarah stepped forward. “Why did you do it?”

He looked at her, and shrugged. “You know what I think, you're a thinker too. Your mind is still free like mine”

Jack shifted. “Answer the question.”

Oswald sighed. “You already know. She does, at least.”

Sarah felt it click into place. “You didn’t destroy the system.”

“No.”

“You revealed it.”

“Yes.”

Jack frowned. “Revealed what?”

Oswald gestured at the books. “History. Truth. Narrative. You think those machines just process data? They curate reality. For some years now corporate interests have been subtly rewriting our global memories and shaping our futures.”

“The Farms are regulated,” Jack said.

“By corporations and by IT illiterate law makers,” Oswald snapped. “By the blind and by people with interests. With biases. With money at stake.”

Sarah’s voice was quiet. “You targeted the bias layers.”

Oswald nodded. “I mapped them. Years of watching outputs. Cross-referencing. The patterns were there if you knew where to look.”

“And the blackout?” Jack asked.

“A distraction. A forced reboot to inject the payload. Sorry about your tournament but I needed the distraction. Everyone was watching you guys. By the way Space Marines all the way in the replay.”

But Jack did not smile at that. “People died,” Jack said.

Oswald’s expression faltered. “Yes. that was not meant to happen, there was only so much I could control from the internet cafe console in K section.”

Silence stretched until Oswald broke it.

“Look I didn’t intend that,” he said. “But tell me, how many lives are shaped, quietly, every day? How many truths buried? How many futures nudged?”

“That’s not your call,” Jack said.

“Whose is it?” Oswald shot back. “The corporations’? The regulators who barely understand the systems they oversee?”

Sarah stepped closer. “What happens now?”

Oswald smiled again. “Now? Now everyone sees. Legislators. Public. The whole edifice is transparent.”

“And you?” Jack asked.

“I get arrested and there is going to be a trial. A trial in which the whole conspiracy will be exposed,” Oswald said simply.

The cuffs were soft restraints. Magnetic. Designed for zero-g. Jack secured them with practiced ease. Oswald didn’t resist. As they moved toward the door, he paused. Looked back at the books.

“They are yours if you want them. I am not sure I trust anyone else with them,” he said to Sarah.

Her eyes filled with tears and she nodded in response.

Oswald added, “You should read them before they rewrite them too.”

Station life restabilized, there was talk about when to replay the final but most conversation was about Oswald and why he'd done it. The world below them also took sides and fought for him or against him. Politicians posturing to their constituencies based on their leanings. Data scientists scrambling to explain what had been exposed and why it was important.

Some called Oswald a terrorist. Others called him a whistleblower. A few called him a hero. Sarah missed her friend.

She returned to her lab continuing her research and her monitoring of the sun. Jack was out on patrol. Solar activity spiked across her screen, an incoming storm. "Jack, there is a big solar storm on the way, get your men inside."

There was a short pause during which Sarah imagined Jack barking orders. Then, "Roger that, you ok?" Jack had picked up the tone of Sarah's voice

"Feeling a little deflated, I am missing Oswald. He shouldn't have done it but I really liked the guy. " She looked at the viewing screen again seeing some minor errors. Another system. Another risk. She looked out at the station, at the fragile shell holding everything together. "It all seems so fragile now she said, it felt like home before."

"We are all in, no man left outside."

"Great."

"It is still our home," Jack replied. "Look I need to run a debrief, but I will be home in a few hours and then we can talk. "

"Yeah, thanks, I think I just need a hug."

"No problem there," Jacks voice smiled at her.

Sarah glanced at the data. At the storm building on the sun. Then back at the station full of people, spacers, temps, tourists, all depending on systems they barely understood.

Outside, the first particles of the solar storm began their silent journey toward them. And inside, the truth, that Oswald had unleashed, kept spreading. Like a virus. Or a cure.

Notes ▶︎

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