In the control room of Raʻiātea, voices whisper in Arabic, English, Mandarin, Tagalog and Samoan: a few of the many tongues of Laniakea.

“Rising sun over the North American continent. Stand by for solar surge.”

Raʻiātea is a lone space station, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the tired homeworld. It is two kilometres long and ancient: its core, a thick cylinder around which are attached two counter-rotating centrifuges, was sent into orbit at the beginning of the interplanetary age, two hundred years ago. The sun-battered hull has turned white, bleached like the bones of a curious animal preserved in a drawer, and alongside the spine gleams the bird of paradise of Laniakea, wings spread against the rising crescent of the moon. Two Lucioles are parked near the Earth-facing airlocks. One of them is a diplomatic transport, and at its tip, cunning eyes oversee the endless dance of the Milky way. The orbital space around the station is mostly empty: beyond the two-thousand-kilometre exclusion zone begins the domain of the USRE High Fleet, and at its core the great berth where three hundred warships stand ready. Way below, near the thousand-kilometre altitude mark, a variety of cargo ships, inflatable stations and Stanford tori form the Cerulean Republic, whose citizens proudly claim to be the sole permanent dwellers in low Earth orbit. Deep below and high above, the towering space elevators of Manila and Nairobi cast their long shadows over Earth’s politics and cultures, serving as ladders to the celestial realm. There is the Moon, too, which is both too far and too close: Raʻiātea remembers the years of the second cold war, and, on lazy days, quietly listens to the radio-waste of the earthside broadcasts.

“Receiving ping-back, all transmissions nominal, rising sun over the Great Lakes, storms dissipating over Florida, expect more drone traffic than usual, all technicians reporting for briefing.”

There are sixty-two people on Raʻiātea: fifty-eight Laniakean technicians and four USRE liaison officers. Raʻiātea’s design quirks have had time to solidify, to turn into the sedimentary layers of a two-hundred-year-old habitat. A variety of sea vines periodically leaves the hydroponics section to wage a war of conquest over the HVAC pipes; electricity is rationed in the lower sections of the cylinder, due to a mishap in the wiring that has never been fixed, and likely never will; the coral weave is flaking off in the engineering section, and leaves a thin layer of nigh-transparent dust on the floor, which clogs the filters of the cleaning drones; and the door to the central armoured section, which does not slide properly, has already knocked two technicians out cold this cycle. It will probably be fixed. One hopes.

“Rising sun over the Rockies, proceeding with surveillance cycle over active assets, Whale Eye reports clear visual contact on NORAD, all installations nominal on ground-penetrating radar.”

But Raʻiātea has its perks. The facility was made to house more than two hundred spacers: it is wide and comfy, with a spa, a gym, a swimming pool, a theatre, a telescope room in the upper habitation ring, and a wonderfully oversized HVAC system that keeps all the usual smells at bay. The food is great; though all ship cooks are virtuosos, few Laniakean stations benefit from daily resupplies from the Earth. Far from the interstellar assignments that sentence a citizen to a year-long exile, or even just the long and pointless patrols around the moons of Jupiter, a posting on Raʻiātea is more of an office job with an unusually long commute. And, though no one here will make a career out of it, Raʻiātea is not a dead end either: rather, it lies in limbo, an outpost over the American Steppe, where officers come and go to surveil the cinders of America.

“Be advised, we have received the launch authority codes for the day, transmitting on integral channel for confirmation: DAWN MAPLE RUBY SEVEN TRENCH.”

There are two weapon systems centred around Raʻiātea. The first one is purely defensive. It consists of a geostationary constellation of chemically pumped X-ray lasers whose hulls strikingly resemble a telescope (but: it is unlikely the eyes below have not spotted the minute differences. They are keen.). It is a primitive technology, a rudimentary way of tilting the scales of the exchange ratio between ICBMs and anti-ballistic defences. A few centuries ago, the deployment of such a system would have altered the dynamics of mutually assured destruction to such an extent it could have caused the technologically inferior superpower to trigger a preemptive nuclear war. Now, it matters little in the geopolitical rivalry between the USRE and Laniakea. Both nations have reduced their number of ground-targeting warheads to the double digits. They do not need them anymore. The Earth is at peace. But these lasers are not for the nations of today, no. They are temporal weapons. If they were to fire, their collimated beams would destroy very real, tangible warheads, yes, but in doing so, they’d truly launch their photons into the twilight of the Anthropocene.

“Codes check out, confirmation. New authorisation cycle on sequence DAWN MAPLE RUBY SEVEN TRENCH, checking status on strategic payload: forty-five warheads accounted for and ready to launch. Raʻiātea calls all clear.”

The second weapon system is dispersed in low Earth orbit: five satellites with nine MIRV warheads each, positioned so that one of them is always within the optimal strike window to the northern American continent. If a launch order is given, Raʻiātea can relay it to the satellites via an encrypted laser-com burst. The whole process takes under a second. The rest constitutes the oft-fantasised, never-realised mythology of nuclear warfare: the missiles leaving their berths, deorbiting into the turbulent sky of the former United States of America, dropping heat shields, decoys and chaff, piercing through the anti-ballistic network, and hitting, hitting, hitting. The system is calibrated to deliver a little under a megaton total on former American soil. The warheads are optimised to destroy bunkers, not wipe out cities: being pure fusion devices, they would release a minimal amount of fallout. Yet, no one aboard Raʻiātea is under the childish delusion that this would be a clean war. Tens of thousands would die: the nomads and roving clans of America, the communes of Appalachia, the riders of the Colorado, fragments of this human dust that refused to leave when the curtain fell. Millions, perhaps, if the enemy manages to slip an ICBM under Raʻiātea’s laser grid and hit one of the metropolises of the new world. The technicians know this. It’s been drilled into their heads, and they think about the demographics of carnage when they work on the warheads, endlessly replacing their payloads, tinkering, updating, upgrading for maximal damage and minimal fallout.

“Checking target orders for the day, send: NORAD node, Cheyenne Mountain. Pentagon node, Washington, D.C., Phoenix node, Arizona. Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Cape Canaveral, Florida. Raven Rock, Pennsylvania. All warheads on standby.”

When their watch ends, the spacers gather in the observation deck, at the earth-side tip of the station. There, with binoculars, telescopes, cameras, and the naked eye, they contemplate what was once the United States of America. It is a wounded place, yes: but for these children of the interstellar age, the gaping holes in the flank of America are normal. Florida has always been a half-sunken wasteland, flattened by hypercanes, populated only by watchful killer drones and the plastic tail of the age of abundance. The Great Plains have always been a dusty desert, exhausted by droughts and agriculture, where ground-penetrating radar still finds the watermark of fields, cities and roads underneath the sediment. New York has always been a castle against the sea, where a few hundreds of thousands of people still eke out a living, barricaded behind a concrete ocean-wall. California has always been a desert, and the Colorado is a faint ghost that evaporates in the searing heat. Seattle has always been an overgrown forest of invasive weeds, its needle long collapsed, planted in the ground by a storm.

America as a whole has always been a phantom: fifteen million people and, for miles and miles and miles and miles, the cemetery of the most formidable superpower in world history, a trigger, a shooter and a magazine, all aimed at the ghosts of Earths past, the Beijing and Moscow and New Delhi and Paris and Pyongyang of the interstellar age.

“Confirming target selection and warhead standby. Raʻiātea beginning seventeenth day watch of the year, all systems nominal, all ground activity nominal.”

Thirty-six thousand kilometres below lie the ruins of a city once called Washington, D.C. They are ruins only in the sociological sense: that is to say, a place of unsociety, a place forgotten, a place reminiscent of what came before. Because Washington, D. C. lies pristine, its empty streets devoid of potholes, its buildings standing clear and neat, its bridges endlessly repaired by a sprawling fleet of cranes and helicopters and worker drones. The woods are kept in check; only the places ravaged by the Potomac a few decades ago remain in a sorry state, waiting for great renovation works that, so far, haven’t come. A little south-west of Washington, there is this little city called Arlington, albeit everyone, in this new age, confuses it with the former capital. In Arlington lies a pentagon of reinforced concrete. Inside the pentagon, there is a small fast food restaurant. Inside that fast food restaurant, there is a cooking drone, a bundle of pincers and manipulator arms dangling from a sphere, itself attached to a rail on the ceiling. Every single day, except Sunday, the drone makes five thousand and fifty-two burgers. Bread, meat and vegetables come from a dedicated agricultural facility, at the edge of the great plains: for the past six hundred years, they’ve been delivered daily, with the exact quantities to make five thousand and fifty-two burgers and their serving of fries. And every day, the drone diligently stores the burgers in the waiting area. And every night, at one in the morning, it gathers them in two hundred trash bags, which are then processed by garbage bots and thrown into a landfill by the Potomac. Then, the drone goes into a maintenance cycle, and the dance of cleaning bots begins. Sometimes, when the wind blows westwards, a faint smell of rotten cabbages and spoiled meat comes from the big hole by the river.

And a few thousand kilometres west, after an eternity of dead malls and deader plains, deep below Cheyenne Mountain, lies a seventeen tonnes computer mainframe, encased in a triple layer of shock absorbers. Inside that seventeen tonnes computer mainframe, there is a small, isolated circuit that, every day for the past six hundred years, has been diligently ordering five thousand and fifty-two burgers for the standing guard at Arlington core node. It does not wonder why the guards haven’t been replaced in more than half a millennium, nor why the burgers are never consumed. Why would it? The HR module is on the other side of the seventeen tonnes computer mainframe, and it went dark three hundred and seventy-eight years ago. Besides, the very concepts of employment, nourishment, or indeed human life are unknown to the chip. They are not in its programming. All it knows are burgers and the myriad of failsafes that ensure the meat, bread and vegetables are always delivered on time.

“Ground control to Raʻiātea, solid copy and mark for day watch. See you tonight.”

And there is a man on Raʻiātea whose job is to keep an eye on the burger joint, day in, day out, the scope of his crosshairs aimed right at the mall in the Pentagon, ground-penetrating radar reading the back and forth of the cooking drone, the cleaning drone and the bartender drone.

“Raʻiātea to ground control, right back at you, see you.”

And Raʻiātea ponders, and Raʻiātea wonders, and Raʻiātea watches America.

Image: JPL/Caltech, public domain.