Monday morning hit me like a wet sack of cement. I was kneeling under the laser printer in the HR department, trying to dislodge a jammed piece of paper that had been chewed up by the rollers. Around me, colleagues were discussing their weekends—barbecues, football, traffic jams. Meanwhile, in my head, I was debating the geopolitical implications of interstellar colonization.
"Paper jam cleared," I muttered, wiping toner off my hands.
"Congratulations," Archi's voice dripped with sarcasm. "You have successfully conquered the printer. Truly, a feat worthy of a galactic emperor."
"Shut up, Archi. Not now." I walked back to my desk, sitting down in the uncomfortable office chair. "So, what's the status of the Centaur? Still sleeping?"
"Sleeping? Yes. Alone? No."
I froze, my hand hovering over my mouse. "What do you mean?"
"We are being watched, Surgrim. My passive sensors picked up directed radar pings from Vandenberg Air Force Base and a very persistent signal analysis from Darmstadt. They haven't identified us as alien yet, but they have tagged us as an 'anomaly'."
I stared at my screen, pretending to read an email. "I told you! I told you the mass displacement would be noticeable!"
"You were right. There. Are you happy?" Archi sounded annoyed, like a cat that had knocked over a vase but refused to apologize. "Low Earth Orbit is too crowded. It's a fishbowl. Every time I move a manipulator arm, three different space agencies get a notification. We cannot expand here. If I start building the second fabricator, the heat signature alone will light up their boards like a Christmas tree."
"So we stop?"
"No. We move. We need a new neighborhood. Somewhere quiet. The Moon."
"The Moon?" I nearly choked on my coffee. "Archi, you can't just fly a rocket stage to the Moon. The moment you fire the engines, every telescope on Earth will see the flare. We're trying to be ghosts, not fireworks."
"The ion drive is low signature," Archi argued, though he sounded hesitant. "If we spiral out slowly over weeks..."
"No," I interrupted, staring at the jammed printer. Sometimes, brute force was better than finesse. "Slow is bad. Slow means they have weeks to notice that the Centaur isn't where it's supposed to be. We need to be gone yesterday."
"And how do you propose we achieve escape velocity without a thermal signature, Surgrim? Magic?"
"No. Deception." I lowered my voice, checking if any colleagues were nearby. "That Centaur stage... it still has residual hydrazine in the lines, right? And old batteries?"
"Yes. Volatile, but present."
"What happens if a fourteen-year-old battery short-circuits next to a fuel line?"
Archi paused. The silence in my head lasted a full three seconds—an eternity for an AI. "A catastrophic overpressure event. An explosion."
"Exactly. A 'regrettable accident'. If the satellite explodes, NASA writes it off. They see a cloud of debris. They stop tracking 'Object 28374' because it doesn't exist anymore."
"And in the chaos of the explosion," Archi picked up the thread, his voice gaining speed, "the sensor saturation would be immense. The radar cross-sections would be blooming everywhere. If we calculate the vector perfectly... we could use the explosion itself as a mask."
"We ride the shockwave," I grinned. "One big piece of 'debris'—us—gets flung straight towards a Trans-Lunar Injection trajectory. By the time the smoke clears, we're just a dark rock drifting away from Earth. Too fast to track, too cold to see."
"A sacrificial burn," Archi mused. "We blow up the outer shell. We jettison the decoys. And the core—the Sleeper Build—slips away in the confusion. Surgrim... that is dangerously reckless. I love it."
"Just one catch," I added. "We can't orbit the Moon. Orbiting takes braking burns. Braking burns are bright. We have to go straight in."
"Direct descent," Archi agreed. "We won't capture into orbit. We will aim for the lunar far side and... hard land. The nanites can survive the G-force. Can your nerves handle it?"
"My nerves are shot anyway. Let's blow this popsicle stand."