Eyes to the Sky
Jane cursed under her breath as she stepped down the street, looking up at the erratic flickering of the streetlights. Her journey home felt like navigating a maze. The flash had rendered her phone’s maps useless — all she could see was a big map without the reassurance of a blue dot.
But at the top of the app store was something new, an alpha version that hadn’t been touched since The Network became everyone’s guiding star. She downloaded it.
“Orion Outdoors” was the app name, in an outdated pixel font, which advertised star charts and a built-in compass.
She had to go out of her way to a hardware store to get the necessary equipment. The clunky attachment had to be placed on top of the phone’s camera, giving it a telescopic lens.
Jane thought about her dad, who had always been worried about her move to the city and was always reading “prepper” manuals. Perhaps his paranoia was actually foresight.
Stopping on a street corner, where the traffic lights blinked in all colors, she aimed her phone to the sky.
She quickly gasped. Without the broad light of the city, the sky was lit in unfamiliar intensity. The app loaded, struggling with unoptimized code to open up the camera and connect to its database. But finally everything came into focus. Constellations appeared, labeled with forgotten names like Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper.
The constellations then turned into a compass. Her world regained some shape. Her journey home was not about following precise streets. The old clocktower became a beacon, aligned in the same direction as Polaris.
Her neighborhood, once a crowded grid of anonymous apartment blocks, had transformed into a community of fellow stargazers. Mr. Chen, a quiet old man who she saw frequently on his own, turned out to a former astronomy professor.
He began hosting nightly gatherings on his balcony, pulling out his telescope and showing residents the many moons of Saturn. Jane learned to identify the brighter guide-stars.
It wasn’t a true replacement for The Network. It relied too much on clear skies, and the user interface was cumbersome. She missed being able to just enter a street address and get the optimal route. Yet there was a quiet satisfaction to this form of way finding. It felt less like being led and more like rediscovering how to trace her own path through the unchanging night sky.
As she walked home one night, taking an entirely new route, Jane saw a familiar bright light on a distant hill. That bonfire had turned into a nightly ritual. She smiled, knowing that even though everyone’s life had been disrupted, communities were resilient and could still grow.
She stared up in the sky, spotting Andromeda without needing her phone, and she realized there were worse things in the world than missing GPS. She had entered a world where you had to look up, to learn the forgotten language of the stars, and understand your place in the universe.
This short story is about the aftermath of ASAT attacks. In a future war, a space attack on the GPS network might cause the service to fail and our reliance on it for navigation to end. Still, generations past could use the stars to find their way and maybe we’ll learn how to do that again.