"No-one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change."
William James
Asteroid Belt, NAF Claim area Gamma
22 July 2148
Swish. Swish.
The radar hand swept lazily across the screen, flashing white when it registered a contact.
Swish
In the northwest quadrant, a wireframe snowflake of lines and circles appeared: Temasek base, impregnable home to the Third Fleet and its eighteen thousand personnel. Docks and wharves clustered around the massive central hub, and the giant bulk of NAFN Childeric, Third Fleet flagship, formed a blister on its lower limb as she rested at anchor.
Swish
In the northeast, the SS Hippolyta and her two escorts, leaving the area as they returned from a supply run. Behind her, a scattering of smaller blips that showed the debris from a cargo transfer that had gone wrong the previous day. Tiny dots flashed among them, marking the tireless labours of janitor drones. The mess had to be cleared, after all, before some freighter captain half asleep and deprived of caffeine ploughed into the obstacle and a billion or more dollars' worth of supplies went up in smoke.
Swish
Sitting in front of the screen, wondering what depraved acts he must have committed in a previous life to be punished with this endless tedium, was Recruit Richard Valleyne, Task Force Ascalon, New Atlantic Federation Navy. Since his posting here two months ago, Richard had been the only living being on the emergency logistics and traffic monitoring platform. His continued failure to come up with a compelling reason to leave his post and demand that Petty Officer Irani order a reassignment to more congenial surroundings – cleaning the lavatories in a sickbay, for example - caused Richard to contemplate murder, suicide or both at an average of eight times each day.
He could not even console himself that he was performing a vital task. Actual telemetric data and traffic control was conducted directly from Temasek base. The platform he was on was completely shielded from external communications unless he pulled a big red two-pronged lever marked 'emergency'. If that happened - if any enemy were ever insane enough to launch an attack near Temasek - the platform could (in theory) avoid hostile eyes and serve as a supply depot for any surviving friendly forces until relief arrived.
Richard's own task was twofold: first, to check that no inventory was missing; second, to manually record all traffic and ensure that it corresponded to the automated logs. By any conceivable measure, it was a punishment assignment, and yet try as he might, Richard could not come up with any reason why he should have been singled out from his class of recruits for this as his first role in the Navy proper. His scores from the academy were comfortably above average – for fleet logistics, he had even been the top scorer - and he did not think he had done anything to offend any man, woman or supernatural being of which he was aware (at least recently).
Yet here he was. Staring at the screen. Again.
Swish
The bottom half of the screen was empty, as it had been every one of the three hundred and forty four thousand previous swipes since Richard had reset it at midnight the last Earth Standard Day. Empty, as it had been every day, month and year before that. Empty because there was nothing there to find, could be nothing there to find, and would never be anything there to find because there was no good reason for anything ever to be in that part of space.
Empty.
And then suddenly, impossibly, it wasn't.
