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Isn't it strange that something so far from us would bring us together again? Sometimes I lean back in the executive
chair and just think about the madness of it. You and me, linked by the Godiva high-altitude surveillance system.
If I had room in my heart for another love, that would be it. My window to your world is a carousel of twenty-nine
satellites hanging in low earth orbit. It's hard to keep from gloating about my ingenuity.
Often, I huddle in my cubicle late in the evenings when the other programmers have shut down their work stations
and gone home. I love to sit in the lab alone. I lurk in the online forums, watching amateur astronomers argue
with each other over Godiva. Thread after thread of rumors and speculation trickle down the screen. It's the same
inane, scatter-shot conspiracy theories set on endless play-back. They're so irritatingly misinformed, but I never
stop haunting their discussions. I'm a wallflower in their frat house basement meetings. A fly on the wall.
A couple of weeks ago, one forum geek wrote: My brother works for LM, he said they won the contract from the USAF
to build Godiva.
Another one egged him on: Yeah I put my money on Lockheed Martin. They cut half their projects in 1999. The official
ones anyway. Smells like spy-tech to me.
A third guy threw out his token of wisdom: It took eight shuttle missions to deploy the grid and all of them were
hush-hush anyway I think there should be a law against crowding the sky with moving lights we have air pollution
and noise pollution laws why can't we have telescope polluting laws???
And then, the message that I couldn't ignore: Agreed. Eye-in-the-sky systems should be renamed Eyesore-in-the-sky.
That's a great idea, let's ruin night watching so we can read the year off a silver dollar from space. I hate the
Gov.
I don't know what came over me, but I had to say something. What we need is a law that bans you idiots from posting
this trash, I wrote. and in reply to the last guy, Godiva can read the year off a dime at night, through heavy
cloud cover, but you don't need the year, because you can pretty well guess its age by how worn and grimy it looks
from thousands of relays between dirty hands. On the back of dime, you can see each flute in the shaft of the torch,
and each lick of flame on the fire. And when your girlfriend goes out to her balcony in the morning to check the
birdfeeder, and she glances up to judge the weather, you can see last night's eyeliner and eye shadow mixing with
the accumulated dead cells in the corners of her lids, and the old mascara clumps clinging to her lashes, and the
waxy remnants of red in the cracks of her lips. You know that she still comes home from the nightclub exhausted
and goes straight to bed without washing her face, and you want to tell her how gross that is. It leaves smudges
on the pillow. Black smudges. On the pillow! Like some filthy coal miner who can't rinse the carbon dust from under
her nails. Godiva shows you she hasn't changed.
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