Space Force 2050

I looked up at the center wall display to see the time.

0230 LOCAL.

I turned to Mr. Barton, the grizzled NASA technician who had been assigned to work with us in the 1st Space Warning Squadron. He seemed even more disgruntled than usual. It wasn't a secret to anyone that Tom Barton hadn't wanted to move to North Dakota. As a matter of fact, he had been perfectly happy in his previous post at Cape Canaveral, FL and he made sure to let everyone know it as often as he was afforded a chance to remind them.

Only five years away from a civil service retirement, Mr. Barton had fully intended to finish his federal career on the sunny Florida coast until a new NASA and Space Force joint venture had been launched at Joint-Base Minot. The relocation agreement he had given little mind to 25 years earlier had finally come back to bite him and his contempt for the government machine he once loved was now only thinned veiled by silence, an ever-present grim expression, and an endless cup of black coffee.

I paused my observation of my sole companion on the night shift and checked the center wall display again. 0233 LOCAL.

"Ugh!" I said and spun around once in my chair.

There was no reaction from Mr. Barton, who had minimized his orbital object observation management program and was reading a news article.

"Could this night go any slower?" I pondered aloud.

Silence.

"Mr. Barton?"

"Hmm?" He replied, not bothering to look up from his display.

"I said, could this night go any slower?"

Mr. Barton turned in his chair towards me and locked his eyes onto me over the top of his square frame glasses. "Look kid", he said. "Your position is ICBM launch detection, alright? You know what that means, right?"

I thought for a second and just when I was getting ready to reply with the job description that had made me choose this specialty in the first place, he cut me off and said, "it means this is as exciting as it gets. You. That chair. All night. Every night. Take a look around because this is your life for the next four years."

I attempted to interject, "but..."

He continued his line of thought. "My advice? Start drinking coffee and spend your time scheming a way out of Minot."

As he turned back to his terminal, I finally had a chance to pipe up and I took it

"It wasn't supposed to be like this, ya know? My recruiter told me..."

Mr. Barton interrupted with a laugh that was rare for him.

"Your recruiter? Your recruiter told you what? That you would be the among the pioneers of space in building a base on the moon? That if we went to Mars, you could be one of the ones chosen for the colony? They've been telling suckers that same story for decades."

I didn't have a reply for him. He turned back towards me and pointed towards my computer. "You see that world map? You stare at it and look for blips. If you're lucky, one day you'll become a master blip spotter like me and have the honor of imparting the knowledge I'm giving you now to whatever sap takes your place."

I looked back at the center wall display. 0237 LOCAL. Five more hours of this shift left. I looked down at my computer display, let my eyes rest on the digital map of the world in front of me, and started imagining which continent I would rather be on right now. I felt my eyelids get heavier and heavier. After a couple of times adjusting in my seat, I let my eyes rest for just a few seconds and then I heard the voice of Mr. Barton.

"Wake up rookie! You're not falling asleep are you?"

"No, Mr. Barton," I said, straightening my back in the chair and refocusing my gaze on the display in front of me.

"I was just..."

"Yeah, yeah..." he said. "I'm sure you were "just" doing anything but getting ready to start drooling all over my desk."

He continued to scroll through his news feeds. "Why don't you bring a book or something? You know, that's the problem with you kids, you never..."

And for the first time since I had started working with Mr. Barton, he was interrupted and stopped dead in his tracks. A single blip had appeared on my display followed by an accompanying, ominously lonesome 'beep'.

"What the hell was that?" Mr. Barton said, wheeling over in his chair to look at my monitor.

"I uh..."

"What did you touch?" He said.

"Nothing!" I protested, holding up my hands. A few seconds later, the red alarm lights embedded into the trim around the room lit up and the center wall display switched to flash "LAUNCH DETECTED" in bold, red block lettering. Three more blips appeared on the screen then a fourth. Over the course of the next ten seconds, five more small white blips appeared on my world map. I stared at the computer, frozen.

"What are you waiting on?!" Mr. Barton said, wheeling back to his terminal, scrambling to close the multiple web browsers he had to get back to his minimized management console.

"Verify the launches!"

"Uh...right! Verifying!" I clicked the button on my display to manually view the error report attached to the notification.

"No errors," I said.

Our phone started ringing. Mr. Barton ignored it.

"Where are they coming from?"

"Um... the Korean Peninsula. Multiple launches, at least ten. Big too." I said.

"Trajectory?", he said.

"The computer has them...on a trajectory out of...the atmosphere."

"Alright, watch it. Let me know when it gets a fix on where they're heading." Mr. Barton picked up the phone and I heard him rattling off the details of what he had seen so far. My eyes were glued to the display. Over what seemed like an eternity, I watched the tiny white dots follow their computer estimated path out of the atmosphere and into outer space. Once the missiles reached outer space, the white dots disappeared.

"Mr. Barton?"

He cupped one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and answered, "what's up?"

"The missiles disappeared."

"They what?!" He said. Uncovering the mouthpiece, he told the caller that he was going to put them on hold, then put the handset down and came over to lean down at my terminal.

"The missiles, they were there one second and then they were just...gone."

"That's impossible." Mr. Barton said, sitting down at his terminal, his management console now open. "The only way they could be gone is if they exploded."

He opened his space junk management window and turned ghostly pale. "What's going on?" I said. He didn't reply. I came over to his terminal and looked at his screen. Where the missiles last were was now a wall of white dots. It stood out clearly among the much more spread out dots that had previously occupied the screen and represented all the known and tracked space junk.

"They did it on purpose." Mr. Barton said, leaning back in his chair and running a hand through his shock of gray hair. "They just made lower orbit a wasteland."

I watched as two lines representing satellites intersected with the space junk cloud and disappeared. The phone's second line began to ring and Mr. Barton jumped from his chair. I took his seat at the terminal and watched as satellite after satellite intersected with the space junk wall and disappeared. Here, thousands of miles from any imaginable front line, I had just witnessed the opening shot of a new war.