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Quantum Sundays |87⟩ Graveyard Shell — A Q-Day Story
A quantum computer cracks RSA-2048 and hijacks dead satellites. Hard science fiction about Shor’s algorithm and the Kessler syndrome.
At 02:14 Mountain Time, a dead weather satellite dropped eleven kilometers.
Mara noticed it only because the automated conjunction script threw a divide-by-zero flag on her secondary monitor. She set down her paper cup of vending-machine broth, wiped the salt off her knuckles, and pulled up the raw radar residuals from the LeoLabs phased array in Poker Flat, Alaska.
Object 35942 — DMSP-5D3 F18, a twelve-hundred-kilogram military meteorological bus launched out of Vandenberg in 2009 — had been tumbling quietly in an 850-kilometer sun-synchronous graveyard shell for four years. Its primary microwave imager had seized up in 2022, and before the squadron could vent its remaining propellant, a six-week continuing resolution in Congress had frozen the contractors’ billing codes. By the time the paperwork cleared, the bird’s primary S-band transponder had drifted out of lock, leaving nineteen kilograms of monopropellant hydrazine sitting behind a latched titanium valve.
Except the valve wasn’t latched anymore.
