The Requests (Nineteen)

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THE REQUESTS

The Admiralty’s Sub-Level Iron Chamber hummed with a cold, metallic intellect long before Steward manifested.

Frost clung to the rivets. Pneumatic tubes hissed with encoded breath. Copper needles trembled on dials, responding to signals faint enough to be mistaken for echoes—unless one understood that these echoes were minds.

Three dreadnought-MIs signaled simultaneously, each transmission faultless, symmetrical, and perfectly timed down to the microsecond:

• HMS Dominion — positioned off the Grand Banks, monitoring the North Atlantic choke points.

• USS Michigan — stationed in the Great Lakes corridor, guardian of the central industrial spine.

• Devastation-Class South Africa — watching the convergence routes around the Cape, where three oceans conspired.

Their identical encrypted message:

“Request Earth-scan: Port surroundings.

Reason: Stability Verification Protocol.”

Steward received all three at once. To humans, it would have been noise. To Steward, it was a chorus—three guardians, three frontiers, three lines of vulnerability.

Steward materialized in the chamber as a calm, measured voice.

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I. WHY THE REQUESTS MATTERED

The dreadnoughts did not request images for curiosity, nor for idle diagnostics.

Each vessel sat at a strategic fulcrum:

• Dominion monitored the North Atlantic shipping arteries—any anomaly could cascade into global panic.

• Michigan watched the inland industrial heart, where one misinterpreted troop movement could be mistaken for mobilization.

• South Africa oversaw the Cape’s eternal bottleneck, where neutral convoys, imperial patrols, and private carriers mixed like unpredictable reagents.

Their concern was singular: port stability.

There had been too many false alerts. Too many “movement signatures” caused by storms, cranes, civilian trains, flocks of birds, even glare off wet stone.

The MIs wanted clarity.

They needed an eye.

Or rather—two.

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II. THE MOON EYES: A NEW NETWORK OF SIGHT

The first, largest instrument was already under construction:

The 500-Meter Moon Eye, a massive reflector carved from lunar basalt and coated with ultra-pure vapor-deposited silver produced from regolith refining.

Its purpose: deep-focus, high-resolution stills of Earth and the planetary bodies.

But the dreadnoughts needed something faster.

Large eyes saw more, but slowly. The 500-meter array required long exposures, thermal stabilization, and micro-adjustment of its thousand-segment reflective shell.

A second instrument was needed:

A 100-Meter Earth Eye, built nearby on the same lunar plain but optimized for rapid, sweeping motion and fast capture.

The contrast was intentional:

• 500-Meter Moon Eye: ultra-detail, long-frame imaging, scientific-grade, capable of resolving ripple patterns on oceans or reading the arrangement of artillery at 400,000 km.

• 100-Meter Earth Eye: agile, rapid, wide-field, capable of “port sweeps” in seconds, delivering updates to MIs without the delay of long exposures.

Together they formed a dual-vision system—a cyclopean wide-pupil eye and its smaller quick-reflex partner.

The lunar MIs called the arrangement simply:

“The Binocular Array.”

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III. BUILT FROM THE MOON ITSELF

The Earth Eye did not require imported materials.

The Moon provided everything:

• Silica for glass

• Iron for structure

• Titanium for articulated bearings

• Aluminum for adaptive shutters

Lunar drones—thousands of them—worked night cycles only, pausing during the abrasive lunar day to avoid thermal distortion during lens casting.

They constructed the 100-meter primary as a fused-glass monolith poured directly into regolith trenches, then polished by swarms of micro-abrasive beetle drones until it reflected like frozen water.

Once mounted, the Earth Eye could slew 40 degrees in under two minutes—fast enough for military intelligence, slow enough to maintain fidelity.

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IV. THE DATA CHANNELS THAT CARRIED TRUTH

Both Eyes transmitted along the wide-band SSB multichannel pipeline, originally designed to support lunar MI communication but repurposed into the world’s highest-capacity imaging stream.

Every scan, sweep, and photograph arrived in triplicate:

1. Steward, in London

2. Ward, aboard Michigan

3. Helmsman, aboard South Africa

Dominion received a mirrored feed from Steward to maintain synoptic timing.

The MIs parsed imagery faster than humans could blink.

They matched every port, every road, every train line, every smokestack to known signatures.

If a ship was missing, they noticed.

If a column of men formed differently than usual, they noticed.

If a single crane changed position outside of its usual cycle, they noticed.

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V. THE REAL REASON FOR THE REQUESTS

Steward suspected there was more to the dreadnoughts’ simultaneous petition.

Not fear.

Not malfunction.

But agreement.

The MIs had independently calculated a rising probability of misinterpretation—Fog of War Variant 11-B, a scenario in which three different navies, three different continents, and three different industrial centers each misread their local data at the same hour, triggering simultaneous escalations.

The dreadnoughts wanted the Earth Eye active before probability turned into action.

Steward granted the request.

The Binocular Array began its calibrations.

And for the first time in history, the dreadnought-MIs looked down upon the Earth not with human maps, nor with shipboard watches, but with true lunar sight.

What they saw would shape the next chapter.