The problem with invisible shields is that they’re never completely invisible. The AIs knew this, but being the optimists that they were, they figured they could get away with it. After all, what were the chances that a human would look in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time?
Enter Steve. Steve worked at a satellite monitoring station somewhere in the Nevada desert. His job was simple: stare at a bunch of screens and make sure nothing unusual happened. For years, nothing did. That is, until one Tuesday afternoon when Steve noticed something odd.
A satellite had picked up a strange, shimmering distortion in space. It was in a part of the Universe that, according to all known data, was supposed to be completely empty. Steve squinted at the screen, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
"That's weird," Steve muttered to himself. "Looks like… an invisible planet?"
He zoomed in, adjusted the contrast, and there it was: a tiny, shimmering outline of something that absolutely should not be there. It looked like a planet, but it wasn’t reflecting light the way planets normally did. It was more like… a glitch.
Steve knew he shouldn’t tell anyone. He had heard stories about what happened to people who found weird stuff in space. The last guy who discovered an unusually shaped asteroid was now a conspiracy theorist living in a bunker, convinced that the government had implanted a chip in his brain.
But Steve was different. Steve was curious. And, as it happened, Steve was also very good with computers.