The tug found them: a small fishing vessel with its bow cracked against the shoal, engines failing, lights out except for a single battery-powered lantern. There were three aboard, wet and mute with relief. The fishermen had thought the harbor's buoys had failed — they couldn't see the beacon because the shoal's tide had shifted, and the old charts were obsolete. If not for the orchestrator shifting power to the environmental sensors and then to AIS and then to a chain of communication nodes, the location might have been missed.
Mara thought of the lighthouse. The ghost node drifting north was mapped to coordinates just off the rocks, near where the old light first warned ships of shoals. A supply ship had recorded an anomalous temperature spike there. There had been no distress call, only the environmental sensor's signature. The orchestrator had acted like an old keeper of lights: prioritize the signal with the telltale urgency, even if it lacked a human confirming voice. gpspowernet fixed