"It's right there! All that time, all that effort and now the buggers can't even' find it! Come on you blind moles! It's right there!"
Tom had his eye on 3 screens, the speech to text was analyzing, looking for phrases. scanning for chatter. ESA showed nothing. NASA and the Russians were preoccupied with some oxygen leak in the old ISS,..
".. Stupid piece of junk.. I knew I shouldn't have depended on them.."
And then..
"ping".
Mandarin characters flashing by, morphing into intelligible text.
"Fox1 to BACC, priority one. Direct telemetry at ISS. Anomaly detected. VECTOR DATA: 1: 25544U 98067A 15079.35493396 .00016717 00000-0 10270-3 0 9001 --- 2: 25544 51.6441 167.7781 0007192 122.7194 237.4653 15.55090335 14219. OVER."
"Of course, leave it to the Chinese to keep a closer eye on the ISS then NASA itself.. "
Tom sighed and typed "The Chinese found it. Prep the PR crew, we're going live in few hours tops.."
Three days. Three days it took the Chinese to convince themselves NASA wasn't smuggling a nuke onto the ISS, I mean, what other use was there for space these days, right? And all that time, Kennedy saw nothing. Baikonour saw nothing. Useless.. but who could blame em, Tom knew very well how few still trying to keep it running, poor sods.
The Chinese had to TELL the ISS where to look. But then, when they moved the station closer, and realed in their toy, everything clicked into place and the plan unfolded as if on rails.
First there was the Personnel Optimization Algorithm. With some minor tweaks their former nemesis became their chance at a rematch. It picked though the psych-evals of the thousands of scientists and engineers rendered redundant. Picked out the brilliant ones. The enterprising, sneaky and with a penchant for rebellion. Usually the trait that got them fired in the first place. 50 were picked. the perfect mix. They all loved the idea and had nothing but time on their hands.
So they got to work.
First they had to build the damn thing. Sourcing the alloys used in the 1970's, his own new part time job as a guide in the Smithsonian came in handy, dozens of good parts he got from there. Other guys in the team were silently stealing billions of cycles from supercomputers all over the world to model the shape of their own galaxy down to every single star. Getting the image into the faked old system. And then even the demise of Cern and the LHC had a silver lining. They smuggled in the toy and used the shut down cycle to blasted it with all kinds of wierd radiaton.
And then the lauch, that was beautifull. 56 of 55 satelites for their new positioning system, really didn't make much of a difference as it turned out.
And now the Chinese had found it. Voyager 2. The real original voyager 2. t All the tests proved it! In orbit around the earth. The Impossible embodied. And buried in it's systems. Unbelievable. A perfect picture of our own galaxy. Taken from light-millennia away. The world gasped.
They had pre-calculated the impact this would have, the whole thing hinged on perception, on how well the story would resonate. It had to overcome a decade of anti-science propaganda. Just the right amount of mystery, not too complicated, not too threatening. Nudged along by some people on the inside, the PR crew. Worked like charm. A spark of wonder reignited. All it took was a lie to get everyone back into searching for truths.