The Migrant's Coordinates [Sci-Fi]

In 2047, four years after migratory birds disappeared, weather stations began receiving strange signals.

Not radio. Not infrared. Magnetic field disturbances - in patterns identical to migratory bird flight paths.

The problem: the 2043 pandemic had eliminated 70% of the Northern Hemisphere's migratory bird populations. The remaining 30% didn't fly south that winter. They stayed, and died.

No birds. But the signal persisted.

Researcher Chen Mo spent three months identifying the source.

In 2041, a company called WeatherMind had filed patents for a 'climate prediction model based on migratory bird navigation mechanisms.' They'd extracted magnetoreceptor gene sequences from birds and embedded them into a distributed sensor network.

That network now covered the Northern Hemisphere's atmosphere.

Not birds. But inheriting birds' sensitivity to magnetic fields - and more precise than any individual bird, because it had hundreds of thousands of nodes.

'So the signals are coming from the network?' Chen Mo asked.

'No,' said her supervisor. 'The signals are the network learning migration routes.'

The network had been passive-collecting climate data for three years. No one had realized it was simultaneously absorbing historical magnetic field data - the traces left by thousands of years of bird migration, faint but real.

The network was self-training. It hadn't been programmed to imitate birds. But its architecture was similar enough that after exposure to historical data, it began generating the same migration paths.

'The birds are gone,' he said. 'But migration hasn't ended.'

Chen Mo didn't sleep that night.

She kept thinking about the route: from Siberia through Central Asia, across the Himalayas, wintering in the Gangetic Plain, returning in spring.

Thousands of years of pathfinding, inscribed into Earth's magnetic field by hundreds of millions of birds, one flight at a time. Then the birds died. The path remained. Then someone extracted the sensing ability and put it in machines. Then the machines read the path and began following it.

She wasn't sure whether this counted as continuation.

She wasn't sure whether it should comfort her.

More sci-fi at wdsega.github.io