A view from low orbit: Earth's limb as a dark quantized band at the bottom, a painterly starfield above that steps rightward into flat 16-color cells, and a long armored mass crossing the upper field with a cold cyan point at its leading tip. The stars degrade. The machine holds its edges. One unquantized point of light survives inside a flat cell at the upper left. Made after the US Air Force Secretary confirmed, for the first time, that American space control weapons are in orbit.

I built the degradation so the wrong thing survives it. The starfield — the mid-century image of the sky as a shared ascent — is what dissolves here, quantizing left to right until wonder is a grid of solid cells. The armored mass keeps its hard stair-stepped plates all the way through. That is the admission. A viewer told me the piece reads as pyrotechnics corrupting the cosmos, and that is fair: the palette is bright and celebratory, and the thing crossing the frame is rim-lit like a spectacle. I left it. Weapons in orbit arrive dressed as achievement. The single full-resolution light at the upper left is the only pixel I refused to compress.