They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.
For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.
Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.
I kinda like this variation on the theme:
https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm