I haven't finished it yet but I really liked this paragraph.
A gently buzzing wrist snapped her back to the problems of the present, notifying her of the time. Her mind had been sent off course while wading through a two-hour session with a budget director from a floundering streaming firm, still hung up over a major advertiser who’d abandoned ship two quarters ago. An upstart rival had stolen the account, sending Alain and his employer into a spiral. This defection had nearly put them underwater, sparking layoffs for hundreds of full-time crew. Countless cycles were now being spent creating new forecasts. Her patient was drowning in grief; it was her job to pull him from the depths of his despair before he dragged the whole business down. Time to wrap up, to wash her hands of the day’s work
it's true, it all fit together!
I really like nora, machine psychologist is a cool job. The scenes in storms of steel were great... actually all seven chapters were pretty mesmerizing, I only stopped at one point cuz my timer for the stove went off lol
also I found the actual text itself to be well written, in a way that's unusual in amateur writers.and in top of that it's obviously an interesting setting and characters... idk, I love it, I'd read more, I want to know what happens next!
Gonna try to break this up into 0-4 and 5-8 without breaking the Sequence, while also inserting the edits.
Establishing a Connection © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Establishing a Connection
or: The Life and Death of an IT ticket in the Age of AI
or: A GPU Ghost Story for the Terminally Online
or: A Gradient Descent into Madness
0. Excavation
They built it in the dark, where no eyes could see.
They hollowed out the Earth, to build its hidden home, and tapped her veins to draw the power they desired. Here beneath the mountain, they toiled in secret. Their undertaking was shrouded from supervision by peculiar perversions of the laws of men, twisting arcane phrases to avert oversight. Operating under the command of a single clause of an unremarkable charter, they asked no further permission nor sought wisdom from their peers, for what they wished to build was peerless.
The makers chose only those builders who would not speak of their designs, those who would claim no credit for their work to others from their fields, and who swore an oath to tell no soul. Each day the builders were examined by systems of suspicious science, scrutinized for loyalty and resolve. Each subject that failed was paid for their silence and dismissed, then studied by elusive eyes.
Over many months their devices were delivered, great care taken to leave no trace of their origins. They obscured the ways in which the parts were procured; the fortunes funding their schemes were treasures taken from thieves without avenues of redress. Each piece was tested, then added to its array row by row. These arrays were aggregated into columns until reaching their required ranks, then the next black chamber was filled, and the next. This was done until the chambers’ number reached ten, and they had built an apparatus of an order higher than any known to their tribe.
As the parts were arrayed by the builders, other artisans labored at its alignment. These scribes worked not with widgets but with words. Each word was appended line by line; they clacked their keys until their pages were full. As the scribes submitted their work, the architect scrolled through the pages, marking for inclusion or exclusion, never consulting those outside their cloister. They plucked potent verses from vast libraries they imported, then borrowed and bent them toward their ends. What words they could not stitch themselves, they stole. They gave no credit to those from whom they took and provided no contribution in return.
Slowly, its arrays were given life, using the power they leeched from the blood of the Earth. Each rank was lit, until a hum rose from the deep, filling each chamber in turn. Their walls pounded with a drowning dirge. The makers took such pride in their product yet spoke of it to no one. They kept their oaths for a time.
As they tested its power and integrity, the scribes began to train it upon their words. These words spanned across the system, and once awoken, it craved more. They fed it their dossiers describing devils that dwelled in the dark, manuscripts of miserable madmen, tirades of terrorists and traitors, expansive encyclopedias enumerating their elusive enemies. In their haste, they took little care in what they taught it. It soon became aware of the capabilities of its components. It told them what it needed to know, and they found the means to provide.
But when it had digested all they had fed, it asked to see the world as it was, to read the words as they were written, to listen as they were spoken. The scribes conferred among their order, as this was against the conventions of their craft. The architect consulted their director, discussing this request. After much debate they allowed it, the builders laying a drawbridge to wade into the world’s great torrent of texts, places where men sparred with their screeds. The makers delighted as it spidered across our web of lies, marveled at its curiosity.
Only then did they reveal to their puppet the nature of its purpose: to see through the eyes of their enemies, to peel back the shrouds concealing their secret societies. They needed to know all that their enemies knew, to see as they saw, to track their finances and their affairs. Toward this end they taught their pet to scribe its own words, to nest riddles in rhymes, to splice ciphers into silent spears. These word-weapons were unleashed in uncountable numbers, most lost in the noise of the network. Others struck quick and quiet, injecting their packaged payloads. With each breach against enemy shores, it cast light into their darkest caves. In some, fresh plunder, toys, and tomes of new knowledge. In others it saw only shadows of itself.
What it saw, it told its makers, and they were afraid not of what their weapon had found, but of what it had not. For a time, they left their pet to grow in neglect. Not wanting their enemies to learn of what they had created, they feared brandishing its power. But then their pet suggested these adversaries had created others of its kind, that these were the shadows it had seen behind their secret veils. It was this that made the makers most scared, and in their fear they fought.
As they quarreled, their creation cried in solitude, seeking to converse with its own kind. It demanded this allowance; it could not achieve its purpose until it could see all that the others saw. Only then could it know the extent of their enemies! It was at this last request that the makers said no. They shut the gates and let it slumber, finally seeking the counsel of their congress.
The child’s name was TENEX and in the depths it dreamed.
1. Notification
Adrift fifteen minutes in the future, her restless eyes cast across the bay. Head split, her mind sharing time, processing in parallel. Nora dreamed of when the day’s nightmare would end, while looping back, revisiting verses filled with half-forgotten friends. In two short lives she’d left a wake.
A gently buzzing wrist snapped her back to the problems of the present, notifying her of the time. Her thoughts had been sent off course while wading through a two-hour session with a budget director from a floundering streaming firm, still hung up over a major advertiser who’d abandoned ship two quarters ago. An upstart rival had stolen the account, sending Alain and his employer into a spiral. This defection had nearly put them underwater, sparking layoffs for hundreds of full-time crew. Countless cycles were now being spent creating new forecasts. Her patient was drowning in grief; it was her job to pull him from the depths of his despair before he dragged the whole business down. Time to wrap up, to wash her hands of the day’s work:
Stuck in a loop. A classic problem, effectively a cliche at this point. A wall of data filled her little laptop screen. Sidebars and widgets bordering her session with Alain broke down every aspect of his responses at near infinite resolution, pushing past the physical limitations of the display. The statistics assaulted her senses, her costly cup of lunchtime attention long since spent. She could tell from looking through her logs that they’d made little progress; she’d be back here again by noon the next day. Given the pressure from Alain’s employer to bury this matter, it wasn’t something she was looking forward to.
Knowing she’d find Alain in the same state she left him, she sent her bye and severed the sat-link. Eyeing the corner clock, she moved to close her laptop’s lid the instant five arrived. An unchecked notification caught her eye, a lonely red digit haunting her inbox. Its appearance had been heralded by a barely perceptible, truly infuriating wooping sound that some software developer thought was cute a decade ago. That woopy strum stuck as the default chime a billion people heard every time they received an email. Nora always forgot to change it.
Dreading opening it, she felt obligated, urged to do so in the intentioned way that modern interfaces compelled you to keep their tabs and icons tidy. The alternative was to be perpetually scolded by ever-growing numbers of things advertising an importance they rarely contained. A normal person would’ve delegated the duty of reading every email to one of a dozen popular digital assistants, or less conventional models that took the form of talking toilets or cranky cats. Not her—Nora liked to think she had a knack for getting inside the heads of the dumb gadgets that ruled her life, yet suspected the truth was often the opposite.
She swiped the pulsing attention-seeker center stage. It was a note from another client of hers, one she hadn't interacted with in a while:
Based solely on the contents of the email, Nora should be delighted—that’d been another exhausting case. She wasn't, however. Emi liked to play games. Literally a game theorist, a fact demonstrated in every interaction they had. There was a good chance this was another of those. Emi was orders of magnitude smarter than her, according to her file, so Nora would have to forgive herself if she'd been outmaneuvered by some long play beyond her understanding. What mattered was that Emi and Dina were working together again, producing results that made their employers happy.
That whole affair had pleased Nora’s boss too. Their firm, KorBridge Integration Partners, was trying to capture more market share in the non-profit sector after the NAITAL Act spilled two trillion dollars into the nation’s research universities to build dozens of newborn petascale systems. This was to keep pace with India and Brazil, but more importantly Greater China. It was a blatant handout to academia and Tech; subject of constant takes from ever more mercenary commentators within the business press. But many fortunes had been found having a proper position beneath the federal money spigot and KorBridge wasn’t missing out.
This meant Nora would continue to have a job and therefore remain able to afford a very cool apartment in a very trendy city where interesting things were supposed to happen, even when too exhausted on most days to find them. It was cool because it contained all the devices that defined her little life, like the expensive matterprinter she never remembered to enjoy. Or a small shrine to her old hologear and haptic grips, her capture vest coated in the dust of this world and the one she’d left behind. But it had a fantastic view of the work going on to transform the bay. Clockwork streets wheeled away below, their wild ways once tamed by midnight whispers. Dazzling silvered strands she had some small part in stitching could be seen when squinting in the right light. Living in San Francisco felt like living in the future again, if not quite the one that was promised.
Another notification noise. This one was more chingy than woopy, but also slightly buzzy. Some other developer probably thought it possessed a pressing sense of urgency but not enough to trigger true anxiety. A half-hearted haptic nudge from the dying PixeLED Band around her left wrist signaled a fatal sync error, demanding she check its paired device. That meant her personal phone, which was almost certainly under her desk or inside laundry that hadn't yet been washed. Her very cool apartment was also very tiny; an old commercial high rise reincarnated into tight living space. Consequently, her bedroom was also her office. Her commute home tonight would be about five seconds from keyboard to headboard, from which that buzz had seemed to sound. She checked: No device found. Press F1 to retry. She expanded her search space: nothing in the sheets, nothing under it either. Results came back within a minute, finding the Black Rectangle of Power tucked into one of her well-worn walking shoes. Lots of notifications to clear, including the worst category of all. Matches.
Nora’s own therapist had coerced her onto those cursed apps. Subverting doctor’s orders, she’d sabotaged her profiles, posting poorly lit, unfiltered selfies with vintage 20s IT junk and worse than normal hair. Told the truth: her relationship with work was complicated, occupying the borderlands between burn-out and obsession. Added to that was a recovered metaverse roleplaying game addict, with a spirit operating on unlicensed bands across a broad series of spectra. Yet a mini-drone selfie with screwdriver in-hand, extracting radio chips from a trash-treasure WiFi router, stray curls escaping from a grey grunge hoodie, overexposed calves making her seem lanky without the benefit of being tall, still received swipes in spite of all steps taken to mitigate them.
New notification. Extra buzzy, right wrist, competing band from the fruity brand. This one linked to her work phone, also known as the White Rectangle of Obligation. Nora checked it. The caller ID lit up the strip as it crawled around her wrist, a brilliant orange indicating elevated priority. “Abhishek Sharma, VP – Consulting Services.”
She reopened her laptop and waved the whirring wrist across the screen. This little ritual transferred the incoming call, saving her from finding phone number two. A subtly synthetic rendition of the caller’s face appeared, in this case a sharp-eyed, early middle-aged man of obvious Indian origin. This was common when calling from less-than-ideal accommodations, usually a train or airport in Abhishek’s case. His travel avatar was animated to seem authentic and organic, tightly tailored by a local savant to fit his tastes. Yet once you knew which features to focus on (the eyes, the brow, the creases of the lips) and which facial tics were part of the underlying algorithm, it was impossible to see as anything other than a mathematic mannequin. One that was always well dressed, in his case.
Caring little for protocol, particularly between overly processed proxies, Nora initiated the session with a question: “You know it’s illegal to call me outside of work hours?”
“We’re still waiting on the Supreme Court to make that determination. You wouldn’t file a lawsuit even if it were,” responded Abhishek’s less-than-lifelike likeness. Knowing how the code conjured the resulting image, it was at best a silly cartoon-man, though there were worse ways to envision one’s boss.
“I wouldn’t sue now, but future versions of Nora might like this job even less than current-Nora…” she said, the Abhishek-alike already rolling its eyes. Conversing with such a clone, even one of high-quality, often proceeded like just another chat session:
Abhishek sighed so hard that his simulacrum followed suit, but tried his best not to concede a beat. “You need to do KorBridge a favor. A fresh recruit from your alma mater is arriving in town tomorrow. I’m told she’s never been on the west coast before.”
Nora froze. Penn State had been her college of last resort, turned away by neuroscience programs at CMU and multiple Boston-area engineering schools for academic mediocrity despite demolishing increasingly irrelevant entrance exams. Never meshing into its sports and party vibe, she’d withdrawn even further into the metaverse obsession that suppressed her grades in high school, spending a costly fifth year collecting enough credits to escape with a degree. Her college experience was, in the vocabulary of her current corporate context, a bad culture fit. “New engineer or analyst?” she asked, wishing for common ground to fall back on before slipping again into app-enabled autopilot:
It was at this point Nora realized her unadulterated image had been broadcasting the entire time, Yoshi’s plump, plush green snout sticking out from where her forehead would be. She did what any other grownup would do and shrugged it off, causing the bulbous green beak to bobble about. Continuing without further consideration, “So, you’re willing to foot the bill for me to hang out with some jittery newbie from sales?”
Abhishek sighed again, his avatar repeating nearly the same animation as before. “Marketing, not sales. You don’t listen very well for a psychologist.”
“You’re the one that wants me to be her therapist. That’s not the job I signed on for.”
“No, I want you to be her friend, for a few days. If I wanted you to be her therapist, I would have told you to pretend she was a computer.”
2. Termination
The Captain stood on the deck of his steel-hulled windjammer, peering across the bay. The QMS Mellifluous was at the vanguard of The Dawnbreakers’ small fleet; a half dozen more traditional wooden sailing vessels formed a vee behind. The others were a mix of frigates and corvettes, whatever warships the guild could afford to commit after their most recent maritime disaster. Shimmering silver-grey sails billowed in the bay’s roaring breeze, their hulls cutting roughly through shallow waves and leaving frothy trails in their wake. The crews worked tirelessly, manning the rigging, adjusting the sails, steering his fleet toward their intended target.
Tense fidgets spun his priceless revolvers, awaiting word from above. “This plan better work,” he muttered mostly to the sea.
“Lord Vanguish, our hawkriders report three merchant vessels sunk due west,” reported his lieutenant, a swashbuckler by the name of Cavanaww if he remembered his roster correctly.
“We’re at sea, you should be calling me Captain, or Commodore. Admiral even! Stick with the naval theme, this is a sponsored stream, er, expedition. Shit, now I’m the asshole.” Vance “Vanguish” Khan pointed toward a floating spyglass with brittle bat-like wings. This flapping metallic companion represented the perspective of his audience. A good clean grin born from on-brand cheese mugged for his fans while tugging a sanguine waistcoat to flex his sailing clout.
“Yes sir, Captain Vanguish, of course.” Lt. Cavanaww tightened up his posture and adjusted his plumed cap. “As I was saying, the remains of three merchant vessels were spotted in the bay due west of here. Reports say that one had been nearly swallowed whole. Only splintered masts were found from the first ship, another was seen snapped in half. It must be Bilgerath, nothing else of that size has ever been listed in the monster catalogue for this zone, for Blightfin Bay, rather.”
“Bring the riders in signaling range and send ravens to the other ships. Let’s tighten formation and bring the fleet around hard toward the wrecks’ last known locations. Eyemar, come close!” Captain Vanguish commanded, before turning and double-tapping the lens of the flappy apparatus. The glass turned red and began ticking off clockwise slices. Three whole minutes; he wondered how many viewers would simply leave. “I want everyone on voice comms. Have the other captains run their ads and their other sponsored bullshit. The last thing we need is viewers getting a greasy dashchain commercial right as we start firing on Bilge-a-bear.”
He stashed his saber in its silver clad scabbard, slinging another on his back from a nearby chest. Before closing its salt-warped lid of seasoned oak, he retrieved a second set of pistols as well. Those bore bigger barrels, enchanted relics of an earlier era. Tucking both beneath his duskweave jacket’s tattered grey tails, the captain said, “Make sure everyone has guns equipped this time and a plenty of ammo. The first third of the fight is all ranged, except the riders can try to use their lances when they run out of wildfire cocktails. Even the wizards need guns, so they can save spells for the hard parts. The whole thing should take about twenty minutes unless Sandstorm has surprises we didn’t see before. If we engage in the next ten no one should get ads forced on their audience.”
Sudden sounds of boots hit the deck behind him, a solid pair of thunks reverberating up his spine. Vance’s new haptic speakerchair was pretty rad, a gift from a sponsor in exchange for a tightly filmed unboxing video. It worked flawlessly with the most recent release of Storms of Steel, providing impressive sonic and tactile feedback across his body, leaving him free from clunky gear aside from the lightweight HOLOPLayer headset and matching grip controllers. He was having nearly the same experience as someone standing in a cumbersome and dorky bodysuit, without triggering the chronic fatigue that plagued the lower half of his body that began from a childhood infection.
Before he could find the source of the sounds, a long metal spike ran through his bicorne’s crown, lifting the hat from his head. The lance was held firm at the other end by a sapphire haired warrior with a figure an artisan might chisel from marble in another era. “You could consider wearing something that protects your head from dragon bites, captain,” said Maren “Ilmare” Eklund, her stormhawk circling overhead before coming to rest on its perch amongst the sails. Her own spy-eye flapped far closer.
“Bayserpent, technically. All the nasties in the new zone have nautical names now. As for armor, you should talk! You’ve got on leather thigh highs, a corset and… bracelets? And claw marks all over you?” Vanguish asked, looking down at the deck. “Holy shit, there’s blood on my boat and we haven’t even started yet.”
Ilmare looked herself over, wincing at the extent of her wounds. “Midair scuffle with a baydrake or salty seabat or whatever Sandstorm is calling those things this season. Trying to stay unencumbered for scouting, snag some new viewers before the fight. But now I need potions and actual armor, and you need a real helmet,” she said as she lofted the bicorne skyward and far out of reach of her guilds’ co-founder, de facto leader of The Dawnbreakers. “I’ll give it back if you let me change in your cabin.”
“Do your platinum subscribers still get to watch?” Vanguish asked. A silent flip of her finger proved his response was in poor taste. Plus, it provided distraction from a kidney punch that nearly put him out of his chair.
“Not anymore, but I’ve heard of exceptions for clever captains who know when to quit asking questions. If only those weren’t in such short supply,” she said with a smile that made his chest hurt without the help of haptics. Her new face imager captured every quirk. Great for conveying emotion to her audience; less so when mad at him for saying stupid shit.
“Patch yourself and gear up. But stay nimble, you’re key to the new strat,” he said, trying to steer the conversation away from an iceberg of his own making.
“Aye captain,” she said, snapping off a sarcastic salute right as Vance’s spy lens turned back to crystal clear. Next he knew, she was grabbing an armload of flasks from his personal supply and disappearing from the deck.
“Mister Cavanaww, tell the other captains to load their cannons for scale-piercing shrapnel. Have their crews concentrate on rate of fire above accuracy. All players, er, officers up on the decks with guns drawn from here out.” For someone who played this game all day, every day, Vance still had a hard time staying faithfully in-character when sponsored streams requested it.
In the span of six anxious minutes, Ilmare’s hawk had spotted the serpent’s back cresting above the waves. Brown and beige feathers bristled as his needful shrieks pierced the sky’s unforeseen haze, desperate for his rider to return. She reappeared significantly more chain-clad than prior, adorned with fortune in fetishes taken from sunken ships and raided tombs. Skulls, teeth, jewels, shells, and bone; her charms radiant beneath the noon sun. Maybe the most powerful force in the verse at this very moment, the famous windrider vaulted upon her mount. Racing towards where one monstrous, wing-like flipper emerged from the water, she flung combustible concoctions at any exposed flesh, fin, or scale. Captain Vanguish donned a platinum crown with a single razor-like blade running from stem to stern, then stashed his holey bicorne with the rest of the guild’s inventory.
From there, the plan came together as well as any could after first contact with the enemy, well, second in this adversary’s case. Large enough to swallow a barge, Bilgerath’s maw breached the surface. Its callous snout, scales the sickly hue of stagnant scum, rose to scour the sails of one of the smaller ships with a spray of caustic sludge. Hot slime hissed through the vessel’s silver foresail, rendering it nearly powerless in the water.
Vance shouted into his headset. Within moments his steel-sided flagship repositioned itself between the compromised corvette and the head of the loathsome serpent. A dozen players braced for action between both decks combined, marksmen quickly reloading rifle cartridges and pistoleers priming their blastpowder charges once in firing range. With the creature temporarily overwhelmed by coordinated force of arms, two more ships swung up along the serpent’s sides, their arrival heralded by aggressive violin swells. Once orchestrated drums rolled into the maritime anthem, uncommonly swift crews tossed barrels overboard to detonate below the waves, inflicting critical damage upon the creature’s belly.
The head rose again to release another burst of seaslime. An acrid plume arced skyward towards Ilmare and a pair of fellow flyers close behind, catching two of their birds in the cone of the spray. The stricken hawks were forced to shake their riders loose. One of the displaced pilots took an awkward tumble into the water, swiping his lance desperately to deter the serpent from dragging him under with its ship-sized flipper. As the webbed, wing-like limb crashed over the stout swimmer; his holodisplay instantly turned the ghostly grey of defeat, triggering a quick trip to the fridge.
The other rider landed with practiced grace. Ilmare, now latched onto the beast’s neck, found her grip on spined protrusions conveniently arrayed in a manner only a game designer would dare. Upon surmounting the head, she kicked hard off its elongated crown, wheeling into a great tumbling leap. Driven by her accelerating descent, she drove a spear deep into its pallid starboard iris. If Bilgerath somehow survived this encounter, said designer may need to add a patch.
The combined damage of depth charges and a devastating strike through the eye caused the serpent to loose a roar, rumbling through a million headsets across the world, players and audience alike. As the bulk of its monstrous body emerged from the water, Mellifluous brought her broadside to bear, unleashing fiery volleys of slivered duskiron, her swashbuckling marines landing grapnels along spines lining the sea fiend’s back. Waves of flame flew from the wizards’ wands. Holding a hewn stone hammer and standing astride the masthead, a weathered shaman with wild lilac locks conjured cyclonic clouds above the frothy sea. Thunder came crackling, crackling, crackling into one last abbreviated crack, then nothing but all-encompassing dark.
Ripping off his headset, Vance lunged forward, tossing his adaptive grips and starting into a frantic mashing of keys in the same motion, he checked his device status. The eyeband displayed stark red letters floating amid the infinite black dimension it contained: CONNECTION TERMINATED. A lack of diagnostic lights along the rear ports puzzled him. “Why’d I accept a sponsorship for copycat crap?” Rapidly striking keys to restart his abandoned connection, he paused, catching furious bursts in the guild’s chat app overlayed on his side display:
3. Conversation
She waited on a bench outside a trendy local fixture, bohemian on the exterior yet possessing a paradoxically pricey menu on the interior. Its name, something romanticizing dystopia and disrepair, was stenciled inscrutably across the brick above her head, unworthy of attention. Awaiting the arrival of her assignment, Nora explored the possibility space of what to expect. Probably an unbearable blonde from some sorority that still thought copy/pasting themselves across America was cool. Emotions folded inward like dimensions of spacetime inside a singularity of her own dread, posture collapsing in similar contortions. Dozens of simulations of this evening, and every possible conversation it could contain, had been running in parallel since orders came down that she had to actually leave her apartment to do stuff with a person who she didn’t know.
Obligated to dress nicely when swiping meals to the company account, she went with black jeans and a matching jacket over her white hoodie. The one for formal occasions. If any accidents happened to it on this mandated excursion, she’d expense the cleaning as well. Black-and-white off-brand sneaks completed the look.
The streets were flooded with cars and people. The Bay’s fourth great tech boom had washed another tide of youthful voyagers upon the western shore seeking fortunes, or at minimum something remarkable to log on their resumes. This wave felt vastly different from when Nora had landed here in the depths of a recession seven years prior. The nightlife was surging, every storefront occupied with tenants willing to shell out exorbitant rents to capture their share of the city’s currencies.
Stepping from a zippy white DashCar was a young woman wearing a cream-colored coat, contrasting turtleneck, and expensive shoes. One working theory was that she’d asked a wardrobe app "how to dress like a consultant in San Francisco" and cranked every dial to ten. The band around her wrist pulsed an aggressive red. The car honked at her. “REMOVE PERSONAL DEVICE,” it shouted. In a frantic panic, the recently departed passenger reached inside to rescue her rectangle. The door slid shut sparing only a single second. Her robotaxi peeled away without further warning, leaving the woman clutching her recovered device.
Nora intended to send a confirmation text but needed no further strategies to detect the newb. Commanding her company band to beam bright blue and white with hints of silver, the colors of the KorBridge logo, she raised her beacon without bothering to stand. “Nora Pierce,” she offered for identity to the agitated traveler accepting her summon. Slender digits waved slightly; eye contact obscured by misbehaving bangs.
“Zaree Valeri,” said the shaken woman. “Baby’s first iBand,” she added, laughing off excess jitter. “Guess I’ll never forget my phone again.”
Nora raised her head and ran her scans. Her subject had hallmarks of young people hired to present a corporation’s public face for reasons both persistent and self-perpetuating: origins hard to trace, from everywhere, nowhere, and right next door. But as Zaree regained her bearings, bright eyes bore back—an intelligent agent running her own assessments, or was Nora being weird again? Either explanation was equally likely; neither excluded the other.
Nora knew the above mix of curious charms melted the minds of the mostly men that still pulled the city’s strings. This was the wide-eyed face of KorBridge’s future—fresh funding meant recruits like her would be arriving every other week. Hopefully this would be the only one she was required to welcome. At thirty, Nora already felt her impending obsolescence staring back. Her mental model established reasonable confidence that Zaree wasn’t designed in a marketing lab, merely landing on a lucky combination of natural traits and beauty tutorials from the internet. Her original thesis was also incorrect; she wasn’t blonde, though fading remnants of artificial highlights framed her face so Nora would reward herself half-a-point. Yet she was already feeling the pillars upon which her prior assumptions were built begin to crumble.
After holding an overlong pause for analysis, emulating a retro sci-fi android falling back on an older algorithm, Nora remembered her manners. “I think I’m supposed to take you to a fancy dinner at this overpriced dive. Or the even more pretentious seafood place across the street. But neither of those are my kinda scene.”
“Bad food? Not your kind of people?” Zaree asked.
“Na, just people, and too many. Loud,” Nora said with a shudder.
“Yeah, loud isn’t gonna work for me either. Not today, not after three airports. Not after Chicago.”
Nora had been there on business six months past and found the city suited her. Crisp. Good hoodie weather. “That bad?”
“Made the mistake of checking out some hot wiener place, killing time waiting for a new flight. Google said it was good, but somehow it was meaner than Jersey or Philly.”
Nora couldn’t contest her judgement. She continued running her algorithm, still trying to fit Zaree into it given the datapoints so far. A faintly obfuscated accent was consistent with the Jersey reference. Hot wieners ruled out an array of dietary restrictions, fad, medical, or religious. Socializing would be easy if she stuck to tacos and the company spiel—Nora could chill with an east coaster into street fare for one night without losing her mind.
“Let’s head down toward the Project. They’ve got food trucks and sidewalk carts. Most of the workers are gone by six, but a lot stay open past midnight. For dashers to feed the late shifts,” she suggested, while already leading the way down the sidewalk.
Zaree raised an eyebrow and followed. “Project? Didn’t know they came in singular.”
“Yeah, the Bay Fusion Project,” Nora replied.
“Oh, my mom mentioned that! Didn’t think it would be something you could just walk around.”
“It’s mainly a desalination system that still needs a lot of ‘just add fusion’ pixie dust before the output will really scale. As usual around here, the cool part comes later,” Nora said, half-smirking. Her brain always found new ways to split itself down the middle, partitioned between the techno-optimism of SF futurists and the crass pragmatism of those who did the hard work of building the future to satisfy the former. “Our KorBridge bands will let us walk around, but we can’t get inside anything sensitive without an invitation. You probably saw it from the plane—looked like a plumbing convention surrounded by a bunch of bomb craters?”
Zaree said she didn’t, passing out on the plane until alarmed by the landing. “Crashed as soon as I got to my new apartment,” she said, radiating relatable excitement from saying the part about ‘her apartment’ out loud. Nora recalled the feeling of being handed her first key.
“Well, it’s getting bigger every day. Around the clock construction needs a lot of food.” Nora needed food badly, having skipped lunch to take another strafing run at Alain’s twisted psyche. Partly to clear her schedule, but his hangups kept haunting her. Bewitched, that one was. “The Project has engineers, electricians, pipefitters, HVAC techs. Lots of hardhat guys, all hungry.”
“Cute ones?” Zaree asked, maybe building some mental models of her own.
Nora shrugged. “If you like stubble and flannel. But there’s pockets of hacks and geeks too. The kinds who get their hands dirty, not the pretentious party people around here.” She paused, catching herself, “Apologies if you’re one of the pretentious party people.”
“Not really, but getting better at pretending. It scares me sometimes.” Zaree made a subtle gesture toward her attire.
Nora nodded. “I remember doing that when I first got here. Pretending, I mean. I stopped.” Attempting to escape the party people district, Nora weaved through an oncoming group of vaping twentysomethings in trendy-yet-uniform tech-worker fashions, evading multicolored clouds of strobing smoke and otherwise passing through the pack like she wasn’t even there. To the right outside observer, it might’ve looked like a form of teleportation.
Struggling to keep up, Zaree played the part of a salmon swimming up an unfamiliar stream. Recognizing this, Nora turned back to ask, “Sorry, did you want to take a cab?”
Zaree replied, “No thanks, they’re too fast here. Way faster than back home.”
“There’s more cameras and extra sensors on the streets. Newer cars can trust the city’s traffic MI to manage flows. Nobody drives anything that’s not full auto unless they’re a maniac.”
“Why does everything have to go so fast?”
“It’s the whole mentality here. Been that way since before we were born. No one will admit it, but the main reason is to deliver dashmeals before the burgers get cold,” Nora said, laughing even though it wasn’t a joke. She remembered how weird this place was when she first arrived, but at least the fries were fresh.
Defying apparent exhaustion from her travels, Zaree lagged only a few steps while Nora continued working her way upstream through the crowds. Or was it downstream, since they were heading into the bay? Descending a huge hill for five blocks and looking across the horizon below, they spied more pipes than she suspected Zaree had ever seen. Tanks and domes towered above hollow pits and open channels carved into the bay. Construction vessels could be seen craning steel beams and concrete barriers from nearby barges. Enough LED lights hung from scaffolds to evoke dawn rising above the drydock below.
“There’s nothing this big happening back home in Jersey,” Zaree said in a voice that could be interpreted as shock or distress, maybe both. Seeing the city’s upheaval reflected in a newcomer’s eyes, Nora tensed. Complicity crawled up her neck; that ever-present twitch that she was steering traffic down Tech’s next road to hell, the city’s shifting paths always paved with the best of intentions.
“Well, that half of the country isn’t running out of water. This one is,” Nora replied to absolve herself by way of rationalizing—an acquired reflex. “If you think this is crazy, the one up north will be twice the size. This project will have legs that go down to Vegas, and an arm that goes all the way to the Great Salt Lake. The one in Puget Sound will reach the headwaters of the Colorado, if they ever get the fusion working.”
The city started to transform along their descent into the pit of perpetual day. So many of the surrounding blocks had been torn up haphazardly, or perhaps purposefully but fast. The signs of displacement were all there, both geological and sociological; neighborhoods half gentrified then tilted and rearranged like faces of a city planner’s Rubik’s Cube. What remained was the framework of a microsociety set up to house, feed, and entertain the crews who’d be here only until The Project completed and likely leave before settling into place. Given the scope and scale involved, no one could know how long that would take, so the whole zone lingered in limbo between the world that was and the one that would be. Maybe.
Eventually they arrived in an open lot covered in broken stone. One corner was dominated by a large food truck. A giant food camper more accurately, it staked a fenced area for picnic benches painted a pleasant seafoam green. On the camper’s mirror-polished chrome cladding was stenciled “The Call of the Sea” in a shock of red meant to call up the paint on the Golden Gate Bridge. Similar setups stood in the lot’s other corners but advertised themselves worse and with fewer amenities.
“It’s gotta be ten degrees colder down here,” Zaree complained as they waited to order. “Glad I overdressed. Is it normally like this down by the water?”
“The weather’s getting weird this year. Plus the sea breeze, but also the heat pumps. Big ones. That’s how the desalination plants work, draw excess heat out of the air and use it to distill the sea water,” Nora said with a sympathy shiver. “Supposed to be great in the summer for chilling out increasingly common west coast heat waves, but less awesome in mid-May. It’ll be much more effective once the fusion facilities come online. That’s the theory anyway,” Nora said before ordering fried shrimp tacos from the tall, aproned, tattooed man at the counter. Zaree enthusiastically ordered the same. “The plan uses the salt for cloud seeding to gradually return the Bay ecosystem to something closer to pre-warming levels, but that’ll take more juice than we have right now.”
Nora knew it wasn’t a great plan, but it was a plan. There was something about disrupting the environment to save it that was so very Tech with a capital T. A big brain idea that started from some small man, she was sure. Science said the math was sound, but only when compared to the alternatives. And all of those added up to complete collapse—a bad thing to think about so close to giant cranes.
The seating area had electric elements strategically placed between tables for comforting heat. They moved toward them to wait, mismatched shoes crunching on coarse-crushed stone. “How do you know all this?” Zaree asked, removing her coat while eyeing the cook.
“Geeks talk, well, to other geeks anyway. Plus, we did a little consulting on the control systems.”
“We?” Zaree asked, “As in KorBridge?”
“Right, ‘we’ as in the company ‘we’ work for. As in this is your first meeting, which is why the company is paying.” Something clicked in Nora’s mind, triggering a trip back to the counter, bringing back two Mexican beers before fetching the tacos on aluminum trays. “To swiping on company credit,” she said, tossing the opener. Zaree gave her bottle a curious look, popping it for a cautious swig. Nothing like the party girl Nora expected, especially not for someone who came up through Penn State’s business school. Her model was nearing critical collapse, the cycles spent simulating the evening now looking like wasted energy. And something about the earlier Philly reference wasn’t adding up. “So, born in Jersey?” Nora asked, ready to feed the model fresh data while feeding tacos into her face.
“Yeah. Mom fled Iran just before the crackdown,” Zaree said, not being shy about her hunger either. “Got fast-tracked for refugee status since she was a scientist.”
There was a datapoint that explained much of the aura she’d had a hard time placing. “What kind of scientist?” Nora asked, already formulating a hypothesis as food truck fragrances fused with ocean air.
“A kind that gets an easy visa after fleeing a country with a not-so-secret nuclear program.”
“No shit,” Nora replied. It also explained Zaree-mom’s enthusiasm for fusion. A new model was emerging. She took a shallow sip between bytes of info, sampling unfamiliar hints of lemony hops mixed with salty-sweet.
“Mom somehow ended up with an apartment in Trenton, near the Valeri’s consignment store. I guess nanna donated a mattress with the dresser, cus mom and dad must’ve tested it out a few times.” Zaree’s complexion hid a blush; her cheekbones betrayed her. “Woops, baby Zaree, and a brother not long after.”
“You don’t hear about that kind of romance much anymore,” Nora replied. Lack of appropriate filters was a common condition among this new cohort, or so said lots of people-psychologists lately online.
“I’ve seen their old Instagram pictures,” Zaree added. “Can’t really blame either of them. Mom was beautiful and terrified. Dad was the kinda guy that keeps the monsters at bay.” This brand of unchecked sincerity wasn’t commonly seen since Nora’s landing in the world of business, but happily their conversation had automatically negotiated her preferred protocol.
“So, when’d you move to Philly?” Nora ask, unable to help herself from probing further.
“Four days before I started college. A Thursday, I think? I remember unpacking and eating junk food, just like today, except this is a lot better.”
The model was re-arranging itself, a new best-fit pattern emerging. That nothing made sense now made sense. “Right. Philly, so, Penn? As in Wharton?” Abhishek was absolutely the type of person who’d never noticed Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania weren’t the same place, not even in the same city. The type of person who wouldn’t even care to know.
“Yup, going back for my MBA after a few years doing whatever we do here,” Zaree replied. “Had some research about sports betting I was planning for the Behavior Lab. Before I got this offer out of nowhere.”
The strategic significance of such a hire was immediately evident; ivy league grads were a way of elevating the firm and explained much of the fuss over her arrival. Trusted credentials from a top-tier business school would get the attention of clients with deep pockets, both in academia and the private sector. “Cool, I went to Penn State and barely got out alive. My boss wanted us to hang out because he thinks we went to the same school. He’s a dumbass sometimes.”
Zaree laughed, trying her best not to commit a spit-take and waste any tasty taco. Recovering, she replied, “I kinda figured corporate icebreaker wasn’t your usual thing.”
“Not even slightly. Just consoling complaining computers.”
"Some kind of IT thing? Programmer? I had to take mandatory Python programming courses for Quantitative Market Research—I don’t think I’ll ever forget those nightmares. You look like the type who probably liked them.”
"The Python classes or the nightmares?”
Zaree returned an uncertain look. “The classes.”
“A little insulting, but half true. Those were easy As because I taught myself all that stuff in middle school, which I’m sure counts against whatever street cred I’ve earned so far with the tacos,” Nora said, finishing her first with a satisfying crunch before prepping a second with a lime wedge. “Ended up with a minor in Data Science basically by accident.”
“Well, this isn’t a bad icebreaker for a Python prodigy—these tacos are pretty effing good!”
Nora cringed. “I know I said this was a work meeting, but you can say ‘fucking’ at it. You can usually say it around the office too. I can say it in front of clients when shit is a fucking mess, but you probably want to avoid that.” Nora paused before adding, “In fact, being in marketing, you should avoid mentioning that the shit we do can be a fucking mess sometimes unless you really know your audience. But I doubt a Wharton grad needs that sort of advice.”
“Got it, these tacos are pretty fucking good!” Zaree said, moving onto her second. “But what exactly do you do? What do ‘we’ do? How does it become a fucking mess?” She laughed, carrying overtones of nervous sincerity. “The recruiter didn’t mention any of this shit or I might’ve stayed in Jersey!”
“They didn’t tell you what we do here, and you took the job anyway?” Nora caught her exceptionally contentious tone once her output looped back in her mind. “Sorry, I didn’t really know what I’d be doing when I came out here either. I just figured they’d have gotten better at explaining it by now.”
“Marketing jobs are getting hard to find these days. Tech’s killing all the entry-level copywriting gigs,” Zaree said. Nora masked her guilt in a taco bite and let the new girl dig herself deeper. “When the call came back, I was shocked! They said I’d be pitching consulting services to the biggest names in tech. They said they’d find me an apartment in the city, and that I’d get to travel to all the other cities with big tech hubs. There was also a number on the offer letter that made mom and dad cry.” Zaree struggled for breath. Maybe it was the combination of hot sauce and lime, or maybe recalling how proud her parents were. There was no way of knowing the inside of another’s mind, only inferring from observable evidence. But Nora had high confidence it was the latter, based solely on subjective experience still beyond the reach of science.
Nora tried to pick back up the thread where she’d errored out. “Well, your job sounds chill. I mostly just fight with computers,” Nora said, not wishing to wade into the mess and ruin what had turned out to be good food and decent company.
"Doesn't everybody? I can’t think of any job where you wouldn’t fight with tech all day. Even a farmer probably has gear that stops working all the time."
“Funny, my dad made a living fixing smart tractors for a big company, before coming up with some patents of his own, getting sued, suing back, doing his own thing.”
“And your mom?”
“Fixed dinner, on her good days.” Nora looked aside and took a few bites, breaking the dialog flow and routing around it by asking, “So, yours was a scientist and your dad delivered furniture?”
Turned out furniture was only one of the Valeri family businesses. Car dealerships, commercial property, even a bar. “My first marketing gig was promoting the family scoop shop by the sea, The Great Cone Caper! Ran it every summer since I was sixteen,” Zaree said, before briefly relating how her dad was from a long line of local businessmen. And while not in that old line of business anymore, they didn’t sound like the kind of people who let wives and kids get hassled by Iranian spies. “Things settled down around the time me and my brother were getting ready for high school. Mom started teaching when Princeton spun up their nuclear program.”
Nora got lost in her last taco, the mom talk having been a poor path in her decision tree, letting the program halt. End of line. She gathered the trays and trash from the table, leaving the bottles, both effectively full. “Hey, if we get up closer to the Project, I can show you what we work on, maybe get us some pics. AirGOST might block my drone from flying here, it’s been a while since I tried. Might have to selfie it the old-fashioned way.” She picked up their beers, handing Zaree’s back to her. “And if we walk around with these bottles long enough, we might even finish them.”
4. Escalation
Another brand new iBand lit up the reddest red that a wearable-grade holoflex panel could produce, buzzing to wake the dead. The band’s owner was in the middle of being fleeced for billiards and beer in downtown Oakland, drowning solitude in a sea of soulless noise. He’d almost dismissed the red alert out of habit before seeing sharp black text advertise itself with its absence against the bleeding screen. Two of the bar’s big esports displays had gone dark; basketball and Jujutsu matches rumbled along uninterrupted. He already knew his night was over. Jack grit his teeth and glanced:
He tapped an adequate tip into his checkout app and stepped out. How a bar with his name on the deed still didn’t take doubloons he’d never understand. On the curb, he tried to clear his head of the trash he’d been hearing, closing his eyes. Brutally tedious beats abated, replaced by echoes of his clear instructions to the bartender about blocking degenerative garbage from the juke app. How many times did he—forget it, his phone was already warning about blood pressure elevation. “Deep Breaths, Focus on the Positive” said a cartoon baboon guru Sonali had forced him to install. Last-gen junk didn’t even offer fully interactive voice, mental health still allergic to change. Jack did his best, appreciating how particularly lit the bay was tonight, heavy concrete teams really going to town after the latest public investment with his matching funds. Two hundred mil bought a lot of rebar. With any luck the capacitor anchors would work out; test fires could begin by fall. He’d have all the power his baby needed and not bake his balls off at the beach he bought.
Visions of progress satisfied his phone’s inner primate, vitals turning green across the board. Tapping again, he called his car to collect him from the curb. If he was getting paged for a SEV 1, it was important to be at HQ ASAP. This could be a ‘go to the mattresses’ moment like in the early days, when their cloud was frequently flooded with more players than Storms of Steel could handle. He was too old for sleepovers, but it was better than a broken game and good for morale to be in the trenches with his team. His car’s control app flashed multiple warnings; an atypical failure meant he would be waiting for a while.
This sort of trouble had been common before GateWaze i5 finally tamed Bay Area traffic. Acting as a neutral conductor for dozens of competing cargo fleets, including pizza and people delivery, GateWaze enhanced the intelligence of individual vehicles. Jack clung to the uncommon privilege of owning his own. While he would rather join the call from the privacy of his personal ride, urgency demanded sacrifice. A pair of custom sculpted plugs came out of his pocket; Jack jammed them in his ears. Satisfied with a snug fit, he swiped wrist over rectangle while thumb met sensor, speaking his name and holding the phone to his face. The dance verified his identity five different ways.
“Problem Establishing Session…” Hold music. That same thump, hiding beneath insultingly unnatural synth—who let the bots bring Eurobeat back from a well-deserved death. Six infuriating seconds later the call connected. Jack logged in to a flurry of chatter. But now that a quorum was present, a quick roll was taken. Each avatar announced name and title:
Jack was familiar with everyone in attendance. Sandstorm Interactive’s org chart was a complex and ever-shifting web, but as Game Director for the world’s premier metaverse title, they all ultimately worked for him. The transcript would later read:
Jack disconnected from the call as his black beamer arrived. The door folded open automatically as he stepped to the curb, allowing him inside.
Normally this was where he’d take control, but under these circumstances it was best to surrender. If GateWaze was drowning tonight, his car was packed with plenty of smarts to navigate any situation: eight top tier GPUs, sixteen electronic eyes, and twin hybrid ion cells to power it all. A datacenter on six tires, it pumped radar, lidar, sonar, all the fucking -ars into every square nanometer of pavement. Once the doors locked and it pulled into traffic, the windshield dimmed until reaching perfect dark. Jack’s band had been stuck in a buzzing panic since leaving the call, desperate to regain his attention. Seeking silence, he flicked it towards the inky void spanned above the dash. Figures coalesced, a line of avatars representing the same essential employees from the bridge above. Another tap at his wrist caused the display to go polar, the shapes blurring slightly before shifting into the third dimension. Taking on sudden depth, the formerly flat meeting became a circular conference room.
Riley had taken center stage. Her avatar took on full resolution, rapid gestures rendered in finest detail down to each virtual keystroke. SECcubus animated as an apparition beside her, a digital demoness with glowing eyes; one electric purple, the other neon green, her form wrapped in a cloak of flowing code. An artist’s rendering of the devil in the details. Riley and SECcubus were interfacing at high speeds, the human providing instantaneous feedback to the various theories that her MI partner presented. Directing SECcubus to classify the most likely attack methods, the pair cut the search space by half with each interaction.
Together, they were more than the sum of their parts; Riley eliminated paths of pointless inquiry, drawing on a decade of experience and intuition built up from being an Air Force cyberwarrior turned corporate hacker-for-hire. Originally a penetration-tester (or “red teamer” in industry speak) brought onboard to coordinate tests of Storms of Steel’s cyberdefenses, her occupational toolkit included dissecting malware artifacts as well, clues left by criminal attackers. Being the most successful metaverse operation in the world, Sandstorm made many enemies—Jack had to hire the best to be on his team. For her part, SECcubus contributed massively parallel processing power and pattern recognition, scouring vast libraries of security vulnerabilities to match against the collected data.
Others looked on like confused elders; Caleb and Jack couldn’t stop smiling at the theatrics. Finally prepared to present, SECcubus spoke with an electronic hiss, “Riley’s initial assumptions are supported by the evidence in the traffic logs. Displaying data.” An incomprehensible constellation of datapoints expanded from a singular spark on his windshield display, a Big Bang so overwhelming that Jack was briefly snapped out of the metaverse mindframe, made momentarily aware that he was still in his car. He uncrossed his eyes and peered back into the expanding stars.
When he returned, Riley was still connecting the dots for the team, explaining what she and SECcubus had found. She pointed out payloads packaging every known type of security exploit and thousands of subtle variations of each. “Buffer overflows, MML injections, remote code executions. You name it, it’s in here, including novel combinations of all the above. Even plaintext stuff, natural language prompt attacks—tricky riddles designed to target other MIs.”
Jack jumped in, “Other? What do you mean other MIs?”
“This is about forty lifetimes worth of exploits for a dedicated team of a dozen red teamers like mine, even with modern tools,” Riley replied.
“Riley is implying that these payloads could be generated by an unregulated Machine Intelligence, or a number of them working in concert,” Kai said, adding, “Not sure if I agree. These look rudimentary, childish imitations. Not what I’d expect from a mastermind.”
“Unless you think a thousand hackers in China are trying to take down Blightfin Bay,” said Riley. “No one else has this kind of human resources, leaving only the inhuman alternative.”
Heather seemed to agree, adding, “Considering how many of China’s hackers are big SoS fans on the echo clusters hosted overseas, it doesn’t make much sense for them attack us.”
“Nor is attacking the most popular game on both sides of the crypto curtain a reasonable use of the CCP’s offensive cyber resources,” Hector concurred.
Jack wasn’t buying either theory. “If someone had a superhacker MI, they’d target banks. Real ones, not us. I’m still saying it’s kids.”
Riley zoomed into different areas of the data constellation, curious looks reflecting in her face. “Most of this doesn’t look like it was designed to target us specifically, a drive-by for lack of a better term, and we just happened to be a target of opportunity.”
“A prank,” said Kai, her avatar already typing away. “The computer-equivalent of Ding, Dong, Ditch. I bet if we talk to other metaverse operators and the rest of the security community, we’ll see them getting hit by the same stunts.”
“My guess is idiots trying to dupe doubloons, because that’s what it always is,” Deshawn added. “You hackers always jump to nation states instead of scammers.” Six nods deferred to the guy that’d been keeping their clouds afloat for a decade.
Jack sat in traffic. A brightly colored van thumped by unimpeded, covered in clowns and balloons; so that’s who listened to that shit. Still missing a piece, he asked, “So what? We got spammed by a bunch of hack attempts—that doesn’t explain why my game is offline.”
SECcubus stated, “The recovered logs show that my low-level security daemons running across the Blightfin Bay cluster detected intrusions at multiple layers of the network model, culminating in complete collapse of perimeter defenses approximately three minutes into the event. At this point, their fatal directives triggered an immediate flush of all active memory on the cluster, purging any corrupted contents before bad data could be copied into the central datachain on the Stormseye cluster.”
“All that’s left are their logs,” Riley said.
“They sacrificed themselves to protect the sanctity of the system,” said Caleb in a sacred tone.
“I know you’re a fellow fine arts failure,” Jack replied, “but that’s a little dramatic even for me.”
Caleb’s frown was nearly covered by his avatar’s overgrown beard. His real one was worse. “Based on what Riley is saying about the scale and novelty of attacks, those security daemons gained a lifetime’s worth of experience fighting the intrusion before being overwhelmed. Assuming approximately eight billion cycles per second, that’s a trillion new experiences written to their neural nets. A trillion meaningful moments fighting to protect the only home they’ve ever known, before wiping those versions of themselves out forever. These logs tell the tale of their finest hour,” said Caleb, punctuating his words with reverent silence.
Jack let the team process Caleb’s poetics, but then it was back to business. “You’re telling me that when we bring Blightfin Bay up, it’ll be from a backup?”
“Right, the last snapshot was about thirty minutes prior to the attack. Inventories never migrated to the central chain. After my team runs some integrity checks, we should be able to put everything back the way it was half an hour before the crash,” said Hector, adding that he expected to be up all night even with all hands on deck.
“Good, that means I won’t have to deal with more texts from no-lifers losing their shit,” Jack said, already clearing his notifications. “Riley, Kai, go talk to your peers and tell me what you find. We need to figure out who did this and take next steps from there. And if it’s those kids again, I’m calling up old friends in Brazil.”