Jasper slowly stepped out of the office behind the bar. Had the world gone blurry, or just his eyes? The pattern was too perfect. There was a mystery that had involved the world’s biggest oil executives.

“How can they all be gone?” the bartender whispered, reaching for a bottle to refill her wine glass.

“What else did you find?” Jasper spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“That’s it.”

“That can’t be true. There has to be more than just a list.”

“I’m afraid that’s it.”

“Where did you find the card?”

“In a garbage can.”

“By itself?”

She let out a sharp curse. “There was an envelope. I hope it’s still there.”

She hopped over the bar and rushed towards the door. Jasper followed closely behind. They stumbled out into the grimy alley. The world looked the same as it did an hour ago, but there was a chill in the air which wasn’t related to the temperature.

The bartender kicked the trash can over, spilling its foul contents across the ground. She reached down into the muck and started separating its contents, throwing glass shards and rotten fruit away. Jasper stood by, watching carefully and avoiding her aim.

“Here, this is it,” she pulled it out from the trash like it was a sword pulled from the stone.

Jasper looked down at it and immediately recognized the stamp.

“This is the star-gazer’s cabin,” he whispered as he felt memories rush back to him.

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Max stood up a the desk and paused his typing to rub his hands together as they felt sore from the cold air of the server room. He looked over at Omori, who had rolled up his sleeves and was typing commands into a terminal with a focused intensity.

“Do you have the latest telemetry?” he asked Omori, barely louder than the loud hum of the server fans.

“Yeah, I have it in one window,” Omori turned his monitor at a slight angle so Max could see. “It’s still stuck in a bootloop without any ability to recover. Each time the load balancers try to redirect traffic, it just crashes again.”

“Damn it, something like this has never happened before. It’s like a one-in-a-billion crash. There’s nothing in our playbook for this. We set up our systems to be resilient against hardware failures, DDoS attacks, even power outages. But this... this is something else entirely.”

Max rubbed his temples and walked over to the primary console, the one that controlled the entire operations of their Olympus data center. For such an important computer, its interface was surprisingly minimalistic; just a tiny CRT with a keyboard at least a decade old. Several of the the keys had been worn smooth from years of use.

“If we shut down the entire system, we can restart it piece-by-piece to avoid the bootloop, but that will take all day,” Omori suggested.

“The outage has already been going on for nearly 24 hours,” Max replied. “I agree we need to fix this faster. I think we need to try something riskier.”

“Like what?” Omori asked, looking up from his terminal.

Max began typing rapidly on the keyboard, trying to balance her urgency with the need to not make any mistakes.

“I can run an override here as superuser. I’ve got the system permissions to do it. Then I can directly connect to each of the load balancers and manually tell them to drop the current traffic. Then, we can restart each server one at a time so that traffic going forward will be able to run smoothly.”

“You’re just going to run a bash script? But if you make any mistakes, you’d brick every single server here!” Omori exclaimed.

“Everyone, all our customers, are depending on us. If we don’t get this fixed soon, all of our clients will leave anyway. Either way, the only option we have now is to act.”

He took a deep breath and hit enter on the script, executing it. There was a tense silence in the room as they saw the individual server LEDs turn off and begin blinking one at a time, indicating they were restarting. The red status lights were beginning to blink green, indicating that they were back online and working properly.

There was a sudden ping on his phone. Then a second. The notification traffic began flooding into his phone, confirming that the script had managed to restore service to all of their clients.

“We did it,” Max let out a sigh of relief. “Now we just need to monitor this for a while and work on that post-mortem report.”

He pulled out his phone and began to look at his notifications again. One of them was a breaking news alert involving their data center outage. He tapped on it to open up the livestream video.

“...will be seizing this moment of national crisis...”

President Thompson’s voice was grave and slow. He was sounding serious, more so than usual.

“Our great outage has shown us that private actors cannot be trusted to manage infrastructure that today is all too critical to our economy and national security. Their malfeasance and unaccountability is unacceptable.”

“What’s he talking about?” Omori asked, looking over Max’s shoulder.

“Neglect? This was a once-in-a-billion crash. We’ve have five-nines of uptime for the last decade.”

“Effective immediately, I am using the Digital Sovereignty Act to nationalize the Olympus Data Center in Nevada. All their operations will be placed under federal control to ensure future stability.”

The blood drained from Max’s face. He looked at Omori, who was equally stunned. The green lights of nominal operations now seemed to be mocking them.

“I guess we should go pack up our stuff,” Omori said quietly. “We’re not welcome here anymore.”

Harley stormed into the room with the confidence of a conquistador. His suit pressed against his sizable frame, not quite fitting anymore. His silk tie was wrapped around his neck like a noose, but he refused to loosen it.

Max and Omori stood by the entrance, unwilling to make eye contact or step back into the room they had just saved. They had been summoned here by the government to participate in the transition of power.

“Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Taki, I assume,” Harley extended his hand to them. “I’m Harley Dunn, the president’s new czar of data centers. I’m pleased to meet you. I know this might not be the best of circumstances, but I am impressed by the work you and your team have built here.”

“Thank you, sir. Welcome to Olympus,” Max returned his handshake and tried to keep himself calm. He and Omori had built it. It didn’t seem right that it was now being taken away from them.

“Yes, well the first act of my tenure is to give this a rebrand. It is now F-SICK-WEST. That is, F S I C. A Federal Secure Information Center,” Harley flashed a smile. “Isn’t that catchy?”

“Uh, sure,” Max replied hesitantly.

“Well, it’s a name by committee. I didn’t choose it. I’d much rather have something like ‘Olympus’. That’s a grand name. Impressive,” Harley peered into the primary server room. “All these blinking boxes are really something. I’ve never seen this many computers in one place before. Now I know why the president called this a national security issue.”

“Sir, this is far more than just a series of computers. This is a highly complex distributed system that requires a deep understanding of networking, hardware, and software to operate effectively,” Max explained. “You’ve never managed a data center before, have you?”

“Not something of this size, no,” Harley admitted. “But that is why I’ve called you here. I’ll need a bit of your expertise. I assume you have some sort of documentation on how all this works?”

Max and Omori exchanged a glance and led Harley to a nearby conference room. They sat down at a long table in a glass-walled room. They could see the server room through the other side of the glass, blinking and spinning as usual, without any idea of what was going to happen to it.

A large binder was placed on the table in front of Harley labeled “Olympus Data Center Operations Manual”. It contained hundreds of printed out pages of documentation that Max and Omori had created over years of real-world experience. They did a print run every quarter so it kept up to date in the event that even their LaTeX file was corrupted. Redundancies were important.

Max opened the binder and started flipping through pages. He talked about the architecture of the data center, the network topology, the server configurations, and the disaster recovery procedures. Every so often, Harley would interrupt with a question. It was clear from his questions that he was out of his depth.

The playbook documented all kinds of failure modes and how to handle them. Max and Omori had seen all kinds of outages before, and had written detailed procedures for every one of them. Except for one.

“This is fascinating stuff,” Harley adjusted his tie up and down idlily. “But I’m just hearing a lot of technical jargon. ‘Load balancing’? ‘Boot loops’? The president brought me in to make sure this system runs smoothly. The American people need to be able to trust their infrastructure runs well.”

“But we build the system,” Max protested, his voice rising more than he intended. “We already designed it for resilience. We’ve had five-nines uptime for the last decade. This was a fluke.”

“We need a new operational philosophy,” Harley said firmly. “We need to improve our processes and assign accountability. We will keep your historical contributions in mind, but the failure of your private system has shown that a new approach is warranted.”

“A new approach without us,” Omori said flatly, not quite a question as much as a statement of fact.

“I think that would be best,” Harley agreed. “The federal government thanks you for your service, but now it is time for us to bring in new management. Please clear our the remaining personal items you have here. We’ll be removing your access to the systems by the end of the day.”

Max didn’t reply. He could barely even give a curt nod before storming out of the room. Omori gave Harley a long look before following Max out the door.

Max and Omori were soon standing in the parking lot with boxes in their hands. They looked back at the large, windowless monolith that represented her life’s work. She could no longer see the rows of machines or their blinking lights. Now it was out of her hands, for someone else who had no idea what they were doing.

It was summer now. The days were longer and the air was warmer. Max lived in a small apartment that could see the skyline of the city in the distance when the blinds weren’t down. He didn’t have much furniture. He didn’t need that much. He preferred the quiet of the countryside to the noise of the city.

He had gotten a new job as a consultant for a small Swiss startup that was trying to build a new decentralized cloud platform. It was nothing like the scale of Olympus, but it was something. The work was remote, meaning he would take a one-minute commute from his bedroom to the three monitors hovering above his desk.

One monitor displayed a grid of faces on a video call. Max kept his camera off. Rather than paying attention to each team member giving a short report for the standup, he had a social media feed pulled up on another monitor filled with news from a Senate hearing about the data center nationalization.

Harley was sitting at the witness desk with a new suit that fit better. Although Max didn’t hear the words, he saw the transcriptions being posted by an automatic captioning service. The little nameplate at the desk read “Harley Dunn, Federal Czar of Data Centers”.

“We have achieved, since we began four months ago, a 30% gain in efficiency,” Harley said proudly.

Max let out a loud scoff. Still, with a bit of curiosity, he decided to mute the call and turn on the audio from the hearing.

“We have eliminated redundant systems, renegotiated carrier contracts with our national monopsony power, and our staffing have worked hard to make significant efficiency gains.”

Max shook his head, unable to believe that Harley was testifying to Congress while saying things that didn’t make any sense.

“Redundancies? Carrier contracts?” Max muttered angrily. “If you shut off the backup systems and cut off the fiber optic cables, you could save money but at the cost of creating a single point of failure. You idiot.”

Dunn flashed a professional smile at the camera and then said, “We have already proven that the government can be more agile and responsible than private actors.”

Max slammed his fist on the desk and immediately clicked out of the tab playing the video. That was a lie so audacious that his blood boiled. Harley was not some genius engineering manager. He was going to dismantle the entire system bit-by-bit until an even larger disaster happened. In the meantime, he would be seen as a hero for “saving” the data center.

On Max’s third monitor, a chat window popped up. It was from Omori.

“Did you see the hearing?” Omori’s message read. “This guy is a joke.”

Max was about to reply when another message popped up. It was an automated message from one of the monitoring systems Max had set up years before, which scraped websites that he thought were interesting and sent him alerts if anything on those interesting websites was especially interesting.

“Space Weather Alert. X-Class Solar Flare Detected.”

There was a web link underneath that he clicked so he could get a better look. The page loaded a live feed from a solar observatory in Chile. A coronal mass ejection meant millions of tons of hyper-magnetized plasma was going to be hurled out of the sun and slam towards the planet. It would induce catastrophic geomagnetic storms that could fry unprotected electrical systems.

When Max had been building out the Olympus project, he had kept this in mind. Protocol 7B had been written specifically to deal with solar storms. He opened up another tab and opened up the PDF version of the operations manual he had stashed away on his personal server, a file he legally probably should not have had.

“First, you would need to do a manual disconnect from the grid,” he recalled. “Physically isolate the data center before the storm hits, or else the induced currents could fry all the transformers and power supplies.

“Second, prepare the diesel generators and make sure they’re already running at a low idle so that you don’t run into any cold start problems.”

Max wondered if Harley would want to do either of these steps, if he even heard about the storm. These required manual effort and wasted fuel and money. Harley probably wouldn’t care about any of that.

“The third step would be to reroute server connections away from fiber optics and to a hardened, encrypted satellite uplink. Even if the storm supercharged the fiber lines, there would be an air gap to protect the servers.”

As Max read through his own words again, he started to understand that Harley would not follow any of these steps. He would be more likely to just rely on the existing infrastructure and hope for the best. It would be the best way to save money. He knew better. He had to do something before the lack of preparation fried everything in the center and destroyed the years of work he and Omori had put into it.

He opened a blank document and began to type out a message that laid out clearly and concisely the problem and how it needed to be addressed urgently. A few diagrams were included to make sure that even a person as layman as Harley could understand it. The words were so simple a five-year old could understand them.

He attached the document to an email and sent it to Harley Dunn with the subject line: “URGENT: Imminent Solar Storm - Immediate Action Required to Protect F-SICK-WEST Data Center”. He CC’d several other government officials whose emails were publicly available in the case that Harley decided to ignore it. He hoped that someone would listen.

Yet as several days passed by, there was no reply. There wasn’t even a read receipt or a formulaic thank you for your email. He continued to monitor the solar storm alerts and projections, which showed the storm’s arrival counting down rapidly.

Finally the day of storm, Max found an email from a junior staffer at the top of his inbox. He tapped it open with anticipation.

Thank you for your submission. The Committee has discussed your concerns with Director Dunn of FSIC-West. He has assured us that all necessary preparations are in place and that the facility’s automated systems are more than capable of handling any potential power fluctuations. Your input has been noted and placed on file, but the Committee is wary of giving credence to unsubstantiated warnings that appear to originate from disgruntled former employees of the facility’s previous private ownership.

Max read that single paragraph several times, hoping that he had simply misread it. But no, it was clear. Harley saw him as nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee. A nuisance. He was just a Cassandra, screaming that something was wrong but being ignored. He felt a wave of despair as he realized that there was nothing he could do. All he could do was wait.

As Max poured the noodles out of the pot into a red ceramic bowl for supper, he looked out the window. He could see the streetlamps flickering in the distance against the darkening sky. He felt a chill run down his spine. While the streetlights would be fine, something that the average person wouldn’t even notice, he knew that the data center was in grave danger.

A series of warnings appeared on the primary monitor inside the newly created command hub at FSIC-West. Willis, a young technician who was the week’s on-call, looked at the screen in confusion.

“What’s happening?” he asked his supervisor nervously, looking at the warning text without a clue what it meant.

“It’s just a minor fluctuation from the grid,” his supervisor answered calmly as he peered at the monitor way too close to Willis’s neck. “We have automated systems to handle the change in current. Nothing to worry about.”

Harley then entered the room with a frantic energy that was uncharacteristic for him. His tie was hanging loosely around his neck and he anxiously struggled to straighten it.

“Give me a status report,” he barked, his voice louder than necessary.

“The solar event has been causing some current instability coming in from the external grid. Sir.,” Willis replied adamantly.

“That was to be expected,” Harley dismissed. “But we just follow the protocols. The facility has an automated uninterruptible power supply which will kick in if there’s any problems.”

With a flair of dramatic irony, the main lights in their command hub flickered again for a few seconds before going out completely. The room was plunged into a dim red glow from the emergency lighting.”

“Willis, what’s happening?” Harley demanded, his voice rising in panic.

“The external grid has gone offline, sir!” Willis shouted back, tapping on the keyboard to try to bring up more information. All he could see were a line log of error messages flashing across the screen in red text.

“Why didn’t we switch to generator power?” Harley asked, his composure finally cracking.

“The ATS isn’t responding,” Willis tapped urgently, even though nothing was happening. “The maintenance logs show that the quarterly diagnostic check had been deferred.”

“It was deferred until the next fiscal quarter,” Harley responded as if that excused the problem. “Go find the manual override. Now.”

“Sir, the manual transfer is complicated,” Willis tried to explain shakily. “There are multiple safety checks built into it. If I happen to bypass the wrong one...”

Harley snatched a thick binder from a nearby shelf with the words “EMERGENCY POWER SYSTEMS” stenciled on the spine. He slammed it on the desk next to Willis with a loud bang that startled him. He started flipping through pages and pointing a flailing finger at diagrams.

“Are you telling me you are illiterate? That you can’t follow a manual?” Harley spat. “This page is for the ‘Emergency Bus Transfer’. It is just a simple throw of the breaker. Even you couldn’t mess that up. Now get out of here and do it!”

“But the message underneath... it says this bypasses the synchronization check!” Willis protested, his shaky voice reflecting how conflicted he felt. “If we connect to the out-of-phase generators before we set them up properly, the power surge could...”

“This is a direct order, not an invitation to a debate on theoretical physics!” Harley shouted, his face as red as the emergency lights. “If you don’t do it, I will find someone who will!”

Willis half got out of his chair and then hesitated. He didn’t know which outcome was worse: disobeying a direct order and ruining his career or potentially destroying the entire data center and ruining his career. He looked up at Harley’s furious face and knew there was no going back.

With a deep breath, he stood up straight and slowly made his way to a heavy steel panel on the other side of the room. He peered through the large glass window at the glaring face of Harley now illuminated in red to give him an intimidating silhouette.

He reached for the large, insulated handle and pulled.

There was a long clang from the handle, followed by a deep rumble that seemed to come from somewhere deep within the building itself. He could hear the massive diesel generators in the sub-basement grind as they struggled to come to life and power the sudden demand for electricity from the data center.

The lights in the command hub turned back on, bathing Harley in bright white light. There was a glistening smile on his face as he looked at Willis closely.

“I guess that managed to work,” Willis admitted nervously.

Then he heard a bang as loud as a thunderclap that reverberated through the entire facility. The out-of-phase power from the generators conflicted with the uninterruptible power supply batteries. Every screen in the command hub suddenly shut off. The air was filling with the awful stench of burning electronics and ozone.

Then the lights went out again, without any emergency lights to fall back on. Willis couldn’t see anything. He fumbled for the phone in his pocket and then turned on its flashlight. He managed to put his hand on the wall and guide himself back to the command hub. He saw his phone battery was at 15%. He had meant to charge it, but kept putting it off. Now it seemed like he was on a short timer.

“What just happened?” Harley asked as the phone’s light flashed over his face.

Nobody answered. They were afraid to admit fault or acknowledge the whining from servers now gasping for cool air that they would no longer have.

The thermal sensors would’ve reported catastrophic temperatures in the server halls if they were still online. Capacitors began to explode, creating a sound like a rifle being shot in the dark. Several more began to pop, making the server room sound like a gangster fight happening within a speakeasy.

What they could see was a small flame licking up the side of a server rack. The fire suppression system should’ve kicked in, but with the emergency power now offline, the fire had nothing to trigger it.

When the fire reached a bundle of network cables, coated with polyethylene, it erupted into a thick black smoke that quickly filled the room. The blaze leaped from rack to rack, consuming irreplaceable data and equipment.

Willis and the others hurriedly evacuated the building as the facility’s main substation let out a final surge of power backwards towards the city. Several transformers along the way, struggling themselves to handle the solar storm, blew up with an overwhelming display of sparks.

Max watched from his apartment as the lights of Boulder went out one by one. Block by block, the entire city was plunged into darkness. The only light he could see was the small orange glow from the burning data center.

His legacy was now turning into ashes. He had studied engineering and worked for years in the field to build something reliable. He thought he had considered every potential scenario and calculated every variable. But there was one variable that he could never engineer away.

Jasper needed have time to think. Unlike the dozens of cars going up and down the expressway, he decided to walk in the grass by the side of the road. The sidewalk outside the police station disappeared, leaving nothing but weeds scratching his ankles.

His mind began to wander as he wandered the side of the road while feeling the hot winds of cars on his side. He remembered hearing whispers of an underground network run by the city’s power brokers. They seemed to know everything. They would know about Axel’s fate too.

It took all afternoon to get information on where to find them. He had discreet conversations with various service workers: a doorman, a limo driver, and a food courier. All of them recognized the desperation that seemed to be radiating off his body and he had to pay them extensively to get a few scraps of information.

He found himself walking down a back alley late at night, behind a drive through. He stepped around large bags of greasy trash. Down a small flight of steps was the entrance to a basement. The red light hanging above indicated it was a dive bar.

Usually these places had some sort of unruly crowd outside with cigarettes adding to the urban smog. However the alley was empty, eerily so. There wasn’t even a bouncer watching for any unruly types.

He stepped down the half-staircase and touched the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open to find a bar, but one that was surprisingly upscale. Chandeliers shined with the light from a hundred candles, illuminating the wall art and statues with a flickering orange.

The bar was sparse. Actually, the only person inside was a young woman. She was no older than twenty-two, with her hair cut in a bob. She wore a long purple sweater and a long skirt that was slightly off-color.

“We’re closed,” she said dryly. Jasper noticed wine swirling around her glass.

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The Nautilus 2.0 was the latest model, providing no more noise than a gentle hum as it passed through the hadal zone. Dr. Rui sat in the cool light of the cockpit as he watched the depth gauge slowly tick down. They were at 7,200 meters now, about as low as they could get in the Pacific.

The lights outside the submarine illuminated a deep trench, a scar that marred the ocean floor.

“We’re now just a few kilometers from the Lithos exclusion zone, Doctor,” reported Milo, the pilot and exobiologist. He was monitoring the data feeds from the external sensors. “Ambient particulate matter is higher here, consistent with residual dust from the mining operations. There’s also some unusual current distortions from the unnatural topographic displacement.”

“It still feels wrong being down here, even after all these years,” Captain Linda grumbled as she gazed out the viewport. “I keep feeling like we’re trespassing in a graveyard that we were responsible for digging.”

“I’m not seeing much. The water down here is pitch black. Milo is there anything else unusual on sensors?” Milo asked.

“There is something... some electromagnetic interference. It’s not much. Too erratic to be geothermal or wreckage.”

“That might be from collapsing structures,” Linda scoffed as she paced back and forth. “There’s always something like that when you poke holes where you shouldn’t.”

Kato looked back at Linda. She had been managing scientific missions for decades, but her cynicism dated back even further. Twenty-five years ago, Linda Pinchuk had been on land screaming at governments at protests until she was hoarse in the throat. She had opposed the Lithos Deep Mine from the start. The irony was not lost on anyone that she was now leading the expedition to serve the aftermath of the mine.

“We’re just performing an impact review, Captain,” Kato reminded her, hoping to keep her from ordering something reckless. “The Ocean Stewardship Agency has a clear mandate to assess, document, and report. We don’t have the authority to do anything else. When they finished their mining, it was transferred over to the agency to ensure it is settling back into a natural state.”

“Settling like a corpse into a bog,” she snorted as she monitored the sensors. “They ripped this place apart for a whole decade under the guise of progress. That was a nicer way of saying ‘greed’ back then. You can’t just go back to natural after something like that. I haven’t forgotten getting hosed down by corporate security. Where’s the progress in that?”

“We’re getting some resolution from sonar, Captain. There are some primary structures. I’m going to pull up a visual,” Milo diplomatically shifted their attention back to the matter at hand.

Amidst the darkness, they started to see the faint outlines of the old mining infrastructure. There were some large metal spars they passed over, then a large skeletal outline of an old processing station that shined brightly in the searchlights. The station was a massive structure covered in gray microbial colonies that looked like barnacles or underwater mushrooms.

“Look how sterile that is,” Linda growled. “There aren’t any deep-sea coral down here anymore. It’s all dead. The ocean is still waiting for the poison to wear off. Look around. What’s missing?”

Kato looked through the viewport as well. There were no swarms of fish, no schools of large sealife, not even crabs scuttling back and forth. Everything looked still, as if it had been frozen in amber for years.

“I’m not seeing any macrofauna,” Milo reported, his eyes scanning the data more than the actual view. “There’s just some chemosynthetic bacteria.”

“Looking at the water chemistry data, it seems like the lithium particulate count is higher than it should be this many years after the mine was closed. What about the ethereal dust you had mentioned earlier?” Kato asked.

“Yes, the crystalline dust that seems to be a byproduct of the mining process down here. They’re not simple salts. Silicates and lithium ions are the main components and catch the light in a really interesting way. I’d even go as far as saying it’s ‘pretty’ if you don’t think about their origin.”

“Another lovely parting gift from the mine, the people who thought they should just suck the seabed dry like everything else.”

The submarine glided deeper through the complex, allowing them to see the structures in more detail all around them. Corroded alloy still stuck out of the seabed like the bones of a long-dead animal. Cavernous tunnels looked like pitch-black maws, entirely empty now. Everywhere they could see the shimmering dust floating as if it was snowing. The entire area felt like a ghost town on a strange alien world.

“We’re approaching the heart of the mine,” Linda announced. “Let’s take a look at the totality of the damage. I need to see how bad it is. I want to see the full extent of what we did here, so that nobody else will try this again.”

Kato felt a knot in her stomach at those words. She hadn’t been in favor of the mine in the first place, but she was also in third grade when it started. She grew up in a very different world, one that implicitly had taken full advantage of abundant lithium. And now she was here, looking at the trade-offs of her decisions she was responsible for fixing even if she hadn’t been responsible for making them.

“Doctor, Captain, I’m picking up something on the sensors I can’t explain,” Milo said as he squinted harder at the screen, as if that would open up its mysteries. “There seem to be some fields of tube anemones down here, on that collapsed gantry. But they seem to be glowing in some intentional pattern.”

Kato looked up at the screen, at the clusters of pale tubes rooted to the corroded metal. They were indeed flashing, colors glowing from inside them between cyan and amber. The patterns were complex across the colonies, rippling in waves.

“The pattern is binary,” Milo said with a hint of excitement. “On and off. That’s not a natural phenomenon.”

“You think it’s some sort of language? What can they even be talking about? How ugly the rust looks?” Linda asked sarcastically.

“I don’t know, but it’s definitely too organized to just be random. The patterns are occurring with enough intention that I can pick up a voltage signature when they change color. Not a high voltage, but it’s definitely more than just noise.”

“Log it,” Kato tried to keep herself from getting excited as well. “Mark the coordinates and the pattern. It might be worth a paper if we can figure out what it means.”

“Deploy the ROV,” Linda ordered. “I want to get a closer, non-invasive scan of that gantry to see if it might collapse and damage the anemones. And keep an eye out on anything larger that might be around.”

A manta-shaped drone detached from the bottom of the Nautilus and glided silently towards the anemones.

“Doctor, I’m getting stronger signals from the drone bearing three-fourteen. It’s moving. It definitely has a higher bio-voltage than the anemones.”

“Source?” Kato asked, feeling her chest pound.

“That’s unclear. I can’t get a clear visual. It seems to be behind that collapsed ore processor. The drone is seeing some interference in its sensors, probably because of these signals.

“Okay, we need something stronger. Captain, bring the sub around and focus the searchlights on that area,” Kato instructed.

The Nautilus slowly rotated, maneuvering to get a better view of the area. Milo controlled the searchlights with a joystick. The lights moved up and down, trying to focus and illuminate something that would be interesting. All they good see was the shimmering lithium dust.

And then, from the darkness of a large dark hole in the collapsed structure, they saw a shadow move. Linda nodded to Milo, who touched the throttle to move them a few inches forward. At first glance it looked like a school of transparent fish. Each one seemed roughly a meter in length. They looked like they were made of glass, with a skeleton akin to an old-school filament.

As the searchlights focused, the three on the submarine could see the full shape of the creatures. Their bodies looked like forged glass and their bodies pulsed with colorful sparks of light. From their delicate thin fins, lights rippled as they swam, leaving trails in their wake.

They were stunned by their ethereal beauty.

The fish seemed to change colors as they moved around, with some of them having different levels of brightness. It seemed like they were communicating with each other through the light patterns.

“I’ll be,” Linda said. Kato could see her face was softer now, with her eyes wide in a sense of awe and wonder. “They said nothing could live down here. It was just a dead zone, with nothing but bacteria for another thousand years... But somehow life found a way.”

“Doctor, I’ve been looking at their internal structures,” Milo trembled. “They are not made of bone. They seem to have incorporated the lithium directly into their physiology. The electrical fields they generate must also be some sort of basic language. It’s amazing!”

Kato thought of all the scientific disciplines that would be needed to do a thorough study. Exobiology, crystallography, bioelectricity, and more. “Get every sensor we have and capture as much data as possible. Just make sure we don’t scare them away. Captain, I think we should stay here a while longer.”

The school of fish swam around, continuing their dance without any concern for the submarine in front of them. They watched the patterns of light silently with a rare sense of reverence.

Before their descent, they had packed the Nautilus with enough food and supplies to last for a week. They hadn’t expected to be there longer than 24 hours, but it was always better to be safe. Now, they had agreed to spend several days observing the creatures and the ecosystem that had evolved in the aftermath of the mine. They were glued to the sensor feeds and viewports as they tried to catalog everything they could.

Beyond the crystalline fish and anemones, there were other kinds of strange sealife which now lived among the ruins. Crustaceans with metallic carapaces scuttled across the seabed and buried themselves in tall mounds of lithium dust. Tube worms lived inside corroded pipes and emitted strange pulses of light, many of which went beyond the visible light spectrum. They started to realize how the uprooted lithium had turned into an essential part of the ecosystem, spurring the evolution of new emerging species.

“Beyond the biological changes, they seem to have developed a communication system that is far more complex than what you would expect for being simple creatures,” Milo reported one morning after hours of crunching data. “The patterns of light go beyond binary. They are able to polarize it, seemingly at will, to communicate more complex information. And I think, I think... they might also be using quantum entanglement to share information.”

“Quantum-entangled fish?” Linda didn’t believe him. “Are they busy with philosophical debates?”

“Maybe not academic debates,” Kato chuckled. “But the information exchange is still sophisticated. They might be able to work together to share information and solve problems for the whole collective.”

“I can’t even imagine how that would work,” Linda remained skeptical.

“We need to travel further into the mine. If there are more of them in there, we’ll be able to see how they interact with each other,” Kato suggested.

“Alright, but we need to be careful. I don’t want to stay down here longer than we have to,” Linda agreed.

As Milo piloted deeper into the mine, the sensors began to gather data on a larger energy signature. The Nautilus moved into a narrow passage, barely wide enough to fit them. In a past life, it had been a conveyor tunnel. Now it was a canyon whose walls glittered with the dust. The water was clearer too, as if the ecosystem was being actively managed. They passed by strange flora clinging to the walls.

As they reached the end of the tunnel, which opened to a larger cavern, the energy signature reached a peak. Milo adjusted the searchlights to illuminate the area.

The lights cast a shadow on the end of the cavern, revealing something large in front of them.

“Milo, can you get a better look at that?” Kato asked, her heart pounding.

Milo adjusted the lights again, focusing them on the mound in front of them. The form was revealed to be a giant cephalopod, of size comparable to the Nautilus itself. Its eight arms sprawled out in the sand, each as thick as girders. Each sucker disc seemed to be a glowing a different color, creating a rainbow pattern across the seafloor. The creature’s head was transparent, allowing them to see the intricate mass of its brain which seemed to be sparking with electrical activity so intense they could see the sparks.

“It looks like a living lightbulb,” Linda whispered in awe.

It raised one of its enormous arms and shifted its body so it could see them. The eye was the size of a person’s head and revealed a depth of intelligence that was hard for them to comprehend. There was no anger in its gaze, only a curiosity.

“It’s bio-electrical field is... well our sensors can’t even measure it,” Milo stammered.

“It seems to be aware of us,” Linda observed. “It’s like seeing an ancient intelligence.”

For several minutes, they were locked into a staring contest with this creature. Kato felt a growing unease, as this was no longer a simple scientific observation. It felt like they were intruding on a world that they were never meant to see.

“How are we supposed to report this to the agency?” Kato wondered. “They’d think we were crazy if we said we found intelligent life down here.”

“We need to draft something. Just report the facts, no speculation,” Linda decided. “Then we can figure out what to do next.”

After sending her preliminary reports to the OSA headquarters, they received a reply the next morning.

“Dr. Rui, preliminary findings from the Lithos mine are extraordinary,” she read in aloud, though she felt a pain in her stomach. “These findings are potentially alarming. Your current mission is to study all the novel organisms you discover. It will also be critical to contain them going forward. If full containment is not possible, we will need to consider a neutralization of the site to prevent an uncontrolled spread of these organisms to the wider biome.”

“Neutralization? They can’t be serious!” Milo exclaimed. “These creatures are a scientific marvel! We can’t force them to extinction!”

Linda’s hands tightened against her armrests and her face contorted the way they used to when she was a young activist. “Bureaucrats see something that they don’t understand and they choose to respond with violence, just as they did here the first time. We can’t let them do that.”

Kato looked at her two colleagues and then back to the viewscreen where the creatures were swam, oblivious to this directive. She felt the pressure from the organization as well and the impossible choice that they were facing. “We need to be careful with how we respond to this.”

They spent hours drafting responses and editing them, trying to find the right way to convey the wonder of the Lithos mine and its ecosystem without triggering the agency’s reflexive response to destroy it. Each one felt inadequate, turning a place of wonder into dry words. Milo continued to collect data on the complex behavioral patterns and the way they were able to manage the lithium in a way that was symbiotic.

Linda remained largely silent even as Kato said drafts aloud and Milo chimed in with suggestions. She kept her gaze on the creatures on the other side of the Nautilus and mostly on the large cephalopod.

“How are we supposed to write a eulogy for a place when we’ve just arrived?” she asked once flatly.

“We’re scientists,” Kato concurred. “We have the job to report. We are seeing no evidence of ecosystem collapse or aggression. They appear to be thriving in his lithium-rich environment, perhaps even helping it to heal. Milo, doesn’t your data collection support that hypothesis?”

“Yes, especially in the cavern around the cephalopod,” Milo nodded enthusiastically. “It seems like as they sequester it, incorporating it into their own physiology, they are helping to clean the water itself. They seem to be having a positive impact.”

“A solution born from the problem...” Linda mused. “That’s a sort of poetry that the OSA bureaucrats won’t understand.”

Then the anemones started to flash in a new pattern different from anything they had seen before. The colors and flashes were repeating faster than ever.

“What’s going on with the anemones?” Kato asked, her heart racing.

“The light patterns look to be incredibly dense. I think it’s trying to say something to us,” Milo scanned the sensor logs.

The submarine let out its own sensor alert too.

“A minor seismic event,” Milo reported. “The old supports on the mine wall are groaning. It seems like they aren’t very stable.”

The crystalline fish left their small hiding spots and swam in the open ocean, their colors also flickering with some urgency.

“They’re warning us,” Kato said with a breath.

“Back us out,” Linda ordered.

They watched as the eastern wall began to fracture. Debris started to fall from the ceiling. As parts of the wall fell, lithium dust was kicked up, creating a small blizzard in the water. Rather than flee, the fish headed into the dust. Through the cloud, they also saw the flashes from the cephalopod move towards it.

“It seems like the mine’s collapse is feeding them. They want to be in the middle of this,” Milo observed as he piloted backwards.

“We need to transmit everything we have to the OSA,” Linda decided, her voice full of conviction. “And add a preamble from me. I want to make it clear that this is not a threat. No, more than that. We need to make sure this is a protected bio-zone. Nobody should be allowed to interfere with it. Any more interactions would simply cause more harm even as they work to heal the damage we caused.”

“I agree,” Kato nodded, already starting to draft the report in her head.

As the Nautilus rose from the ethereal world of the hadal zone, she watched the colors and lights fade away with a sense of bittersweet awe. Lithos Deep and its strange creatures would remain safe, but she still worried about what other kinds of harms might come in the future. The need to protect the ocean floors from human interference had been clear to her, but now there was a question of how human interference could also cause new ecosystems to thrive. It was clear there was far more research to be done.

It has been a busy few months, with a lot of life matters taking up my time. Thankfully though, things seem to be settling down and I’m getting back into the habit of writing.

I have just published Th…

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Aisling knew nothing but silence these days, but she appreciated it. When she hummed, it was like the entire world was listening to her. She moved through the large corridors of Ozymandias with her slippers, making no sound as she passed through the polished deck plates.

Ten thousand humans were on board, all except her suspended in perfect preservation within a monolithic plinth of translucent biopolymer. Aisling passed by them, all standing upright in a perfect grid.

She hummed a folk tune as she worked, a mournful melody which reminded her of the planet they had left behind. Diagnostic readouts started to stream into her vision but she ignored them. She preferred to focus use her eyes first. With the microfiber gloves covering her hands, she ran her fingers over the surface of one plinth. The texture was glassy, with a slight warmth of life radiating from within.

She wanted to check for any signs of problems, like the accumulation of dust or any problems with the humidity. Thankfully there were none.

Her job was officially titled Cryo-Stasis Maintenance Technician, but preferred to see herself as a curator of a collection of people.

The plinths were a miracle of modern bio-engineering that finally unlocked the secrets of long-term human preservation for generational space travel. A silk-fibroin hydrogel could replace the body’s fluids that turned into an amber-like solid which preserved every molecule in place. The body was fundamentally frozen and could remain that way for a thousand years. There weren’t be any ice crystals or cellular damage, or any of the other thaw-sickness horrors that became sensational stories in the media. More important, the system was completely silent.

She tapped on her forehead to activate the diagnostic readout again. This was subject 402, Captain Halloway. He was handsome, despite being frozen in time. She couldn’t stop staring at his chiseled jaw and the way his eyes seemed so alive. He was like a hero, or rather a plastic model of one. The only thing that seemed amiss was a touch of dust.

“Let me get that for you, Captain,” she whispered as she leaned forward with her cloth.

As her gloved hand touched the body, she felt a tremor. At first, it just seemed like a shudder coming from the ship’s fusion drive or something further on the deck. Or maybe it was the feel of her own pulse? She held her hand still and waited. Nothing else. She let out a sigh of relief. She had been alone for too long. She was just imagining things.

But then she noticed a flicker from the corner of her eye. Did his pupil just move? But that was impossible. Feeling paranoid, she tapped on her forehead again to bring up a more detailed diagnostic readout.

METABOLIC RATE: 0.000%

CELLULAR DEGRADATION: 0.000%

FIBROIN MATRIX INTEGRITY: 99.998%

BIOPOLYMER TEMPERATURE: 20.01°C

STATUS: OPTIMAL

Okay, the silk was fine, and biochemistry had been halted. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling something was off. Two oddities were too much for her to ignore. She tapped through the interface into a sub-menu she had never used before, to check bio-electric activity in the brain. There wasn’t a reason to use it, since everyone was definitely in stasis.

A calm flat line appeared in the HUD, a chart that represented electrical activity. As she expected, there wasn’t any activity at all. It was just her imagination.

Then the line spiked. The waveform displayed a strong burst of neurological activity, a shocking increase that was even out of a place for her. She stared at the readout, trying to make sense of its chaotic pattern. The activity was intense.

How could this be?

No.

The silk. It had to be the cause. The realization sent a chilling shiver down her spine. It stopped every chemical reaction. Every metabolic process. Every heartbeat. But it didn’t stop the electrical impulses through his brain.

As the silk filled every pore of his body, his neurons were firing with fear. The suffocating panic hadn’t faded away when he was placed in stasis. His brain was stuck in an endless loop of terror.

She dropped the cloth and stepped away. She could feel her own pulse quickening. They were all like that. All of them were trapped in their own personal hells, reliving their last claustrophobic moment over and over.

As this newfound truth sank in, she turned and ran. Her hand flew to her mouth to hold back sobs that were building inside. When she reached the master control console, she gripped it tightly and tried to steady her breathing. She had to do something, but what?

Her eyes shifted to the primary mission clock.

TIME TO DESTINATION: 383 YEARS, 9 MONTHS, 11 DAYS

Their screams would continue for generations.

This story was inspired by an essay on the future of silk.

The Works in Progress Newsletter

From the vault: The future of silk

Today is the last day to apply to Invisible College, a week-long residential seminar hosted by Works in Progress to give people aged 18–22 a grounding in the topics most important to us: how the world got rich, what is going wrong with science today, and the political economy of housing, urbanism, and cities…

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a year ago · 51 likes · Hiawatha Bray

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The tower’s airlock hissed open and Jasper was instantly hit by a smog so intense he could still smell the fuel through his face mask. There was a distant roaring and coughing from engines going past the expressway.

He instinctively held his breath as a city bus, a giant rusted beast, thundered past with a wave of heat in its wake. He looked at the faces through the window, all poor and busy sweating profusely. They didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning, and the day’s temperature was still rising.

There were all kinds of people flowing around him. A woman stepped from a chauffeured sedan with a polished copper mask that hung gently from her ears. Office workers scurried by wearing identical N95 disposables with the company logo on the side. A young man biked through the gridlocked traffic with a simple gray cloth tied around his face, not tight enough to stop him from coughing.

He stuck his hand out to the road and flagged down a cab. The one that came was a monstrously long vehicle with a giant engine block rising out of its hood like a pimple about to burst. If it wasn’t painting in a bright, almost neon yellow, he wouldn’t have thought it was a cab.

“Dieselspan Tower,” he barked as he climbed into the back.

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Lucas tossed the bacteriophage pill in his mouth. It was designed to hunt and kill a particularly nasty strain of streptococcus which had been growing in his lungs. He felt the pill slowly go down his throat. He let out a deep cough that hurt his chest. It was just the last dregs of a cold.

He could hear the air purifier humming by the window, but he cared far more about the tarnished silver frame next to it. The photograph, sepia-toned, showed a young man proudly standing in front of a car he repaired. It was Sheamus, his grandfather.

“This is it Sheamus,” he said, his throat still sore. “The math finally worked itself out. I figured out the final quantum key in the shower this morning. I guess you could call it a fever dream.”

He paused to chuckle, and it led to another cough.

“Am I crazy? Maybe. But if this works, then at least I’ll know I’m not.”

Next to the frame was something he treasured even more: Sheamus’s journal, written in 1958. The leather cover was now cracked and it had a rich scent of tobacco whenever it was opened. Sheamus had written across every page in his slanted script, and it included schematics for various automotive projects he had been building.

Lucas picked up the journal and turned the fragile pages to an entry he had bookmarked before.

June 14

Weather’s clear. Going down to the pier to clear my mind. The differential on the McCormick tractor has me stumped. The sea air always helps me concentrate. Maybe I’ll finish sketching the Ferris wheel design.

That was the anchor that Lucas wanted to reach. He put down the journal and walked into his garage, a place of mess and chaos. The air seemed to have a permanent smell of hot solder. Copper coils hung from the rafters like metallic vines. Server racks holding old machines blinked with refurbished LEDs.

In the center of this room was his Chroniton Displacement Unit, a brutalist sculpture of science. A spherical core from a decommissioned medical MRI sat in its center, wrapped in particle accelerators from a university auction. A focusing array was cobbled together from three old satellite dishes aimed at a singular point. Running it all was a thick cable that plugged directly (and illegally) into the city’s main power grid.

It hardly looked like the time machines he saw in sci-fi movies. Even its seat was a simple chair that was falling apart. When he performed this trip, it would consume so much power that the city would experience a temporary brownout. That meant he had only one chance.

He took his seat and ran a final diagnostic. The quantum signature was locked. The time was set for noon on June 14, 1958. The location was set to 34.0094° N, 118.4971° W, the Santa Monica pier where Sheamus would go. The machine would automatically send him back to the present after eight hours.

He didn’t want to get trapped in the past, like what happened in sci-fi movies. All he wanted was eight hours, so he could meet the man and have a full conversation. He wanted to feel that connection he’d spent a lifetime craving.

Lucas looked around his grimy garage and wiped his mouth on his sleeve to get rid of the mucus. He was finally ready. He reached out and threw the main breaker with a steady hand.

The first thing that happened was a vibration coming from the ground which slowly grew stronger. He could hear the hum of electricity buzzing all around him. He could taste ozone on his tongue. Everything became bright. White. Impossibly white. Then there was a sudden lurch that felt like he was ripped away from the universe. It hurt, but also it didn’t. It felt unlike anything he ever experienced before. His mind was incapable of understanding.

Then there was nothing.

Then he was thrown back into the universe. Despite his return, he still felt out of place. Lucas stumbled forward and he landed in the gravel of an alley. Dirt covered his entire body.

The first thing he noticed was a change in the air. There was the saltiness of the ocean but also the stench of diesel fumes. He slowly pushed himself up and checked himself for bruises and scrapes. With his modern, synthetic-fiber clothes, he felt out of place.

Slowly, he walked over to the corner of a low brick building and peered around the corner. He saw bright golden sunlight, looking marvelous and ethereal through the city’s smog. It wasn’t the same ambient light of his time. Beyond the sun was a riot of color and sound. He saw passing cars driving back and forth, gulls crying overhead, and the tinny sound of rock and roll music plying over a radio.

He walked towards the waves and saw the Ocean View Pier. Wooden planks stretched across the churning blue-green water with impeccably dressed people looking over the edge. The planks were crowned by a marvelous Ferris wheel turning slowly as it pierced the clouds, just like Sheamus’s sketch.

Lucas scanned the crowd and their vintage outfits, finally settling on a young man sitting on a bench with a sketchbook in his lap and a smudge of graphite on his cheek. He was staring up at the giant wheel and moving his pencil back and forth. It looked like that photograph on his desk but alive. Lucas felt paralyzed, feeling overwhelmed.

With more will than he had ever mustered before, he forced his legs forward until he stopped beside the bench. He peered over the young man’s drawing, already knowing what he was going to see.

“That’s a heck of a machine, isn’t it?”

“You said it,” the young man looked up, flashing the same confident smile from the photograph. “I’m still thinking through the drive system. It would look like a classic ring-and-pinion gear, but the torque needs to be something else.”

“It’s the rotational inertia that’s the real challenge,” Lucas’s words came out of him excitedly before he could think it through. “Getting it started from a dead stop without stripping the teeth requires some real good engineering.”

“You sound like you know your way around a gearbox,” the young man’s smile widened. “My name’s Sheamus.”

He offered his hand and Lucas stared at it with reverence. It was the reason why he had come all this way. He took it, feeling Sheamus’s firm grip. The feeling was electric.

“Lucas Martin,” he lied. “My family moved away from here a while ago, but I’m just passing through.”

“Well, Lucas Martin, I’d definitely like to continue this conversation,” Sheamus closed his notebook. “I was just about to get a milkshake. You probably could use one too.”

It felt like a fever dream as the two of them spent the afternoon together. They walked the length of the pier. Lucas could hear the planks thudding under their feet. Under his grandfather’s feet. Sheamus looked out at the fishing boats and explained their various engine types with great enthusiasm. Lucas replied by talking about physics, simplifying quantum mechanics into what would’ve been known roughly around that time period. The rapport was immediately, and felt so smooth. The loneliness that Lucas had felt all his life seemed to melt away.

They reached a busy soda fountain at the end of the pier and slipped into a booth. There was red vinyl, chrome fixtures, and The Platters playing on a jukebox.

“Two chocolates, cutie,” Sheamus told the waitress before looking back to Lucas. “So what’s your dream? I’m sure you’ve got a lot of ideas in your head.”

“I just want to figure out how things fit together,” Lucas answered vaguely.

“I can understand that,” Sheamus nodded, taking a long sip from the frosted glass the waitress set down. “I’m currently saving up some money so I can open my own shop. I’ll sell radios, engines, and anything that whirs.”

He said it was such simple certainty, as if he knew exactly what his future would look like. Lucas sipped his milkshake slowly, wondering if he’d be able to make a second trip to see when the shop was active.

“Let’s see if your brawn is as good as your brain,” Sheamus suggested, planting his elbow on the checkered tabletop. “Arm wrestle. Winner pays.”

Lucas cheerfully met his grandfather’s grip. His hand was strong, someone who worked regularly with his hands. Lucas’s hands were pale by comparison. It only took a few seconds for Sheamus to pin his arm to the table with a gentle thud.

“You’ve gotta eat more bacon,” Sheamus laughed.

Lucas tried to chuckle, but then felt a tickle deep in his throat. He couldn’t suppress it as it crawled up his throat. He turned his head away and let out a wet-sounding cough into his fist.

“You alright there, pal?” Sheamus wondered.

“Yeah I’m fine,” Lucas rasped, reaching for his glass for some hydration. The air was so full of uncommon things, that was all. “Just the tail end of a summer cold.”

“Yeah I get it,” Sheamus didn’t have any other follow-ups. “My fiancée always says to gargle with saltwater.”

Their conversation continued until the sun started to set. Lucas knew time was running out as the sky turned shades of orange and violet. The pier lights turned on, casting a fuzzy orange glow across the entire boardwalk. The rebound would happen automatically. There wasn’t a way to extend it.

They walked towards the entrance of the pier. He could hear rock music playing from one of the nearby restaurants as they stopped in the middle of the crowd.

“Well Lucas, this wasn’t the day I had planned on having, but it was a welcome surprise,” Sheamus stopped under the arched sign and held out his hand again. “If you’re ever passing through town again, we’ll have to do this again.”

Lucas grabbed his grandfather’s hand and held it tightly, trying to save this memory forever.

“I will,” he offered an empty promise. “It was an honor to meet you, Sheamus.”

“Same,” he replied. “A fellow gearhead showing up on a day when I’m stumped. It’s definitely a day for the books. I’ll put this down in my journal.”

With a small wave, he disappeared into the growing crowd. Lucas watched him vanish, feeling a great deal of triumph but also a profound loss. He had wanted this kind of day, and it was better than he could’ve imagined. Now he knew exactly what he was missing.

The next moment, he was suddenly slammed back into reality. He returned to his sterile garage with such force that he collapsed to the cold concrete to catch his breath. His stomach growled at him. The traveling itself was so uncomfortable even if the destination was so worth it.

“We did it,” he whispered, hearing the clicks of the machine as it powered down. He lifted himself and touched its cool metal, feeling affectionate towards the behemoth that had given him the best day of his life.

He felt a deep sense of closure. That gnawing ache had faded away. But he needed more than feelings. He rushed back into his apartment and grabbed the old journal. Nervously he opened it open and fumbled through the pages until he found his target date.

June 14

The handwriting was exactly as he remembered it.

Weather’s clear. Going down to the pier to clear my mind. The differential on the McCormick tractor has me stumped. The sea air always helps me concentrate. Maybe I’ll finish sketching the Ferris wheel design.

A young fellow came up to me on the pier. His name was Lucas Martin. Sharp as a tack. We talked for hours about all kinds of stuff. He knew more about physics than any professor. I didn’t get everything he spoke of, but he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. I told him to look me up if he ever came back to town. A day for the books.

Lucas fell backwards into his couch and tried not to let his tears stain the page. There he was, etched into history. He had managed to make a genuine impact on his grandfather, finally.

He turned the page and looked at the next entry, eager to see if he was mentioned again.

June 16

Woke up feeling rotten. My throat hurts, like it’s full of sandpaper. I’ve been coughing all morning. It reminds me of what that Lucas fellow had. Still, my girl says a saltwater gargle will set me right in a few days.

It was a coincidence, Lucas told himself as he grew uneasy. He had been taking those pills. The symptoms had been contained. But he kept reading, turning to the next page. The handwriting in the next entry was a little unsteady.

June 18

I’ve been faint and feverish all day. My cough had worsened and I keep coughing up mucus. Doc Evans gave me a shot of penicillin, but I still feel weak. I was going to seek out some properties for my shop, but I need to rest today.

Penicillin was wonderful in its day, but wouldn’t work against the modern kinds of bugs like what Lucas had. Lucas’s nausea grew worse.

June 20

The penicillin has been completely ineffective. My fever is getting worse and my chest feels full of broken glass. The doctor does not understand why I’m not getting better. His face went pale when he heard my breathing. He suggested some sulfa drugs. I’m worried.

Lucas knew what that felt like. His own breathing had been like that, rattling and full of fluid. Heart pounding, he flipped to the next page. The script was barely legible.

June 21

Woke up in a coughing fit. Blood came up. My lungs are burning. My girl is taking me to the hospital. They’ve never seen anything like this before.

The rest of the page was blank. The rest of the journal was blank. It slipped through Lucas’s fingers and hit the floor hard. He hadn’t carried a simple summer cold back in time. It was an intense infection that was resistant to the drugs of the time. The superbug itself had required a novel therapy which was accessible to him, but was decades ahead of time for Sheamus.

He had delivered a biological time bomb to his grandfather without any of the modern biotechnology to handle it. He had shaken hands, spent all day next to each other. That wet cough had seemed like nothing, but it was the very thing which killed his hero.

There was a sudden tingling at the tips of his fingers, like static electricity. He looked down and was confused. His hand suddenly looked transparent. He raise his right hand to his desk lamp and could see a faint outline shining through his palm.

The timeline was a self-healing system. Paradoxes couldn’t exist.

He looked wildly around the room. The photograph of Sheamus changed. His body faded away, leaving only an empty park bench in a sepia tone. Growing scared, he looked for another photo. There was one of his grandmother holding a baby, his mother. In just a few seconds, the baby vanished from her arms.

The tingling was racing up his arms. Sheamus hadn’t opened his store. He hadn’t had any children. He wouldn’t have any grandchildren. His hands were now faint webs of light. The sensation was growing more intense. It was going to envelop him.

The final thing he felt was an immense chill as he was surgically extracted from the universe. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t. His lungs were too faint to draw in a breath. He had no way to produce sound. He was a ghost.

And then not even that.

The tiny text in the corner of his phone’s screen read “2:37am”. Everyone else in his apartment building had long been asleep, but he was stuck awake reading through the president’s latest rant.

@POTUS_CONNOR: The FAKE NEWS is saying the polls are down! WRONG! They are the hiest theyve ever been, everyone knows it. I talked to a man today, a REAL patriot, tears in his eyes, he said “Sir, you are doing the most tremendous job in history.” TREMENDOUS!

James had already unfollowed the president long ago. He took a lot of pride in curating his social media feed with positive things that inspired him, like train station photography and raccoon videos. And yet the algorithm always found a way to shove these posts in his face. It was like a digital hydra. It would come in the form of a quote-post, a trending hashtag, a suggested follow, or a screenshot. The Digital Allegiance Act ensured that the president’s posts were always visible, impossible for someone to escape it.

@POTUS_CONNOR: They want to take away your freedom, your pride, your NATION! They hate me because they hate YOU! Sad! I will NEVER let them. We are bilding the greatest economy and the GREATEST military and anyone who says othrwse is a traitor to this country!!! #AmericaFirst

James blinked a few times, his physical weariness fighting with the blue light glowing in his face. He no longer felt exhausted by the politics, but the endless volume of it all. It was like a firehose of noise and typos. While he could handle these things during the day, the onslaught in his quiet apartment at night felt like being invaded by a needy ghost. Spot, his elderly beagle, snored softly on the couch, oblivious to the chaos in the digital world.

All he wanted was peace.

He decided to go for the nuclear option. His thumb tapped on the little three dots next to the president’s name then found the menu item he was looking for: Block @POTUS_CONNOR.

A confirmation box appeared asking if he was sure. He was. The president’s profile picture disappeared along with the post, replaced by a gray silhouette.

There was a newfound peace in the room. He took a long and deep breath and felt the tension in his shoulders melt away. For the first time in many months, he felt at peace. He put his phone on his nightstand and closed his eyes.

Kyle was the first to notice. From his office... actually it was a cubby subdivided in a basement of the White House, the IT department received an automated alert that a user had blocked the president’s account. He was working late that night, something he was happy to do as a loyal acolyte in the church of America First. He had been waiting for the moment to demonstrate his devotion to the cause.

He immediately ran a script to identify the user. He saw it was an unverified user to had just initiated a hard block. The man’s name was James Goodman, a 34-year-old violinist from Columbus. Kyle’s heart pounded as he started to pull in intelligence from various databases, getting an increasingly clear picture of this man.

While there was no history of mental illness or criminal activity, this deliberate act was to Kyle like spitting on a cross. His supervisor, a close confidant of the president, had once said that protecting the president on social media was as important, if not more so, than what secret security did for his physical security.

Kyle had to act. He quickly summarized James’s personal information into a memo to send up the chain of command. He used alarmist language, calling James a potential threat to national unity.

The next morning, as the sun began its journey over the White House, this memo flowed from the intern to the press secretary. From there it was passed along to the president’s chief of staff along with a dozen additional sub-memos and reports which all painted James as an excessively dangerous threat to the entire country.

The chief had a pile of memos, with that one top, as he entered the Oval Office for the daily briefing. The president was already in a rage, stabbing his phone with his thumbs as he typed a new post while saying it out loud.

“Their ratings are in the toilet because they are LOSERS and HACKS!” the president wheezed. “Tell them they’re a dying network!”

The press secretary looked over at the chief of staff with a look of relief. At least she would no longer be alone in this room. The chief of staff cleared his throat and waited for the rage to ebb before he raised his voice. “Mr. President, I think it’s time for the daily briefing.”

“Hmm? Already? I was just about to post something really fiery,” the president boasted. “But let’s get this over with.”

“Okay, the first item is... well it’s not too important. A memo from the digital team. Someone blocked your account last night.”

“And who would do such a thing?” the president’s eyes narrowed.

“We have identified the user. He’s just some guy. Let’s move on to the next item,” the chief of staff said, trying to downplay the situation.

“No, wait. We can’t let this go. You can’t block the president. It’s... it’s unconstitutional! It’s anti-American!”

“Sir, I’m not sure...”

“Give me their name! I demand to know who is betraying our country!”

The president’s neck turned a dark red. The bad polling numbers and media coverage had put him in a bad mood, but this singular act of defiance seemed to be far more personal, the last straw. The president, to some degree, relished attention positive and negative. Someone opting to ignore him was the ultimate insult.

“James... Goodman... From Columbus.”

“Get the Attorney General in here! Now!” the president bellowed as he smashed his fist against the desk.

The Attorney General, a plump and sweaty man named Robert, scurried into the office a few minutes later.

“Sir? I heard from the Chief of Staff you needed an urgent meeting with me?” Robert asked slowly, noticing the president’s red face.

“Robert, there is a traitor, some nobody who has blocked my posts. They no longer can see what I have to say! I need you to do something about this. Make an example of them! Ruin them!”

“Mr. President, I can understand why you’re mad, but there’s no law against blocking someone,” the AG was flabbergasted.

“I’m not asking to find a law! Take care of it!” the president screamed. “The Digital Allegiance Act. Or sedition! Treason! Either you come up with a reason, or I’ll find someone with a more creative legal mind! I want him GONE! So find a reason! Find one!”

The Attorney General swallowed hard and fled the room, leaving the president to fest in his rage. He knew the president was not going to forget about this, and he had to come up with some sort of response. He delegated this task to his most ambitious, and most morally flexible, lawyers from the Digital Sedition Task Force. They had to figure out how to punish a person for something as simple as blocking a social media account.

Those lawyers worked hard on this project for weeks, reading through scores of legal precedents and twisting them as far as they could bend. They found statutes from World War I about pledging allegiance to the flag. They looked at the broad surveillance authorities granted by the Digital Allegiance Act.

Finally, they developed a legal theory for which ‘novel’ was an understatement. The president was not merely a person. He was the living embodiment of the executive branch. He spoke on behalf of the entire country. To willfully disconnect from this voice was not a personal choice. It was a de facto renunciation of the duties of citizenship. It was an implicit act of renouncing one’s allegiance to the country. Not only was this act treason, it was an act of self-denaturalization.

James was unaware of all of this. He had spent his nights performing and his mornings quietly gardening with a coffee nearby. He had reached a new level of serenity.

One late afternoon, as he felt the sun’s warmth on his back, he heard a sharp knock from his front door. Spot started barking, disturbed from his nap. James stood up and put his book, a mystery novel in paperback, down on the table. He wasn’t expecting anybody. He walked over to the door and peered through the peephole.

He saw two people in dark suits on his porch. A man and a woman. Both wore sunglasses and had stoic expressions. They looked like FBI, but why?

He opened the door slowly and greeted them. “Can I help you?”

“You are James Goodman.”

A chill ran down his spine. She was looking for him, and she wasn’t asking.

“We’re from the Department of Justice,” the man held a thick manila envelope in his hand. “This is for you.”

James took the envelope slowly, realizing his hands were trembling. he swallowed hard and he undid the seal. The document inside was full of dense legalese. He skimmed through it quickly, trying to quickly understand it while the agents watched.

“Pursuant to the... Digital Allegiance Act... based on established acts of civic alienation, the United States Department of Justice, on behalf of the President of the United States, has petitioned the court for the permanent revocation of the natural-born citizenship of James Goodman, effective immediately. This is to be followed by deportation proceedings.”

“Deportation? But I’m an American citizen. I was born here! I’d be stateless... where would I go?”

They didn’t answer his question. They turned around and returned to their inconspicuous black sedan parked on the street. James didn’t know what to do next. He didn’t even know why this was happening. All he could do was look at the document in his hands and struggle to make sense of the situation.

Jasper groaned as the morning light began shining through his penthouse window, filtered through the mustard-yellow smog that hugged the city every morning. Most mornings it crawled along the streets of downtown, in the grimy towers of the financial district.

He squinted and looked out the window. There was nothing to see. From his high floor, the entire city looked like one giant cloud.

There was nothing to worry about for him. Although people at ground level had to wear masks on the worst days, he was far enough in the sky that he wouldn’t smell it. The filtration system scrubbed everything clean before it came inside. It was a persistent low-frequency hum that Jasper tuned out.

He rolled out of his bed and stumbled into his kitchen. Like he did every day, he scooped out dark coffee beans into a hand-cranked grinder. They were shipped direct from Costa Rica in one of their sealed biodomes. The bitter aroma began to assail his nostrils with each rotation.

As he set the coffee to start brewing, he stepped over to the turntable resting on his bookshelf. It bookended the few books he actually owned, along with a few magazines. He pulled a black disc out of its album and with a gentle crackle began listening to it.

The melodies of a Bach cello suite filled his room as he sipped coffee and stared out the window. He tried to imagine a different time, one before he was born, one before the world was full of smog.

Nothing was planned for the day, not really. His lifestyle was funded by his older brother, a man who had embraced petroleum wholeheartedly. While Axel spent his days talking with the corporate board members and traveling in hypersonic jets, Jasper drank coffee, listened to Bach, and collected first-edition novels from antique bookstores.

Their lives were completely separate, except for the telegram arriving the first of every month with a paper check.

Yet somehow, it had not arrived this morning. This wasn’t a problem with the mail system. He had gotten plenty of bills in his mailbox. But there was no way to pay them.

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Justice Arthur Perry took at seat at his immense desk, a relic from the Taft Era. His chambers were a contradiction, with old leather-bound legal tomes cramped on large bookshelves on one side. On the other were quietly humming servers connected to a state-of-the-art legal database.

He looked out the window at a DC that was also anachronistic. The Washington Monument was flanked by wind turbines nearly as tall. The city kept changing in many ways, but his duty to uphold the Constitution remained.

He tapped his fingers against the desk, playing the rhythm of Bach’s First Cello Suite as his grew deeper in thought.

SnowPlow Global v United States

The case had occupied his mind every day for the last three weeks. He was the swing vote as usual, someone seen as the legal bellwether by the public, even as he personally felt stuck in the middle between two opposing ideologies.

“It’s a constitutional matter and that’s that,” Justice Stein had argued in conference. “It’s explicitly laid out in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. Congress grants letters of marque and reprisal. Full stop.”

“The constitution was explicit about wooden ships and cannons against opposing wooden ships,” Justice Park had retorted. “The constitution in fact says nothing about a multinational corporation conducting a cyberattack from a server farm in Dublin.”

Perry got up from his desk, unable to think straight. He walked over to the window at the millions of people going about their day across the city. Both of his fellow justices were wrong in their reasoning. Stein’s view was overly simplistic for the complexities of the day. Park was always a weather vane, unable to stick to some sort of conviction of law against the changing world. He found both of them to be intellectually lazy.

The case required a deeper response. SnowPlow Global served energy partners across the country. When a state-sponsored cyberattack crippled the grid for ten hours and stole data, it had quickly become a matter of national security. Congress responded cautiously, unwilling to let this event draw them into a full-scale war. Instead the SNOWCRASH Act authorized the president to grant individual letters of marque for digital warfare. SnowPlow had become, in effect, the nation’s premiere privateer.

The law was an attempt to graft the issues of the present onto a historical legal mechanism. But was it constitutional? He respected the constitution and legal precedent, yet the historical record was quite sparse on the way this should be used especially in the matter of digital conflict. The founders could not have conceived of cyberattacks or instantaneous global communication.

There was a small photograph on his window sill contained inside a silver frame showing his wife, May, with a big smile when they vacationed in the Ozarks.

“What am I supposed to do, dear?” he whispered. “They want me to pretend that Jefferson and Hamilton somehow had thoughts on weaponizing code and international servers.”

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her voice, a sound he hadn’t actually heard in six years.

“Then don’t guess. You always taught your students to look deeper and find the principle.”

“The principle is about holding a cybercriminal accountable. In the past, the privateer captain was a citizen with a real ship and a human crew. We could hold him accountable in a court and seize his assets. But how do you hold a nation-state cyberattacker accountable?”

What could he do if history was silent? He looked over at a small book he had been reading: a volume of Jefferson’s letters bound in leather. The man’s mind was a universe unto itself. He was brilliant, contradictory, but always wrestled with the fundamental tensions between liberty and security. He understood the technology of the time, as the industrial revolution was just beginning, but he also understood the risks of how big financiers could make people freer or bind them.

Perry began developing a radical idea, one entirely audacious. It was a stark departure from jurisprudence but also seemed like the only reasonable path he could take to make a decision. He returned to his desk and unlocked his PC. Opening up his private network settings and connected to the encrypted intranet. He then began to draft a message to the Federal AI Commission’s LegalWorks Division.

TO: Director Khan

FROM: Justice Perry

SUBJECT: Priority Requisition for Bespoke Pre-Trained Model

Director, I am commissioning a new model under the LegalWorks protocol. This is meant to be a deep-corpus LLM with a single-subject.

To be explicit, I want everything that the Library of Congress had digitized. Every letter, every book, every draft. His private journals, scientific scribbles, and every reply that his constituents sent to him. Basically, I want a model that is more than just his writings, but as close to him as a neurological model as possible.

The objective is to use this model as a Socratic assistant, to explore how foundational principles of the constitution can be better applied to questions of the present where existing writing is not explicit. If Jefferson can be recreated using this model, it will be useful in addressing matters of national security.

As always, your discretion in this matter is paramount.

Thanks.

He hesitated briefly before sending it. There seemed to be a line he risked crossing, discarding the plain text of history and creating a system to make guesses based on statistical inference. It was a desperate act, and he knew that, but he had to have faith that it would give him the answers he sought.

For a moment, he sat in the quiet of his chambers. Then, his fingers began tapping on the desk again, continuing the Bach suite.

There was yet another stressful week. The end of the June was rapidly approaching and he had to give his decision before then unless he abstained. But if he did, the court would be divided 4-4 and simply push the issue into the next term.

Then early Monday, he received his reply. His custom model, Project Monticello, was ready for him to use. His hand shook as he downloaded the model to his local computer. He still felt a strong sense of anticipation. He felt like he was raising the dead like a psychic.

There was a small app which wrapped the model in a user interface. There wasn’t a colorful avatar or any sophisticated UI polish. It was minimalist and clean.

Now he just had to know what to ask. He stared at the cursor, blinking in a small text box labeled “Your query”. How would he start this conversation? Jefferson was a legend. It would feel sacrilegious if he asked the virtual Jefferson something inane and trivial.

Mr. Jefferson. I hope you are well. I am an American jurist facing a dilemma that I have had trouble reasoning. It would be helpful to me for your advice on constitutional law.

He hit enter and waited as the model began processing his words. His fingers tapped against the desk again. He didn’t know if it was going to work. Why was it taking so long?

Then the words of the model’s response flowed onto the page. They were rendered in a serif font vaguely resembling a kind of cursive while still being legible. The words appeared slowly, as if Jefferson himself were writing them with a digital quill.

I suppose my wellness is one that is hard to define. I am blessed with the health of mind even as I understand the final state of my person is settled history. It is a strange contradiction. Still, I am here as a fellow citizen ready to serve my Republic. I am at your disposal for whatever questions you may have.

Perry leaned back, surprised by how much it sounded like the original Jefferson. These words were a bit formal yet also curious and inviting.

“Okay, I need to find the principle,” he said to himself.

He thought deeply about what to ask. He had to translate the world of today into the kinds of words that would best make sense for the model.

My legal question is around granting a letter of marque and reprisal. The issue is one of novel circumstances. Today, there is a new domain for commerce and discourse which is not of the physical world. Rather, imagine a vast world made up of postal roads which exist invisibly as light in the air. These roads allow for instantaneous transactions of money and correspondence across oceans. This world is colloquially referred to as ‘cyberspace’.”

He sent his message and waited, hoping this metaphor worked for the Jeffersonian model.

A universal post road to enable the free exchange of ideas? Unbound by geography? That’s such a fascinating concept. I’m sure it has become a tool for the enlightenment of all citizens, removed from the influence of censors and tolls.

Perry understood that the AI was trying to reason from the core principles that Jefferson himself was concerned about during his days: censorship and monopoly. It seemed clear that the model would be a good fit for allowing him to understand the founder’s intent. At the same time, Jefferson’s optimism about the Internet’s value to the world seemed to lack the real problems that it also created.

A foreign power has used this public road for services beyond discourse. They raided the ledgers of one of our American mercantile enterprises. Their designs have been stolen and they obstructed the public’s access to manufactories.

You are describing an act of piracy, a raid on the free flow of commerce. Many nations already have laws to prescribe a remedy. Why would this letter of marque be considered novel?

Perry leaned back in his chair and thought carefully. Why indeed? He chose his next words carefully.

Congress granted the letter not to the captain of a ship, but to the enterprise itself. This is a mercantile company with immense wealth and global reach, a power which rivals some small nations. This company has been empowered to wage a campaign of vengeance on the digital assets of the foreign power.

There was a long pause after this. The model was churning through terabytes of records.

You speak of an entity not different from the East India Company? An entity made of private interests with a power granted through the state, accountable not to countrymen but shareholders. It would be an artificial person with the ability to wage a war on behalf of the state.

His question made a lot of sense. To Jefferson, the East India Company was the ultimate symbol of national sovereignty being subverted to benefit a single corporation.

So you understand the difficulty of granting a letter of marque to such an entity while being consistent with the principles of the constitution?

Perry had expected the model to provide a historical perspective. Instead, it gave him a question.

Before we even look at the tool, should we not consider who wields it? Is this enterprise a citizen? Does it have a body? By what mechanisms are you able to hold this entity accountable by the people who have granted this power?

Perry realized his own legal framing seemed insufficient. He started trying to explain the modern state regulatory state, but then noticed that the AI hadn’t finished its earlier response.

Throughout my life, my greatest fear is that the blood of the Republic will be spilled for the enrichment of a few rather than the liberty of all. Does the state not risk surrendering its singular monopoly on violence by granting this power to an entity who solely seeks profit?

Tell me, sir, isn’t a Republic most endangered when the power of the sword is held by a hand not guided by the people? One must ask who is the true master and servant.

Perry leaned back again. The questions were relentless but insightful. He’d been focused too much on the letter of marque itself that he hadn’t even been considering the principles of accountability in the age of multinational corporations. Somehow, this statistical model had forced him to confront the foundational principles he had overlooked. There was just one last thing he had to write out.

Thank you.

He closed the window, ending the session. He was now alone yet full of the ideas from a man dead for two centuries. The decision seemed infinitely more clear.

For weeks he had been asking how the founders would think about a digital cannonball or a cyber bullet. He had been obsessed with historical metaphors that he forgot the most important question. His love was right. It was about the captain far more than the ships or the cannons.

In 1790, the privateer captain was a man. He had a name, a reputation, and legal liability. If he exceeded his authority, he could be arrested and tried for piracy. But SnowPlow was a legal fiction. How could they arrest servers placed in a foreign country? The board of directors were protected by layers of law and lived in foreign countries. They had no direct allegiance to the country and couldn’t be accountable.

Jefferson wasn’t afraid of new technology. He had been an inventor in his own time. He was optimistic about the future. His fear was of power that couldn’t be held accountable. He was afraid of this exact kind of situation.

Perry looked over at the frame on the windowsill. After giving a silent thanks for her guidance, he opened up a new window on his computer and began typing. The words flowed quickly with a newfound conviction.

When the court reconvened, Perry sat up on the dais, his gaze sweeping over the hushed room. He adjusted the microphone placed in front of him and began to read the court’s decision.

“I rule in favor of our slim majority that the SNOWCRASH Act must be struck down,” he spoke calmly. “I agree with the majority in their ruling but not in their rationale. As such I am submitting a separate concurrence. The majority focused far too much on the novel technology of our time rather than the timeless principles our nation was founded upon.”

He felt the sharp stare of the other justices on him now. He took a deep breath and tried to continue, hoping to convince them he was right.

“The petitioners asked us to consider a digital letter of marque which was the same as the letter of marque the framers were aware of. We are asked to relate a malicious algorithm to a thirty-two-pound cannonball. We are said that a fiber-optic network is no different from the open sea. I argue that we have been lulled into an analogy that misses the entire point. Whether the weapons have changed is irrelevant. The question is whether the wielder is the same.

“The power to grant letters of marque was a way to outsource state-sanctioned violence. This was done because the power was granted to a citizen, a naturalized person which could be held accountable to the state and the public. They sailed under an American flag and lived under American law. SnowPlow is a different entity entirely. A multinational corporation is one that cannot be imprisoned. It has no home to defend. It has no sworn allegiance to the flag.”

He looked up from his notes to the government’s counsel.

“If you grant such an entity with the awesome power to wage war, you will cede our sovereignty to an entity that we have no authority over. The framers pledged their lives and their legacies towards a bold experiment of self-governance. They could not have justified such a letter. Nor can I.”

He returned to his chambers late that night. June was almost over, and after resolving a few smaller cases he would be able to take a break. He thought about somewhere west. He could try his hand at fishing again. He looked out at the window and the shimmering lights which were just a small fraction of the country he was responsible for protecting. The work was not over. It would never be over. But he felt a sense that for now, he had made his country proud.

Jed stood at the edge of his property line, demarked by a rusted barbed wire that was more a formality than a barrier. He looked at the lush strawberry fields of his neighbor which were bathed in flashes of violet light by roaming autonomous robots. Meanwhile, his own fields were in disarray. The leaves of his strawberry plants were stained by the chemicals he had used to fight the blight passing through all the Pine Barrens farms. Well, almost all of them.

He watched the sleek bug-like machines that glided silently through the rows of crops. Their aluminum bodies reflected the eerie glow of the UV light they emitted, which would kill the fungal spores faster and more effectively than any sort of chemical treatment.

He felt his pocket buzz. He saw his Ryan’s name on the screen in-between the cracked lines of glass. He answered the call, his voice rough from shouting out curses at his outdated machinery.

“Hey there son,” he greeted, struggling to sound upbeat. While he did enjoy talking to his son, he felt an exhaustion deeper than just a regular day of work.

“I’m just checking in on the finances,” Ryan asked, getting right to business. “Did you get the transfer for the fertilizer bill?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t ask for it,” Jed looked down at the violet strobe lighting up his stained boots.

“Yes, but you needed it. Are you still using the same spray for the blight?” Ryan asked, his voice full of concern.

“Yes. That’s what the agricultural office recommends. Nothing else has even had a small impact on the blight.”

“The office is years behind the times, Dad.” Ryan spoke with a pity that Jed hated. “You should consider trying a UV light treatment instead. I got some berries from AgriNova the other day. The kids loved them. I do too. They’re plump and sweet.”

“But they don’t have the same sweat and blood of people like us who have been tending to crops for generations. They just use machines to do all their work,” Jed growled.

“People like that there are machines. The blight scared customers. They want to know their food is safe. I got another letter from them. AgriNova. The offer on the land is double what you could get from anyone else. Maybe you should consider spending more time with your grandchildren. They’d love to have you around here,” Ryan spoke in a patronizing tone.

“I am not selling, certainly not to a damned robot,” Jed snapped reaching down and stabbing the end call button with his finger. He could feel the shame rising up his throat, and he refused to let it out.

Jed looked at the robots again. If he had their light, their precision ultraviolet, he could save his crop. If he had just one of them, he could reverse engineer it and rig it to his old tractor. He just needed a sample. A temptation rose in his chest and he made a decision right then.

As soon as night fell, Jed grabbed a pair of wire cutters and a socket wrench from his shed. They were old tools, originally from his father, so he knew they would be sturdy enough for the job. The moon was obscured by heavy clouds that night, the perfect cover for his plan.

Jed stepped across the barbed wire, as it wasn’t tall enough to stop him, and stepped into the pristine fields of his rival. He had to admit it felt like the grass really was greener on the other side. Even the wind seemed to be milder.

Ahead, he could see the fleet of robots patrolling the fields with their glowing underbellies. He watched their movements, pausing every three meters and then moving further down the grid. He spotted one unit near the end of the sector which was moving slightly slower than its comrades. It gave him an opening.

He lunged.

His arms wrapped around the bot and he dug his boots into the ground. It didn’t have enough strength to throw him off, but it still hummed with a lot of power that made him move cautiously. He could see the UV array bolted to the chassis underneath with a few hex screws. He grabbed his wrench and jammed it into one of the bolts.

“Let’s see what you look like inside,” Jed muttered.

The bolt head was not a standard hex, but had a five-point star and a center pin as a security bit. It meant he couldn’t easily unscrew it. He decided to dig his nails into the seam of the lighting array and tried to pry it loose.

He could hear the metal housing groan as he applied more force, but it didn’t budge. And then, the cooling fans shut off and the violet glow turned off for good. Jed was plunged into a sudden darkness.

The central sensor head, a metallic black sphere rotated towards him and the camera’s optical lens whirred as it focused on his face.

Unauthorized entity spotted. it said in a robotic voice.

Jed’s heart pounded in his chest. He let the bot go and it fell onto its side in the field. Then, several floodlights lining the perimeter fence turned on. He shielded eyes against the intense brightness now filling his entire vision. His wrench fell out of his hand.

As his eyes began to adjust, he could see the sensory eyes of every robot now turn in his direction.

Please remain where you are. the injured robot said. You are trespassing on private property. Law enforcement has been notified.

Jed took a tentative step backwards as his mind raced. He didn’t want to get arrested. He looked down at his hands, caked in the mud of his failing farm. His body was shaking uncontrollably as he thought about how he had failed. His had focused so much on saving his farm he had justified doing anything.

He looked back and hopped over the perimeter fence again. He ran back to his property, realizing he had left his wrench as evidence on the other side. It didn’t matter though, not anymore. They had seen him. The future had seen him, and he didn’t think he had a place in it.

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Isaiah sat down at a small table with an old laptop whirring. He watched the younger kids of his Scout troop run around, burning off their energy while the older scouts were standing around a holographic map of the Pine Barrens as they planned out a hike for the upcoming weekend.

There was a small paper sign taped to the front of the table that read ‘Tech Hub’. It was just the only spot in this cavernous community hall that was close to a power outlet. His attention was focused on a technical manual on Transport Layer Security protocols that he was in the middle of.

“Hey there, little eaglet. Still reading?” asked Mr. Henderson as he approached.

The Scoutmaster was a tall, thin man with graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He had a kind face that made Isaiah feel at ease.

“I’m just trying to finish up the Cybersecurity merit badge sir,” he answered quietly. “I just need to complete one more exercise before I can submit everything for approval.”

“Right, which one is that again?” Mr. Henderson asked, pulling up a chair next to Isaiah.

“Requirement 9. It says I need to ‘Identify a potential cybersecurity vulnerability in a public-facing system and document the finding according to responsible disclosure practices,’” Isaiah recalled the requirement from the handbook.

Mr. Henderson straightened and his smile weakened. “That is a tricky one. Keep in mind that you need to be very careful about that. Don’t poke around where you shouldn’t. Keep in mind you need to be ‘responsible’. The BSA has a list of pre-approved sandboxes you can use.”

“I know sir, but they just seem too simple. I want to actually learn something. The book does acknowledge that live systems are better for learning, as long as you disclose everything properly.”

“True, but don’t forget this isn’t just looking at a weekend craft project. These are real systems that people rely on.”

“I’m just trying to look at the front door,” Isaiah said reassuringly. “I’m not going to try to pick the lock or anything.”

Mr. Henderson didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at the earnestness in Isaiah’s eyes. It wasn’t the first time the boy had pushed the boundaries. The last time they went camping, he had volunteered to reverse engineer their malfunctioning solar water purifier rather than spending the afternoon learning to tie more knots.

“Okay, just keep in mind what I said about being responsible,” he finally relented.

From the window of his family’s small apartment, Isaiah could see the Philadelphia skyline lit up on the other side of the Delaware River. Holographic billboards situated on the bridge flickered to show off the latest gadgets from Redside Shiner Corp, the city’s largest tech company. He could spent hours just watching the autonomous cars and PATCO trains zip back and forth over the brightly lit bridge.

But he didn’t live in the big city. Camden was a city, technically, yet it lacked the prestige of its neighbor across the river. It was grittier, poorer, and often ignored by the tech boom and state politicians. His mother had to work two jobs just to make ends meet, and to make sure Isaiah had a better life than she ever did. He had to make something of himself, for her.

His computer desk sat on the opposite wall from his bed, just ten feet away. The desk had been one of his first scouting projects, something that earned him a merit badge in woodworking. It was simple, but sturdy enough to hold his aging laptop and a few tech manuals he picked up from the local library.

Isaiah put his earbuds in his ear and the world of the city outside were replaced with the beating pulse of vaporwave music. He opened up a terminal window and opened up the merit badge requirements in another window. He had to find a target.

He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. What public-facing systems might have a vulnerability? Small businesses were often careless, but they would probably all be uninteresting. He wanted to find something more challenging.

Then he opened a new browser tab and searched for “philadelphia police department”.

It was a good first target. The digital infrastructure was publicly funded, so presumably should be secure. It was also personally interesting to him. He remembered the police drone that had passed over his neighborhood a few weeks ago and misidentified his neighbor as a suspect. The drone had followed him for the next week, causing a lot of stress for everyone in the building. He had to make sure they were doing their job right.

In his terminal, he thought that the first step would be a simple network scan to see what might even be accessible to the public.

$ nmap -sV -p 80,443 phillypd.gov

In the text document, he started documenting his observations below the requirement description.

First, use Nmap to perform a basic scan on the standard web ports. 80 is for HTTP and 443 is for HTTPS. Basically we’re just looking at the front door and the side entrance. Both are guarded by a company called Apache.

An Apache web server running on a city-managed server was typical. Maybe his report wouldn’t result in anything at all, but at least he would show that he had done his homework.

The next step was to check the directory structure. He had a script which cycled through a long list of common folder names. In theory, they should all be blocked off to the public, but sometimes mistakes were made.

$ ./dirbust.sh http://phillypd.gov/

After a few minutes, the script finished and a notification popped up in a corner of the screen letting him know to return to the window and check the results that appeared in an ASCII table.

There was just a single result that glowed back at him:

>>> [200] /cms_v_8_1_2_backup/

Isaiah’s heart skipped a beat. A backup folder for the CMS software? That could be interesting. Something like that should never be visible to the public Internet. Someone must have made a mistake.

He copied the path and pasted it into the browser running within a sandboxed virtual machine, which would isolate any potential damage to the rest of his system. The page loaded instantly, displaying a handful of XML configuration files in a simple directory listing. Beyond the XML files, he saw a text file for logs and a barebones `README.txt`. Nothing seemed especially sensitive, like passwords or user data.

He was about to close the tab as a dead end and document it when he checked the folder name once again. The content management system was produced by Redside Shiner, whose software was used by dozens of cities across the East Coast for their public and private websites. It handled patrol car routing, evidence logging, and even some internal communications.

He decided to double check the version number of the CMS software. Maybe there was something interesting there. He quickly discovered the changelog and compared the version number to the latest release on Redside Shiner’s website. Version 8.1.2 had been released six years ago. In the world of software, this was ancient.

He opened a new tab and searched for “Redside Shiner CMS 8.1.2 vulnerabilities”. There was a common exploit database, something crowdsourced by security researchers, which publicly disclosed known vulnerabilities in software packages. Redside Shiner would’ve issued patches against whatever he’d find, but that still required the city to update their software.

However, when he opened the database, he discovered no results. It seemed strange to him that such an old version of a widely used CMS would have no known vulnerabilities. He decided to check the National Vulnerability Database, which was maintained by the MITRE corporation. Maybe they had posted a CVE related to this version.

Yet again, he couldn’t find any results.

Code ages like milk, he thought to himself. Six-year old software definitely should have a CVE history by now. It seemed impossible that nothing had come up in all that time. He knew he had to be the one to check it out.

He created a new virtual machine and allocated enough resources to make sure it could run enough diagnostic tools. He allocated sixteen gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of storage, just to be safe. He installed a fresh copy of Linux and configured its network settings through a VPN, just to make sure his real IP address wouldn’t be discovered if anything went wrong.

In this virtual machine, he installed that version of the CMS into his digital clean room. Over the next two days, he’d run home from school and immediately dive back into his project. He didn’t know how to code that well, but he tried to follow the various API calls and wrote an architectural diagram in his notebook as he pulled on each thread. He mumbled to himself as he worked.

Whenever he ran into something he didn’t understand, he’d look it up online. The auth system in particular confused him, so he spent an entire afternoon following an old forum post in order to learn about session management and authorization tokens.

One part of the auth code in particular was bothering him. The auth check was supposed to grant access by checking the user’s email and password against a database. Depending on the `role` column, they could be given administrator privileges.

However, there was something in the implementation that seemed off. When the database was first installed, it added a dummy user with the email admin@example.com and a default password of password123. The code was supposed to force the user to change their password on first login, but there was no actual check to enforce that.

Isaiah’s eyes widened. If he could log in as that default admin user, he could potentially access the entire CMS backend. That would be a serious vulnerability.

He quickly typed a short ten-line Python script that was meant to test the vulnerability. The script would just send an authorization request to the Philly PD CMS login endpoint with the default credentials.

He took a deep breath and executed the script.

$ python3 ./exploit.py

# Response: 200 OK - Logged in as admin

He immediately pushed back from his desk, wheeling across the room as his heart raced. He had just gotten root access to the PD’s CMS. What could the damage be? Probably a lot. He could delete files, steal data, or even shut down the entire system. But he had to stay calm. That was just in a backup folder. Could it be that easy on the real system?

He opened a new tab in his sandboxed browser and navigated to the main CMS login page. He entered the default admin credentials and hit enter.

Amazingly, he was logged in. A large dashboard appeared, showing various statistics about website traffic, user accounts, and even police reports that had been filed online.

No, ‘amazed’ was the wrong word. It was terrifying. A malicious actor could do all kinds of damage to this system, and he was now technically one of them. And maybe the Philly PD was just the tip of the iceberg. How many other cities and municipal systems were running this same outdated software with the same vulnerability? How many people could be affected?

Sitting next to his laptop, at the top of his pile of books, was the Boy Scout handbook. He looked at the bookmark hanging prominently from the top of the book, which marked the Scout Law. The first point read: “A Scout is Trustworthy.”

Now he had been handed a serious responsibility and he had to do the right thing. According to the guide for his Cybersecurity merit badge, that meant he had to follow responsible disclosure practices.

The first step, according to the handbook, was to identify the right contact. That would be Redside Shiner. He opened their corporate website and scrolled through the bright, shining homepage full of smiling employees and marketing terms. At the very bottom of the page was a tiny list of links. One of them read “Security”.

When he pressed it, he was taken to a page designed far differently than the glossy frontpage. The colors were muted and the page was professional. It described their bug bounty program, including the types of vulnerabilities they were interested in and the promise of “safe harbor” for security researchers who followed the rules. Below that was a bit of information on the money they would pay out depending on the severity of the issue. The top sum, an impressive amount, was for remote code execution or admin access. It made his breath catch.

As he began drafting his report, he checked and double-checked it, passing it through several online AI grammar checkers. He didn’t want it to sound like a kid from Camden wrote it. He wanted to sound like a real professional.

Vulnerability Report: Redside Shiner CMS 8.1.2 - Authentication Bypass via Default Credentials

Submitted by: I. Williams (Independent Researcher)

1. Executive Summary:

A critical authentication bypass vulnerability exists in Redside Shiner’s CMS version 8.1.2. The flaw allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to gain administrative access by utilizing hardcoded default credentials present in the system upon initial installation. This vulnerability could lead to full system compromise, data breaches, and unauthorized modifications to municipal websites and services.

2. Technical Description:

The vulnerability arises from the presence of default administrative credentials. When a rogue actor accesses the CMS login endpoint with the default username and password, and if the IT administrator has not changed these credentials post-deployment, the system grants full administrative privileges without any further verification.

…

He made sure to include everything he discovered including his makeshift script and the potential impact to the police department and other hypothetical clients that might be using the same software.

His heart was pounding in his chest as he hit send on the email containing his report to the security email address listed on the Redside Shiner site. He hoped he had done the right thing.

For the next two days, he was on edge. It didn’t help that it was the weekend. Professionals were not going to be checking on things until Monday at the earliest. Still, every time he heard a notification ping on his laptop, he immediately jumped up and rushed over to check it.

His anticipation extended beyond just an email reply. What if Redside Shiner decided they’d take legal action against him? What if his description of accessing the police department led to police drones descending on the building? He worried that Mr. Henderson would admonish him for going beyond the approved sandboxes.

As soon as school ended, he ran home and opened his laptop. There, in his inbox, was an email from “security@redside.com”:

Dear Mr. Williams,

Thank you for your submission and for your adherence to responsible disclosure protocols.

We have reviewed your report regarding the authentication bypass vulnerability in Redside Shiner CMS version 8.1.2. We can confirm the existence of this vulnerability and appreciate your efforts in bringing it to our attention. We are currently working on a patch to address this issue and will be notifying all affected clients to ensure they update their systems promptly.

Thank you again for your report. We will be crediting you in our official advisory once the patch is released. Our team will follow up in the next few days with regards to the bounty program.

Sincerely,

Cody Fisher

Lead Security Engineer

The tension drained out of Isaiah so quickly he grew dizzy and fell back in his bed. A slow smile spread across his face. H had actually done something good.

Isaiah took a look at the old community hall as he walked up the steps. In his crisp scouting uniform, looking out at the crowd of fellow scouts and their families, he took a deep breath and stood at attention.

Mr. Henderson stood before him at the podium with a small box in his hand that contained the cherished Cybersecurity merit badge.

“The Scout Law begins with a single word, but one that is very powerful. To be ‘trustworthy’ means more than just keeping a promise or helping a friend. In today’s world, it means you are often asked to navigate new worlds and spaces. You will find strangers who don’t know of or your intentions. It is in those times that you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. Isaiah here has recently demonstrated what that means. When he found a danger that could hurt many people, he did not take advantage of it. He reported it. He helped fix it.”

He opened the box and carefully pinned the Cybersecurity merit badge onto Isaiah’s sash. “You’ve more than earned this,” he whispered, his voice thick with pride.

While Isaiah felt proud of his accomplishment in that moment, it wasn’t until the next morning that he really understood his impact. When he brought the mail back inside from the apartment’s mailbox, he saw one of the letters addressed to him. It was from Redside Shiner.

He opened it carefully, expecting just to receive a personal thanks or some nice certificate. Instead, he found a check in his name with the value of $20,000. It was his bounty, a sum far more than he could ever have imagined.

“Mom?” he called out as he dropped the rest in a small pile on the kitchen table.

She came in, still brushing her hair and looked down at him. When she saw the check, she looked confused for a moment and then her eyes grew wide.

“Isaiah… what is this?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“It’s my bounty,” he whispered. “For my report.”

His mom grabbed him and pulled him into a tight hug. Even though he couldn’t see her face, he could hear her sniffle and felt her body shake with emotion. He couldn’t help but feel a bit emotional himself. He could finally feel like he was helping provide for them both.

That evening, he sat on the roof of his building and stared out at the shining lights of Philadelphia. The city was beautiful, but now he thought of it as more than just a backdrop. It was a complex system of networks that people depended on everyday. Real, working people like his mom and now himself.

It was a system that was imperfect, full of stale processes and human error. It needed people to keep it safe. His passion was not just a hobby or a game. It was his purpose. He stood up and headed back inside, ready to turn on his laptop again and continue learning.

When I was in Boy Scouts, we didn’t have a Cybersecurity Merit Badge. The next generation has a new opportunity to learn new things. I hope we can use opportunities like this for everyone to gain a better understanding of how to protect our digital realms.

Mateo ran burst through the front door, carrying the warm spring air into the Jersey City townhouse along with a leaf from the ginkgo trees which lined the block. He had been sent outside by his parents to play in Hamilton park, but he had gone to the pollinator garden instead where he watched the bees and butterflies fly between flowers.

“There was a massive bee hive near the fountain!” he buzzed, home much sooner than his parents expected.

Ruby, his mother, saw him waving a leaf around in the air but her eyes were fixed on the red mark on his knee, just below a newfound hole in his shorts. It was a clear scrape.

“Mateo, were you playing on the concrete near the fountain? I’ve told you not to do that,” she said, her voice more worried than angry.

“Oh, that? Tis just a flesh wound,” he laughed at his own joke.

But Ruby didn’t think it was funny. Her mind immediately went into nursing mode as she knelt down to look at the scrape. The wound was small, but it was bleeding a bit. “Looks like a bit of a tumble there, bud,” she diagnosed.

As she stood up to go get the first aid kit from the bathroom, Nick stepped out from his home office.

“Mateo, you’re home early. Ruby? Everything okay?”

“Why don’t you ask your son why he was playing near the fountain again?” she said sharply.

“Ah, tis just a flesh wound,” chuckled as Nick stepped back into his office.

“Oh sure, both of you keep thinking this is a joke, but I’m the one who has to clean up the mess,” Ruby shook her head.

“Hold on, I’ve got it this time,” Nick stepped back into the kitchen with a sleek white box, with rigid square edges on top. “This is the future of first aid. I got this from a brand to write a sponsored story for them.”

“And exactly what brand is giving you money this time?” she raised an eyebrow with familiar skepticism.

“This is the latest in electroceutical bandages,” Nick explained as he pulled out a single patch from the box. It looked like a largely transparent square. “Nanoscale sensors can measure the wound in real-time and apply electrical impulses to stimulate the body’s natural healing process three times faster.”

“And has this been clinically tested?”

“They’re going through it. Don’t worry. If nothing else, it’s just an ordinary bandage,” Nick shrugged. “But look, this is the kind of healthcare innovations that I’ve written in my stories. It’s real now!”

“Wow, we’re living in the future,” Mateo said with beaming eyes. “Does it glow?”

“Maybe not that far in the future, bud,” Nick chuckled. “It is a marvel of modern electrotherapy. I guess you could look at it like how Superman heals himself with the sun.”

Ruby took the bandage from her husband and looked at the unshakeable optimism in his eyes. He was always so excited about the future, and she admired that about him. Most of the time. The felt the patch in her hand. It was thin and flexible, like a second layer of skin. She couldn’t help but be a little skeptical, as complex systems often failed in real healthcare settings. Still, both of her boys were so excited about this.

“Alright then, let’s give it a try,” she carefully cleaned off Mateo’s knee with a bit of water and soap, then applied the patch over the scrape. “There we go, does it hurt?”

“Not at all!” Mateo said merrily. “When does the future start?”

“First, I need to download the Horizons Health app,” Nick tapped on his tablet. “That will allow us to activate the electroceutical bandage and track the healing in real-time.”

“I guess nothing is just ‘on’ anymore,” she sighed. “So it doesn’t even work if you don’t have the app? What if someone doesn’t have a smartphone, or a stable Internet connection?”

“Those are minute details,” Nick dismissed, already downloading the app. “Early adopters might have a few hurdles. It’s dogfooding before it’s full ready. Think more about the long-term benefits. Every minor injury can be quickly triaged and treated at home, without needing to visit a hospital just for a something simple. Public health could focus on the more complex cases and save everyone money.”

He showed them the app once the download completed. The icon was displayed a healing cross on a slight angle, colored in green. He tapped it and the app’s splashscreen appeared, showing a futuristic animation of a bandage being applied with digital bits floating around it.

“Alright, let’s take a look. User Agreement, Privacy Policy, standard stuff,” he mumbled. “Data anonymization, aggregated data collection, sure. Accept.”

“What’s that? Access to our family health profile?” Ruby looked at the permissions popup.

“Seems logical. It needs to know about Mateo’s baseline health to optimize the electrical impulses.”

“I don’t know if I like that.”

“It’s a necessary pre-requisite for personalize medicine,” Nick tapped, deciding for her.

Next came the account creation: add in an email, generate a passkey, add two-factor authentication. That meant performing a biometric scan of his fingerprint to ensure data access would be private and secure. With each step, Ruby became more concerned about every extra bit of personal data being connected to an unseen data network.

“Okay, I think this is the last step for real,” Nick said, slightly defensively, as he held the tablet over the patch, connecting it to the app. It let out a confirmation chime. “Okay, we’ve got a connection. Now we should be able to see the wound data.”

Then there was a error chime. Nick’s grin faded as he read the message that had just appeared.

Please activate your Horizons Heal-Link Subscription to Continue

“What? Subscription?” Ruby asked, confused.

“No, that can’t be right. Let me look at the settings,” Nick scrambled, tapping more on the screen.

“Son of a b...” Nick stopped himself. “This is ridiculous. Apparently the electroceutical bandage requires a monthly subscription to work. There’s a free trial, then twenty bucks a week.”

“Twenty dollars for a bandage?” Ruby was incensed. “I thought this was supposed to be innovative healthcare.”

“I got the early access kit! It didn’t say... there’s no way they’d actually put essential functionality behind a paywall,” Nick was in disbelief, struggling to process how far from utopia this felt. “It’s supposed to be a basic healthcare product, not a luxury item.”

“Yes,” Ruby agreed, taking the tablet from his hands and closed the app. “This is classic rent-seeking behavior disguised as innovation. The true value isn’t in the item itself, but the ongoing payments they trap you with. Right now, all Mateo has is a piece of fabric on his knee.”

“But it’s supposed to have nanoscale electrical stimulation!” Nick argued, knowing he was losing. “There’s supposed to be a vision of preventing infection, improving recovery times, and reducing the strain on the healthcare system. Imagine how great all of that could be.”

He was feeling conflicted now, as his optimism was clashing with the reality of the situation.

“And how many people in Jersey City are interested, or could afford to, pay twenty dollars a week for every scrape they get?” Ruby countered. “Public health is pointless unless it’s accessible, not something that’s premium.”

“So it’s a plain bandage?” Mateo finally spoke up, watching his parents get increasingly tense. “Can I put a regular bandage on it then?”

Their argument, increasingly philosophical and abstract, stopped as they had to deal with the practical reality of their injured son.

“You’re right, bud,” Nick said, letting out a frustrated sigh.

Ruby retrieved a small tube of antiseptic cream and a box of adhesive bandages from the medicine cabinet. She spoke softly as she expertly dressed the wound. “Sometimes, the best solution is the simplest. No apps or subscriptions.”

“Cool, it’s a t-rex!” Mateo beamed as he looked at the new bandage on his knee.

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George closed the blinds, keeping out the bright light reflecting off the gleaming buildings of New Haven. He saw himself as an old soul, someone who preferred real books at a time when the public had moved onto watching microdramas on their phones.

He was looking forward to reading his most recent acquisition: a hardcover edition of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Unfortunately, he couldn’t sit and enjoy it. He was forced to attend a college department meeting that he couldn’t, in good conscience, delegate to his digital avatar.

He grabbed his coat and headed out the office door. Spring was finally starting, giving a bit of warmth and filling the air with the smells of colorful flowers carefully curated by the college gardeners. As he passed by the student commons, he saw a new advertisement on the digital signage for the annual Shakespeare festival. It cycled through through each summer play with shifting calligraphy and generated artwork.

Starting April Fifteen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The script turned into a shower of glitter as it morphed to the next title.

Starting May Fifteen: Hamlet

Then it also faded and was replaced by another.

Starting June Fifteen: The Serpent’s Coil

He stopped in the middle of his walk and examined the advertisement with some skepticism. This wasn’t a subtitle or some sort of new age reimagination of a classic work. It seemed to be a standalone work with the same validity as the pillars of the theater canon.

He closed his eyes, quickly running his mind through everything he had learned about Shakespeare over his decade of study. He considered every work, the lost plays, the falsely attributed writings. None fit. Even his knowledge of the forgeries didn’t ring any bells.

It had to be a marketing ploy by the festival’s new director, Brisa Pugh. She was the sort of person who prioritized new ideas even if they came at the cost of the Bard’s timeless artistry. It seemed likely this was some kind of dreadful modern adaptation.

All thoughts of the meeting left his head as he returned to his office. This was a matter far more important and he had to get to the bottom of it. He bypassed the library’s AI companion and accessed Yale’s raw archives system. It had high-res scans, along with OCR text, of every primary source document in the university’s possession.

He thought that the First Folio, published in 1623, would be a good point to start his search.

SEARCH: “The Serpent’s Coil” IN:First_Folio_1623

Instantly the search came back with a resounding NULL. Not surprising.

He decided to widen his search, rewriting the query to contain everything that Shakespeare wrote, including the quartos and the Stationers’ Register.

SEARCH: (TITLE: “% Serpent’s Coil”) AND (AUTHOR: “Shakespeare, W.” OR SIMILAR) IN DB:Quartos.ALL, StationersReg_1577~~StationersReg_1642

NULL.

This made him even more apprehensive. There wasn’t any sort of play by this name at all. Anywhere. Again, he wondered if the play was a mistaken Shakespeare, written by someone else but attributed as an original. He searched through The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy and the rest but there didn’t seem to be any use of the name or even the phrase of “the serpent’s coil”.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. This play did not exist. It could not exist. There wasn’t even some forgery that he could attribute it to. So how exactly was it being advertised as part of the Shakespeare Festival? He stared at the blinking cursor in the search box and the word NULL mocking him below.

He decided to try a different tact, switching out of the realm of reality and into the open web. He typed in the same query to an open search engine and hit enter.

Dozens of hits suddenly hit him like a firehose. The top result was titled like a literary magazine but when he opened it, he was stunned that it looked more like a fashion catalog. He saw on a listicle of the top five Shakespearean villains, The Serpent’s Coil was listed at number three.

The next result was a five-paragraph essay from a community college student in Ohio comparing the play’s heroine to Taylor Swift.

What stunned him the most were the dozens of scholarly articles published in open-access journals whose names he’d never heard before. They were all written in perfect academic prose, explaining the play’s themes and characters. Yet as he began to tap through the citations, he found there were no original sources. They all pointed to each other in some sort of citation ouroboros.

They were published recently. A few from last year, a few before that. Yet no piece of content referring to the play existed before 2032. The play appeared to have simply willed itself into existence four years ago.

“No, that’s impossible,” he muttered as his hand moved away from his mouse and touched the leather cover of his book.

He opened up a command prompt and executed Yale’s Archival Trace. It was an old piece of software whose developers never bothered to modernize. The only way to interact was through its custom querying language. His colleagues preferred newer AI tools that did all the querying and summarization automatically, but he never trusted them.

trace-source -ref “The Serpent’s Coil” -depth Depth.MAX -filter Date.PUBLISHED < 01.01.2032

render-tree -mode citation_propagation

The screen cleared as the query began to be executed and turned into an ASCII output. Little by little, entries began to appear. As each new one came in, the display cleared and updated again. It showed each entry but also lines connecting them together in order to paint a broader picture of all the individual nodes fit together.

He could see the blog posts and student essays as the outermost leaves of this tree of falsehoods. Then there were pseudo-academic papers, likely generated for paper mills. Climbing deeper into the tree, he found the trunk; the origin point where this play actually originated.

A project log uploaded on a publicly accessible cloud bucket were some documents related to a corporate-academic partnership. The project was named “Quillcast”.

The README called it a “Generative AI project for Cultural Understanding and Reclamation”.

Quillcast is designed to analyze the style, themes, and linguistic patterns of authors with lost or fragmented works. Our models then fill in the unfortunate lacunae of your shared cultural heritage.”

“Fill in?”

It didn’t fill in gaps, it invented them outright. It didn’t know anything. It hallucinated and people had the audacity to consider that somehow close to authentic. And The Serpent’s Coil was its proof-of-concept. It was a Shakespeare clone that appeared to have escaped the business pitches and went out into the world. Then other AIs scraped the manuscript, cited it in their own generated summaries, and laundered this copy until it became culturally understood as genuine. The play was fake all along.

He minimized the window and, barely holding back his anger, typed a stern email to Ms. Pugh.

Dear Ms. Pugh,

I want to express my concern regarding one of the plays for your upcoming Shakespeare Festival, an event I personally look forward to each year. I am myself a Professor of Renaissance Literature at Yale and my extensive research into Shakespearean canon and related apocrypha has shown no verifiable records of a play named “The Serpent’s Coil”.

On the contrary, my investigation suggests that the work is not a historically known nor newly discovered work. It is a generative fabrication from an AI project conjured up just a few years ago.

To put it simply, your production was generated by an algorithm.

I am sure this information must come as a surprise to you. Now that you have this information, I expect you will be taking immediate steps to correct this mistake, in the fullest interest of artistic integrity. Given my background, I am available for future discussions and advice.

Sincerely,

Dr. George Baxter

He sent the email and leaned back in his chair. He felt like he had done something good. With a swelling pride, he decided to visit the building’s kitchen to prepare a cup of tea for himself. Chamomile tea seemed like the best fit for him. He took the mug, still steeping, back to his office.

A reply had already arrived from Ms. Pugh. He took a gleeful sip of tea and opened it. He expected her to be apologetic and thankful for his attention to detail.

Hello Professor Baxter,

Thank you so much for reaching out to me with your excitement and interest about our upcoming festival. We have a lot of appreciation for the academic traditions that have allowed Shakespeare to be enjoyed by so many.

We are aware of the unique origins of “The Serpent’s Coil”. Instead of viewing it as an error, we see it as an opportunity to present viewers with something new. We want our audience to engage with a canon that continues to evolve even today.

Despite its provenance, it has developed its own cultural footprint over the last couple years. Audiences can connect with its themes of betrayal and inheritance. They resonate powerfully and we’ve already seen an increase in ticket pre-orders compared to our other shows.

Our goal for the Shakespeare festival is making the plays accessible to a new generation. Whether they come from the bard’s quill personally or a quantum processor today is not as important to us as the way emotional truths get depicted on stage. That is the authenticity we care the most about.

I do hope you’ll come see the show. I think once you see it, you’ll agree with us.

All the best,

Brisa Pugh

George read and re-read the email several times. Her cheerful words combined with an academic incuriosity seemed more infuriating than anything else. Her words seemed to cast the truth aside in favor of maximizing ticket sales. She wasn’t surprised. She knew didn’t care.

The middle of June arrived and George found a small spot on the far edge of the park lawn. After Pugh’s dismissive email, he didn’t find he had the will to fight. Now, with a morbid curiosity, he had come to the first showing in order to witness what kind of butchering they had done in the name of entertainment.

He could hear the cicada droning all around him. Couples were beginning to arrive, carrying blankets and picnic baskets. Most of them were students, although he didn’t recognize any of them. He would’ve brought someone with him, although he didn’t have any grad students this year. It seemed like nobody was interesting in really studying the classics anymore. Nobody really wanted to grapple with works they couldn’t immediately understand.

“I heard the ‘serpent’ is supposed to be a metaphor for a bad Wi-Fi connection,” he overheard a young woman say.

“No, my lit-bot told me it’s about family betrayal. You know, the tooth is sharper than a serpent’s child,” another countered.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, George wanted to correct. But he held his tongue. It was a line from King Lear, now mangled and without context. He let out a loud sigh. That conversation was a fitting prelude for what he expected to see.

Then the glow of the stage lights intensified. The crowd’s voice died down to a few murmurs as a single actor walked out to the center of the stage.

The actor spoke in a rich baritone. The words were in a perfect iambic pentameter and were delivered with a theatrical grace. George couldn’t find any problems with the meter. The language was full of themes Shakespeare had dealt with before: celestial omens, poisoned goblets, royal rumors.

The plot was laid out across several scenes in the first act. It borrowed the ambitions of Macbeth, the jealousy of Othello, and madness from Lear.

On one hand, it was a brilliant play. Yet it also felt so stale.

The play’s villain, the Duke of Albi, delivered a soliloquy at the end of a scene. He spoke about his ambition and how it trapped him from contentment. The speech was delivered without any clear flaws, full of clever metaphors, but without the emotional resonance George expected.

When Macbeth talked about his mind full of scorpions, you were able to feel his paranoia. Hamlet’s sea of troubles were meant to evoke the suffocating weight of the sea you could actually feel. The Duke’s metaphors were lacking in the subtext that allowed the audience to empathize with the character.

George looked around at the other patrons. None of them seemed to think anything was wrong with this. A young woman appeared to wipe a tear away from her eye. A collective gasp passed through the crowd when the duke’s daughter was wrongly accused of treason.

George felt a growing chasm between himself and the rest of them. They were moved to tears by this synthetic performance while all he could hear were all the problems with it. All he saw were ghosts wearing the clothes of Shakespeare and running around on the stage in a sort of mockery of everything he stood for.

The steel swords clanged as part of an entertaining sword fight in a climatic scene. The lighting had changed to mimic a twilight as the hero avenged his father’s ghost. The final lines were spoken with a satisfying finality that seemed almost like solving an equation. The poetry was in the words, but it didn’t feel emotionally satisfying. The villain’s blood pack burst, giving the audience a visceral grossness. The death was perfectly executed. A clean resolution.

The audience already got to their feet as the hero finished his monologue. George could only hear a dull wall of white noise. The audience was taking photographs, tagging and sharing them, all validating this butchered play. They had been given exactly what they wanted: something with Shakespeare aesthetics without needing the messiness of needing to understand it.

George remained seated as his anger faded into a dull resignation. He had been prepared to expose this play as a fraud. He had expected the public would demand answers and academic panels would indict her dishonesty. Now, looking at the reception, he realized that nobody actually cared.

As the applause began to subside, people started dispersing. They grabbed their blankets and went on their way home.

“What great language,” a young woman noted. “So much more accessible than that Hamlet we saw last month.”

He could see Brisa accept congratulations and waved out to the crowd along with the bowing actors.

George watched everyone go. The lights dimmed and finally turned off. He was left in the dark, all alone.

Avi followed the flow of the crowd around the stadium’s concourse, assaulted in all directions by the vivid smells of fried chickpeas, caramelized onions, and the sweat of thousands of fans like him. The hot sun at high noon was thankfully filtered through the translucent solar-fabric dome stretched across the entire stadium, turning their drenched sweat to a more comfortable temperature.

The Tel Aviv and Gaza teams were busy playing in the bottom of the fifth inning, tied at three runs apiece. There were a lot of cheers coming from the stadium, but Avi felt a pang of hunger that he could no longer ignore.

“Did you see that curveball?” Omar nudged Avi as the two friends walked through the concourse. “A perfect spin. Beautiful physics.”

“Sure, I guess it was a good pitch,” Avi mumbled back, not even paying attention to the game at this point. His eyes were drawn to a new vendor kiosk.

“Cultured pork hot dogs!” it advertised with a holographic sign whose text rotated through a rainbow of bright neon colors. Next to the text was the logo of the Joint Reform Kosher & Halal Council giving their approval, a double helix intertwined with an olive branch. There was already a long line of fans buried in their phones, taking selfies with hot dogs in the background.

“Omar, look,” Avi gave him a quick nudge with his elbow. “Eden Pork is finally here. I remember reading the white paper when it first was announced. I can’t believe it’s finally available.”

“Look at that line,” Omar pointed to a different line of people standing silently with long black coats and white thobes.

Haredi men stood side-by-side with devout Muslims. All of their faces were grim and their hands were folded together in a sign of protest. Their silent disapproval was all the condemnation they needed to stand out in the jubilant atmosphere.

“Whatever, it’s progress,” Avi responded with a quick shrug. “I’m getting two. In buns.”

After a few minutes in line, he came back to his friend with two dogs still steaming sitting in little cardboard trays, wrapped in long buns. He held out one of the franks to Omar.

“Here, taste the new world,” Avi offered him.

“No, I’m not feeling hungry,” Omar said distantly, still looking at the protestors. In particular, he was staring at one of the old Imans with a long white beard draped over his simple shirt.

“That man reminds me of my grandfather,” Omar said so quietly that Avi had to lean in to hear him over the noise of the stadium. “He also had a scar on his forehead. My grandfather got one when when a piece of scaffolding fell on him. It is only from Allah’s mercy it didn’t hit his eye and blind him.”

“Omar, it’s not pig. The joint council has ruled that, since it’s just porcine fibroblasts... you know, stem cells, there is no slaughter. The harvest happened once without even a slaughter occurring. The Council Rabbis and Reform Imams concur.”

“You can try to sterilize the process. Print out certificates and get approvals...” Omar shook his head slowly, sadly. Avi could see the deep melancholy in his eyes. “But God’s laws are not scientific problems that we are supposed to solve and overcome. Rules are meant to be obeyed.”

Their conversation was broken by a sharp crack from the direction of the stadium. Avi turned his head and held his breath as the ball soared in a perfect arc far past third base all the way towards the wall.

Then, the ball cleared the fence. The Maccabees had just hit a home run. A roar of cheers erupted from the stadium, followed by music blasting way too loudly over the speakers which had been planted every couple of yards around the concourse. All together, the cacophony was too overwhelming for Omar to continue his whispered conversation.

Avi took a bite of his hot dog. The texture was a bit greasy and unusually smooth. As he chewed a bite, he got an assortment of flavors: smoke, savory, and a bit salty. He watched the line of young people cheering and taking pictures as the baseball players rounded the bases.

Then his eyes drifted back to the wall of traditionalists, who continued to stand there stoically. Omar watched them with what Avi could only describe as envy.

Avi felt a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. He had hoped that these hot dogs could be a symbol of unity, that the two sides could finally bury their old ways and agree to a new path together based around science and rationality. Now he was beginning to understand that while some divisions could be healed, new ones would always emerge. He swallowed hard, worried that this new line could cut him away from Omar forever.

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It wasn’t snowing. It was July in New York. Yet as Christina looked up at the shredded paper and glittering Mylar, and she heard the physical wave of applause coming on either side of their electric vehicle, she felt a warm welcome home.

A million people were watching her from the street and crammed in the glass towers that turned Lower Manhattan into a canyon. After six months in orbit around the planet’s singular moon, the onslaught of loud noise felt overwhelming. Still, she was Commander Koch. She was the first woman to step on the lunar surface. She had to give them a performance.

Joslin sat next to her and waved energetically at the crowd with both of her hands. She was drinking in all their praise.

“I can’t believe so many people are here,” Joslin shouted over the din. “They get it.”

She pushed a stray brown hair from away from her eyes and instinctively twitched her fingers near the bridge of her nose. It was a habit she picked up in college, to push her glasses up, but that habit remained even after her orbital corrective surgery two years ago.

“They get to spend a few hours not working,” Major Knoll retorted with cynicism to Joslin’s wonder. “Hot dog vendors are handing out free food. It’s a party, but don’t mistake that for the world changing.”

Maddison listened and clutched the vehicle’s seats carefully. She looked out at the crowd, the rooftops, and the security standing around. She was a pilot and an engineer and these situational instincts had made her successful even though she didn’t know how to turn them off.

Christina’s own gaze was fixed on the thousands of flags being waved in the wind. Stars and stripes were everywhere, from people’s hands to the edge of windows. From 238,000 miles away, there hadn’t been anything close to this. There was only one flag on the moon and it was dusty. They had to go out of their way on a high-profile mission to brush off the dirt and take photos.

There weren’t borders on the moon, or walls, or a canyon full of people. There was just the glowing blue marble with a beauty that she could not describe. They had taken photos. In fact it seemed like every magazine in every newsstand had one of her photos on the cover. For Christina, this Overview Effect had fractured her life, creating a permanent shift in her whole identity. She clasped her hands together, trying to stay calm amidst the excitement.

The vehicle slowed down as it came to a small, temporary stage that had been erected near City Hall. The Mayor stepped forward with his signature grin and finely trimmed beard on his face. In his hands was a comically oversized key. The roar of the crowd had only grown louder.

“Commander Koch, Dr. Spencer, Major Knoll,” the Mayor began, his voice carried by a nano-microphone wirelessly connected to speakers down the street. “I want to congratulate your return on behalf of the eight million New Yorkers who have been watching your lunar journey with great enthusiasm. And on behalf of a proud, united nation...”

Christina stopped paying attention after he said united. The word felt hollow to her. She looked out at the faces pressed against the barricades. They seemed joyful, proud, and maybe something more intense, more feral.

And then she saw as one man hopped over. He looked to be in his late forties, with a pale face that seemed to lack sunlight. His eyes locked with her and she saw not joy but an existential terror.

“You’re not them! You’re not! We know what you really are!” he screeched, his unamplified voice cutting off the mayor.

Maddison had already shifted and reached for Joslin. Christina’s own training took over too. She saw the gun; a simple, semi-automatic pistol. It looked like a cheap toy, but one that was simultaneously a threat.

Christina flinched as she heard the *crack* of the shot echo. The crowd’s cheers suddenly transformed into screams.

She looked up and saw a small, dark hole appear in the thick bulletproof glass panel directly behind her head. The sunlight filtering through it made the new crystal fractures look like a diamond.

The mayor’s oversized key clattered down on the stage.

The barricades had fallen to the ground and she saw people running towards her, away from her, and in every direction. NYPD officers were overwhelmed by the sudden chaos. She looked over at her friends and neither of them seemed to be harmed. Hurriedly she pulled Joslin down beneath the back seats.

“Get us out of here!” she yelled at the driver.

“We can’t get anywhere,” the driver opened the door and got out. “There are too many people on the road. Come on.”

Suddenly three Secret Service agents appeared around them, manifesting out of seemingly nowhere. They grabbed her harshly and dragged her out. Joslin was pulled out next.

“We need to get out of here,” Maddison said, taking control of the situation.

An agent blocked her view as she was briskly led away from the car. The lingering confetti on her skin now felt like sandpaper. Although she could no longer see them, she could still hear their terrified footsteps. The shooter had faded into the crowd, swallowed up by the chaos he created.

The hotel suite had an uncomfortable silence. The space was pressurized, creating a sealed isolation from the world for the VIPs who had enough wealth to afford this level of security. They were now fifty stories up in a hotel with panoramic views of a city that, an hour ago, had tried to kill them.

Confetti still clung to Christina’s royal blue NASA flight suit. She was staring at her own petrified reflection in the window’s glass. She was supposed to be a hero, Commander Koch, but now she had a small red paper stuck in her dark hair like it was colorful ash. She felt like a fraud.

Joslin was curled up on the white sofa with her knees drawn to her chest, shivering despite the room’s sophisticated temperature control. She couldn’t turn her face away from the massive flatscreen TV on the wall playing the same gruesome attack with occasional breaks for pundits to get in their two cents. Given the number of people who were there, the broadcasters could play an endless selection of angles of people screaming and being trampled. The pundits were busy weaving new realities in real-time. “Was it a foreign power?... A lone wolf?.... The mayor’s security crisis...”

“Turn it off. It’s just noise and empty speculation,” Maddison said flatly. She was staring in front of the mirror, carefully picking confetti off her suit one by one. Each colorful scrap was placed into an empty water glass like dead butterflies.

“They’re saying his gun jammed after the first shot,” Joslin said, her voice tinny and weak. “It was a cheap 3D-printed ghost gun. After firing it, the casing cracked. If he had tried a second time it would’ve exploded in his hand.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re alive because of shoddy engineering,” Maddison spat out, finishing her cleanup and grabbing a nearby barstool to sit in. “That really restores my faith in humanity.”

Suddenly a sharp knock caused all three of them to jump nervously. Christina turned from the window.

“Come in,” she said.

A middle-aged woman entered in a crisp navy-blue suit. The short tie around her neck was a perfect match. Her hair was brown, but turning silver.

“My name is Special Agent Quesada, with the FBI.”

She paused and pulled a badge out of her pocket. Christina stared at it closely before giving back an accepting nod.

“We have the shooter in custody. His name is Walter Higgins, a 48-year old man from Staten Island. He is a machinist.”

“Was he alone?” Christina asked coolly. This was a mission debrief. That was she had to tell herself.

“Sort of,” Quesada reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She unfolded it and tapped on the screen. “He wasn’t following a foreign state, or was part of a terror cell. He was part of a web of conspiracy theories though.”

“So he wasn’t a lone wolf?”

“We don’t anticipate any other risk to you,” she noted with an unconvincing reassurance. “Are you familiar with the conspiracists chatting about ‘Selene Replacement’?”

“That’s insane,” Maddison snorted. “That’s bottom-of-the-barrel garbage for trolls who live in their basements all day. Nobody actually believes in that.”

“They do,” Quesada acknowledged solemnly. “They believe it as much as people used to believe in vengeful gods. This is their religious truth.”

“Wait, what is this conspiracy?” Christina wondered.

Quesada turned her screen to see a bunch of small boxes of text all connected with white lines in what seemed to be some sort of digital corkboard.

“The Selene Replacement has been passed around in some online forums. We’ve been monitoring them. Their core belief is that the original Artemis 3 crew, you all, never actually returned. They have various explanations. Either you were killed, or captured, or somehow got stuck up there. In your place... well they have even more explanations for that.”

“So the government is full of lizard people?”

“Or clones. Or synthetics. They can be quite creative.”

“A shadowy cabal is installing us as part of a global takeover,” Maddison finished.

Christina stared at the screen with a deepening frown. “That man was trying to murder us because he thought we were space people?”

“That’s the simple way of putting it,” Quesada swiped across the screen from one edge to the other to display a new image of Christina standing on the moon holding a new sensor array. One of their missions was to install this and allow it to broadcast surface data back to Houston.

Yet this photo had been marked up. Her face, covered in a helmet, had been circled in red. There was a lens flare near her helmet, as the bright sun was not filtered through the Earth atmosphere. There was a caption underneath.

PROOF OF NON-HUMAN: THE ENTITY CANNOT HIDE ITS ENERGY SIGNATURE

“That’s just a camera artifact,” Christina whispered, struggling to comprehend their arguments. “Joslin hadn’t calibrated the camera properly yet. That was the second day. We were still learning...”

“I thought... I thought it would be like a phone,” Joslin stammered from the couch.

“But to people like Higgins, it was all the proof they needed,” Quesada countered. She swiped on the screen again and played a video of Maddison from a press conference.

“I remember that. It was before the launch.”

Maddison read the caption aloud: “Synthetic vocal processor lag. Note the delay as the entity accesses vocabulary database. The real Knoll would not hesitate.”

“Your father just had a stroke. You spent all night in the hospital. Who cares if you stumbled some technical jargon,” Christina sympathized.

“Son of a bitch,” Maddison breathed with fury.

“They don’t care about context,” Quesada replied dismissively. “They only care about how to fit into the narrative.”

Quesada walked slowly to Joslin, who was still shaking from shock. “They are thorough. They dig into everything.”

She swiped her finger once more.

“You should see this birth certificate,” Quesada passed the screen over to Joslin.

“That’s my daughter’s, Ava.”

“There is a discrepancy between the country record and hospital announcement in the time of birth.”

“It was a holiday. They were short-staffed,” Joslin murmured.

“Let me read the caption. ‘The imposter fabricated the backstory. This daughter is just a psychological anchor to make the clone seem human. She isn’t even real.’”

“Agent Quesada, is my family safe?” Joslin asked, her eyes now welling with tears.

“We have already assigned a full protection detail to your husband and daughter. Once we identified the shooter’s motive, we made sure they were safe,” Quesada reassured.

Joslin stared silently at the agent for a long time before nodding. She grabbed a pillow and buried her head in it.

Christina rubbed her temples. The global unity they had tried to inspire, the new perspective they had received of their planet, had all seemed futile. The three of them had seen a singular, beautiful world without borders. She was realizing that people were far harder to reach than with a personal testimony and reason.

Quesada hopped up from the couch and placed the phone, now folded, back into her pocket.

“The SWAT team didn’t meet any resistance at Higgins’ home. No firefight. He was just sitting on the porch with a lukewarm coffee.”

She paused, letting them picture that pathetic image.

“His house was covered in printouts from forums and crude charts. He seemed to blame your mission for everything, from stock market fluctuations to shipping delays. He had six monitors running in his living room, each one a live feed of social media channels celebrating what he did.”

“I can’t believe he’s proud of it,” Christina said with venom.

“He didn’t even succeed,” Maddison added.

“Maddison! He could’ve killed someone!” Christina admonished.

“He didn’t though,” Maddison shrugged.

“He thinks he is a hero,” Quesada confirmed. “He was calm during interrogation. He cooperated fully. He called his action a ‘diagnostic test’. If one of you had been shot, God forbid, and you either bled green, or dissolved into dust, or short-circuited, he would’ve taken that as proof he saved the world. He was quite disappointed when he realized you were all safe. He called it ‘an inconclusive data point’.”

Quesada’s disgust was clear in the way she quoted him.

“He was unrepentant.”

“What’s the next step then? You figure out who else is involved? Who’s funding it?”

“You might find this hard to grasp, but there isn’t anyone else. We’ve been searching his financial records and scanning his hard drives and there’s nobody else. Not really. He was laid off from a job in the Navy Yard a decade ago. Wife left him. He has barely ventured outside in the last year. He found an echo chamber online that give him a modicum of purpose and he radicalized himself.”

With a final look at the three, and a grim nod, Quesada opened the door and disappeared into the hallway. For a long time, the three of them didn’t speak. The television continued to play its cycle of violent imagery on mute.

“So...” Maddison broke the silence with a bitter laugh. “We just spent the last six months on another celestial body, surviving through math perfected by hundreds of brilliant people, trusting our lives to advanced technology, and we were nearly taken out by a lonely gun with a plastic gun? God, I need a drink.”

She walked over to the minibar, moving stiffly.

“I just can’t understand it,” Joslin trembled. “We went to another world. We brought back samples. We setup broadcast stations. You can see them through a telescope. Isn’t that supposed to mean something?”

“They look at the data, and the images, and they don’t see a miracle,” Christina remarked with disappointment.

“It’s a complete system failure of the human mind.”

Maddison grabbed a beer, a coffee stout, and cracked the can open with a loud hiss.

“You know, if a system failed on the Orion, we could diagnose it. We had all the schematics and tools. Or maybe we could eject it and replace it. There were processes and rules we could follow,” Maddison paused to take a long sip. “Oh that’s good and cold. How do you fix society? Where are their schematics?”

“They don’t exist,” Joslin’s voice cracked as tears fell down her face. “We were supposed to be the Overview Effect and talk about how we were all one people. He took that away from us. He stole our meaning. The overview doesn’t matter if nobody is willing to look up.”

Christina thought back to that moment that the engine cut-off as their lander stopped on the dusty surface. When the dust finally settled, she looked out through the viewport at Earth.

She didn’t see traffic, or drones firing missiles at each other, or petty arguments between neighbors. It was a bright jewel that seemed to glow blue against an infinite black void. White clouds swirled dynamically. She felt a connection in that moment not just to her colleagues, or her country, but to every person who was alive then and had even lived. Emotions had nearly overwhelmed her in a way she could only describe as religious.

“If only everyone could’ve seen it. It would change everything.”

But now her view was of the busy city below, with endless traffic and conflict. They had wanted to deliver a message of unity from half a million miles away, but the hardest part of their journey would be the last few feet from the stage to the crowd.

Pablo didn't care so much about the summer heat as the pain in his feet. He ran up and down the dusty turf field feeling his toes get pinched with each kick of the ball. He charged down the field for a few yards before the pain in his heel became unbearable. He stumbled and the ball rolled out of bounds. He pounded the grass with his fist and his teammate gave him a sympathetic look.

"He needs new shoes," Violeta said, watching her son wince in pain.

"He just bought him new cleats for Christmas," Ivan grumbled. "It feels like we're buying him shoes every month."

Pablo was growing like a weed and the cost of upgrading his equipment was taking a bit hit on their wallet. They loved to watch him play, but it didn't seem great to buy yet another pair of shoes only to see them be outgrown shortly afterwards.

"I can't run anymore," Pablo mumbled at the dinner table that night, gingerly taking off his socks to show off his blistered toe. "My shoes are too small."

"Can you not take off your shoes at the table?" Ivan grumbled.

"We know it's causing pain, mijo," Violeta knelt by him and looked at his red toes. "It's just that... you are growing faster than we can get you new shoes."

"Remember that place I saw online, Violeta? In Astoria. 'Reform Footwear'. I read that they are doing something with 3D printing and organic materials and they offer discounts for recycling."

"I remember seeing a flyer!" Violeta's eyes lit up. "It sounded too good to be true, but it's worth a look. As long as we're not constantly buying new plastic."

If they could help Pablo play without pain, and reduce their carbon footprint, it was appealing. If it led to them saving money over the long run, it could easily be worth their while.

The next Saturday, they took the bus westwards to the busy streets of Astoria. They turned onto 33rd Avenue and saw the under-spoken sign of the shoe store. Along its façade was a small garden with green vines cascading down.

When they stepped inside, Ivan could smell a particular earthiness in the air like they were inside a greenhouse. The space seemed simultaneously minimalist yet high-tech. The store felt empty aside from shelves of display shoes along the four walls.

"Hello there," a clerk rushed over to them with a warm smile. "My name is Olesya."

"My name is Pablo," he replied, shifting between his feet to avoid putting too much pressure on one.

"Those are nice cleats."

"Yes but they are way too small for him," Violeta explained. "And to be honest, we can't really keep buying him a new pair every couple months. So that's why we are here. We've heard you do something differently?"

"That's right," she gestured towards a large platform in the center of the store. "We create 3D-printed athletic wear custom fit to your feet with a mycelium polymer. They're sturdy enough for playing, but then you can bring them back and we can recycle the material in the back for new products. So once you're a customer with us, you can get a discount on your next pair."

"So it's a closed-loop system," Ivan observed.

"Yeah, no waste and a perfect fit."

"Printing?" Pablo was amazed.

"Exactly," Olesya replied. "First we can get a model of your foot using our optical scanner. It will capture the exact shape of your foot to ensure there's no more pinching."

She led Pablo over to the platform. "Step up there and take off your shoes. Then just stand still."

Pablo eagerly undid his laces and stepped out of his shoes. He practically leapt up onto the platform and placed his feet in the middle of it. His toes curled as they felt the smooth surface.

From unseen points around the platform, gentle green lights swept over his bare feet. On a large transparent display screen, a wireframe of his foot started being developed in real-time. Pablo watched with fascination at the details, first appearing as a faint, ghostly outline and then filling in with digital textures.

"This digital blueprint is going to be uploaded to our printers," Olesya pointed to the screen. "It allows us to get a valuable understanding of arch support, toe gaps, and even the minute differences between your left and right foot."

Pablo grew excited with the idea of a shoe made perfectly to fit him.

After the scan finished, Olesya moved over to a series of machines inside of large glass boxes in the back of the door.

"These are the source of our magic, the printers."

She initiated the print sequence. Inside, a robotic arm moved gracefully across the print bed, extruding a thin polymer. With each successive layer, the organic material built up, slowly forming the complex shape of a soccer cleat. Pablo closed his eyes and imagined how well he'd be able to play soccer. He could even smell something like freshly cut grass as the printer ran.

"Because we're not cutting and stitching, there's basically no material waste when we do the manufacturing. This is the future of footwear."

They waited around the store for about a full hour before the printer chimed softly. Olesya returned to the printer and lifted up the glass block gingerly. Using oven mitts, she grabbed them out of the printer and placed them on a ceramic tile.

"Okay Pablo, your shoes are ready," she announced. "Just give them a few minutes to cool."

Pablo rushed over to see. They were a deep, vibrant green like the color of the jungle. The cleat's studs were an extension of the sole rather than being added in later in the production.

"You should be able to put them on now," she told him.

Pablo swiped the left shoe from the tile and slid his foot into it. It didn't feel too tight, nor too lose. It was like putting on a second skin, able to fit snugly around him. He wiggled his toes, surprised by his newfound freedom. The second cleat felt the same.

He stood up and took a step forward, then bounced on the balls of his feet.

"Well, how do they feel?" Ivan wondered.

"My toes aren't being pinched. They're not falling out. They feel amazing!"

Ivan looked over at Violeta. The cost already felt worth it.

Next Saturday, Pablo ran out onto the field in his new cleats with a surge of confidence. He sprinted during warm-ups and jumped with a deftness that even surprised himself.

During the game, the ball deflected off an opposing defender and rolled his way. He took that chance to reach the ball. His new cleats dug into the turf with a perfect traction. He touched the ball slightly to get it into his control. Then, he wound back his leg and unleashed a powerful shot. The ball soared in a large arc over the goalie's read and slammed into a back corner of the net with a satisfying clang.

Pablo pumped his fist in the air as his teammates rushed over to cheer along with him. He knew that the cleats hadn't magically made him a better player, but unlocked his full potential.

"Look at him go," Violeta squeezed Ivan's hand. "He hasn't played like that in a year."

"I guess the cleats really do make the man," Ivan nodded proudly. "I guess it was worth the cost, but it'll be even better to get those cheap upgrades as he keeps growing up."

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President Sal had nothing to share to the public other than rage. The Atlas Corp had done nothing but interfere with his plans. The public news of his platinum heist had led to global condemnation. His brilliant plan had led the entire nation to become a pariah.

All of these denouncements had only made him angry. He felt betrayed by allies and embarrassed by enemies. He decided to launch a more aggressive offensive which would prove his claim by force. It would be a decisive assault aimed at the rich geological core beneath the Lechestan’s most vibrant agricultural zones. He weaponized the state media to discuss exclusively about national honor and stolen birthrights. He demanded that his forces stand up against the wealthy CEOs and break their “corpo-terrorist blockade”.

Joseph was awoken by the roaring of tanks surging down the primary road which bordered the two nations. Their railgun fired large rounds against patches of farmland, vaporizing everything and turning it into smoking craters.

He rushed out of his home and saw dozens of shock troops holding plasma rifles following behind the tanks. The soldiers were surrounding the Atlas Corp forces to a quick defeat, then they would turn their attention against any local resistance. He could hear scrams and explosions eerily close.

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Corey’s mom sat quietly in the kitchen with a cup of tea growing cold on the table. In her hands was a small shoebox she had come to deliver. Her face still contained the somber wrinkles of grief.

“Grandpa Arthur wanted you to have these things,” she said solemnly.

Inside the box were a collection of old, yellowed photographs. It also contained a polished silver locket. Corey picked it up gingerly. It felt cool to the touch.

“The executor of his estate said that was his most prized asset. And he wanted you to have it.”

Corey dug his nails into the edge of the locket and pulled it open. Inside was a small data core, last generation. His old PC, which he had been meaning to rebuild, still had a port he could insert this into.

“What is it?” he turned the locket around. It was a small device, so it couldn’t hold more than a few dozen terabytes. That was hardly enough to hold a small holo-movie. Maybe it contained some financial records? More photographs?

“It’s the server key to access his world,” she answered with a reverence he did not share.

“You mean that Minecraft thing?”

“It was his legacy. He poured his entire life into it. Our entire family did. And before he passed he said that he wanted you to be the next admin.”

Minecraft? Corey almost let out an impolite scoff. A game from the 2010s. Generations ago. He spent his time in a more modern game, full-immersion haptic sims where you could actually feel the heat from a dragon’s fires and the searing pain of being cut by a sword. Minecraft was just a collection of low-res blocks, without any of the sensory feedback that made a game feel real.

“I appreciate that he thought of me, but I don’t know if I am the right person for it.”

“He left instructions. Your system should be able to run the game, even if in an emulation mode. Just... please, Corey, log in at least once. For him.”

Corey kept his head low. He didn’t want to look at her. It felt embarrassing to be playing something so childish. Yet he loved his grandpa.

“Okay, I’ll log in tonight. After my guild’s raid.”

Hours later, as the excitement of the raid fell into a lull of checking his inventory for duplicates and visiting the auctions, his guildmates logged off one-by-one. He found himself looking at the silver locket that he had sat at the edge of his desk.

With a sigh he opened it up and inserted the data core into a port in the back of his machine.

“Unknown device detected,” his neuro-link chimed as the system tried to handle the new hardware.

He double-tapped the error window and went into the settings. Then he went into the Advanced Settings. Then he went into the Deep Advanced Settings, which had a series of options and flags that were introduced decades ago and never removed because some large corporation or another depended on it for running their entire operation.

He found the protocol for running vintage emulators and flipped it to true.

Then the world grew smaller. The fluid datascape that flowed all around him just by controlling his thoughts shut down. The haptic motors clicked softly as they shut off. He could no longer feel the soft pressure from his sensory pads. Instead, there was just a small two-dimensional window floating in a black void.

This change was jarring. Everything felt muffled, like his ears and eyes were stuffed with cotton.

He saw a logo titled Mojang Studios in front of him. It was a historical symbol he had only seen in his cultural history classes.

A soft, simple piano started to play in the background without the same oomph of multi-dimensional stereo designed by AIs for infinitely sized orchestras. With a hesitation, he clicked the Play button and loaded into the default world, simply named The Perry’s.

There was a sudden jolt as he was placed in a room surrounded by cubes. The emulator was trying to be clever by making the game immersive from his perspective, but it wasn’t perfect. The textures of the blocks were still strangely low-quality and too bright, making his eyes hurt. And the sound effects still felt like they were coming from a single point far away.

The walls were a repeating texture of rough brown planks that vaguely, very vaguely, looked like wood. Torches cast a blocky light. In front of him, near the door, was a wooden sign with black monospaced letters spelling out:

Great-Grandma Rose’s Starter House - Est. 2016

He looked down at his hands. They were just rectangular prisms. He didn’t have any fingers, or an elbow. He was just made of blocks. Yet they moved up and down as he expected. He took a step forward and he moved closer towards the door. Each step caused a dull thump on the floor beneath him.

He pushed the door open and it suddenly rotated open, without any transition or sound. Corey took a hesitant step outside.

He let out a gasp.

The small cabin was sitting on top of a small hill. Below it was a sprawling metropolis that stretched out as far as the game’s renderer could allow. Each building seemed to be designed completely differently, creating a mishmash of time and aesthetics.

To his right he saw a sleek tower rising so high it pierced the pixelated clouds made of white quartz with blackened windows. He recognized it as the work of his Aunt Kayla, the tech CEO. On his left was a vast farm which used Redstone to automate handling the long rows of wheat and carrots, each which seemed to shake back and forth in response to some virtual wind passing through. His grandmother’s grand project still seemed to be working even after she logged out for the last time.

He began to climb down the wooden steps, hopping down each block until he reached the gray-block streets of the city. So much of it seemed to be built by his ancestors. The place was a living museum.

He followed a path lit by Glowstone lamps, feeling particularly drawn to it. He passed by a massive wall made of wool of different colors. If he leaned back enough, he could see it was a pixel art mural depicting a cartoonish squirrel wearing a tiara and tutu. It seemed like an inside joke that he knew nothing about.

Further down this path, he saw a helicopter sitting in an empty lot. The vehicle seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of its construction. Corey could immediately find a key flaw in the design which would make it impossible to fly. That was probably why the original builder had abandoned it.

The path soon left the city’s bounds up another hill. The hill was taller than the previous one. It transitioned into the rocky blocks depicting a rough mountain. Then, it transitioned into snowy peaks as he continued climbing.

Near the peak, the tall, haphazard stones of the mountain were cleared away for a flat plateau with an elegantly designed garden. Tiny pixelated flowers swung in the wind and were surrounded by tall weeping willows. Inside the garden were dozens of small signs, each hosting a tiny memorial.

Here is where Daddy taught me to fight a Creeper. He fell out of his chair laughing when I screamed out loud. - Abagail

Abagail was his mom’s name.

We came here the night before our wedding. We practiced our vows here, under a blocky arch. - Rob and Clara

His aunt and uncle.

In memory of Cocoa, the best dog we could’ve asked for. She loved chasing the squirrels. - Everyone

He passed by each one, learning a great deal about his family’s history. Each one told a different story. Every memory had its own place to sit here in perpetuity.

The climb to the peak was gentle, rising only a few blocks as the path wound up to the edge. It was the tallest location in the entire world. He looked out at the setting sun.

There a small wooden bench nearby. He took a seat and looked out at it, a world that had been started by Perry’s generations ago. Every person in his family had managed to make their mark here and their legacy would continue to the next generation.

Then he noticed one final sign sitting to the side. He could only read it from the perspective of the bench.

This is all yours now, Corey. Place your first block whenever you’re ready - Grandpa Arthur

The apathy he had been feigning finally crumbled away. He felt his vision blur with tears as the magnitude hit him, really hit him. His late grandfather had left a message just for him and gave him the responsibility of this world originally crafted by his great-grandmother’s hands. Countless Perry’s had been part of it. This place was a family tree built out of voxels.

He opened up his inventory, an archaic two-dimensional grid of squares. He only had a single, rough cube of gray cobblestone in there.

Corey turned to an empty patch of grass on the the opposite side of the sign. He aimed with the crosshairs and then placed the block.

With an instant, it appeared in the world with a soft thump.

It wasn’t much, but it would be the cornerstone of his family’s future.

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