[Carlotta: You piece of shit! I know what you assholes are doing! I’ll find you. I can find out who my daughter talked to!]

“She can’t do that,” Reggie said, showing us the message on his phone. It wasn’t the only one. They were all from a woman named Carlotta, one of our alpha testers. At least Carlotta was her username, but we figured out pretty quickly that whoever was logged into her account was not the same one who was alpha testing for us. Carlotta—the real Carlotta—had only given us positive feedback. This user was irate.

“Maybe they’re a troll,” Shay said. “So, we need moderation, I guess. For dumbasses like this.”

“The bigger question is, why does someone have access to Carlotta’s account?” Matthew asked.

That was perplexing. Black Fire didn’t have an account system before, but we needed one to give users an identity when posting content. We thought it was secure. I guess it wasn’t.

“No,” I said, as all four of us glanced at the phone. “The bigger question is, why is she even angry?” We had all assumed it was because whoever had access to Carlotta’s account didn’t precisely like Black Fire. “Let’s figure that out first.”

I could have been a hostage negotiator, judging from how the person accessing Carlotta’s account calmed down. We were playing tech support. Back at Teleperformix again.

When she finally told us what was wrong, I froze.

[Carlotta: My daughter’s been unconscious for eighteen hours. Are you the bastards that did this to her?]

We all had to read the message a few times to comprehend it.

“Holy shit,” I muttered. “What’s the longest someone’s been under?”

“Three hours in one session,” said Auntie Havannah once we presented the message to her.

“Like what Shay was getting at, it could be some clown trying to troll us,” Andrei said. “Or… they could be trying to lure us in the open. PNP or the Giants.” Or Kalawang, he didn’t say.

There was no sense waiting around. “We unfortunately don’t have the luxury of choice,” I said. “First impressions are important, right? Let’s first check if this is real, then we can figure something out next.”

It didn’t take long to find the problem.

As soon as Reggie checked the active sessions of all BFO users, he found Carlotta’s. He turned his laptop screen towards me. “It’s called a memory dump,” he said. “I won’t explain the specifics, but it happens when a program keeps doing things when it shouldn’t be. In this case, a script is accessing messages stored locally in her stitching’s nanobots. It’s staying open. It should be closed automatically.” No one responded to that comment, so he continued. “It won’t let her go until the script stops.”

“‘It. Won’t. Let. Her. Go,’” I said, pondering Black Fire as a tentacled beast holding Carlotta in its grasp. And we created it.

“Who did this?” asked Andrei, looking around.

“It’s a bug,” Matthew sneered. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“I don’t care. That’s pretty fucked up.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though it did. Reggie and Matthew both knew this. Matthew, however, was under Reggie’s supervision during all of this. Reggie oversaw everything.

I could have blamed him all day for doing this. I was less concerned about being pulled out in the open with this, and more about the negative publicity we’d receive from our users. Black Fire Online would die before it takes off if this news spread.

“Take care of this,” I told Reggie and Matthew. Someone still needed to be held accountable.

“How do we even fix it?” Auntie Havannah asked Reggie and Matthew. “Should we stop distribution?”

My hands started to shake a bit. I could predict the answer, and it wasn’t good.

“No,” said Reggie. “We can remove the latest update. The program, however, is still running in Carlotta’s stitching. And we can’t access it remotely.” He blinked. “We have to stop the stitching from running. Locally.”

“Locally,” I said. “In person. Right?”

Our meeting had been at breakfast, and I nearly dropped my spoonful of rice. I had feared this outcome but didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

“We can’t bring her in,” my aunt said. “She’ll see everything.”

“Then we have to risk going to her,” I said. “Which is worse, with all the surveillance drones running around. No.”

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“No?” asked Auntie Havannah. She stared at me blankly, like elders did when their children got out of line. “Sorry, Jayson. I agree with you, but this isn’t your decision.”

“Why not? He’s my engineer.” I was referring to Reggie.

“Because you’re not the authority on this matter.” She squinted. “We’ll always be family, but here, you’re under your uncle’s direction and mine. Don’t forget that.”

The silence was palpable. My friends must have felt like they were watching an argument between parents. But she was right. Uncle Nestor and Auntie Havannah had given me a safe haven here. I had to obey them.

For the most part.

“Are we actually sure it’s a memory leak holding Carlotta under?” I asked.

Reggie appeared to wrestle with the idea. “She’s definitely unconscious. I can see that from here.”

“But is that why she’s unconscious? What if it’s another medical reason?”

Reggie squinted at me. “What do you suggest, then? They take Carlotta to the hospital?”

I almost asked why until I remembered she was a Black Fire tester. There would be an investigation. More trails would lead back to Sagingan Haven. But I thought more about it. “Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

Everyone turned to me.

“Are you crazy?” Shay asked.

“Hear me out,” I said. “Black Fire is everywhere. I doubt this is the first time anyone has been hospitalized over it. Far from it. We can brush it off as saying it’s due to an underlying cause. While that happens, we fix the bug. If people say otherwise, we say Black Fire wasn’t related.”

“That’s lying,” Shay reminded me.

“I know. That’s how we’ve survived before. Lying. Are you guys trying to reach some moral imperative now?”

Janice chose that moment to step in. “He’s right.” She was poetic, and Shay seemed to appreciate the gesture, judging from how she regarded my sister. “At least, my brother’s right about some things. We have to make her better, but we don’t have to blame it on us. Not yet.”

Ah. Still the voice of reason. She was younger than me but acted like a bigger sister every day. Doing more than me. Accomplishing more than me. But she was right, regardless.

“I have an idea, then,” I said.

----------------------------------------

We arranged a compromise. Carlotta’s mother would bring her to a motel. We would meet her there. There would be a moment when the girl would be left alone, which didn’t sit well with Carlotta’s mom. Regardless, her mom left the room key where we could easily find it.

Looking back, the whole process sounded worse than it was.

Andrei, Reggie, and I found Carlotta ‘sleeping’ in some dingy pay-by-the-hour motel in General Santos City. Carlotta looked barely in college. Just after the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, if her ID said anything, she was excited to begin a promising career as a nurse in another country. She looked a bit like Janice, which unnerved me.

One more person joined our party to meet Carlotta. Doctor Familla Illagan was Sagingan Haven’s resident physician, and even she could spot the cause. “At least Carlotta isn’t watching re-runs,” she said.

Carlotta’s vision played out on my phone while Reggie and Matthew watched. Sure enough, one of the messaging windows on Carlotta’s user interface was still open, superimposed over a high fantasy show scene with vampires and dragons that I thought was entirely unoriginal. Carlotta wasn’t trying to close the window. She had probably given up trying.

I imagined myself in her position, forced to watch television for almost twenty-four hours straight. The girl’s eyelids flickered with all the activity in her brain. I hope—and I prayed to God—there wouldn’t be any long-term consequences.

I operated the proximity video feed scanner app, which was the only way we could see what Carlotta was seeing. Reggie typed away on his laptop while Andrei watched the door. Doctor Illigan was fully immersed in what was showing on the laptop screen and checking Carlotta’s vital signs.

“She is quite healthy,” said Dr. Illagan. “Low blood pressure, but not too low. Normal heart rate. Her body fat percentage is in the athletic range, too.”

That made sense. The girl did look like she played sports. I felt perverted staring at her while she slept. I thought about looking away.

Until we locked gazes.

“Oh,” Carlotta said.

Dr. Illagan perked up, smiling and standing over her. “You’re in good hands, little lady. Sorry for the extended stay.”

“The what?”

We all looked at each other, including Carlotta.

“Wait…” she said, “Where am I?”

I got her up to speed on everything, not mentioning our names but telling her vaguely that we were administrators of Black Fire Online. I told her I was ‘the one who got her into this’ and it was not far from the truth. For that, I was sorry.

“Really?” she asked. “All that happened? I thought I went to sleep five minutes ago.”

“More like a day ago,” Dr. Illagan said. “Now, we’ll need to run more tests to ensure you’re stable.”

“I feel okay.” Carlotta stood, stretching her arms. “Hoy. God. I need a run.”

We compensated Carlotta, of course. Dr. Illagan and Reggie packed their devices while Andrei kept his eyes on the door. I sifted through the duffel bag I brought and found a wad of cash that might have been 10,000 PHP or so, but I hadn’t bothered counting. We had already been gone too long, and I didn’t want to linger on specifics.

The amount satisfied Carlotta. She took the bills or tried to. They immediately fell, spreading on the bed. I scooped them up again and handed them to her. As I did, I noticed her looking towards the ceiling as if lost in thought. Then, her mouth hung open.

A moment later she returned and shook her head out of it.

Are you alright? I thought but didn’t say.

Carlotta didn’t address it either, taking the bills from me and smiling as she did.

We parted ways, leaving first and instructing Carlotta to go an hour later. We hadn’t been chased back to Sagingan Haven, either, as I drove scenic routes and detours. We had successfully fixed our first bug.

I should have felt good about the fix but couldn’t stop thinking about Carlotta’s momentary lapse. It was like she was having a seizure, but instead, she was perfectly still.

I tried to forget about it.