Carl stared at the screen of his laptop. Technically he was staring at the windows from his laptop that were projected onto the AR display of his glasses since it wasn't like he was going to be working with just a single display in the current year. He stared at those windows, and he grimaced.
He'd been looking into the Thursday afternoon slowdown for the past few hours, intermittently taking short breaks to respond to a couple emails and interact in the team's internal group chat when necessary to maintain an appropriate level of camaraderie without overstepping his bounds as a boss, but the progress he'd made was…
It wasn't minimal, that was for sure. He'd dissected the logs from the references that Gab had found in her investigation of the network switches, which had led him to the address of a certain machine—though he couldn't pinpoint its exact location given that he wasn't in the office, and it wasn't going to be productive to get any of his team members to spend however long trying to figure that out right now—which was doing something.
Something.
It was an ominous word in Carl's field of work. It meant that he didn't know exactly what was going on, and his business was to always know exactly what was going on at all times.
Now that he had these logs, he'd done some historical analysis across past Thursdays for as many weeks as he had full log data from, which was only two weeks, since logging all traffic in this manner was something that only an incredibly paranoid—or smart—person would do, and also it took up an incredible amount of drive space—which still wasn't all that much in the current year. There was a colossal stream of binary data being passed around from the mystery machine to every other machine on the network—tens of gigabytes per machine, which certainly explained the slowdown—and even a basic binary diff between those couple datasets had revealed, to his frustration and growing paranoia, that the entire content of the payload changed every week.
The more deeply he looked into the problem, the more impossible it felt for him to solve, almost like it was some kind of magic. His usual playbook would've been to isolate and remove the machine, but his excision of the mail server problem with disastrous results days earlier had left him wary of any such intrusive action. The scale here seemed far larger, especially given that he'd discovered, to his dismay, that all the in-office servers were also being targeted.
Including, he strongly suspected, the offline machines that he was now aware stored the historical brain link data for all of New Era's payers.
Despite only being connected to a separate, isolated network, and despite the only source of data change being physical drives that were handled by the Data Management department to update the storage servers at regular intervals, somehow they were also almost certainly caught up in whatever was going on Thursday afternoons—or at least that had been a theory he'd had immediately after spending a short while in consideration of everything he'd found so far.
Carl didn't like the idea of this at all.
Just to be safe, he'd asked Adi to do a physical inspection of the well-monitored storage server room that morning.
Just to see if there were any unusual cables or anything.
Just in case.
What many people lacked, but what Carl specifically looked for in his hires, was an eye for details. He wanted the people who, when shown two pieces of paper with the same identical picture on both sheets and asked to describe the differences, would point out that one of the corners of one of the papers was slightly creased. He wanted the person who noticed that one sheet of paper was ANSI-A sized and one was A4 sized.
He wanted the person who noticed one was printed with an inkjet printer and the other with a laser printer.
Coincidental or not, Adi was the most senior person in the department, and his attention to detail was also the best—barring Carl's own, of course. As such, when the man had reported back that he'd noticed a thin, nearly transparent cable descending out the back of one of the towers, affixed to the black metal of the enclosure until it disappeared into the ground, Carl hadn't doubted him for an instant, and his only further comment had been to specify that this was absolutely Not To Be Discussed For Any Reason. His worry had only heightened at that point, and he'd begun to feel that maybe there was some real sense of urgency that he should've paid more attention to previously.
The final hypothesis Carl had arrived at was that he was dealing with some sort of time-based attack Gary had left. His predecessor obviously had skill in creating redundancy-laden systems with a high degree of maliciousness, and it made some sense to Carl that any sort of dead man's switch would be designed to go off significantly after Gary had departed the company in order to deflect suspicion.
The potential result of whatever was going on didn't concern Carl. No, what concerned him at this moment was how much time he had left. If today was the last day before it would trigger…
Well, he might be very, very good at what he did, but he had less than two hours before it would trigger again, and even he was forced to admit that there was no way to disarm it in time. The only possible solution, short of being absurdly lucky and happening to guess exactly what was happening and how it could be stopped, would be to immediately power down every single machine in the building, but that was only a stopgap measure; powering them back on at any later point would still trigger whatever was going to happen, and there was no telling how long it might take to complete a full forensic analysis—which was, bluntly speaking, not something he'd want to be responsible for doing anyway, since, while he was a specialist in certain types of security, he'd want to leave something this massive to people who were specialists in this type of thing, which he was definitely not.
In all his years, Carl had never faced a problem of this magnitude. It felt like it was very clearly Above His Pay Grade, and yet, he was the highest functioning technical-level employee at the company who would ostensibly be dealing with such a thing, so it was definitely something he was expected to deal with. The problem was…
The problem was he couldn't deal with it.
Not before it triggered again.
More than anything, this knowledge made him feel like he'd failed at his job.
He had a responsibility to the company to keep things running smoothly, and he'd failed. Sure, he'd had way too many problems to solve with the resources he'd started with, and yes, maybe the company itself had hobbled him a bit by not letting him in on the whole Gary thing much sooner, but ultimately, he'd known that there was a problem here, and he'd chosen to de-prioritize it in favor of other issues.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Carl sighed. He tipped his glasses up and rubbed at his eyes. He knew he should be at the office today for this, but, even with the severity of what was happening, he still couldn't justify going in now.
Above all other things, Carl Weathers was a father, and he wasn't about to drag his vulnerable, traumatized daughter over to the office for anything, nor was he going to leave her here alone.
He steeled himself before sending the brief, two sentence mail he'd composed.
Then he waited.
Thirty seconds later, his phone alerted him that he'd received a call.
"Hey," he said once he'd answered.
"How bad?" Gab asked in a neutral tone.
"Not sure. Probably very."
"Today?"
"Not sure."
"Ballpark me."
"I really can't. Could be today, could be years."
The line was silent for a few seconds, save for the sound of something tapping faintly.
"Okay," Gab said in the same tone. "Do what you can, and keep me updated. I'll take care of the rest."
Carl sighed again. "Okay," he said, trying to inject a note of confidence into his voice.
"Carl, this isn't your fault," Gab said firmly. "This situation is fucked. Don't blame yourself."
He blinked, not having heard his new boss curse until that moment. "Uh," he said, still trying to come to grips with the entire situation, "yeah. Right."
"I mean it, Carl," she said as a thumping sound emphasized her words. "Take some time and decompress if you have to. I have some calls to make. We'll talk later."
"Yeah," Carl said. He tipped his head back in his chair. "Good luck."
She chuckled. Once. "Thanks. Same to you."
The call ended.
Carl sat, immobile, for several minutes. He wasn't particularly thinking of anything. He was focusing on not focusing on anything, and it was working, just as it always did on the rare occasions that he needed to just stop.
"Um… Is… Shall I return later?" Mina asked quietly.
Carl's head came forward, and he regained some of his focus.
Mina stood in the kitchen entrance, looking nervous.
Looking afraid.
"Hey, Mina, what's up?" Carl said. He quickly powered up to Dad Mode One, which was the best he could manage given how many stacks of the Ugggghhhhhhhhhhhh Work debuff he was suffering from. "How's the reading going?"
She smiled hesitantly as she set one foot into the kitchen. "I'm… I'm truly not disturbing you?"
Carl shook his head and waved a hand dismissively at the idea. "Nah, it's just some annoying work stuff. You doing okay?"
She took a few more steps in before moving more quickly to come around the table and take the seat next to him. "I'm well," she said quietly. She let out a small sigh and leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. "It's all so… So different."
Carl wrapped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against him a little. "Good different?"
Mina nodded against him. "Quite good." She snuggled adorably into his half-hug. "I… You'll truly allow me to remain here as long as I wish?"
He looked down and brushed a few strands of hair away from her hopeful eyes. "Of course you can, sweetie. You're family now."
She didn't reply, but she did nuzzle his shoulder a little with her head.
At times like this, Carl knew that he needed to change topics a little since it was kind of a heavy mood, which wasn't likely to be producing any of the smiles he, as a dad, needed for sustenance. "Anything you miss so far?" he asked. "We can always do some shopping." He wasn't entirely sure how or why she'd arrived with seemingly no possessions—not even clothes, apparently—but he was expecting to have a longer talk with Annie later, one that had been put off as a result of his wife's need to talk to her sister as well as how Mina had immediately latched onto him and fallen asleep while they watched basketball.
She remained silent for a little while. "Well, this may sound silly," she began, "but I'd grown quite fond of those dungeon cores."
Carl smiled in remembrance of the cores. Sometimes they were annoying, and sometimes they were useful, but—
"Would it not be quite helpful to have one here?" Mina said in the same kind of increasingly enthusiastic tone she took when she was talking about engineering stuff. "For example, there would be no need to ascend or descend stairs, and the dungeon core could instead be used to move about."
He chuckled slightly at the thought of having a core teleporting him around the house. "Yeah, I guess, but they're kinda annoying, so it'd be a bit of a compromise."
"Ah, but also consider," she said, pulling herself up out from under his arm and sounding even more enthusiastic, "how incredible it might be when put to use for repairs? Or for simply reorganizing? Or cleaning?"
He'd never really thought about any of that, but then again, he'd never thought about a lot of the things that Mina came up with. Having a dungeon core to handle repairs? That was pretty smart. Could it handle the lawn too? Because if so, he imagined that it could probably also handle fertilizing and all that nonsense, which he grudgingly took care of even though he still didn't particularly care about having a lawn in any sense other than not wanting to be competing with the Jacksons for the worst and most overgrown yard on the street.
Then, going back to repairs, well, he imagined that if a core could handle the lawn, it could probably handle the driveway, and he'd been meaning to get something done with that for a few years now, but it was a bit of a hassle since he had to figure out exactly what he and Annie wanted, which meant there was a need to research types of driveway surfacing, then finding the right company to handle that, and then dealing with the hassle of… There was a lot of hassle involved, and he imagined that one of the cores would probably just annoy him a little bit in exchange, so he'd almost certainly still come out ahead in that case.
Actually, the more he thought about it, the more awesome he imagined having one of the cores would probably be, and he was totally in favor of it now. He could put like, turrets and stuff on top of the house if he wanted. And a moat around it. Also cannons. Some really intimidating gargoyles would be great too. Maybe figure out if cores could control weather so they could make ominous lightning strikes if any boys—or girls—ever came by to see one of his daughters, which he was obviously totally gonna be okay with, but they had to know exactly what kinda consequences there were gonna be if anyth—
"That brief fantasy aside," Mina said, still smiling a little, "I'll confess that I've… Well, I know it's been only a very short while, but I've been missing…my friends." She continued to smile, but her eyes became wistful. "Vol, and Ir'alith, and Valgud, and Jungrathol," she said, naming off a couple people he'd never heard of, but that was totally fine, because Bobby and Sammy also had… Well, they definitely had… Yeah, they had, between them, at least one friend he hadn't met yet, and that was…
"Who are the last two you mentioned?" Carl asked.
Mina started and looked up at him. "Oh, well, Valgud is a dear friend and one of my tutors. He's taught me much of mechanics and other sciences. Jungrathol is…" She frowned a little. "Jungrathol is a colleague? Of Ir'alith's. He's… Well, perhaps he's not the most intelligent, but he… He's quite a helpful individual," she finished with a nod. "I'd like to assure them all that I've arrived safely, but…"
It was then that Carl had another genius idea that he imagined might solve any number of problems. In fact, it was the only idea he could come up with.