The backstage area of the Tacony Music Hall looks like what you'd get if you crossed a Radio Shack with a college dorm room and then let a tornado redecorate. Cables snake across the floor like technicolor spaghetti, connecting a hodgepodge of monitors, towers, and other bits of tech I couldn't name if my life depended on it. The air hums with the soft whir of cooling fans and the rapid-fire clacking of Jordan's fingers flying across their keyboard.

I slouch deeper into the sagging beanbag chair that serves as my unofficial throne in this digital war room, fighting back a yawn as I watch Jordan work their magic. It's well past midnight, but sleep feels like a distant memory at this point. There's too much to do, too many fires to put out.

"Alright, hit me with the stats, O Great and Powerful Oz," I say, stretching my arms above my head until my shoulders pop satisfyingly. "How're we looking?"

Jordan doesn't even glance away from their screens, their face bathed in the eerie blue glow of multiple displays. "Well, if by 'looking' you mean 'drowning in a tsunami of data,' then we're looking fan-fucking-tastic."

I snort, reaching for the lukewarm energy drink balanced precariously on a stack of old tech manuals. "That good, huh? Give me the highlights reel."

Finally tearing their gaze away from the endless streams of code, Jordan swivels their chair to face me. There are dark circles under their eyes, and their hair is sticking up at odd angles like they've been repeatedly running their hands through it. Which, knowing Jordan, they probably have.

"Okay, so, good news-bad news situation," they begin, gesturing vaguely at the bank of monitors behind them. "Good news is, we're getting more submissions than ever. Like, exponentially more. Bad news is... we're getting more submissions than ever."

I quirk an eyebrow at that, taking a swig of my drink and immediately regretting it as the syrupy sweetness coats my tongue. "You wanna run that by me again, but maybe with 100% less paradox this time?"

Jordan sighs, pinching the bridge of their nose. "Look, it's like this. Remember how we used to get maybe one or two submissions for each incident? Well, now we're getting ten, fifteen, sometimes even twenty different angles on the same thing. Which is great for verification, don't get me wrong. But it also means we're spending way more time sorting through everything, trying to piece together what actually happened. And storing each video, picking which one goes on the front page... it eats bandwidth, it eats memory."

They pull up a series of video clips on one of the monitors, each showing the same confrontation between a security guard and a student from slightly different vantage points. "See? This is just from today. One incident, seventeen separate submissions. And this is happening for pretty much everything now."

I lean forward, squinting at the grainy footage. "Jesus," I mutter, watching as the guard gets right up in the kid's face, clearly trying to intimidate them. "That's... I mean, it's good that we're getting so much evidence, right? More proof that this shit is really happening?"

Jordan nods, but their expression is grim. "Yeah, but it's also making it harder to keep up with everything. And that's not even getting into the fake submissions."

My stomach does an unpleasant flip at that. "Fake submissions? What do you mean?"

In response, Jordan pulls up another set of files. These videos are obviously staged – kids in cheap security guard costumes doing exaggerated impressions of the real thing, complete with fake mustaches and ridiculously over-the-top "evil" laughter. Then, another one - two security guards having a fake fight in front of a maintenance closet.

"Some people think this is all just a big joke," Jordan explains, their voice tight with frustration. "They're submitting this crap to mock us, or to try and discredit the whole thing. And we have to waste time sorting through it all, making sure none of it slips through and undermines our credibility."

I groan, slumping back in my beanbag. "Great. Because we didn't have enough to deal with already. How are we supposed to handle this without compromising the integrity of the site?"

Jordan shrugs, looking as lost as I feel. "I've been trying to implement some automated filtering, but it's tricky. We don't want to accidentally block legitimate submissions just because they seem a little off, you know? It's a balancing act."

We lapse into silence for a moment, the weight of everything we're trying to accomplish settling heavily on our shoulders. I can't help but wonder if we've bitten off more than we can chew here. Are we really making things better, or are we just adding fuel to an already out-of-control fire?

"Hey," Jordan's voice breaks through my spiraling thoughts. "You still with me, Small Stack?"

I blink, forcing myself to focus. "Yeah, sorry. Just... thinking. Is all this... I mean, are we doing the right thing here? It feels like everything's just getting more chaotic, not better."

Jordan's expression softens a bit, some of the manic energy draining out of them. "I get it. It's a lot. But we're making a difference, Sam. People are finally paying attention to what's going on. That's gotta count for something, right? You can't make an omelette--"

Before I can respond, a series of alarms start blaring from Jordan's setup. They whirl back around to face the screens, their fingers flying across the keyboard as they pull up window after window of incomprehensible (to me, anyway) data.

"Uh, what's happening?" I ask, sitting up straighter as I watch Jordan's face contort with concentration. "Is that supposed to be doing... whatever it's doing?"

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"No, it is absolutely not supposed to be doing that," Jordan mutters, more to themselves than to me. "Shit, shit, shit. We're under attack."

My heart leaps into my throat at those words. "Attack? What do you mean, attack? Like, someone found out it was us?"

Jordan shakes their head, not taking their eyes off the screens. "No, not that kind of attack. It's a DDOS – Distributed Denial of Service. Basically, someone's flooding our servers with a metric fuckton of fake traffic, trying to overwhelm the system and knock us offline."

As they continue to type furiously, clearly fighting some kind of digital battle I can barely comprehend, I feel a fresh wave of panic rising in my chest. "Okay, but... you can stop it, right? Like, there's some kind of cyber-judo move you can pull to make it go away? This doesn't look anything like the movies make it look."

Jordan grits their teeth, their whole body tense as they work. "I'm trying, but whoever's behind this knows what they're doing. They're hitting us from multiple angles, adapting faster than I can block them. It's like... okay, you know how in World War II, the Allies used inflatable tanks to trick the Germans into thinking they had way more forces than they actually did?"

I blink, thrown by the sudden historical tangent. "Uh, sure? I mean, I think I remember something about that from history class..."

"Right, well, this is kind of like that, but in reverse," Jordan continues, their words coming out in a rushed jumble as they try to explain and work at the same time. "Instead of making it look like there's more than there actually is, they're flooding us with so much fake traffic that our servers can't handle the overload. It's like trying to push too much shit through a septic tank rated for half that amount. And I have to manually block every bad IP range without cutting off legitimate traffic that might be coming from that range."

I nod along, pretending I understand even a fraction of what they're saying. "Okay, so... what can I do to help?"

Jordan glances over at me, a wry smile tugging at the corners of their mouth despite the stress etched across their features. "Unless you've secretly been hiding some elite hacking skills under that shark-tooth exterior of yours, not much. Just... moral support, I guess? Grab me a beer from the minifridge? I'll work better at the Ballmer Peak."

I give them a mock salute, trying to inject some levity into the tense atmosphere. "Aye aye, captain. I'll just be over here, cheering you on and definitely not feeling completely useless in the face of our digital doom," I say, scrambling over to the minifridge and grabbing a beer from it before underhanding it gently in Jordan's direction. With a little twist of their wrist, they catch it without looking. "Wait, how did you get--"

For the next hour or so, I watch helplessly as Jordan wages their virtual war against our unseen attackers. The constant clacking of keys and muttered curses under their breath become a sort of white noise, punctuated occasionally by triumphant whoops or frustrated groans. But there's no fun heads-up display or surfing cybernetic waves - only lines of text on a terminal, constantly opening up and closing "log files", whatever those are, and two more beers.

I try to follow along as best I can, asking questions when there's a lull in the action. Jordan, to their credit, does their best to explain things in terms I can understand.

"See that graph there?" they say at one point, gesturing to a display that looks like a heart monitor having a seizure. "That's our incoming traffic. The spikes are the attack waves, and those little dips are where I've managed to block some of it. But it's like playing whack-a-mole with a sledgehammer – as soon as I knock one down, three more pop up somewhere else."

I squint at the screen, trying to make sense of the numbers and charts flickering across it. "What's that thing in the corner? The one that keeps flashing red?"

Jordan grimaces. "That's our CPU usage. It's basically how hard the server's working to keep up with everything. When it hits 100%, that's... bad."

As if on cue, the number in question starts climbing rapidly, inching closer and closer to that dreaded 100% mark. Jordan's typing becomes even more frantic, if that's possible, their forehead beading with sweat as they race against the clock.

"No, no, no," they mutter, their voice tight with frustration. "Don't you dare, you piece of—"

But it's too late. With a final, plaintive beep, the monitors lock up. With an expression on their face that's bordering on murderous, Jordan presses on the power switch of their computers, holding it down like smothering someone with a pillow. The constant hum of equipment that I'd gotten so used to over the past few hours suddenly cuts out, leaving us in eerie silence.

"Fuck!" Jordan yells, slamming their fist down on the desk hard enough to make me jump, after a moment of waiting. "Fucking bullshit amateur hour fucking copyballing fuck!"

I blink, momentarily thrown by the creative profanity. "So, uh... I'm guessing that's not good?"

Jordan slumps back in their chair, running both hands through their already disheveled hair. "No, Sam, it is not good. When the computer fills up like that it'll get stuck in a way that causes cascading failures down the line. All our data is probably safe, but it's annoying. And I hate being annoyed."

The weight of what that means settles over me like a lead blanket. All our hard work, all the evidence we've collected... just gone. At least for now.

"Can you... I mean, is there a way to fix it?" I ask, hating how small and helpless my voice sounds.

Jordan nods, but their expression is grim. "Yeah, obviously. I turn the computer back on, and start getting hammered again, until I do the same thing and then start rage shitting. More importantly, we need to seriously beef up our defenses if we want to prevent this from happening again."

They turn back to the blank screens, a determined set to their jaw that I recognize all too well. It's the same look they get when we're up against seemingly impossible odds on patrol – a mixture of stubborn defiance and calculated strategy.

"Oh, you want to play hardball?" they mutter, cracking their knuckles with an ominous pop. "Fine. Let's play hardball."

As Jordan launches into what I can only assume is the digital equivalent of gearing up for war, rattling off a list of upgrades and security measures they want to implement, I can't help but feel a twinge of unease. We started this thing to make a difference, to shed light on the injustices happening right under everyone's noses. But now... now it feels like we're in way over our heads, fighting a battle on multiple fronts with enemies we can't even see.

I watch as Jordan throws themselves back into the fray, determination radiating off them in waves. Part of me wants to tell them to stop, to just let it go before things spiral even further out of control. But I know they won't listen. And if I'm being honest with myself, I'm not sure I want them to.

Because as scary and overwhelming as all this is, it's also... important. Necessary, even. We've started something here, something bigger than just us. And no matter how hard it gets, no matter how many setbacks we face, we can't just give up now.

So instead of voicing my doubts, I settle back into my beanbag throne and start brainstorming new security protocols. It's not much, but it's something. And right now, something is better than nothing.

"Hey, Jordan?" I call out, interrupting their stream of techno-babble. "You want me to go on a coffee run? I've got a feeling it's gonna be a long night."

They flash me a grateful smile, the manic gleam in their eyes softening just a fraction. "You're a lifesaver, Biggie Smalls. Make mine a triple shot, would you? We've got a lot of work to do."