“This is not good,” Dr. Margolin said, after Trudy Zhang had finished her report. “Not good at all.”

“I know,” Zhang said.

The two of them were in a “skiff,” a secure conference room that was completely shielded from any possible transmissions. It was like a bubble inside a bubble.

“Who found it?”

“Wallis. James Wallis. He’s a junior analyst, but very sharp.”

“Sharp enough to understand what he was looking at?”

“Definitely.”

Zhang gave him a brief rundown on James Wallis, and then Margolin asked her if anyone else knew about what Wallis had found.

“I don’t think so. He’s one of ours, so he’s well versed in security protocol. We should just count ourselves lucky that a BerylBlue contractor wasn’t the one who found it. That would be a different story altogether.”

Margolin let out a long sigh. There would be a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. He spent the next hour briefing Zhang. When they were done, he told her, “Let’s go see Mr. Wallis.”

They walked down to Level D in silence, Margolin thinking about how he needed to start visibly shifting the inquiry out of SE into medical. Qadri would help with that.

It felt cooler down here—cooler than normal. Maybe because of all the extra heavy equipment. They made their way down a long glass corridor which provided a view into the Hatchery where hundreds of beta testers were asleep in their stim-pods, dreaming in the paracosm.

Margolin felt a headache coming on. There was no way he would allow Groves and his army of bureaucrats to jeopardize what was arguably the most important scientific breakthrough in human history. He had already come up with a plausible story for Wallis, and Zhang was now briefed enough to back him up. The thing they would have to jump on was creating the signals for the alternative narrative.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

He glanced back through the window into the Hatchery. For every beta tester sleeping in a stim-pod, there were a half dozen medical and technical workers monitoring all the bio and interface functions. It was an extremely labor-intensive process, and although they had shadow automation mirroring all the work that humans were doing, it still might be a year before they went full auto. Of course, Project: Reverie couldn’t scale without the automation coming online, but for now, that’s what they were working with. A lot of humans, and a lot of potential for human error.

When all was said and done that’s what this whole thing would be chalked up to. Human error.

As they walked, they passed knots of Loneskum-Alexander employees. Folks nodded deferentially to Margolin, but no one tried to engage him in conversation. They all knew better.

Zhang had called ahead and arranged for James Wallis to meet them in a skiff down here on D. He was already in the conference room when Margolin and Zhang arrived.

“Mr. Wallis,” Margolin said, shaking the younger man’s hand. “Nice to meet you, and congratulations.”

Wallis looked surprised. “Congratulations?”

He was a short man in his late twenties with an unruly mop of hair and a somewhat disheveled appearance.

“Yes, it seems you were the first one to find our hidden treasure. Have a seat.”

“I… uh… don’t understand.”

“The BerylBlue folks will be miffed, but I knew our team would find it before them, and you did not disappoint. Not at all.”

“Sir?”

Margolin glanced at Zhang disapprovingly. “You didn’t fill Mr. Wallis in?”

“No, sir, he hasn’t met with a disclosure officer yet.”

“Well, get Ackerman down here.” Margolin turned back to Wallis. “Sorry, Wallis, this whole security exercise is a SAP-8. It’s a pain in the ass, but we’re going to have to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s with Ackerman before we discuss this further.”

“That’s fine, sir. I have to admit I’m pretty much in the dark about what’s going on.”

“We’ll remedy that shortly, I assure you. In the mean time I just wanted to thank you personally for the outstanding work. There’s a nice bonus allocated for this, so enjoy that as well. I need to run to another meeting now, but Drs. Zhang and Ackerman will handle the debriefing and further security mandates.”

He shook the bewildered junior analyst’s hand once more, nodded at Zhang, and left the conference room. This would all work out; he was sure of it.