The morning routine at Tarkwa Bay had a rhythm that felt untouchable. The ocean breeze was cool, the ledger was clean, and the open-source network was processing millions of tons of global freight without a single administrative hiccup.
Until the cooling fans in the primary diagnostic stack abruptly died.
I was standing at the volcanic stone table, checking a printout of the Rotterdam port telemetry, when the deep, ambient hum of the laboratory didn't just drop—it froze into a absolute, dead silence. The bright green status bars on the central wall projection blinked once, turned a flat, matte grey, and then began to repopulate in a tight, vertical column of amber text.
Ethan emerged from the lower hardware bay before the secondary alarm could even chime. His silver-rimmed glasses were
