We thank you for your service.

Their vacuous words sputter like flares over the dark sea of his mind.

Given your seniority and notable tenure with the company, we are pleased to offer you a premium buyout package comparable to Tier-S GovUBI with the added benefit of a lifelong discount for Augur Corporation services and subscriptions.

Alvaro doesn’t need his glasses to recall the precise phrasing of the notification. He sets them down on his nightstand atop the charger plate with that “ethical mineral sourcing” tag he never bothered to peel off.

As you may already be aware, current Augur employees benefit from access to our full suite of counselor extensions. Should you require talk therapy or other mental health services, please install and activate the extension suite prior to your contract termination date of October 15.

Restless, Alvaro paces the length of his apartment, a modest one-bedroom in one of the 3D-printed modular high-rises that now loom over Kensington. Alvaro steps out onto his balcony into the autumn air, marveling at the glitter of a revitalized Philadelphia that his younger self might have doubted was ever possible. The once-dilapidated SEPTA railways are plastichrome-sleek, maintained by a fleet of ballooning ASTRAL-C class “cleaner” drones that purge graffiti from the walls and trash from the floors before they can pile up. His childhood neighborhood of Kensington, a district long occupied by the city’s most impoverished, has been refashioned into a vibrant mecca for the country’s growing class of UBI recipients, where former fentanyl dens have been converted into urban railway gardens to offer “community-grown” produce to residents. Part of him recoils at the sight of these changes, noting the new hipsterified “Croissant Factory” in place of the humble panadería his mother used to run, where she served crispy quesitos to homesick Boricuas in greasy paper bags.

This is not your inheritance. When I die, I don’t want you taking this over, you hear me?

Alvaro was a teenager when his mother told him her wishes for his future. As punishment for skipping class, she made him work in the bakery with her that weekend, knowing how much he would rather be gaming on the new Windows 95 PC she had bought him for Christmas.

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I not wanting you to be like me, working all day with your body, having pain in your bones at night. You can have a better life—you just have to put that big cabeza of yours to use.

He laughed at the memory, the charred smell of the Bustelo coffee they served in disintegrating Styrofoam cups reminding him of the sacrifices she made to give him a good life. Papi had been in and out of the picture, bouncing between Puerto Rico and Philly, lapsing and relapsing until the substances he used as a balm for his pain brought him to a final deliverance. In the end, Alvaro did as his mother wished, turning his nerdy computer hobby into a profession straight out of high school. Ironically, this choice to walk the path of IT had not spared his joints from aching, because IT work is more than just keystrokes at a console.  

Alvaro, you have a message from TRAINEE. Should I read it for you?

“Sure Serafina,” he says to his ever-listening Augur assistant, the successor to a clunky lineage of Siris, Cortanas, ChatGPTs, and other feminine-coded personalities.

TRAINEE says—Serafina starts and then pauses, as if she needs to take a breath before intoning upward to perfectly match the cadence and pitch of the speaker she is ventriloquizing—“Sorry to bother you off-shift, but I was hoping for some advice. You free tonight? It’s kind of urgent.”

Alvaro exhales into a sigh, leading Serafina to ask, Should I ignore the message for now? You sound frustrated.

“Frustrated,” Alvaro repeats to himself before bursting into almost hysterical laughter, the kind where you end up snorting.

Are you alright, Alvaro?

“I just got fired, what do you think, Serafina?” he growls, regretting naming the assistant after his mother. He remembers when the bot asked him if he wanted her to appear as his mother in extended environments. “Hell no” was his decisive response. His mother would have thought of such technological deepfakery as some unnatural devilry. Part of him agrees, but another part of him admits a generative replica of her might comfort him now and then, even if it wouldn’t purge the coronavirus that claimed her life.

I think meeting TRAINEE would be a good idea, seems like you could use the diversion.

“I think …” Alvaro huffs into a feigned serenity. “You’re right. Tell TRAINEE to meet me at O’Reilly’s in Haymarket.”

Alvaro retrieves his glasses from the charger just as TRAINEE replies, a string of semitransparent text overlaid in the upper right corner of his lenses. That awful dive bar?

Alvaro twitches his fingers, activating the gestural keyboard, typing up his reply rather than speaking it aloud. “Does your royal highness prefer somewhere else?”

There is a long pause before she chimes, No, O’Reilly’s is just the vibe I need tonight.

From Jefferson station, Alvaro wades through a polychromatic panoply of competing extensions. Swatches of watercolors bleed into advertisements superimposed on his vision, framed by diaphanous squares, lines, and shapes that contextualize his environment with dizzying depth and clarity. Product pop-outs, orderable with the slightest tilt of the head or verbal cue, invade his field of view, even as another message from TRAINEE comes in: Just arrived. With a simple gesture, he toggles down his extension emitter, reducing his layer field to “minimalist” mode. In that instant, a cartoonish Ronald McDonald perched above the restaurant’s golden arches dissolves into a pixelated smoke of red and maize-gold.

Without so many augments and layer enhancers, the world is less colorful. The familiar ruggedness of his city returns, bringing him comfort. He turns to enter the alley where O’Reilly’s is nestled between the brick walls of old buildings, when a young man with dreadlocks nearly crashes into him, his eyes flashing momentarily with alarm, before retreating once again into whatever world his lenses are conjuring. Alvaro wonders how he must appear to the boy. Was he a knight in shining armor, striding triumphantly to a heroes’ tavern in some fantasy universe? Or maybe something more frightening, a many-limbed science fictional alien shambling about in search of unsuspecting humans duped into buying whatever extensions are trending on the marketplace?

O’Reilly’s is as it should be. It reeks of spilt beer and cigarettes and stale frying oil. A gentle crystalline square in his lens field frames a waif of a young woman sitting at the edge of a bar, a comically gigantic stein of Guinness held captive in her tiny hands. TRAINEE. Also known as Liam Li.

“What a wonderful place,” Liam says, eyeing the dart board, which looks like it hasn’t been used in years, the holes plastered with dust.

“I have high standards,” Alvaro says, hopping onto the stool next to her, grimacing as something cracks in his back. “Hey, I’ll have the same!” He waves to the bartender, who frowns at the man who insists on ordering verbally rather than just using the extension overlay. “Please.”

“So …”

“How’s Assata?”

“She’s good—working on a new art installation, which means the apartment is in shambles. Something about ceramic tiles made from electronic waste.”

“Spouses.”

Liam raises her glass. “Spouses.”

“Tried that once, didn’t last a year,” Alvaro says between gulps. “I think mami scared her off.”

At this Liam bursts into laughter, “Well, Asian moms are not for the faint-hearted. Fortunately for me Assata is tough as her e-waste bricks.… Thanks for coming.”

A Guinness appears in front of Alvaro, black malt capped with tan foam. He takes a longer than casual gulp from the perspiring glass before replying, “Had nothing better to do.”

Liam sets down her glass, running her fingers through the spiky mullet she is sporting, a trend among the youth that reminds Alvaro of kitschy films from the 1970s. Alvaro knows her well enough to know this little tick as a sign of nervousness, but before he gets to ask what is causing it, she strikes first. “What’s wrong?”

Alvaro takes another gulp. “Nothing.”

Liam lifts her eyebrow, and her piercing there glints preternaturally like a starfield. He wonders what extension it is coded with. “Doesn’t look like ‘nothing.’ You might as well be chugging that thing down.”

“You first,” Alvaro says, suppressing a belch. “I don’t want to spoil the mood.”

Liam sighs, looking away as if in shame. “Augur made me an offer.” 

Now it is Alvaro who frowns. “If they’re promoting you to TECH-2 already, then they haven’t told me.” 

“No,” Liam bites her lip, her polychromatic fingernails clutching the sill of the bar. “A buyout with a UBI-equivalent severance package.” 

Alvaro stares blankly at his glass. This is when he decides to order two shots of Brugal, using the extension interface so as not to upset the already disgruntled barkeep.

Liam eyes the shots suspiciously, before puzzling out the query. “You too, huh?”

Their glasses clink as they take the shot. That’s when the food arrives, two bacon cheeseburgers, “labgrown” because he can’t afford the real thing and it’s better for the planet and blah-blah animal rights. “Not exactly.”

One bite into the greasy burger, Liam’s tone is almost gleeful at having figured out the mystery of his pissed-off mood. “They’re making you retire, aren’t they?”

Alvaro nods, too engrossed in the overly seasoned meat to speak aloud.

“But they can’t do that. You’re only 60 … something.”

“Fifty-eight!” Alvaro snarls, stroking the graying twists of his hair as if to certify his youth.

Liam retreats into her beer and french fries like a child caught stealing from a cookie jar. “When?”

“They said I have to finish training you first, so a month or so,” Alvaro says, cracking his neck. “But what is the point if they’re already trying to lay you off?”

Liam’s gaze shifts around the room, settling on the anachronism in the corner. An old LCD screen with retro-style scrolling news feeds: the latest civilian casualty from the “mineral war” raging in the Congo; Secretary of State Agnihotri announcing the closure of the American embassy in Beijing; the US Senate voting on an expanded universal basic income package that is expected to pass. She points to the screen. “They’re really going through with it then?”

“They are … and here I was thinking you and I were safe,” Alvaro sets down his beer, musing about the changes that have brought them to this point. The onslaught that was artificial intelligence has restructured the world economy, with a boom and then a bust that decimated entire sectors. His employer, Augur, was smart enough to invest in generative reality tech and wearables, making use of the data centers and computing power developed for the AI revolution that only partially arrived. The result was a sweeping success that mirrored the rise of social media in the Web 2.0 era of the late 2000s. Alvaro never worried about being replaced because even with the increasing entrenchment of automation, computers needed caring for. His time as an “essential worker” during the COVID-19 pandemic reassured him that he picked an AI-proof profession. He appears to have been wrong.

The barkeep, a grizzled, burly man with a red beard, squints at the television when the monthly tally of unemployment statistics appear in red font. “When are the robots coming? What do you think? Should they replace me with a robot? Would a robot get a better tip? Or maybe I should dress up as a robot?”

He starts to break into a clumsy robot dance. Approvingly, an inebriated youth nearby raises his glass with too much enthusiasm, dousing the floor with half a liter of something cheap and amber-colored. While the kid’s friends giggle, the barkeep flicks his wrist, summoning a cleaner to soak up the mess and apply a soapy sheen of what smells like Alvaro’s mother’s Fabuloso detergent in its wake.

Alvaro shuffles in his chair, embarking on that eternal struggle to find a comfortable position while seated and being over 50. “So, are you going to accept the offer?

Liam is staring at the drone cleaner, as if the little Roomba-esque automaton will soon replace her.

That’s when his glasses go dark and the world takes on that familiar dull hue of normalcy. No augments. No layers but the unvarnished real. He should have let his glasses charge for longer.

“What the …” Liam says, her face contorting with alarm. “I think I need to reset my glasses. Everything just …”

Alvaro notices the others around him freezing, panicking, or fiddling with their rigs, trying to understand what is going on. They step outside, wondering if somehow the building with its hidden caches of asbestos and other abominable pollutants is somehow blocking the wireless signals.

Amid a cold burst of wind, a message flickers on their feeds.

Server unavailable.

Then the city plunges into darkness.

“Here’s what we know,” booms the voice of Cyrus Clark, VP of operations, as he gesticulates theatrically in the conference room. Gray stubble pricks out from the sweep of his typically clean-shaven jaw as he speaks through bloodshot eyes. “This was not an isolated incident. Downtime struck in 12 of our data centers in the greater New York metro area. There was also a power grid failure … and the facilities in question had more than sufficient redundant power with batteries and diesel generators, but they still went down. We need to know how and why this happened, and if it could happen again.”

Alvaro takes another sip of the coffee that at this point is doing nothing to keep him awake. His slurp is so audible in the tense, silent room that heads turn in his direction as if he has something to say.

Cyrus glares at Alvaro and the others, seeking blame. “Well, any theories?”

“What is the postmortem from diagnostics?” someone asks in the back. “What caused the downtime?”

Cyrus almost laughs at the question. “If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t have called you all here to an in-person meeting. The result was inconclusive. No anomalies with the load optimization algorithms. No detected bugs in any of the environmental management consoles.”

Cyrus displays the results of the feed on the screen layered over the tabletop.

Alvaro speaks through a sigh. “And have you sent someone to do a walk-through, inspect the equipment?”

At this Cyrus recoils, as if he has been punched in the throat. “Of course. Diagnostics sent drones to comb through the entire facility, they found nothing.”

Alvaro cracks his knuckles, causing Liam to smirk. “Maybe they don’t know what to look for.”

“And you do?” Cyrus replies, rolling his eyes as he does it.

“Possibly,” Alvaro says, noting how everyone in the room is staring at him. “If I were you, I would send some techs to do manual walk-throughs. Have them check every rack and cable and plenum duct. Leave no floor tile unturned. There has to be more that we’re not seeing.”

“Our resources are limited, drones are more efficient,” Cyrus says, the blue flecks of his eyes narrowing. “But you can spend all night walking through our King of Prussia data center if you think that is a good use of your time.”

“I do,” Alvaro replies, before nodding to Liam, who is realizing rather suddenly that she will be coming along.

“Unless there are any other bright ideas,” Cyrus continues, his pale face flush red with frustration, “there’s someone I need to introduce to you. This is—”

The suited woman beside him, who until now has seemed almost invisible, interrupts Cyrus with little ceremony. “I’m Special Agent Johnson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

At this the room falls even more silent. No slurps of coffee. No clearing of throats. The woman seems to savor this, the effect of her authority settling over the room. And this is when Alvaro notices her for the first time, the dark wells of her eyes lined with crow’s feet, the gray cloud of her hair. This is a woman forged in the crucible of Philadelphia’s poverty. Her accent marks her as a local like him.

“The bureau treats outages on the scale of those that took place yesterday as matters of national security. I will not rule out the possibility that this incident was an act of sabotage carried out on our infrastructure at the direction of domestic terrorists or … foreign actors.” Her eyes land on Liam as she says the word foreign. “We expect your full cooperation with this investigation and trust that you will uphold the strictest standard of confidentiality as we proceed.”

Special Agent Johnson dismissively waves her hand at Cyrus, restoring his permission to speak. Sweat sparkles visibly along his receded hairline. “We’ll meet again in 24 hours. I want everyone working on a detailed postmortem. We’re on emergency shifts until further notice. And I expect you to make yourself available to speak with Agent Johnson should she have questions for you.”

The room is still frozen until Cyrus bellows, “Get moving!”

As everyone shuffles out of the room, Alvaro hears Cyrus addressing him by his surname. “Guiterrez, can you wait up a minute?”

Liam lingers for a moment until realizing she is not invited to “wait up,” giving Alvaro a nod on the way out. Special Agent Johnson shuts the door behind them.

“What?” Alvaro says, not hiding his annoyance. In his years working for Augur, he has survived many executives like Cyrus, frail egos who seldom last as long as the floor technicians they routinely berate and demean, with very little clue as to how the facility actually works. In the older days of data center management, it was not uncommon for “suits” like Cyrus to have paid their dues in the rack trenches, untangling cables, lifting 4U servers, resolving support tickets, and other techie heroics. Today, however, executives seldom have the faintest clue as to how the data center really runs, relying instead on their AI “assistants” to translate the technical to what matters most to them: the bottom line.

“I’ll allow your request,” Cyrus says, his tone softening. There is something strange about his feigned kindness, an artificial sweetness lacing his words. “It’s a good proposition. And a worthwhile use of time. Especially given your wealth of experience.”

Alvaro frowns, and he can hear the ghost of his mother’s voice scolding him for showing his emotions in front of authority figures to whom he should show respect. “And?”

Special Agent Johnson approaches, her smooth face hued violet-brown by the trickle of dusk filtering into the conference room. “Your trainee, Miss Li. I understand you two occasionally meet outside of work.”

Alvaro crosses his arms, repulsed by this line of questioning. “We do. She’s something like a daughter to me.”

The woman’s face creases into something steely and ferocious, like a predator baring its fangs to strike. “Has she said anything … unusual to you lately?”

Alvaro shrugs. “No. She’s a class act. Doesn’t even bitch about work like a normal person.”

Johnson studies him, likely searching his countenance for any sign of betrayal or dissemblance. He wonders if she usually uses her to lenses assist with that, algorithmic polygraphs working in the background as she interviews her victims. “So you’ve observed nothing suspicious about her behavior?”

“Seriously?” Alvaro blurts out, suppressing the urge to roll his eyes. Cyrus is stiff as a statue, offering him no support. “She’s a suspect … because of her last name?”

The woman waves her finger in the air. “Everyone is a suspect.”

“Even this old brute?” Alvaro thumps his hand on his chest.

“The incident occurred just four hours after you were notified about your severance,” Johnson observes.

Alvaro glares at her with incredulity, noting Cyrus’s stunning submission. “Are we done here? I have work to do. Unless I’m fired, again.”

“Alvaro,” Cyrus finally speaks. “Don’t—”

“You may go,” Johnson says, inclining her head toward the door, “but only because I want someone with eyes on Li at all times. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Note it down. Report back.”

“I don’t work for you,” Alvaro says, eyeing Cyrus.

“No, you don’t,” Johnson says, venom lacing her words, rippling over the contours of her weathered face. “But I can bring you into custody right now if you like. You have a motive to get retribution against an employer that scorned you. You have the technical know-how and experience to credibly orchestrate something like this. That’s all a judge needs to throw you into a cell for the duration of this investigation.”

Cyrus coughs to find his voice. “Hey, just do what they say, okay, no need to make a bad situation worse.”

“She’s a good kid,” Alvaro says assertively. “You’re grasping for straws. She’s Chinese, so what?”

Johnson steps closer to Alvaro, and he can smell her perfume, something between fermented wood and roses. “You’re in denial, like everyone else.”

“About what?”

“We are under siege, Guiterrez,” Johnson says, scanning the room for signs of the enemy. “Relations between Beijing and Washington are on the brink of total collapse. What has been cold until now is heating up at a rapid clip. Every day there are more drone sightings and data breaches. They are probing our infrastructure for cracks and leaks, looking for the weakest links in the nodes and chains that tie everything together. You haven’t the slightest clue about what we are up against. None of us do.”

Alvaro shakes his head in disgust. He’s heard this talk before on the feeds. Fearmongering. Scapegoating. The same rhetoric used against people with an “ez” in their last name being used now against anyone with ties to China—or for those who can’t find China on a map, anyone from anywhere east of India.

Johnson opens the door for him. “Let’s hope yesterday wasn’t the opening salvo.”

Alvaro steps into the hall without honoring her paranoia with a reply.

So much of the world has changed since Alvaro was a kid, but King of Prussia is the same clusterfuck it has always been—only the mall, like him, has grown wider. At its edge lies its data center, which would appear to anyone on the street as a nondescript warehouse. The only tells are the lack of windows and the fleet of air chiller units on its squared roof. Liam uses drive-assist to park their company car in the visitor lot. Then they wait for the shuttle that will bring them into the concrete-walled perimeter of the facility.

Liam waves it down as if it can’t see them and needs to be reminded they need a lift inside. “I still don’t know why we can’t just park in the main lot, we have badges.”

Alvaro sizes her up as a threat: a 4’11” stringy thing, light on muscle but heavy on personality. “Yeah, and for all they know your car is a bomb or an EMP.”

“Fair point,” she mutters as they hop inside the self-driving shuttle. “Especially with that FBI person sniffing about.”

Alvaro feels Liam searching his face for any clue or hint about what was discussed. “Hey, is everything alright? I mean, Cyrus, he seemed …”

“No,” Alvaro admits. “That’s why we’re here. To find out why.”

There is only silence as the shuttle brings them to the lobby. They flash their badges at the clerk and place their belongings into magnetized bins so that they can step through the metal detectors. A final scan of their faces permits them access into one of many transparent vestibules with doors that automatically lock on either side. These “man-traps” are one of many deterrents for would-be saboteurs, not to mention the constant surveillance and the robotic dog sentinels with enough strength to pin down a sumo wrestler.

They disembark from an elevator that takes them down into the server rooms, carefully pressing their shoes on a sticky mat before proceeding. Dust is another unwelcome infiltrator in this temple of electronics. Alvaro points to the glittering steel racks of servers, arrayed in a dizzyingly uniform fashion, like stacks upon stacks of library books. Only the subtle labels on the floor with combinations of numbers and letters give them any indication of where they are in the windowless labyrinth. This, Alvaro remembers, is yet another failsafe, an architectural feature that doubles as a kind of fortification so that only those supremely familiar with the facility’s layout can efficiently traverse its corridors, should they attempt a hasty exit.

Fighting to be heard over the roar of ventilation equipment, Alvaro nearly shouts at Liam. “So the report said that C3 through C7 are the problem areas. Let’s find out what happened, shall we?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Liam says, slipping on her protective headphones per her training, while Alvaro proceeds with ears bared for the fans to finish his gradual deafening. Role modeling is sometimes about showing someone what not to do, he tells himself.

A canid drone scuttles about the rack, fiddling with a bundle of brightly hued network cables using its mandibular appendages. Alvaro mutters, “Excuse me,” to the inanimate beast as he steps past it, inspecting the racks adjacent to it, one of many nodes of high density electronics, where neural processing units, the successors to GPUs, are arrayed in stacks of iridescent chrome, a sign of the corrosion-resistant desiccant coating that guards the equipment from mold, rust, and other sieges of an atmospheric variety.

Together they inspect the units, one by one, searching for signs of anything unusual. On the surface they appear as they should. That is when Alvaro starts sniffing the server’s faceplate.

Liam starts chuckling. “What are you doing?”

Alvaro continues to sniff, pacing the length of the rack, comparing, measuring like a connoisseur might compare the bouquet of various blends of wine. “What do you think?”

Liam folds her arms. “Are you part bloodhound? Are you trying to sniff out the saboteur’s scent?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Alvaro says. “What does it smell like to you?”

Liam starts sniffing, and she smiles as she does it, probably embarrassed. “If this is some kind of hazing …”

Alvaro raises an eyebrow. “Tell me.”

“Nothing—” Liam starts, then sniffing again, raises a doubt. “Maybe a little like plastic. Burnt plastic. Is that normal?”

“No.” Alvaro shakes his head, and in an instant, he has his screwdriver out, and Liam follows suit. They remove the screws holding up the faceplate of the 4U NPU unit. Inside they find something they are not expecting.

“That doesn’t look right,” Liam gasps. “It looks …”

“Melted,” Alvaro says.

Liam continues to pry around the server’s innards, noting more signs of deformity where the plastic warped with heat. “How is that possible? The sensor logs reported no cooling failures, just unexpected shutdowns.”

“As you know, the onboard temperature sensors on these units automatically trigger a shutdown when the temperatures exceed the operating threshold,” Alvaro says in the voice of an instructor. “So Liam. Any theories? What happened to her?”

Liam looked up at her instructor and then back to the exposed server. “She overheated, but recorded that she didn’t … which shouldn’t be possible unless those temperature logs were overwritten with inaccurate ones.”

Alvaro removes Liam’s headphones. “Thermal outages masquerading as network failures. How did this happen?”

Liam’s face darkens. “Sabotage. Shit. That FBI agent, maybe she’s right.”

Alvaro stiffens, not entertaining her theory just yet. “Possibly. For now, the question is not why but how.”

Liam’s gaze shifts to the quadrupedal drone, which is still gingerly “seeding” network cables into their sockets. “The only protocols capable of overwriting environmental data are the facility AIs. Last week, there was that performance optimization update for users, maybe something changed?”

Alvaro’s lips crease into a smile. “And how might we verify this?”

Liam’s eyes brighten with excitement. “The Cage!”

Then it is Alvaro chasing after Liam like a mother pursuing her overly zealous and energetic young as they make their way to the Cage. The exterior is still securitized in the old way, with a padlock and a single card-reader for entry. Alvaro brandishes the key that dangles from his neck like a crucifix to grant them access. Inside, the test environment awaits them. An anachronistic setup that includes a raised floor and a chilled plenum of pressurized air beneath it. Perforated floor tiles facing racks of servers with the exhaust heat emitted into containerized glass gables that resemble those found in greenhouses. For Alvaro it’s nostalgic, reminding him of his days as a young trainee, crawling around underfloor plenums like this one, prying open floor tiles with a suction cup tool to adjust the airflow, running back and forth with cables spooled around his shoulders like someone who gets casual about having a pet boa coiled around them.

“We have to reproduce the problem,” Liam insists, adjusting the environmental controls using the old tablet to interface with the test environment. “We’ll apply the optimization update to these racks and run the others on the previous build as a control.”

“A sound strategy,” Alvaro approves. “Once it installs, you need to instruct the CPUs to simulate some kind of high-performance compute—rendering activities, anything on the scale of generative reality. Let it cycle for a few hours.”

“On it,” Liam murmurs into the tablet.

“Until then, let’s grab a bite to eat.”

“You read my mind.”

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In the break room, Alvaro and Liam eat cheap noodles. “Just like your mother’s home-cooking, right?”

Liam stares into the brownish liquid as if searching for something in the oily bubbles forming on the surface. “She wouldn’t feed this to chickens.”

Alvaro bursts into laughter. “That’s how I feel about that hipster restaurant in Passyunk with the plantains. They charge you an arm and a leg for something that my mother could make 10 times better blindfolded.”

Liam slurps up her noodles with her eyes closed. Is she imagining her mother’s broth? “What was she like?”

“My mother?”

“Yeah.”

“A pain in the ass.”

At this they both nearly spit out broth. “I can relate to that. Do you miss her?”

“No,” Alvaro lies, spooling noodles around his chopsticks like yarn. “Yes.”

“I can relate to that.”

Alvaro finishes slurping before adding, “She always had these sayings, you know. A person who tries to bring in all the groceries in one trip will end up breaking stuff for their laziness. The person who is ambitious who steps over others to reach for the stars will be humbled when the sky comes crashing down upon them.”

At this Liam raises an eyebrow playfully. “Sounds like Cyrus.”

Another chuckle between them gives way to a long silence.

“I don’t think there’s much more I can teach you,” Alvaro says, setting down his chopsticks, making sure not to cross them. He had learned from Liam that doing so might result in grave misfortune or his death. “You have a pretty good handle on things.”

“Clearly I have to work on my nose,” Liam replies, pinching her nostrils. “When we first started, you said …” she clears her throat, deepening her voice in imitation of her tutor, “We are the eyes and ears of the data center.”

“I suppose I should have added nose to that list of sensory organs, but at least you got the hearing and seeing part down. And most important of all, you didn’t pick up my bad habits.”

“Like not wearing protective headphones.”

“Yeah.”

“Like not wearing safety gloves when handling metal sharp enough to cut you.”

“Yeah.”

“Like cursing the ancestors when a blanking panel pinches your finger?”

“Yeah, that, and the whole, you know, being, less … crass to the equipment.”

Liam sets down her bowl. “I told you I don’t mind referring to them as ladies. I think it’s cute.”

Alvaro chuckles. “Well, the person who trained me used much more … colorful … language to describe your… ‘ladies.’”

“Blah-blah-blah tech is still a man’s world.” Liam throws back her hair performatively. “You know I don’t give a shit.”

“I know,” Alvaro says, admiring how far his pupil has come. Her resilience in weathering a profession that is especially unwelcoming for a woman. While he cannot imagine her as anything but true, the faintest possibility that there is some other motive, or something hidden about her corrupts his thoughts. “Earlier today, at HQ …”

Liam freezes, and he can see that she has been waiting for this, for him to reveal what was spoken to him in confidence. But the moment is interrupted. The tablet starts flashing to indicate an alarm.

“Temperature spike!” Liam bolts for the door.

Back in the stuffy conference room, Alvaro and Liam are seated beside each other when Cyrus and Johnson arrive, 20 minutes late. The lick of hair cresting the VP’s head has been resculpted with hair gel, but his face looks haggard, a wreck of worry. Johnson, on the other hand, is as crisp as ever, her suit still perfectly pressed and her face smooth and perky despite her age.

“Sorry we’re late,” Cyrus says, opening his thermos and drinking deeply of what Alvaro imagines is a mixture of booze and coffee.

Johnson turns to him with a scowl on her face, as if apologizing is unwarranted or a breach of protocol.

“We know why the downtime is happening!” Liam blurts out.

The pair of suits turn to Alvaro as if only he can certify what she has discovered. “We reproduced the episode in the test environment.”

“Tell us.” Cyrus starts picking at his cuff, one of his many nervous ticks.

Alvaro nods to Liam to continue the briefing. “Last week you implemented an Infrastructure Intelligence update. On the user side, it’s given performance boosts and higher bandwidth capability. On our end, that means shifting cooling and power assets strategically to get more compute in real-time. Optimization.”

Cyrus stretches his arms in feigned boredom. “I know. I drafted the plan with the engineers.”

Alvaro cuts in, his face a contented smirk. “But what your engineers didn’t anticipate is that their AI has taken extraordinary measures to supply your users with more compute.”

Johnson, the least technically minded in the room, leans forward with interest. “Define … extraordinary.”

Liam stands up, kicks on the display on the table for them to see. “We put in some analog sensors as an experiment. Off-network. These are the temperature readings. Way over the safety threshold—and that spike there, that’s when the automatic shutdown is triggered.” With a wave of her hand, she shows them the AI’s environmental sensor readout, a nearly flat line. “The AI is lying. It wants more performance and recognizes that it’s too hot, so it pretends it’s colder, which ends up triggering the shutdown because the caddies and plastics in the drives start to melt.”

Cyrus stares blankly at the screen, as if working something out.

“Was that part of your plan with the engineers?” Alvaro says mockingly.

“How did you figure it out?” Johnson asks, eyeing Liam with what looked like newfound respect.

“We followed our nose,” Liam says proudly. “It’s amazing what you can still find doing a walk-through. Alvaro is the one who—”

Cyrus lifts a finger and they fall silent. “And the power failures?”

Alvaro shrugs. “We don’t have access to the grid’s AI, but it could be possible our AI was misrepresenting our energy needs or somehow convincing the power grid that it had more energy than it could supply.”

Johnson peers over at Cyrus, terror wracking his already distraught face with new wrinkles. “This update is still active? Is it not?”

Cyrus nods, tugging at his cuff. “Since there were no further issues, we expanded implementation.”

Alvaro gets up. “Well we have to do something about that, don’t we?”

Cyrus folds his arms. “I’ll call the AI team. See if we can get another opinion. We need to verify what you’ve found before pulling the plug on the rollout. It’s a huge investment, so I want to be sure.”

Liam shakes her head. “Subsidence.”

“Subsidence?” Johnson asks, as if they are referring to some technical term she is not aware of.

Liam speaks softly, as if to a friend. “My mother grew up in Sichuan, at the edge of where the Eurasian and Indian plates are grinding into the Himalayas. She was there when the earthquake happened, saw most of her world swallowed by the Earth. But there were some houses that escaped its maw. The ones that survived were built simply with strong bones. Too much complexity, too many stories and nested layers—that’s what leads to subsidence.”

Cyrus groans. “This is hysteria.”

A knock, then someone barges into the room, a woman in a suit, blonde, middle-aged. He recognizes her from the company-wide virtual meetings. Dana Snow, CEO of Augur Corporation. “Cyrus, what the fuck is going on?”

Cyrus shivers, glancing over at the glasses he set down, noticing a flood of messages pouring in. “I’m sorry?”

“Three Mile Island,” she rasps. “You don’t know?”

Johnson frowns and Cyrus fills her in, his hands trembling. “The nuclear reactor. We turned it back on to power Augur’s generative reality infrastructure.”

Dana slams her fist on the table. “It’s in meltdown. Their engineers can’t figure out why. Somehow—”

Liam breathes into her answer. “It’s just like the test environment. Our AI ‘lied’ about temperature sensor readings to get more performance. It’s probably lying to the reactor’s AI to get more power than it can produce safely without overheating.”

Johnson’s eyes narrow on Cyrus, then shift to Dana. “This is on you. Your recklessness could cost lives. Shut it down, immediately.”

Dana nods, suddenly wary of the FBI agent, calculating the legal repercussions to her company. She gestures into the air, her glasses tracking her movements as she provides some kind of biometric authorization for the infrastructure kill-switch.

Johnson storms out of the room, muttering something about evacuations, while Liam and Alvaro remain, still as stones, watching Cyrus wither and melt like the overheating servers in C7.

“When this is over, so are you,” Dana whispers to Cyrus, then looks over to Alvaro and Liam. “And you, you’re the ones that figured this out?”

“She did most of the heavy lifting,” Alvaro leans back in his chair.

Dana appraises them with her lenses, likely scanning their personnel files. “No furlough for you Guiterrez, not yet. As for you Li, well, we look forward to your bright future.”

Later at O’Reilly’s, Alvaro and Liam are toasting to their future, watching the progress of the precautionary evacuations of greater Harrisburg on the old LCD screen, interrupted by the commentaries of politicians reacting to the revelation that Augur’s AI had played a role in the Three Mile Island meltdown. Senator Garcia, presidential hopeful and shameless opportunist, is the first to come forward calling for a ban on nuclear energy, while moderates like Senator Wu insist on reviving a long-dead bill to reign in AI use and simplify “complexity” to prevent similar infrastructural entanglements from arising in the future. A late entry to the chorus, the proud Sinophobe Representative Waltz is calling for a congressional investigation into the incident, alluding to the possibility that a “vast conspiracy” of saboteurs from the Chinese government have infiltrated American corporations like Augur.

Alvaro tunes out the chatter on the television and finds himself swept up by a curious sense of mourning for his once again changed future. Fantasies of what might have been flood his mind. Opening a panadería across the street from that dreadful, bougie Croissant Factory, naming it “Serafina’s Quesitos” to honor his late mother. But then he remembers her words long ago, her wish for him to use his “cabeza” to make something of his life.  More than anything, he wishes to speak to her, to tell her of his and Liam’s heroic feats, to tell her that he is grateful for the life her sacrifices enabled.

Alvaro peers over at his student. “Until a few hours ago, I was looking forward to ‘finding myself’ in early retirement. My mid-late-life crisis era. Can you see it? Me dying my hair purple and taking on an eccentric hobby like collecting model trains or bubble football.”

Liam chokes on her beer. “Purple, eh? Hey, purple would suit you. Assata could help you with the makeover. She knows how to weave in some extension emitters if you want to live on the wild side. I’ll make noodles, not that crap we ate at King of Prussia.”

Alvaro shrugs, running his hands through his rapidly graying twists. “Maybe we can do the purple anyway. But I’ll skip the model trains … and the bubble football.”

Liam scratches her head sheepishly. “This could be a … generational thing, but what even is bubble football?”

Alvaro shrugs, and at this they start laughing. Then he pulls something out of his pocket, a simple chain with a key at the end of it, handing it to Liam. “It’s your Cage now.”

Liam gasps, grabbing the chain and holding it up as if it is Excalibur being pulled out from the stone. “Wow, it’s so much lighter than I imagined.”

Alvaro shakes his head. “Hey, that’s what it wants you to think. This is like Frodo’s ring. It’s a burden. Gets heavier over time. Are you ready?”

“I think so,” she says, still admiring the generic and utterly forgettable key on the end of the chain. “But it’s not official until you complete the knighting.”

Alvaro theatrically straightens himself up, clearing his throat and muttering something in a horrid rendition of received pronunciation: “I hereby bestow thee the rank of TECH-2.”