Morning sunlight bled through the blinds of Florence's office, soft and golden — the kind that lied about how peaceful the world was.
Her desk looked like it had been the losing side of a hurricane: open case files, scattered reports, one untouched cup of coffee now cold enough to qualify as a biohazard.
She was halfway through rebandaging her own wrist from a night spent rewiring lab equipment when the comm terminal beeped.
"Please be caffeine delivery," she mumbled.
Instead, Tesla's face filled the holographic display, hair worse than usual.
"Morning, Doc," Tesla said. "You look like you fought a printer and lost."
"I won," Florence replied flatly. "Barely. To what do I owe this early dose of sarcasm?"
Tesla's grin faded. "We picked up something strange in Kamchatka last night."
Florence froze for only a moment before leaning back in her chair. "That's not my jurisdiction. I'm more of a needle-and-thread girl, not a snowfield explorer."
"Yeah, well, our scanners disagree. The anomaly came through a relief signal that matches one of your Rhodes Island convoy routes. C9-series frequency band."
Florence tapped her tablet, pulling up logistics data. "C9? That's one of our northern humanitarian lines. Standard supplies — meds, food, maybe a few shiny needles if the locals behaved."
"Except," Tesla continued, "the convoy's signal was cloned. Someone used it to mask a field transmission. Old Schicksal code, pre-eruption type. Einstein's digging, but she thought you'd want a look."
Florence's eyes narrowed. "Old Schicksal code? As in, 'we thought we burned that history' old?"
"Exactly that old."
She sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "You people and your bad news. Send me what you have. I'll see if any of our tech division logged interference."
"On it," Tesla said. "Einstein's tagging the data as nonpublic. Keep it internal — we don't want Schicksal realizing we're peeking under their carpet."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Florence said. "Rhodes Island runs a clean ship. Mostly."
Tesla smirked faintly. "Just keep your ship from sprouting missiles."
"Ha. No promises."
The call ended.
For a while, the office was quiet again. Only the hum of the city filtered through the glass — distant, alive, unaware.
Florence opened the incoming packet from Anti-Entropy. A wall of code rolled across her monitor: encrypted noise, cross-references, something half-decayed.
"Not even breakfast first," she muttered, cracking her knuckles. "Rude."
She decrypted the first layer easily. The second fought harder. The third screamed.
When the screen finally stabilized, it spat out fragmented coordinates, half of them familiar. Kamchatka. The rest — corrupted identifiers.
One stood out.
PROJECT DESIGNATE: K-423
Florence frowned. "What kind of name is that?"
She scanned the metadata. The signature was ancient — Schicksal formatting but mismatched with any known division. Something they'd buried deep.
"Otto, you paranoid old ghoul," she whispered. "What were you digging up this time?"
Her terminal chimed again. Einstein this time.
"Doctor Florence, did you receive the transmission?"
"Loud and glitchy," Florence said, eyes still tracing the K-423 code. "Half the data's rotted. The rest smells like Schicksal's leftovers."
Einstein's brow furrowed. "We thought so. The encoding style matches their Babylon-era drone schematics, but it shouldn't be operational."
Florence smiled faintly. "Shouldn't be. Famous last words."
"We'll continue analysis," Einstein said. "If anything overlaps with your systems, alert us immediately."
"Of course," Florence said smoothly.
When the call ended, she sat still for a moment, drumming her fingers against the desk.
Rhodes Island's humanitarian lines. Schicksal's old ghosts. Anti-Entropy's scanners screaming at the same time.Too many coincidences for one morning.
She leaned back, staring at the ceiling. "If this is your way of keeping me from sleeping, universe, well played."
Then she set the coffee aside, stood, and crossed to the console by the window — a smaller, older terminal that wasn't connected to Rhodes Island's main net. She keyed in a short command:
TRACE / C9-TRANSMISSION / LOCAL RELAY:offline node access authorized
The screen blinked, then dimmed.
Somewhere beneath Tokyo, an unseen process stirred.
Florence's lips quirked. "Let's see what you really were hiding."
Outside, the morning grew brighter. The city went on — busy, oblivious, alive — as Florence Schariac, doctor, survivor, and reluctant CEO, quietly began to pull a new thread from the world's tangled fabric.