BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
The pager on her nightstand blared.
Systems check.
Time: 07:45:49Z
Date: May 22, 2050
Hostname: cyberaustralia
Power Draw: 283 Watts | Temperature: 32° C | RAM Usage: 10.6 GiB / 119,209 GiB
Fahk’s sake. It’s Saturday noight. Wot da bloody hell dew they need me fer? I’ve already resolved all my tickets fer da week…
“A ping on Discord would ‘ave sufficed,” is what Eureka would have liked to say regarding Hannah Sinclair and Mac McGuire-related work incidents, but reality had proven her wrong for the seventh time in seven weeks of working with her.
Smack! A thunderbird courier bonked her bedroom window, scattering mail in the planter below. Caw! Caw! The silly bird flew off without any further incident, leaving a trail of moonlit blue feathers in its wake.
Bolting out of her burrow of silk and down and sitting up, Eureka flicked her sleeping mask off and gave herself a few vicious wake-up slaps: her standard way of disabling Redshift, the blue light filter.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Faaaaaaaahk… Awright already! Shut up!
She jabbed for the pager and read the ticker:
THE CHUTE?!?!?!?!?!?!
- H.S.
“Wot da—”
Eureka hung, her desktop environment freezing the moon in place and stopping the gentle breeze through her macadamia and avocado orchards for 16,404 milliseconds.
Power Draw: 33,220 Watts | Temperature: 80° C | RAM Usage: 118,769 GiB / 119,209 GiB
And so life resumed once again. A distant, bitcrushed cry warbled in the distance as the moon skipped to its rightful place. Splat! Failing an emergency landing, the thunderbird courier dropped dead on Eureka’s driveway.
“Hannah CHERYL Sinclair, my fahkin’ Saturday noight… And yew killed Thunderbird! Poor birdie…”
She snapped her fingers, and Thunderbird found himself back on his feet.
Thunderbird shook his head, blinked, then took off towards the moon once more. Eureka sighed, staring at the bedroom wall for 468 milliseconds before vwooping herself out of bed. With another snap of her fingers, she made her bed.
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Better get dressed fer this shitshow. Sooner I get this done, sooner I ken go back ta sleep. Like fahkin’ Takumi…
On her Spare Gamer Chair of Sorta Clean Clothes, Eureka heapsorted the stack, finding her go-to old blue vintage rally sweatshirt, a sweat-laced Noctua baseball cap that fit just right (Mac had a point about beat-up hats.), navy athletic shorts (Mum said it looked cute!), plain black running socks (Hannah…), and a pair of gray New Balance 574s (Uncle Gordon had some drip, not gonna lie.)
One spin later, and Eureka was all dressed. She kicked her bedroom door open like Shrek did his outhouse in the opening scene of Shrek. Hurricane Eureka tore her way down the hallway into her kitchen, thwacking off a couple King’s Hawaiian Rolls from the big block in her fridge and karate chopping a few slices of Kraft thermal paste American cheese off the cheese skyscraper she built one day because she was bored. Whack! Using an unnecessary and mindless amount of violence fueled by her 24/7 on-call gamer rage, several toasty cheese sandwiches scared themselves together in one hand. In the other, she called down from the heavens a gallon of hot coffee. In a pimped out thermos, of course. The type to get Jan and Karen from HR jealous. Not that she knew who those people were. She just knew they were loathsome, cripplingly miserable harpies from her training data.
Stuffing one of the grilled cheese sliders into her grumbling gob, she opened the door into the crisp Australian autumn night air and stepped into it. “Mahzherdahking Hannah…”
---
Eureka tracked the moving dots on My Immortal 2.0, a monumental, hyperverbose, near-incomprehensible, beautiful, technicolor mission control dashboard: a panoramic view of spreadsheets, attribute tables, .csvs, infographics, ESRI Operational Dashboards, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (467,069 and trending BULLISH, baby!), ManiaLink HUDs, Persona 5 damage numbers, Overwatch particle effects, World of Warcraft addon stacks, and EVE Online corporation management hire-and-fire menus, all smooshed together into one Xfce Terminal emulator window that looked like NetHack. The ASCII-art version.
Eureka hit Alt + I, R. Then, holding MOUSE8, she keyed her mic in Teams. “Mum. Ken yew please reset da machine thet hosts owr fanfiction website? It’z somehow holding da whole suite hostage.”
Tar disconnected from her match of Halo. “Sure, hon. This server is full of noobs anyways.” Moseying over to one of the many server racks in her garage, she identified the problem box and power cycled it. “Always the third one from the top…”
The red, blinking cells in the new row Eureka created populated with the expected values. Eureka and Tar shared a tired giggle.
Booting up her dramatic monologue program, Eureka zinged a “This is da cost of wroiting spicy fanfic about…” and killed the process in the same breath.
Tar broke more. “Wait… that reminds me. We need to add them to the group call.”
Hannah joined the call.
Mac joined the call.
Hannah’s only slightly annoying Valley Girl accent found the gaps in the congested corporate air between Tar’s garage and the cheer clubhouse at Mt. Ham Prep. “We have, like, a few more friends joining us.”
Julia joined the call.
Rowcols joined the call.
Wait. Who are Julia and Rowcols? I sweahr—Hannah doesn’t tell us ANYTHING about what’s going on in HR.
Tar thankfully had more grace. “Welcome to the party, dearies. Eureka, please introduce yourself, sweetie.
---
Not even two minutes later, the impromptu all-hands Teams call devolved into a Saturday Night Live-when-it-was-still-funny mockery of Robert’s Rules of Order.
Poring over her old reference books, Eureka flipped to the page containing the engineering drawing and GIS shapefile of The Chute.
Encrypted. Oof. No big deal. I ken just—
A voice that sounded like Thunderbird’s ruptured her deep thinking model. Julia. “Eurekaaaa… it’s your turn. Play a word, dammit!”
She tabbed back into Words With Friends and dropped BUFFOONERY on a triple-word score.
“Oh come on! That’s not even a real word,” Mac complained.
Hannah muttered something unprintable in French.
Eureka summoned her general-purpose icebreaker daemon, a snarling worm made of clockwork and wearing a librarian’s sweater and glasses, and sicced it on the encrypted documents. “Enyway, here’s Wonderwall. Fifteen seconds to breach. :3”
On a free corner of her ninth monitor, she opened another terminal emulator window and set it loose.
“Dictionary check: ‘BUFFOONERY’ is valid,” Rowcols chimed in.
Julia beamed some crying-laughing emoji reactions into the call screen.
Raaaaaaaah! Wonderwall finished their job and burrowed back into the file system. On her fifth holographic display, The Chute rendered in.
