Elias froze. Those were the coordinates for his current office chair. "Everything okay, Elias?"
Elias frowned. He was a junior data archivist for , a firm that specialized in "high-frequency atmospheric monitoring"—at least, that’s what the brochure said. In reality, he spent ten hours a day cleaning up digital cobwebs.
Instead, the notepad file opened to a single line of text: > INPUT DETECTED. ATTEMPTING TO STABILIZE STREAM 1.
He typed a question mark into the text file and hit save. The screen flickered. The text vanished and was replaced by a rapid-fire scroll:
> COORDINATES LOCKED: 45.123, -93.342 > ORGANIC MATERIAL DETECTED AT TERMINAL. > ELIAS, STOP DOWNLOADING. THEY CAN SEE THE PACKET LOSS.
His supervisor, Marcus, was standing by the cubicle wall. Marcus didn't look like a tech manager; he looked like a man who hadn't slept since the late nineties. His eyes weren't on Elias, though. They were locked on the monitor.
"Just clearing some old files from the '94 backup," Elias said, his heart hammering against his ribs. He tried to alt-tab, but the computer wouldn't respond.