Chapter 7: This Could Be Chernobyl

Aleks thought his monitor had glitched. That was the obvious explanation. The WarMAC had been there. Then it wasn’t. Then it was again. He sat very still.

“Huh.”

The word did not adequately describe what he had just seen. Aleks had been working for Reactor Critical for a little over a month.

Calling what he did engineering would have been generous.

Calling it unskilled labor would have been insulting. The truth was somewhere in between. Reforged had developed a new way to construct WarMAC armor and internal structures. The process worked. Reactor Critical wanted as many of its competitive machines converted as possible before their season got into full swing.

Unfortunately, parts of the production process required manual execution. Very precise manual execution. Timing windows. Repeated actions. Processes that could not simply be handed over to a script because the game did not allow scripts to perform them.

So Reactor Critical had hired several people who were good with their hands, good with computers, and capable of doing the same annoyingly complicated thing for hours without losing concentration. Aleks was one of them. Thirty dollars an hour. NDA. Temporary position. Good money while it lasted.

He had no complaints. Especially since Reactor Critical had agreed to let the workers upgrade their own WarMACs in their off-hours, provided they used their own materials and did not interfere with production. Aleks had taken them up on it. His personal machine had a stealth module. Nothing exotic.

Stealth systems were useful, but nobody confused them with invisibility. They distorted targeting. Made locks harder. Created uncertainty. Visually, they produced a shimmer and occasional sensor ghosting. They did not make half a WarMAC cease to exist. Aleks stared at his screen. Then activated stealth again.

Shimmer. Distortion. And then, for perhaps half a second, the WarMAC’s left side vanished. Not faded. Not obscured. Gone. Then it snapped back. Aleks leaned closer.

“Okay.”

He disabled stealth. Waited. Enabled it again. This time nothing happened. He frowned. Again. Nothing. Again. The upper torso flickered out. Aleks stopped. His first instinct was to tell his supervisor. His second instinct was better. His supervisor was a good man. Competent. Organized.

Could keep six temporary employees doing tedious production work without any of them murdering one another.

But if Aleks showed him this, the response would probably be:

Huh. Weird.

Then somebody else would eventually have to look at it anyway. Reactor Critical had given all of them very specific instructions. Questions about the new production process went to Martin. Do not waste his time. But do not decide automatically that you would be wasting his time. Aleks remembered the wording because it had sounded strange when they were told.

Now it made more sense.

Still, he was not emailing Martin with:

Hey, my WarMAC disappeared. Weird, huh?

If this was real, he wanted evidence. If it was not real, he wanted to know that too before embarrassing himself. Aleks reset everything. He started recording. First, the machine before modification. Stealth behaved normally. Then the modified configuration. He documented the exact production sequence he had used.

The timing. The pause before one stage. The state of the stealth module. The order in which he had activated systems. First attempt. Nothing. Second. Flicker. Third. Nothing. Fourth. Nearly the entire WarMAC disappeared for just under a second. Aleks stared.

“Oh, that’s not good.”

He ran it again. And again. There was a pattern. Not perfect. Not every activation. But enough. He started taking notes. Then screenshots. Then copied every piece of system information he thought might matter without changing anything. By the time he was done, the email had attachments, video, text files, configuration information, and a step-by-step description.

He read it twice. Then once more. Finally, he hit Send.

Martin woke on the air bed in his office. The air bed had been an excellent acquisition. It allowed Martin to maintain irregular working hours while minimizing unnecessary travel and avoiding chicanery or tomfoolery elsewhere. Both were useful words. Reforged lived on chicanery and tomfoolery.

They were, however, remarkably effective chicanery and tomfoolery. Martin sat up. His computer showed several new messages. Most were routine. One was not.

Subject: Possible interaction between new structure/armor process and stealth module

Martin opened it. Read. Opened the first video. Watched. Rewound. Watched again. Opened the second video. Then the configuration notes. Then the production sequence. Martin’s expression changed. It was not a dramatic expression. Martin did not generally possess dramatic expressions.

But had anyone been watching closely, they might have described it as the closest Martin ever came to the human equivalent of:

He read the email again. Aleks had not merely found something strange. He had reproduced it. Documented it. Controlled for obvious causes. And, importantly, stopped before trying to exploit it. Martin replied.

Interesting.

Then:

Call me. Now. I wish to discuss this.

Aleks called less than a minute later.

“Hello?”

“Please run the process again.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

Aleks hesitated.

“Do you want me to share my screen?”

“Everything.”

“Okay.”

Martin watched. Aleks walked through the setup. Slowly. Precisely. No shortcuts. No assumptions. Activated stealth. The WarMAC flickered. For a fraction of a second, most of it vanished. Martin leaned forward.

“Again.”

Aleks reset. Repeated the entire process. The WarMAC vanished again. Martin was quiet. Aleks waited.

Finally:

“Do not alter anything.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Good.”

Martin opened another window.

“I am informing Kelto.”

Aleks swallowed.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Martin looked at the frozen image of a WarMAC that was mostly absent.

“If anyone is in trouble, it is probably Kelto.”

The Kelto employee who received Martin’s email had been given specific instructions months earlier. They had been delivered with unusual seriousness. If Martin contacted him about a technical problem, he was not to blow Martin off. He was not to ask whose department owned the issue. He was not to redirect him to a ticket queue.

He was not to decide, independently, that Martin had misunderstood something.

If Martin said there was a problem, the correct response was:

Show me.

The email itself was characteristically Martin. No drama. No speculation. Just facts. I have observed and independently confirmed an interaction between a stealth module and the material/structural modification process previously disclosed to Kelto. The result appears to extend beyond expected targeting degradation.

Under repeatable conditions, portions of the affected WarMAC intermittently fail to render visually while stealth is active. I have observed the process performed twice by the individual who discovered it and confirmed the result both times over live video.

I do not presently know whether the cause lies in the material process, construction state, stealth implementation, client rendering, or an interaction among them. I believe Kelto should investigate. Please advise how you wish to proceed. The Kelto employee read it twice. Then scheduled the call.