Monday morning.
Ivana sat in a cubicle in the basement of Sharpe Tower. There were no windows. The fluorescent lights hummed.
Aleta had set up a special "overflow" station for her, separate from the main data pool, ensuring Ivana was isolated.
Her job was to type numbers from paper forms into the computer.
It was mind-numbing work.
But as she typed, she noticed something.
The data she was entering... it was for the nutritional supplement formula. The flagship product.
She looked at the chemical ratios.
They were wrong.
Specifically, the lipid binding agent was too high. It would cause malabsorption.
She paused.
This was her algorithm. Or rather, a bastardized version of the algorithm she had written under the pseudonym MOON five years ago.
Someone had tried to copy her work and failed.
She looked around. No one was watching.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She could fix it. But she couldn't use her login. IBECKER would be flagged immediately.
She accessed the terminal's command prompt. It was an old system, full of patches. She quickly routed her entry through a background maintenance protocol, making the change look like a system auto-correction triggered by a rounding error.
She changed the ratio from 0.4 to 0.2.
She saved the file.
Upstairs, in the penthouse office, Gannon was looking at a monitor.
His lead scientist, Dr. Vane, was sweating.
"Sir, I don't know why the efficacy projections are down. We're following the MOON protocol."
Suddenly, the graph on the screen spiked. The red line turned green.
"Wait," Vane said. "It just... corrected itself."
Gannon leaned forward. "What happened?"
"I don't know. The system just ran a calibration update."
"Who authorized it?"
Vane checked the log.
"System Auto-Calibrate. Source: Terminal 404. Basement Level."
Gannon stared at the screen. Terminal 404 was the overflow station. The one Aleta had assigned to Ivana.
He felt a chill go down his spine.
Ivana was a college dropout. She barely knew how to use Excel. How could her terminal trigger a high-level algorithm correction?
Unless she wasn't who he thought she was.
He stood up.
"Bring her to me," he said.
