Anita didn’t celebrate. She opened a command prompt, ran the manifest system’s bootstrap script, and watched the lines of green text cascade down the screen.

“We can’t pull the runtime from the web,” her junior, Leo, said, his face pale in the monitor’s glow. “The network’s partitioned. No external traffic in or out until the cable is spliced. Twelve more hours.”

It took seven minutes. Seven minutes of the building groaning around them, of distant shouts from the night crew. Then, a chime.

Anita stared at the blinking cursor on her terminal. Outside her window, the sprawling data center of Trans-Atlantic Freight hummed like a living thing. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and stale coffee. It was 2:00 AM, and the ship was sinking.