Maya sat in the control room as alarms layered over the hum. She thought of every person who had smiled when things worked better and felt the weight of what could go wrong.
She pocketed it.
HOT: Registration key detected. OWNER: UNK. AUTHENTICITY: VERIFIED. REQUEST: BIND.
"You're early," said Jonah from Infrastructure, glancing up from a bank of monitors. He was the sort of coworker who archived old jokes the way he archived incidents: meticulously. Maya smiled and padded past him to the secure desk—an oak slab between her and a room that housed the city's oldest running automation scripts: the Automated Vital Control suite, AVC for short.