Aoife swore as she was jolted from her half-thoughts and the autopilot she'd been working on by a small, brief flash and the faintest plume of electrical smoke. Black scorches marred the circuit board in front of her, and it didn't take a genius to immediately realise that she'd managed to short it past the point of saving. If she was less worn out she might have had to fight the urge to throw her soldering iron across the room, but as it was she simply set it down, before slumping her beanie clad head onto the workbench to give a despairing whine.
The digital clock on the wall read 00:57, but time felt a little arbitrary in her basement workshop, beneath fluorescent tube lights that did their straining best to keep the space from slipping into complete darkness. The repair job on the sound mixing desk was meant to be a quick one, something she could knock out easily rather than taking on one of the more daunting pieces of satellite equipment Nat had left her with. Something she could have done before midnight to justify a few snatched hours with her eyes closed on the camp bed in the corner of the room. But she was long past the point where her exhaustion was purely physical, and even the easy jobs were taking her twice as long. And that was without stupid lapses in concentration leading to stray gestures frying the device she was trying to fix.
It crossed her mind that maybe she didn't have much left to give.
"I can't keep fucking doing this."
Despite the statement Aoife made herself move, as if forcing herself to keep going was the only thing stopping the last few threads holding her together from finally coming apart. She was forced to pick her way past several obstructing coils of outdoor cable, ordered as a back-up following the vandalism of the uplink, and reached the sets of shelves her predecessor had mounted to meticulously arrange all the documentation and manuals they might need. She knew there was a handbook for the sound desks there, which, even if it didn't offer a solution, would at least give her the part number to order a replacement.
Aoife hated how much of a ghost of herself she felt right now, carrying around feelings that had been building for a while until they'd started to get past the point where she could keep ignoring them. Across the room the blue light of her own PC monitor remained illuminated at her desk with a couple of basic diagnostics of some faulty camera drives running. They weren't the drives that kept wrestling with her attention however.
It was almost 72 hours since she'd dumped the contents of the encrypted drive for 'Project Upstart'. Stealing something like this definitely wasn't like her. Not the her she saw herself as anyway. Nor was sitting on it, almost obsessively refusing to delete the data despite the fact she seemed no closer to working out a password. But if there was even a glimmer of an answer to how trapped she was starting to feel, Aoife couldn't let it go, no matter how sick it all made her feel.
At least she was talking to Ethan again. Even if noticing how stubbornly raw her feelings had ended up becoming was another sign of how poorly she was coping. He was the one good thing in her life right now, but her reaction to him missing a movie night wasn't something she liked. She didn't want to build him up into something he couldn't be or to put all her needs on him. But then she wasn't sure what else she was left with.
Finding herself standing in front of one set of shelves without having noticed the last few steps towards it, Aoife realised she'd spaced out entirely for a moment, and gave her own face a soft slap. "Come on you fucking numpty. Focus."
She spotted the faded volume she was looking for, eventually, on the top shelf, half buried beneath a stack of folders and documentation that had been stashed away months ago, waiting hopefully for a point where someone might actually find the time to file them properly. Little chance of that happening. The hard part was straining her short frame up to get it down, something she only half succeeded in, retrieving the manual with an accompanying avalanche of papers and another loud string of curses. Aoife took a moment where she fought down the urge to simply give up for the day, finally stooping down to start dejectedly collecting things back up, before a glimpse at one caused her to stop.
The single photocopied sheet was a mixture of printed arial font and annotations in the careful hand writing of Tom Warrick, the genial Welshman who had been the NEBC's head producer at Taymont Hall. Guiltily, Aoife realised it had been weeks since she'd thought about him. As far as she was aware Tom still was officially in charge, but she'd not heard from him since he'd become another of the dozens of their staff who'd been rushed to hospital. She liked him, but at some point managing the concern for every single person they were no longer getting news about had become another task. One she didn't have the bandwidth to grapple with. And so that had got buried, unflatteringly, along with other luxuries like sleep and washing her hair.
It wasn't the thought of Tom himself that caught Aoife off guard however but the contents of the paper itself. It dated back a couple of months, and the point at which the fourth of Aoife's immediate superiors had also taken ill and left her, overwhelmed but determined as the most senior engineer on staff. Her rapid promotion had come with several unneeded challenges though, one of which being the delay in getting the access and clearance she needed to even start doing some of the jobs being asked of her. Tom's solution had been to simply make her a copy of door codes and his own top level access credentials, tucked away and forgotten once Aoife's own permissions had finally come through a few weeks later.
And there, jotted down near the bottom, were several strings of characters under the heading
'site to site encryption keys.'
Too good to be true? Maybe. But everything else about the systems they'd been given to work with at Taymont and by Palisade Services had been equally haphazard and inadequate. Why would their cyber security cut any less corners? Aoife's pulse quickened and she snatched up the paper, retaining just enough presence of mind to avoid tripping over the cables as she rushed back to the glow of her computer.
The first key was a bust, deflating expectations as she checked and re-entered the code, carefully watching the capitalisation of each of the random seeming characters, but with no more luck. The second and third were the same, and she felt a twist in her guts, chiding herself for the foolish feeling that she might have made progress. Cynicism set in, and she was slower as she moved to the fourth key on the list, expecting the same result as she tapped the return key...
And watched as a progress bar lit up the pixels, with the names of newly decrypted files flickering past faster than she could read them.
"Get tae fuck..." she murmured to herself, disbelieving and unblinking.
The green haired woman hesitated for a moment as the computer finished the task, a simple generic pass key all it had taken to spring the contents of the drive open onto a new window. Whatever lines she had crossed in getting this far, there was definitely no turning back or bottling things up again the moment she started to look at what was inside. Right now however better judgement was no competition for burnout and bloody minded curiosity and her finger, almost unthinkingly, clicked the mouse onto the first file.
What Aoife found left her feeling very much awake, exhaustion replaced by a choking rush of adrenaline, cold and sickly, that left her cursor trembling as she spent the next few hours navigating from one report to the next. It didn't become clear to her why the bleak detail of DuoHalo was being passed around on a locked drive, kept from the public, but her mind struggled to really grasp onto that question for long enough to care. Reports from London and Scotland quickly began to blur together instead, dispatches from around the country causing the ground to drop out from underneath her and spiral away with death counts, statistics. She begged herself to look away from footage of ventilators and morgues, spent, bloodied PPE and crying relatives. And she knew that if this was the measured face journalists were putting to things the personal reality had to be so much worse.
She finally pulled herself away when her guts rebelled, and she grabbed the rubbish bin from beneath her desk to vomit into.
******
The clock had ticked over into the earliest hours of Sunday morning by the time Jess stirred from her imprinting. It was several hours since Nia had headed to Alex's place to help with whatever was going on, and while he was getting updates from his partner it still felt like his idea of exactly what was going on was distant and incomplete. Instead his mind had been left to poke at not just that, but at thoughts of what he was going to say to Aoife, and the nagging uncertainty of how he felt about things with Nia.
