Into that space, though, something had just entered that clearly didn’t belong. It was… I couldn’t tell what it was. One corner was squared, sharply, like a building block. The opposite faces were irregular, rippling and jerking like some kind of living thing. Its surface shifted colors rapidly, along with its shape, though the three edges of it remained consistent. Fragments grew and shrank in the air, fingerlike projections or completely separate objects that vibrated slowly before fading out or merging with the underlying structure. It didn’t even announce itself; one moment it wasn’t, and the next it was, letting out chirps and warbles seemingly at random.

“So what is it?” Imogen asked, her paws on her hips. “More to the point, where’d it come from? I thought you said this place was closed.”

“It is,” I insisted. I hesitated a moment, then added, “It was, anyway.” I opened my hardline and scanned through menus, looking for intrusions or malware, but each check came back clean. “I’m not seeing anything. Giri, any ideas?”

The fox shook his head, his tail lashing behind him. “I have checked it twice; even with your added permissions, it has no properties, no structure. It does not actually exist.” He scowled. “It reminds me uncomfortably of the FutureShock.”

I nodded at that. “Yeah, but Jules isn’t here, and he did the real hackery on that place.” I looked back at Imogen. “Let people know we’re poking at it, but truth is I don’t know.” I glanced at Giri, but the fox shook his head. I sighed; I wanted to tell her more, but Giri was right to advise against it.

The mouse nodded, then walked back towards the group she’d been addressing before. “C’mon, folks. Let’s go somewhere else and let these guys work. C’mon, everybody, make some room. Soon as these guys have things figured out, they’ll let us know.” She motioned, and despite the collective groans of about a hundred weary people, they rose and began to shuffle away, towards another part of the space. Before they’d even gotten a few steps, though, Imogen was back into her story, and it sounded like the others sank quickly back into the rapture of her narratives.

As soon as Imogen’s voice was down to a murmur, I looked back at Giri, voice low. “Any clue? I’m at a loss.”

Giri shook his head again. “The server is failing; that much is certain. Could this be a side effect?”

I stared at the shifting block and shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. I can hack a bit on back-end stuff, but my job was always front-end components. Aesthetic, not functional. I’d need somebody like Jules or Briar for details, and even she might not know.” I sighed. “I’m afraid this is out of my league.”

The fox stared intently at the shifting image, a frown spreading on his muzzle. “It is growing.” He motioned with one paw to the object. “It has a second corner now.”

I looked where he indicated, tailtip hooking in frustration. “You’re right, it does. That still doesn’t tell us what it is, though, or anything else.”

“You know as much as I at this point,” Giri said. “I would have to do a deep dive to determine more, but I am not sure I would know what I am seeing. It does not appear to have definition, yet it is there. It is not anything, yet it exists. And it is still growing.”

I watched with fascination as a square, about a foot per side, slowly filled the space. The chattering and clicking that it emitted changed in timbre as, and the shapes that it filled rapidly took on the edges and corners. It looked almost as though someone were pouring luminescent, light-and-sound-reactive goop into an invisible mold that hung perfectly still in the air. It ratcheted up to the top of the space, and then, as if meeting an invisible lid, it leveled itself and then formed a perfectly shaped rectangle, about four inches tall.

As if cued by its completion, a shout rang out across the space. Heads turned, and Giri and I broke into a sprint towards the voice. Imogen beat us to the site and already asking questions of a visibly-upset black cat as we approached. “What is it? What happened?” She spread her drawl thick, resting a paw on her shoulder. “It’s okay now. Everything’s gonna be—” She stopped, then followed the cat’s pointing finger to a space in front of her in which letters and numbers hung in space. “Ah, hell.”

“It just showed up out of… hey, is that my—” She stopped, as the block started to echo her speech, but a scant moment before she spoke, as if it knew what she was about to say. The same words scrolled in space, in a vivid violet, starting cleanly at one point, then disappearing off raggedly off of another. Perpendicular to that, code fragments flickered. The area between them filled in rapidly as the cat spoke. “What’s it… it’s writing down what I say!” She looked at Imogen, then me. “Why’s it—it’s hard to… to talk with… with that. How is it… doing that?”

“I have no idea,” Giri said, spacing his words evenly. His words showed up a deep blue calligraphic script. “I find this even more disturbing, though.”

I nodded. “Me, too. It’s like it’s—” My own text looked like angular gold text, blocky and monospaced. “It’s… reading out of the—” I stopped, head snapping to Giri.

The security expert’s head canted to the side. “What? What is it?”

Imogen leaned forward and adjusted her pince-nez. “Yeah, you look like—” I made a quick cut-it gesture, dragging my paw across my throat, and she snapped her jaws shut, her teeth clacking audicbly; the sound showed up as a splat of red in the air.

I put a finger over my muzzle, then motioned for them to follow me. They exchanged glances but did so, stepping away from the fresh distortion. I looked back at it, then squinted and whispered, “test, test.” The midair text block flickered, and I sighed, returning to full volume. “Damn, never mind.”

“What?” The word was simultaneous from three muzzles. A cacophony followed, as they sorted out who spoke next, but Imogen easily overpowered both of the others. “Don’t leave us hanging, John; what is it?”

I pointed to the space as it swelled. “It’s a chunk of the speech engine. It’s… it’s how the graphics engine is rendering the speech engine.”

Imogen and the cat just blinked in confusion, but Giri’s eyes shot open in shock. “Are you sure, John?”

I nodded. “Pretty sure. I can’t think of any other way it would be getting that information.”

Imogen held up a paw. “You two lost me at ‘chunk,’” the mouse said. “Try again, in English.”

Giri jammed his paws into the pokets of his coat. “If John is correct—and I hope he is not—it is… a piece of Irokai’s underlying software that Irokai’s display system is attempting to render.”

“Okay, I get that,” the mouse said slowly. “But why? And what’s so bad about that?”

I looked at Giri, then back at Imogen. “It’s… listen, this plan… the server can’t hold everybody on here right now. I deleted everything I could, but I’ve still got more people on here than my development box can sustain at the same time. Everything we do, it all takes memory. Computer memory. Every thought, every action, it’s all computer code. It takes memory to execute, to tell who’s doing what. We’re running out of it. It’s—” I barked a laugh. “It’s the only limited resource we have… and we’re running out.”

Imogen blinked and canted her head to the side. “How do you run out? Nobody new is showing up. Nobody’s running anything, right?”

Giri shook his head. “It is not so simple. There must be a time delay between when a bit of memory is allocated to record that someone has done something, and when the bit that marked the past state is freed, to ensure that all systems have the new state. The more people, the more things are present, the more complex the interactions, the longer delay that must be to ensure safety.”

I nodded at the fox. “Jules explained it to me once, but he’s the genius on this stuff. The short form is that the system’s out of memory, and it’s out of backup memory, and there’s nothing left for it to use to store people’s actions… so it’s using whatever memory it can.”

The cat blinked. “You mean it’s…” She looked back at the block of code, then burst out, “It’s bigger! Oh, my god, it’s… there’s another one!” Her finger shot out suddenly, and I followed it to another patch of flickering graphics hanging in mid-air, some distance away.

I groaned. “It’s run out of everything else, so it’s using this space. And because it is, everything that happens on the back-end that shows up is rendering, and we’re all seeing it, so it’s changing the environment that much faster!” I looked at Giri. “This… this beats the Beni hack, by a long shot.”

Girl smirked. “I believe this is where Mitsuko would say, ‘oh, hai.’”

Imogen put a paw on each of our shoulders. “Okay, bad. What do we do? How do we stop it?”

I blinked. “Stop it? We can’t stop it. Anything we do makes it grow faster!”

The mouse’s eyes hardened, “John, that’s—damnit!” The cat took off at a run, over to a group of people, pointing and jabbering agitatedly at the distortions. They turned, then approached, and the volume spread as their words were echoed, then spread as they went to show others. “I swear, nobody learns around here,” she grumbled, putting her muzzle in her paw. “You and Giri work on this; I’m gonna go stop the deluge.” Then she clapped us on the back and followed the others. “Hey! Hey!”

I tuned her out, then looked back to Giri. “This is going to go to hell fast if we don’t do something. Ideas?”

Giri shrugged. “I do not know. I wanted to understand the way in which my world worked, but… now I am not so sure.”

I shook my head, then popped open my hardline. “There’s got to be something.” I started scanning menus. “Change the garbage collection speed.”

The fox shook his head. “Desynchronized actions and corrupted accounts.”

I scowled. “Cache dump.”

He shook his head again. “That would make the problem worse; we want fewer misses, not more.”

“Damnit, Giri, I want help, not—” I caught myself mid-outburst. “Sorry, sorry, this is… stressful. Suspend the whole system, wait for Jules.”

Giri nodded. “I… am unused to being afraid, myself. If we trust that, we should have trusted the rollback. Plus, we have no way to know if he will be able to restore us, regardless of whether he wants to do so.”

“Right. Damnit. I’m running out of options here.” My eyes flicked over hovering menu choices. “What about—” A scream cut me off, followed by another. I turned, then gaped. The cat that had run from the conversation had one paw on her other elbow, shaking and crying as she tried to pull her first out of a silvery box shot through with multicolored lightning streaks. One of the people she had gone to see had her by the shoulders and was trying to extract her; the other was backing away quickly, then suddenly turned and bolted.

“Help me!” the cat shrieked, blubbering. “Help me, please!”

That was the only spark the room needed. What had been a crowd instantly became a mob, people running in terror from the alien blocks and from each other. Some tried to help; others tried to escape. Of course, with all that commotion, the system needed that much more memory to render it all, and the only place it had left to find it was in here. Alien spires and fractal fragments began to materialize across the universe as the graphics engine seized more memory to try to display what was happening.

I looked back at Giri, eyes hard. “Space partition; cut the ceiling in half, buy us some more time.” The fox didn’t respond. “Giri, I need your opinion here. What about—Giri? Giri, what’re you doing? I told you, no loading!”

The fox had a sword in his paws; I hadn’t seen him with it when he’d arrived. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember him having one, but he held it balanced across his pads, his head bowed. “I… am sorry, John. It is the right thing to do. Please… give my apologies to Briar.”

I blinked. “Giri? Giri, what the hell are you—no! No, no, no!” I ran over to grab the fox by his lapels. “Don’t you dare quit on me!”

He smiled. “This is not abandoning the fight; this is giving you a little more time. It is… fitting. This is the role Tadashiissei wanted me to play, so I will play it. Good-bye, John-kun.” He drew the blade in a graceful arc from its sheath, then turned it in his wrist and, with a solid thrust, rammed its tip into his gut. There was no blood; he must’ve been too conscious of how much rendering power that would take. Instead he just… froze in place. He didn’t even crumple or fall. His body just stopped moving. His eyes were squinted tightly closed against the shock and pain, but on his muzzle was an almost beatific smile, his head upturned and his tail held high.

“Damnit!” I swung at the statue of Giri in front of me, but as my fist came in contact with it, a black square shot with angry red lines materialized around his head, wiping the smile off of his muzzle and catching my fingers in mid-air. “Shit!” I felt my heart leap into my throat as panic tried to set in. Screams and cries filled the spaces around me, interspersed with static and pure-tone beeping. Music rippled across the panel in front of me, notes making the lines wink on and off. A wolf grabbed my arm. Her eyes were gone; in each socket, a pair of luminescent letters glowed. She opened her muzzle to say something, but only the smell of violets and shift right two && call_function(vox, TRUE, #0xA1830128725E); came out.

Make or break(); time. There had to be something I could do. I wasn’t going to let this be LOOKUP_FAIL(memory()); NO_SWAP(memory());. Why couldn’t I think of anything? The rollback had to be almost done by now; we just had to hold out a little longer, but we couldn’t. The system would resync any minute now, and the database would offload its Atomic transaction(rollback) aborted mid-process; unable to write to log; but we couldn’t wait. We were out of time.

Time. Timing. open_menus(admin(TRUE)); Scan down to the system statistics. Find the Irokai services. It is a shame he could not come back, Mitsuko said. Lower priority. Lowest priority. Garbage collection. The scent of rotten eggs, the feel of something unpleasantly moist, and a charnal taste, overwhelming. Highest priority. Less action per time unit. More time for sync. Time.

Hopefully it was enough.

Imogen looked up at the podium, then nonchalantly adjusted her glasses. “You sure got their attention,” she quipped sardonically. “Think maybe you can get everyone else’s?”

I nodded, then lifted my arms to my sides, amplifying my voice to boom over the plaza again. “Everyone, please! Calm down!” If the crowed noticed, nobody reacted. “This is an intimidation tactic to get us to disperse; it’s harassment, and it’s illegal. Everybody, relax; we’ll take care of it.”

The mouse pulled the pince-nez from her muzzle and breathed on them, then polished the lenses with her vest. “Nice. Here’s some free advice for you, John: don’t go into politics; stick with advertising.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and let out a piercing whistles that rattled the windows and turned the heads of everyone standing in Tadashiissei Plaza. “Everybody, sit tight! They’re playing hardball. Don’t let ‘em see you sweat and we’ll get through this just fine!” At that, the crowd started to stabilize, and the shouts faded back to a dull roar. Imogen then grinned up at me. “All yours, John. You’ve got about ten minutes before people start cracking again.”

As much as I appreciated the help, I was fighting my own rising panic. I held out a paw to her, pads out. “One sec, please.” I opened my hardline, then snapped through menus to send a message to Mits, asking her where she was. She hadn’t answered the last five times I’d paged, but I had to try again. This time, as will all the others, the only reply I received came from the subsystem handling communications: the person you are attempting to reach is not presently available; please try again later.

“Damnit!” I swore, pounding one fist against the other. “Where is she?”

The mouse cocked her head to the side. “Who, thin raccoon that was with you when you arrived? Green blouse, white pants?”

I nodded. “Mitsuko. She’s a resident, too. I have to find her, make sure she’s okay.”

“Ouch.” Imogen grimaced, then looked around the crowd. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s okay right now, though.”

I nodded, but my eyes were back on the crowd, scanning for Briar and Giri, but they weren’t hard to find. The fox and rabbit were clinging to each other like lovers in a life raft, his arms around her shoulders, hers around his waist. I glanced back to the mouse and said, “Let me get theirs first.” Then, punctuating my words with a sharp whistle, I called out to my co-conspirators. “Briar! Giri! Get up here, please?” The two looked at each other, then back to me. As the approached, I grabbed the fox’s arm to help him onto the platform, started talking fast. “I need you to run interference on the crowd and get people calmed down. I have to go find Mits.”

I made it one-and-a-half steps before Briar grabbed one arm, Giri the other. “I can’t let you do that, John,” the rabbit said. “We need you.”

“Mits needs me,” I growled back, my tail lashing. “I have to go find her.”

Giri shook his head. “I must agree with Briar, John-kun.” The fox’s grip tensed against my fingers. “This situation is of your… our… making. We have a responsibility to protect them from this.”

My eyes went wide. “Protect them from a rollback?” I blinked. “How?”

Despite the gravity of his expression, Giri’s eyes twinkled. “You work in development; you tell me.”

I shook my head rapidly. “No, listen, I don’t have time for this; I have to go find Mits and make sure she’s safe.” I turned away from the two of them, but neither one would release their grip on my shoulder or arm.

“For aether’s sake, John,” Briar sighed in exasperation. “Start thinking digitally already!” She tugged on my sleeve, spinning me to face her, then gripped the sides of my head in her paws. “Mitsuko is fine. Yes, she might be panicking now just like you are, but consider. Either the rollback works as planned, or it doesn’t. If it does, you’re both restored to pre-disaster versions of yourself. Your relationship’s older than this crisis; it’ll survive. If it doesn’t, you’ll be back as you are now without any perception of the intervening time. Either way, you’ve got no reason to panic.” She looked at the fox. “It’s you I’m worried about; we only got together after this whole mess started.”

“That is untrue,” Giri replied, a faint smile spreading on his muzzle. “I arrested you for shoplifting before the attacks.”

I rolled my eyes. “Touching, very touching. Now let go, or I’ll delete you both myself.”

Briar grinned. “You can’t; you don’t have access.”

I sighed. “Not here, but if you were—that’s it!” I snapped my claws sharply. “I’ve got an idea. Let go already; we don’t have time for this. I said I’m not running and I meant it.” The two hesitated, looking at each other, then stepped away from me. “Thank you,” I continued. “So, I still have my old development server hooked onto the system. The shutdown probably won’t take that offline, and any code running there is probably safe.”

“Probably?” Giri folded his arms across his chest, looking skeptical. “You do not know?”

I shrugged. “I doubt it; too many people have bought those and spent way too much money on them. My account’s paid out through the month, and I can pay that one manually for a while. If we need, we can probably take up a collection to keep it active. Besides, do you have a better idea?”

When the fox shook his head, I opened my hardline. Some of my options were already grayed out, but the messaging system still worked. I need your help, I sent in a meeting invite to Jules. Can you meet me at the transit station?

The reply came quickly: Weren’t you the one saying being seen around the HQ was a bad move for me? I’ve read the transcripts from your spat with Security; nice job giving away the farm.

I let out a groan. Not now, Jules, I shot back.I need a portal to my server. We need to move people.

What for? It’s just a rollback. At least it fixes the problems. I could hear Jules’ shrug in his text.

I sighed and snapped out a fast reply. And makes more. Last known-good backup means before the attacks. Means before the revolt. Means none of us inside remember why we were fighting. Means you stay banned and we don’t know why you’re so angry again.

Jules was silent for several seconds, then shot back, Be there in three, hon. Then his icon went grey.

I laughed and shook my head. “He never changes.” I looked at Imogen, then Briar and Giri. “Jules says three minutes.”

Imogen glanced upwards, then back to me. “You probably got two. Who is this guy, anyway?”

The rabbit’s ears had already perked. “Jules? He’s one of the founders of the FutureShock. Guy’s a genius coder, if a little fast and loose. I thought he’d gone native when I first met him; I only found out he wasn’t when he got banned for making a stink about uploading.” She hesitated a moment, then mused way too innocently, “I didn’t know he was back. Did they lift his ban?”

I couldn’t keep the faint smirk from my muzzle. “Somebody sent him an induction rig and a hacked account. Somebody on the inside with ties to Minshukakumei.”

That got Giri’s attention; the fox snapped his head around, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Are you saying that someone within Tadashiissei was working to destroy Irokai?” His tail lashed, and I saw one of his paws reflexively go to his hip before clenching into a fist.

I shook my head. “I think somebody on the inside is playing double-agent, and Jules got caught in the middle. Tadashiissei destroying its own creation makes no sense. No, I think the company found out about a group of active dissidents, they tried to deal with it quietly instead of admitting they had security holes, and things ended up getting out of control.” I grinned. “They fell victim to their own hubris, and they awoke a sleeping dragon.” At Giri’s puzzled expression, I explained. “The populist backlash. They made people angry enough to fight back.”

The fox nodded, tail waving behind him. “It makes sense, though it still makes me angry. So much of this could have been avoided.”

Briar shrugged. “Yeah, well, hindsight has perfect vision, so they say. Now they’ve got a bunch of angry residents and they’re about to try to clean up their mess by wiping everything back to how it was, which means if Jules doesn’t get his tail here soon, they’re going to get away with it.”

“They won’t,” Jules replied.

The rabbit whipped around, one paw on her chest. “Don’t do that! Are you trying to get me to jump out of my pelt?”

The wolf grinned, his ears perked and tail waving. “That’d be kind of hot, but—” He glanced to the side, at Giri’s glare. “I don’t think your new boyfriend would approve.” He turned to me, his paws jammed into the pockets of his oversized pants. “So what’s the plan? I heard the Voice. And where’s Mitsuko?”

I nodded in response. “We’ve got about forty-five minutes, and Mitsuko is… not responding to my messages. Is your account still wide open?”

Jules’ tail lashed once. “Really.” His eyes flicked about in his skull for a few seconds. “Yeah, everything seems to be there, why? Are you really going to try to crowd everyone onto your dev box?”

I shrugged. “It’s the best option I can provide right now. Once I’m on there I should be able to make room for everyone.”

“John, love, that box isn’t sized to hold that many people.” The wolf’s eyes tightened around the corners and his voice dropped to a low whisper. “I don’t think you understand the load you’re asking to put on that thing, and its support system’s about to get bounced. You’re talking about….” He visibly snapped through menus, fingers tapping against the air. “Two-thousand people on a server maybe sized for a quarter of that. It’s a development system, which means not ready for production. You overload it, it goes down in the middle of the rollback… I don’t want to think about what happens.”

My chest froze. “So do you have a better idea?” I asked in the same tone.

He shook his head. “No, but I don’t see how you’re going to make this work.”

I grinned, tail hooking. “You get me a public portal and get everyone here and then we’ll worry about that.”

Jules’ grimace deepened. “No, you’ll worry about that. I’ll be calling Adam once you’re up and running and then taking off.”

“Taking off?” I blinked. “But… Adam? And what about all of this?”

Jules ticked off points on his clawtips. “One, I’d just be one more person on the system, and I have no idea what I’m doing to the local environment coming in from the outside. On Tadashiissei’s boxes, I didn’t care so much. On yours, right now, that’s a risk I won’t take. Two, great job sidestepping the rollback, getting out of their environments, but now you’re on an isolated system that’d be way too easy to unplug. Somebody with physical access to the box needs to go guard it until they’re finished. Three, I need Adam to come unplug me because I’m on an intravenous line and my disconnect function’s on a hard timer that’s not set to go off until some time Sunday night when the bag runs dry.”

My eyes went wide, accompanied by Briar’s gasp. “Jules!”

The wolf’s ears went flat. “John, don’t start on me,” he growled. “I said I wanted to live here. Give me some credit, here. I’m not doing anything they don’t do in the pods, just with homebrew equipment.”

“They don’t turn off people’s safety switches!” I shouted back, then immediately caught my voice and lowered it. “Jules, assuming I survive this, we’ve got to have a talk about boundary-setting.”

Jules winced, but his grin returned anyway. “If you make it through this unchanged, then it was a good thing I did this. If you don’t, you won’t remember it anyway. If you don’t make it, it won’t have mattered.” He brought his paws together and cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get this started.” His eyes closed, but beneath the lids they shook rapidly, and put his paws in front of him as if resting them on a table. “I don’t see a teleport-enabled door around here I can borrow; I’ll have to make one.” The Voice of Irokai started to announce unauthorized local edits, then suddenly fuzzed into unintelligible static as a rippling liquid silver mirror poured into place, hanging vertically in midair. “I always hated that voice,” he muttered. “Now, John, I need a door on your side. Object reference, database name, something.”

I scanned my notes and documentation, then passed the wolf a reference. “Main airlock to the station.”

“Station?” His head canted to the side. “Right, right. This ought to come through any minute. Send me a back link, and whatever you do, don’t delete this door. I don’t care what else you purge, but leave this one intact. Once it’s gone, I won’t be able to put it back.” His connection request arrived and I approved it. “Good, now go through and send me back a remote link request; different zone, so you’ll have to—”

I waved off the rest of the explanation. “I remember how to do this; I’ve got one in my office. See you…” I stopped, then looked at the wolf, my ears drooping. “I’ll see you after this is over, I guess.”

Jules nodded. “I’ll hang around until the request comes in, then call Adam. It’ll take him about ten minutes to get to my place, and fifteen to get to the data center, so figure half an hour and we should be in place. If they’re going right at fourteen, that’s five minutes of leeway. You better hope we don’t hit traffic. Take care.” One paw snapped out and grabbed the collar of my shirt, then tugged me into a rough kiss before shoving me towards the portal. “Now move.”

I broke the kiss roughly, then turned to the others. “Once I have the place pared down, I’ll contact you and you can start sending people through. We’re going to be cutting this close, but we should make it. Everyone ready?” When they all nodded, I dashed through the portal. As soon as I was on the far side, my feet left the floor, sent flying from the force of a step in the local microgravity. Behind me, the iris of the airlock stayed stubbornly open, a hack Jules must have put in place to keep the connection open.

It took me a few moments to sort out my bearings, but I quickly had the development panel open and started flipping through server statistics. With everything set as it was right now, the server could safely hold about five-hundred people, with another fifty pushing it into the danger zone. I grimaced; the station had to go if I wanted to fit everyone onto the system. First, though, I could de-allocate the biggest wastes. Space went first, as did everything else outside the station walls; that doubled my available memory. The physics engine governing orbital mechanics got me another hundred. I glanced out one of the portals at the black emptiness beyond; no stars glittered, no suns burned.

I shivered; this was about to become a really desolate place. Walls and doors started disappearing. Shops and pylons vanished. Every chair, table, and detail that didn’t have to be there rapidly went into the trash and was purged. Soon I was down to the outer walls, a few textures, and the airlock; the server cap sat stubbornly at 1900. I closed my eyes and shook my head. A few finger twitches wiped out everything but the doorway and defined a single featureless rectangle of space, three meters tall, a hundred on a side. Everything else I reverted back to system defaults, as blank as the day I got it. Then I started scanning the base code and wiped everything I could think to remove. I hesitated a moment on the checkbox for the archive system, then disabled it as well.

I glanced at the capacity meter: 1970. It would have to do. I opened my communication window and sent a message to Briar and Jules. The server is ready. Have Imogen start sending people through.