I'm The King of Business & Technology in the Modern World

May 6th, 2024 — 9:15 AMAurora Central Hub — Systems Monitoring Bay

The screen blinked red.

Just once. Barely noticeable. Like a heartbeat skipping. Then again—longer this time. Long enough for Angel to look up from her coffee, brows pulling together.

She walked over, tablet in hand, and leaned over the shoulder of the junior analyst manning the real-time systems dashboard.

"What was that?" she asked.

The analyst tapped furiously, scrolling through the data logs. "Packet loss on TBM Aurora's secondary telemetry feed. Could be routine signal bounce."

Angel frowned. "Could be?"

"Could be," he repeated, less certain.

She looked up just as Matthew entered, sleeves already rolled, a pen in his mouth and a checklist in one hand.

"You seeing this?" she asked.

He pulled the pen from his lips. "What's the issue?"

"Telemetry dropout on Aurora's secondary channel."

Matthew immediately crossed to the terminal. Within seconds, he was leaning in beside her, scanning lines of code and timestamps. "It's not just packet loss," he muttered. "Look at this spike."

She saw it—a sharp climb in the signal noise, just before the drop. Too clean to be random. Too irregular to be routine.

Matthew straightened. "Run diagnostics on the uplink node. We need to confirm it's not a hardware fault."

Angel tapped her tablet. "I'll pull the last full command stream from before the spike. If there's a misread at the command relay, we could be getting false readouts across multiple subsystems."

Her voice was calm. Focused. But inside, her pulse had picked up.

Something was wrong. And in this line of work, wrong meant delay. Delay meant exposure.

And exposure meant risk.

—

10:40 AM — HQ Crisis Review Room, Sentinel East Wing

Matthew stood at the front of the room with a laser pointer in one hand and a scowl on his face.

Angel was beside him, arms folded, eyes fixed on the display.

"Telemetry blackout originated here," he said, circling a node on the schematic. "Node 4B, just above Shaft 2. We lost twenty-three seconds of control feedback during cutterhead rotation. System defaulted to pre-programmed alignment."

A murmur ran through the room.

"That's not supposed to happen," said one of the engineers.

"It's never happened before," Angel replied, cold.

Matthew continued. "If the tunnel veered off alignment for even a meter, we'll need to reassess the structural integrity of that entire segment. At minimum, it's a two-week delay."

Another murmur. More frantic note-taking.

Angel added, "We've shut down Aurora until we finish a full diagnostic. No tunneling until the system checks clean."

Someone in the back cursed softly.

Matthew glanced sideways at her. She was already typing into her tablet. Efficient. Sharp. But her jaw was locked. That meant stress. That meant the pressure was mounting.

And this time, it wasn't just about machines.

It was personal.

—

12:20 PM — Sentinel HQ Rooftop, Private Balcony

Angel stood by the railing, tablet under one arm, coffee long since cold in her hand. She didn't hear Matthew approach until he was beside her.

"Bad time?" he asked gently.

She shook her head. "No. Just trying to get my brain to stop simulating failure cascades."

Matthew leaned against the railing next to her. "We'll fix it."

"I know," she said. "It's just…"

He waited.

"I hate when things break under my watch," she admitted. "Especially this. Especially Aurora. I feel like I let something slip."

"You didn't," he said immediately.

Angel gave him a side glance. "You don't know that."

"I do," Matthew replied. "You run a tighter system than anyone. If this happened, it's because something failed beyond your control."

She didn't respond.

He added softly, "You're not a machine, Angel."

She smiled faintly. "I know. But sometimes it feels like the system expects me to be."

They stood there for a while, letting the breeze cool their thoughts.

Then Angel asked, almost too quietly, "What if we're building something fragile?"

Matthew looked over. "The subway?"

"No," she said. "Us."

That stopped him.

He stepped closer. "Why would you think that?"

She bit her bottom lip. "Because things have been easy. Smooth. Like it's all momentum. But now? When something hits? I don't want us to crack."

Matthew took her hand. "Then let's not crack. Let's talk. Let's be honest. Let's not let one glitch make us doubt the entire system."

She looked at him, really looked.

And slowly, she nodded. "Okay."

—

2:00 PM — Aurora Central, Command Deck

The mood on the floor had shifted. Tighter. The buzz of progress was gone, replaced by tension.

Angel stood at the central display, eyes locked on the scrolling diagnostics.

Matthew appeared beside her, headset around his neck.

"We isolated the glitch," he said. "Corrupted firmware update. The secondary system didn't parse the new command packet correctly. It wasn't sabotage. Just a timing issue."

Angel exhaled. "So it was a hiccup."

"Yeah. But one we can't ignore."

She nodded. "We roll back the patch, push a stable version tonight, test again at 0400."

"Already scheduled," Matthew said.

They looked at each other.

And this time, there was no edge to the silence. Just calm. Just understanding.

—

5:30 PM — Rockwell, Matthew's Apartment

They were on the couch, shoes kicked off, reports silenced. Dinner was simple—noodles, scrambled eggs, and slices of leftover bread.

Angel rested her head on his shoulder. "You know what's funny?"

Matthew raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"I almost snapped at you earlier. When you told the team it wasn't my fault. I wanted to yell."

He blinked. "Why?"

"Because I was already blaming myself. And hearing you dismiss it made me feel… like I wasn't allowed to own it."

Matthew set down his glass. "Angel. You can own the pressure. But not the blame."

She sighed. "I know. I just needed a minute to get there."

He nodded. "We'll take as many minutes as it takes."

She turned to him, eyes soft. "You're annoyingly good at this."

"I studied emotional scaffolding," he said dryly.

She laughed.

Then kissed him.

—

8:00 PM — Aurora Diagnostic Room, Night Shift

The command feed blinked green again.

TBM Aurora, paused but healthy. Clean signal. Stabilized telemetry.

Angel tapped the log with quiet satisfaction.

Matthew stood behind her, arms crossed, watching her.

"System's clean," she said. "We go live tomorrow."

He nodded. "Good."

Then he reached forward and tapped her screen, right next to the phrase PRIMARY UPLINK PATH.

Next to it, he typed in one word: Resilient.

Angel turned, confused. "What's that?"

Matthew smiled. "A reminder."

"For what?"

"For us."

And in the heart of the hub they'd built, surrounded by blinking lights and the low hum of progress, the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder once again.

The glitch was gone.

But the lesson stayed.

Systems, like people, only grow stronger when tested.

And this system?

This one was built to last.