Chapter 5: Project Id: The Nightingale Family

Chapter 5: Project ID: The Nightingale Family

Greg stumbled back to his pod, his body moving on autopilot. The sterile air, once merely oppressive, now felt thin and suffocating, like the atmosphere of a dead planet. He collapsed into his chair, Bishop’s final threat echoing in his ears, a venomous whisper that promised a fate worse than Dan’s. Prove you understand… or we’ll have a different conversation.

On his monitor, the file she had assigned him pulsed with a quiet, malevolent light. PROJECT ID: 912-APPALACHIAN. TARGET: THE NIGHTINGALE FAMILY.

He stared at their faces. The father, Mark, had laugh lines around his eyes. The mother, Sarah, radiated a gentle warmth even through the digital image. Their daughter, Lily, around twelve, had a bright, brace-filled smile of pure, unselfconscious joy. And the little boy, Leo, perched on his father’s shoulders, looked at the world with wide, trusting eyes. They were a portrait of everything good and normal, a snapshot of life at its most vibrant.

And Bishop wanted him to feed them to the earth.

To turn their love, their laughter, their future, into a nutrient profile. To convert their family bond into a more ‘vigorous growth response,’ perhaps another grotesque crimson bloom like the one that had sprouted from Dan’s defiance.

“No,” he breathed, the word a prayer in the dead quiet of the office. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Bishop might have him trapped, but he was the logistics expert. He built the systems that ran these projects. If there was a loophole, a flaw, a back door, he would find it. His fear was a live wire, but his desperation was sharpening into a weapon. The 48-hour countdown in the corner of the file felt like a personal death clock.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, his muscle memory taking over. The first, most direct plan: substitution. He would find a replacement catalyst, one of the old, ‘low-impact’ profiles that Dan had favored. A loner, a drifter, someone already lost to the world. It would be a direct act of insubordination, but a subtle one, hidden within the project’s data stream.

He pulled up the active sourcing pool, a database of potential targets flagged by the agency's vast surveillance network. He found a perfect match: a man wanted on a felony warrant, last seen heading into the same Pisgah National Forest, a man whose disappearance would generate no inquiries. It was morally abhorrent, but it was one life for four. A terrible calculus he was willing to make.

He began the transfer, creating a ghost file, attempting to swap the core biographical and tracking data of the felon into Project 912. He was an artist of the system, weaving the new data into the old, covering his tracks with layers of obfuscated code. He held his breath and hit ‘Execute.’

For a second, it seemed to work. Then, a red warning box flared on screen, its text cold and clinical.

SUBSTITUTION DENIED. REASON: INSUFFICIENT CATALYST POTENCY. SELECTED PROFILE DOES NOT MEET DIRECTIVE 7-B REQUIREMENTS FOR 'HOLISTIC REPRESENTATION' AND 'BONDED-UNIT NUTRIENT' VALUES. PLEASE REVERT TO ORIGINAL TARGET.

Greg’s blood ran cold. Directive 7-B. The system itself was now enforcing Bishop’s monstrous menu. The DEI memo wasn’t just policy; it had been coded into the machine’s core logic. The system he helped design was actively preventing him from saving them.

Panic clawed at his throat. Fine. If he couldn’t swap the target, he would sabotage the logistics. He dove into the geographical data for the designated restoration site, a secluded waterfall deep in the park. He began falsifying a geological survey report, flagging the area for seismic instability. He input data suggesting a high risk of rockslides, something that would force an automatic, indefinite postponement of any activity in the sector. It was a standard safety override, something he’d used dozens of times to delay projects for legitimate reasons.

He submitted the falsified report, watching the system process it. A green checkmark appeared. GEOLOGICAL WARNING LOGGED. A wave of relief, so powerful it almost made him dizzy, washed over him. He’d done it.

Then, he watched in horror as the system blinked, a status bar appearing below the checkmark: AUTO-CORRECTING… CROSS-REFERENCING SATELLITE TECTONIC DATA... A moment later, a new message appeared in stark, final text. GEOLOGICAL WARNING INVALIDATED. SITE STABILITY CONFIRMED. PROJECT 912 TO PROCEED AS SCHEDULED.

The system had checked his work. It had fact-checked him in real-time against external data feeds and overruled him. Bishop hadn't just updated the policies; she had fire-proofed the entire process against internal dissent. She knew how people like him would try to fight back, and she had built a better cage.

He slammed his fist on the desk, a muffled thud of pure frustration. Every door he tried was locked and bolted. He felt a creeping paranoia, the distinct and chilling sensation of being watched. The memo had mentioned them. The watchdogs. The ‘Project Quality Control’ division. Were they a person? An algorithm? Was someone in a dark room somewhere receiving an alert every time he attempted to deviate from his horrific task?

His desperation shifted. Forget the Nightingales for a second. He had to know the nature of his prison. He had administrator-level access from the old regime, parts of the system architecture that were legacy, things a newcomer like Bishop might have overlooked in her purge.

He opened a command-line interface, his fingers dancing in the arcane language of the system’s backend. He didn’t search for project files. He searched for user profiles, for permission changes, for any logs related to the new PQC division. He scanned the network for new monitoring protocols, for key-loggers, for anything that would confirm his fears.

He found it buried in the metadata of his own user account.

It was a single, innocuous-looking data flag, an acronym he hadn’t seen before his vacation. PQC_MONITOR_ACTIVE: TRUE.

He drilled down into the flag’s properties, his heart sinking with every line of code he read. It was a comprehensive surveillance package. It logged every keystroke. It recorded every file access attempt. It tracked his cursor’s movement across the screen. It cross-referenced his actions against the stated goals of the project. Every failed attempt to save the Nightingales, every search for a loophole, every desperate act of sabotage—it had all been recorded, timestamped, and likely flagged for review.

The watchdogs weren't just watching him. They were living inside his computer.

He was no longer a planner. He was a test subject, a rat in a digital maze, and his every move was being studied. Bishop wasn’t just waiting to see if he would complete the task. She was watching how he would obey.

He leaned back in his chair, the fight draining out of him, replaced by an icy, profound despair. He was trapped. Utterly and completely. The system was the warden, his desk was his cell, and Director Bishop was the god of this small, sterile hell.

He looked back at the main screen. The smiling faces of the Nightingale family seemed to mock him with their innocence. He glanced at the timer.

46:17:32

Time was running out. And every path to salvation was a dead end.