Chapter 6: Buried Data

Chapter 6: Buried Data

The PQC_MONITOR_ACTIVE: TRUE flag burned behind Greg’s eyes. It was a phantom afterimage on his retina, a digital brand marking him as the Director’s property. Every click of his mouse, every tap of his keyboard, was no longer a private action but a performance for an unseen, unforgiving audience. He felt a phantom weight on his shoulders, the gaze of the watchdogs, whoever—or whatever—they were.

He forced himself to breathe. Panic was a luxury he couldn't afford. It was also, he suspected, a nutrient Bishop would be all too eager to harvest.

He brought the file for Project 912 back to the forefront of his screen. The smiling faces of the Nightingale family stared back, oblivious. The countdown clock ticked mercilessly onward: 45:58:12. His previous attempts at direct sabotage had been pathetic, like a mouse trying to chew through a steel wall. The system Bishop had implemented was too smart, too responsive. It hadn't just been updated; it had been hardened against the very people who operated it.

His failed attempt to falsify the geological data replayed in his mind. The system had auto-corrected his input by cross-referencing live satellite data. The thought was chilling, but it also contained a kernel of an idea. The system relied on data. It trusted its own archives. If he couldn't create a flaw, maybe he could find one. A real one. A legitimate, pre-existing geological fault, a documented aquifer instability, anything that a safety protocol written in stone—a protocol even Bishop couldn't easily override—would flag as a no-go zone.

It was a long shot, but it was the only move he had left that could be disguised as diligent work. To any PQC watchdog monitoring his activity, he would simply look like a conscientious curator doing his due diligence, ensuring the ‘restoration’ site was perfect. He was hiding in plain sight.

He opened the agency’s deep archive server, a labyrinth of directories and sub-directories that contained decades of environmental and geological data. This was his home turf. He knew its architecture better than anyone, including the messy, forgotten corners left behind by previous administrations. He started with the Pisgah National Forest sector files, pulling up topographical maps, water table analyses, and historical survey data.

He spent nearly an hour cross-referencing public USGS data with the agency's more detailed proprietary surveys, looking for any discrepancy, any crack he could exploit. The work was methodical, painstaking, and so far, fruitless. The site Bishop had chosen was, from a logistical standpoint, perfect. Stable, secluded, with predictable weather patterns. It was as if she had anticipated his every move.

Frustration gnawed at him. He pushed deeper into the server’s file structure, past the neatly organized contemporary files and into the digital attic—the legacy directories from his predecessor’s tenure. The old Director, a man named Wallace, had been a bureaucrat of the old school, more concerned with budgets and golf scores than radical ecological theories. His filing system had been notoriously idiosyncratic and chaotic. Bishop's systematic purge had likely cleaned up most of it, but Greg knew that in any large-scale data migration, things get left behind. Digital ghosts.

And then he saw it.

It wasn't listed in the main directory tree. It was an unlinked, orphaned folder, accessible only if you knew the direct command-path string, a relic of a server configuration from five years ago. Greg only knew it because he’d helped set it up. Its name was bland, designed to be overlooked: ~DIR_ARCHIVE_DEPRECATED_77A.

His heart began to beat a little faster. He ran a quiet query. The directory was still active, but flagged as redundant, scheduled for deletion in a system-wide cleanup in six months. It had been missed.

He navigated to it, his screen flickering to a simple, text-based file list. It was a digital graveyard. Most of the files were encrypted with an old cypher key Wallace had taken with him into retirement. They were useless. But his eyes snagged on one file name that was different from the others. It wasn't encrypted, but its extension was corrupted.

F8T3_vLog_Corrupt.dat

A video log. It was small, only a few megabytes, which meant it was likely just a fragment. Greg’s hands trembled slightly. This was it. This was something outside of Bishop’s clean, new system. A voice from the past.

He quickly copied the file to a sandboxed local drive, a temporary partition that was less likely to be actively monitored by the PQC flag. He couldn’t risk trying to play it directly. He had to repair it first. He ran a data recovery utility, a piece of software he’d used countless times to salvage information from damaged field recorders.

A progress bar crawled across his screen with agonizing slowness. Scanning for salvageable data packets... The minutes stretched into an eternity. He kept glancing at the Nightingale file, at the ever-present countdown. 44:31:05.

Finally, the utility pinged. Recovery Complete. Audio Stream Partially Restored. Video Stream Unrecoverable.

His breath hitched. He plugged his headphones into the jack, ensuring the sound would be for his ears only. He clicked play.

The file opened with a harsh crackle of static, like a radio searching for a signal. Then, a voice burst through, panicked and strained. It was Wallace, the former Director, but not the complacent bureaucrat Greg remembered. This was a man at the end of his rope.

“—can’t control it anymore!” Wallace’s voice was thin, reedy with terror. In the background, Greg could hear the frantic shuffling of papers. “The containment breaches are becoming more frequent. Site 21 in Borneo, Site 45 in the Congo Basin… the growth is too aggressive, too… sentient. It’s not just restoring ecosystems anymore. It’s terraforming.”

A long pause, filled with a ragged, wheezing breath.

“The appetite… Christ, the appetite is growing,” the voice continued, dropping to a horrified whisper. “The profiles we’ve been using, the low-impact sources… they’re not enough. It’s demanding more. More complexity. It’s… adapting. Bishop thinks she can manage it, that she can bargain with it by giving it what it wants. She’s insane. She’s not managing it; she’s empowering it. She thinks she’s its high priestess, but she’s just its head waiter.”

The static grew louder, threatening to overwhelm the voice.

“She’s locked me out of the primary controls,” Wallace rasped, his desperation palpable. “There has to be a way… The founders… they foresaw this. The possibility of the Maw’s needs exceeding the parameters of the mission. There’s a protocol. A last resort. It’s not in the system; it can’t be. It’s buried in the original agency charter, the physical document. The failsafe… they called it the ‘Failsafe Protocol’… It’s the only—”

The audio cut out, replaced by the dead hiss of static.

Greg ripped the headphones from his ears, his mind reeling. He stared at the blank screen, the silence of the office pressing in.

Failsafe.

The word echoed in the void of his despair, a single, brilliant spark in the darkness. It wasn't just about saving one family anymore. Wallace’s terror, his warning about the Maw’s growing appetite and Bishop’s fanaticism, confirmed his worst fears. This wasn’t a stable system; it was an escalating crisis.

But it wasn't a hopeless one.

A failsafe. A last resort, hidden not in the digital world that Bishop controlled, but in the physical one. In the agency's founding charter. For the first time since he’d watched Dan Slater be consumed by the earth, a sliver of wild, dangerous hope broke through Greg’s terror. He had a new goal, one that went beyond mere survival or sabotage.

He had to find that charter. He had to find the failsafe. It was his only way out. It was the Nightingale family's only chance. And it was the only way to stop the hungry god that his agency served.