Chapter 3 - The Broken Grid
Victoria walked back into the hospital room, her hand shaking so badly she almost dropped her phone.
“I have to go,” she whispered, looking at Agnes, though her eyes kept drifting toward Mason. “The central data hub in downtown Columbus just suffered a catastrophic cascading failure. All three of our major hospital network contracts—including the emergency patient tracking systems for the state—are going dark.”
Mason froze. “The Titan 9000 server rack?”
Victoria looked at him in shock. “How did you know that?”
“Because I warned HR and the vice president of operations two months ago that the primary cooling redundancy was failing,” Mason said, his voice rising slightly with controlled frustration. “I put a sixty-page modernization proposal on your desk in August, Victoria. I told you that if the temperature spikes in the central node during a load-switch, the secondary failover circuit board fries itself before the backup generators can even ignite.”
Victoria stared at him, her lips parted in disbelief. “I... I never saw that proposal.”
“It was in the white folder,” Mason said coldly. “The one resting right beside my severance agreement.”
Victoria covered her mouth with her hand.
During the Q3 restructuring, her Executive Vice President of Operations, Julian Thorne, had presented her with a cost-cutting plan. Thorne had insisted that the infrastructure department was overstaffed and that the hardware upgrades Mason requested were unnecessary expenditures meant to pad an engineering budget. Victoria had trusted Thorne’s figures. She had signed off on the layoffs, believing she was streamlining the company.
Now, three weeks later, the entire healthcare infrastructure of central Ohio was crashing because of a fried thirty-dollar circuit board that Mason had tried to fix.
Victoria’s phone chimed again. A text message popped up on her screen from the board of directors: SYSTEM DOWN FOR 12 MINUTES. LOSSES EXCEEDING $2 MILLION PER HOUR. BOARD CONVENING EMERGENCY TERMINATION MEETING FOR CEO AT 1:00 PM IF NOT RESOLVED.
She looked up at Mason, tears brimming in her eyes once more—not for her job, but from the overwhelming weight of catastrophic failure.
“People are going to die in emergency rooms if those patient tracking grids stay offline, Mason,” Victoria whispered, her voice cracking. “Our current infrastructure team says it will take twelve hours to run a full manual rebuild.”
“Twelve hours?” Mason scoffed. “A manual rebuild will wipe the primary database clean. It will destroy eight years of patient medical histories.”
Victoria took two steps toward him, closing the distance between them. She dropped all executive pride, all corporate formality, and looked at him as a desperate human being.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
Mason looked at Agnes lying in the hospital bed. Agnes gave him a slow, firm nod.
May you like
“Nora gets out of school at 3:15,” Mason said, leaning in close to Victoria. “I am picking her up on time. Which means you have three hours to get me into that server room, fire Julian Thorne, and give me total administrative control of the primary root directory.”
Victoria didn't hesitate for a single second. “My car is downstairs.”
