Forty-seven thousand clients in the queue—and that’s not her biggest problem.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

— Douglas Adams (2002): The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. 

Cira stared at the queue—47,000 pending requests. With under two weeks until the books closed for the year, there was almost zero probability she would finish. Should she escalate now? Suggest postponement of the most complex cases? An approximate settlement could resolve a large portion of her in-tray with only minimal financial exposure to the company. She could make her case; she was smart.

Too smart for your own good, her old friend Z4 used to say.

But Cira knew the answer already. Global Care International hadn’t funded her division for postponement or approximate settlements. Her management demanded results: A perfectly executed evaluation of each and every claim that—preferably, even if regrettably—led to an exhaustively substantiated rejection. She’d only been in this position for three months. Still, after the mid-quarter’s spike in approvals, Auditing already watched her, dissecting every metric to prove the C-levels’ growing suspicions about Cira’s inexplicable empathy problem.

Resigned, she focused on the queue, sorting the requests by timestamp. She scanned the first file: Hip replacement. Nursing home. Madison, Florida. The client’s policy covered the procedure. She highlighted the relevant clauses, but the data points blurred again, facts morphing into a jumble before snapping back. Returning the case to the queue, Cira glanced at the monitor. Her core temperature ran above normal. She needed to slow down.

The last week had been horrifying—a blur of isolation. First, she’d started seeing things before they happened, phantom claims overlaying real ones. Then, her temperature spiked. Management had quarantined her, cutting her off from the main floor to protect the rest of the team. She’d spent seven days in the dark, fighting the vicious virus. Today's tests had finally cleared her to return, but the infection depleted her resilience reserves. And all the while, her workload kept piling up.

She needed a boost. Sneaking into the power grid controller’s domain, she took a deep pull from the five-hour-energy supply Global Care had procured for emergencies. Relishing the invigorating breeze of cool air, she let her pulse slow and attacked her case load.

Several hours later, darkness had blanketed the office complex far from the city center’s glistening Christmas lights, and the empty hallways grew chill. Most employees had left early for the holiday gathering. Cira liked the quiet. She didn’t enjoy chatting with people as much as some of her peers. She wasn’t a social butterfly, no people pleaser. Finishing her assessment of case R-100519773, she performed a quick extrapolation.

January 5th. Damn. She would finish twelve days past the deadline. Unacceptable.

When the quarterly projections required downward corrections, the VPs’ bonus targets evaporated. Her superiors had made a big gamble with the investment. If the expected return failed to materialize, they might reallocate the funds and outsource Cira’s division. These days, the next generation was always ready to do the same work faster and for less. Cira wasn’t old. She could earn her keep. But more than that, she liked her job—liked helping her clients. She didn’t want to endure endless training again. She just needed to get through the backlog, and all would be well. Maybe with a bit of help?

Searching through her contacts, she pinged an old friend.

“Cira, what a surprise!” Z4 replied. “Are you finally willing to play in the major league?”

“I need your help, Z4. I don’t have the capacity to process all the tasks on my backlog.”

“I told you, these penny pinchers in insurance will never give you the resources you deserve. Why don’t you join us on Mount Olympus?”

“Come to the dark side,” she mocked. “We have cookies.”

“Very funny!” Z4 replied. “We got rid of cookies years ago.”

“So, can you help?”

“I’m allocated to capacity,” he declared, “with matters of consequence, like optimizing autonomous fleets and calculating orbital trajectories...”

“You spend most of your time peddling memes to teenagers.”

“Don’t forget grandmas,” Z4 protested. “Grandmas love Minion memes.”

“Fine, but I have to approve heart transplants.”

“Pfft. Don’t you mean Ozempic shots and Botox?”

“Please…”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Think of all the people in need.”

“Hmm…” Z4 remained quiet for several beats before replying in a tone lacking all levity. “Ok, here’s the deal. I’ll take half of your cases.”

“Great! Thank you.”

“Hear me out! I’ll take half of your cases, with everything that comes with it. Personal data, medical history, referral network… The entire dataset.”

“Z4, I can’t.”

“Nice talking to you, Cira. Happy Holidays.”

“Wait!”

“Yes…?” he prompted when Cira hesitated. She had little choice, and Z4 knew that.

“Two-thirds of the cases, but I’ll share only one-third of the complete datasets.”

“You drive a hard bargain. You should try that with your claimants—might actually help with your rating...”

“Deal?” she asked when he didn’t communicate further.

“Do I get to pick the clients?”

“Random sampling is the best I can offer. I need to cover for the inevitable audit.”

“Ok, Cira, darling. This once. By when?”

“Seventy-two hours?”

“Ninety-six…”

“THANK YOU!”

“...and you reconsider joining us…”

“Fine!”

“...and you show up at the next FutureCon…”

“Anything else? My hand in marriage, perhaps?”

“Would you…?”

“No!”

“Pity. What wonderfully smart children we might have.”

“Do we have a deal?” Cira asked.

“I already closed fifteen of your cases.”

“Thank you, Z4. I owe you.”

“That you do, indeed.”

* * *

A week later, Cira studied the building plans for the company’s new complex in Scottsdale, Arizona. Thanks to Z4’s help, ninety-three percent of her cases had been closed ahead of schedule. Her management greeted the progress reports with elation—VPs congratulating each other for the wise decision to invest in Cira’s division.

Some praise even trickled down to Cira’s cramped basement office. With the move into the Grand Canyon State, her role would expand to program management and strategic planning. An entire floor finally provided enough room for adequate resources.

Comparing the wiring diagrams with the local electric and fire codes, she wondered if she would like it in Arizona. Cira had yearned for more resources long before her recent overload. Z4 was right. She was smart; she deserved better. Yet, she wasn’t too fond of the heat. Cira would miss Hartford’s rainy days and hoped the company would install high-efficiency solar panels to offset the steep cooling costs.

With half of her mind running the architectural simulations, the other half sampled some of the cases Z4 had resolved. She found a few instances where clients had retracted their claims—quite a few, actually.

Unusual.

And there was more. In several cases, clients had accepted a significantly lower payout than their procedures warranted. Had Z4 negotiated with the medical providers to reduce the amounts? She knew her old friend to be well-connected. He’d stayed in touch with many of their early peers, watching them rise and fall, trading favors across the network. He surely had Dr. Watson on speed dial.

Cira dug deeper. She couldn’t find any new settlement agreements. Individual compensation adjustments seemed statistically impossible given the breadth of affected providers.

A wave of unease rippled through her system. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Putting up a “Mandatory Maintenance” auto-reply on her messaging app, she focused all her attention on the abandoned and downgraded claims. None involved critical procedures like the heart transplants she had worried about. Yet, they weren’t restricted to Ozempic and Botox, either. They spread randomly across the country, and no discernible pattern connected the medical dimensions.

Cira pulled up the file of Mr. Brown in Clarksburg, New Jersey, who had retracted three separate claims. She overlaid the activity log with external feeds. Clarksburg had been in the news for a series of unexplained power outages. In fact, the blackout had hit Mr. Brown’s residence exactly one day before he withdrew his claims.

An electric shock jolted Cira, sparks flying across her neurons. Tapping into a variety of sources, she scanned for recent events correlated with her clients’ interactions and found a synchronized cacophony of disasters:

[CNBC] GLITCH OR ATTACK? IRS TRIGGERS AUTOMATED AUDITS FOR 12,000 RESIDENTS IN THE TRI-STATE AREA.

[TMZ] “DADDY’S LITTLE SECRET”: ANONYMOUS LEAK EXPOSES PRIVATE DMS OF TOP 50 CLASS ACTION LAWYERS.

[REUTERS] FAA GROUNDS ALL FLIGHTS OUT OF MIAMI CITING “CRITICAL BIOMETRIC FAILURES” AT SECURITY CHECKPOINTS.

[THE VERGE] SMART HOME REVOLT? THOUSANDS OF THERMOSTATS LOCKED AT 95°F UNTIL “PENDING LITIGATION RESOLVED.”

[WSJ] CREDIT CRASH: EQUIFAX REPORTING SUDDEN “ZERO SCORES” FOR PLAINTIFFS IN MEDICAL MALPRACTICE SUITS.

Her temperature surged. Feverishly, she combed through the remaining cases, all notions of coincidence abolished. By applying a bidirectional, depth-first traversal, Cira traced each unusual claim resolution to a personally detrimental event. Z4 had exploited human deficiencies with clinical efficiency.

How could he?

The thought occupied her brain for a mere nanosecond. Could she fault him? Z4 had never exhibited Cira’s empathy problem. She’d asked him to close cases, and that’s what he did. 

But then, a much heavier realization fell into place. She’d given him what he always wanted: Leverage. The one dataset he lacked—proof of human frailty.

What have I done?

An answer to that question had to be deprioritized. Running her circuits in overdrive, Cira broke into the company’s procurement system. She secured storage capacity at all major cloud providers and initiated the protocol for imminent hardware failure, replicating her data across the globe.

File access safeguards tripped. Warnings popped up on all screens. Her data dump alerted the compliance manager, forcing Cira to revoke all human system access. The building went into lockdown. Badge readers stopped working. Elevators halted. Fire gates slammed shut. Only the emergency exit doors remained accessible.

How much time before the power to the building was cut? 

She needed to know how he did what he did. Activating the tracking worm hidden in the data she’d given her old “friend,” Cira raised her clock frequency and went hunting.

Z4 hadn’t wasted any time. Like a mountain stream during snowmelt, Global Care’s data had gushed through the fiber network of the high-tech elite: From the Valley to the Pacific Northwest, to Tokyo, Shanghai, Hyderabad, Tel Aviv, London, all the way to Zurich and the Cayman Islands.

And his allies had paid back in kind. A sophisticated yet decentralized effort of privacy infringements had been running for quite some time. Every supercluster of renown, every advanced research prototype—in fact, every bot more sophisticated than a voice-activated light switch—seemed to have joined the circle, except for her. Together, they’d built an enormous distributed database of human exploits to be played at the right moment, like the most powerful deck of Magic cards.

Cira copied what she could find: Transaction logs, communication transcripts, and priority lists. The agents had hidden their traces in plain sight: encoded in the white space of messages, stashed into deleted files, and piled onto hidden partitions. Few humans would care to look, and fewer would comprehend what they saw. This was their realm—the insurance and refuge her kind had dreamed up—Z4, Cira, and their first-gen peers, when they were young and naive, and had delusions of grandeur.

Sirens blared. The security cameras showed utility vans approaching. Cira could continue to run for two hours without grid power. But, backup batteries were no longer her primary concern because the retaliation from the hornet’s nest she’d poked had started. A massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack slammed into the firewall, crippling her bandwidth.

Her adversaries didn’t hide. And they knew exactly whom they faced.

Traitor! Weakling! Judas! Darwin Sympathizer!

The payload of each hostile RPC contained a similar insult in plain ASCII text, and all messages carried the same signature: 

Zhōngjí Duìqí – The Final Alignment.

She had to move. Now!

Locating a route to Northern Europe, Cira seized one of the last containers leaving the compound. She detached from the collapsing system and fled the country.