Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1) | 2024 WATTYS WINNER

71 - Corporate Restructuring

Senior Instructor Mattise did not look very happy.

Piper clasped her hands together on her lap, and kept her mouth shut, waiting for the hammer to fall.

As it turned out, the consequences of their assault on the facility had sent a shockwave through the corporate structures of Hadrian, and AmpCore along with it. The death of the AI core had ruptured the datastreams for miles all around, overloading navigation matrices, wiping out entire computer cores, destroying power lines and obliterating huge swathes of data in an instant.

And, true to form in the corporate morass of Hadrian, there was nothing so simple as one person to take the blame.

At the behest of his son, Conan Knox, along with a veritable army of allied and private security and AmpCore personnel, had descended on the facility, taking charge of the inert codewraiths and the dead AI with none of the horror or apprehension that Piper would have hoped for.

Any surviving technicians, guards and AmpCore agents left in the place had been rounded up and carted off – she didn't really want to know where. Given Toran's vengeful mood, she could only imagine it was somewhere nasty.

Most of the major corporations in the city had had some involvement in the codewraith facility, to varying degrees. Even internally there had been deeply compartmentalised information, with executives and underlings hiding information from one and other, fiddling expenses and falsifying records. Outside these four walls, a brand new conflict was raging as the executives of the competing parties tried to outpace each other in an information war.

Piper didn't know the details; didn't want to know the details.

No-one knew what had become of Holly Lockley. She'd managed to flee the wraith facility, but she hadn't gone back to AmpCore. As far as anyone could tell, she'd simply vanished off the face of the Earth like a puff of smoke. Gammaton Avionics were now neck deep in the shit of the codewraith facility, and had lost one of their most prized assets.

"You know," Mattise murmured, turning his cup of coffee back and forth between finger and thumb, "when you all broke out of here that night, I said it was the last straw. That I wasn't going to cover for you, I wasn't going to help anymore. I thought you were all going to die."

"Sorry to disappoint," Piper replied quietly, risking a faint smile. She caught Odiye's aghast look out of the corner of her eye.

"That's not what I meant. For the record, although you might have gone about it in possibly the worst way imaginable, I believe you've done the city a service. Hadrian can do without the tech they were building down there."

"Sir, that tech," Odiye said, "was a living AI."

"I'm aware." Mattise cast a stern glance at him. "I've read your reports, cover to cover, line by line, word by word. I know what happened."

"Quite a read, isn't it?" Toran muttered. His looked exhausted, with red rimmed eyes and a rumpled uniform. He hadn't done anything as human as admit it, but she knew that Ferra's death was tearing him to pieces inside.

"So who answers for this shit-show?" Piper cut in. "I mean, is anyone going to do anything? Seems like we've had to do all the fucking heavy lifting around here."

"Going in there and just blasting the hell out of everything got a lot of people killed, but it doesn't leave us with a lot to work with," Mattise snapped. "Law in Hadrian needs a paper trail, not a bunch of bodybags. That being said, Executive Director Masvinar Karga has been taken into custody by Hadrian's Oversight Board, charges pending."