Elena had barely settled into her office after a string of back-to-back meetings when her phone lit up with urgent notifications: INTERNAL SERVER ERROR – CRITICAL SYSTEM OFFLINE.
She was already moving before the second ping. By the time she reached the IT floor, the corridor was buzzing with tension. Screens flashed red. Analysts typed furiously. The system dashboard in the control room blinked with real-time damage: two client portals down, one internal drive inaccessible, and an entire marketing archive vanished from the intranet.
No one noticed her at first until her heels clicked sharply on the tile floor.
"Elena Ms. Roth" stammered Ken from the IT admin desk. "We're working on isolating the cause. It looks like a corrupted node initiated a chain"
"I don't need to guess," she snapped, crossing her arms. "I need results."
That's when she noticed him.
In the middle of the chaos, a man in a navy hoodie and black jeans was crouched beside the main server tower, his fingers flying across a tablet. Unlike the others, he wasn't panicking. His expression was focused almost calm. As if this wasn't his first time staring into a digital storm.
"Who is that?" she asked under her breath.
Ken blinked. "Uh, that's Carter. Liam Carter. One of the new IT techs. Just started last week. He hasn't even finished onboarding."
"Then why is he leading this?"
Before Ken could answer, Liam stood. "The corrupted node was a misfired auto-update linked to a deprecated process script someone forgot to disable legacy mode. I've disabled the trigger, rewired the command, and started a manual server reset."
The room fell quiet. A few screens began stabilizing, colors shifting from red to orange to soft green.
Elena stepped forward. "How long until we're fully online?"
Liam finally looked up and their eyes met. His were a startling shade of green, like pine leaves backlit by sunlight. Intense. Focused. Not intimidated.
"Fifteen minutes, tops," he replied. "I've rerouted access through a clean proxy. Data integrity should be intact, but we'll run a checksum to verify."
She stared at him for a beat too long. Then she nodded once. "Good."
She turned to the rest of the room. "I want a full incident report on my desk before five. And an audit of every legacy process still lives in the system. If this kind of sloppiness happens again, I'll gut the department from the top down."
Heads nodded, hands moved faster.
As she left the control room, Sophie met her at the elevator.
"What happened?" Sophie asked, falling into step.
"Someone screwed up a system update," Elena said, still watching the control room over her shoulder. "And a newbie fixed it faster than anyone else in that room."
Sophie raised an eyebrow. "Impressive?"
"Suspicious," Elena replied, her voice cool. "He was too fast. Like he already knew our systems."
"Maybe he's just talented?"
"Or maybe," Elena murmured, "he's hiding something."
Down in the server room, Liam Carter watched the green-lit screens blink back into perfect order.
And behind those green eyes, he knew this wouldn't be the last time his fingers danced through Roth Industries' firewalls.
Not the last time at all.