Chapter 4 - The New Foundation
The commercial flex-space off Interstate 95 smelled of fresh drywall, ozone, and industrial-grade coffee.
When I pulled my car up to the loading bay at 9:00 PM, the security lights blazed white against the asphalt. Inside, Marcus, my lead network engineer, was pacing beside a floor-to-ceiling rack of humming server towers, a tangled mess of blue ethernet cables pooled around his boots like nesting serpents.
"Tell me we didn't lose the client cluster," I said, walking through the sliding glass security door and pulling my laptop bag off my shoulder.
"We didn't lose them yet," Marcus said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "I managed to route the primary stream through our backup satellite uplink, but the latency is killing our transfer speeds. The local ISP claims a contractor severed the main trunk line three blocks down during a road-widening project, and they won't have a splice crew out here until tomorrow morning."
I dropped my bag onto the stainless-steel workbench, popped open my laptop, and plugged a diagnostic cable directly into the core switch.
"Tomorrow morning is too late," I said, my fingers already flying across the mechanical keyboard. "The Meridian Group's compliance audit locks at midnight. If their data isn't fully migrated by then, our service-level agreement voids, and we lose the government subcontractor tier."
"Well, unless you know how to splice fiber-optic cable in an underground utility vault with your bare hands, we're at the ISP's mercy," Marcus sighed, leaning against the rack.
I didn't answer him. I pulled up the city's municipal utility grid map on my secondary screen, cross-referencing the local fiber node locations with the blueprints I had pulled when we leased the building three months ago.
"They didn't cut the main trunk," I muttered, staring at the telemetry data stream scrolling down my monitor. "Look at the packet return rate. It's too clean. A severed line causes a hard drop. This is a controlled reroute."
Marcus peered over my shoulder. "A reroute? By who?"
"By the city's primary infrastructure contractor," I said, typing a rapid command sequence to trace the IP handshake of the node override. "They're shifting bandwidth capacity away from the industrial park to support the new commercial plaza development on the north side of town—the one my brother's real estate firm just partnered with."
Marcus blinked. "Your brother's firm?"
I stopped typing. The name on the utility work order wasn't just an anonymous municipal code. It was registered under Bennett & Sterling Properties—the exact commercial development firm Caleb had been bragging about at dinner two weeks ago, where Leah's uncle sat on the board of directors.
They hadn't just cut my power line by accident. They had systematically deprioritized the industrial park's utility allocations to feed bandwidth directly into the new high-end retail plaza my family's circle was building across town.
"They're starving our bandwidth to pad their own launch," I whispered, a cold, sharp anger settling deep into my chest.
Marcus stared at me, his eyes widening. "Are you serious? Can they legally do that?"
"No," I said, grabbing my jacket and pulling it back on. "They can't. But they assumed nobody down here had the technical capability to trace the routing back to their master terminal."
I picked up my phone, opened my contacts, and dialed a direct number I hadn't used in two years—an old college professor who now headed the state utilities commission's digital compliance division.
May you like
"Professor Vance," I said the moment the line picked up. "It's Mara Bennett. I need an emergency compliance audit on a fiber node in Sector 4, and I need it executed within the hour."
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