Drake One was one of those eternal projects.

It ate away at every resource it was given. It was the second largest power draw in the facility, behind the shield generator lattice, narrowly ahead of the quick change system. The size of the platform it sat on was no so much a requirement of computation, rather the air system that pulled away waste heat. The processing core had to be upscaled a few thousand times from anything Tanya had built before, dictated by the macroscopic integrated circuits the little planet could produce. It pushed silicon to the absolute limit of its ability, and burned through chips without remorse. It was not a cost effective hobby, but there was nothing else available that was adequate.

Today’s task was work that could have been postponed. A single blown chip, or three, or ten, meant almost nothing relative to the entire system, and it arguably wasn’t even worth the time to disassemble the access panels to get at one failure point. Tanya recognized that the maintenance was more for her benefit than the supercomputer. She had too much to do, and it was starting to take a mental toll, and it was worth it to her to spend an hour or so, pushing through a tight mess of wires and heat sinks under the main interface, and lie in the dark with a flashlight, working through the error codes the machine sent her to indicate hardware failure.

No one would follow her into the belly of the machine. None of them had been willing to try, in any case.

She heard a rap on a keyboard over her head, and Mallory calling “Welfare check!”

Tanya shouted back with the handle of a screwdriver between her teeth “Ahhh, I’m taking a nap, obviously.”

Mallory’s silhouette blocked the light coming in from the platform as she leaned over the access hole. “One day you’re going to get stuck in there and you’ll be happy someone noticed.”

“Sure, sure, after I get that nap in,” Tanya agreed. “Give me a good thirty minutes or so before you rescue me.”

“There are monsters punching through walls,” Mallory said, more quietly, as if there would be anyone to overhear them. “I don’t like the idea of you getting caught in that hole.”

Tanya resumed picking through the modules over her head, checking their status lights and referencing them against the inventory Drake One fed to her communicator. “Won’t catch the monsters without my equipment working.”

There came a low rumble that she felt through the floor panel against her back, that eventually became a sound that overwhelmed the ever-present rush of air. She had heard it before, plenty of times, and continued working unworried. One of the elevators was moving to the platform, the one that lead up and outside. A sliver of Mallory’s boots were visible at the access panel in her peripheral vision, as Tanya finally found the faulty chip, pulled it from its slot, and rummaged at her side for the replacement she had prepared. The elevator door opened at the platform.

“Oh, you decided to grace us with your presence again,” Mallory’s voice turned back to its usual biting charm. Duke returning, then.

“Wasn’t expectin’ a welcome party but your efforts are appreciated,” he said smoothly.

“Where did you even go?” Mallory asked.

“You’ll be delighted to know all I stole was innocent hearts.”

“Coming out,” Tanya called, reminding them of her presence. She snapped the replacement chip into its slot, gathered her tools, and leveraged her way out of the access tube feet first, back into the light of the ready room. Once they had made the space for her to replace the panel and resecure it, Mallory continued.

“I know Wildwing tolerates it when you go dark but you could choose better times to do it.”

Tanya worked in the third screw, then the fourth, then the fifth, and then realized the conversation had ceased. She looked up and saw that Duke was watching her intently, and Mallory, confused, following his line of sight.

“I didn’t want Wildwing to know,” Duke said, carefully.

“What?” Mallory asked.

“I still don’t, so keep it to yourselves, for the moment.”

Tanya set down her tools and stood up, alarmed, but somehow the conspiratorial nature of the request made her lower her voice to a harsh whisper and lean in to the two of them, as if, again, there were any possibility of the three of them being observed. “What-what are you talking about?”

“Where did you go?” Mallory repeated.

Duke instead answered with a question. “You remember that factory where we found Canard?”

“Sure. You went back there?”

“How well?”

“What?”

“How well do you remember it?” he asked.

Mallory seemed to lose some of her confidence, looking to Tanya as if the answer would be there, and then responding. “I mean, all we saw was the parking lot. We never went in.”

“Did you notice the parkin’ lot was all the same three cars?” Duke asked.

Mallory frowned. “There were more than three cars.”

“The lot was full, but it was the same three,” he held his hands up in parallel, and moved them incrementally as if down a row. “Red, blue, green, red, blue, green.”

Tanya shifted from one foot to another, “I mean that’s... weird, I guess, but I’m not sure its at the level of conspiracy.”

“Lot’s completely empty now. Factory, too,” Duke said.

“The workday is over.”

“No, not that kind of empty. Someone stripped the wires and fixtures years ago empty. Landscapin’s dead. Lot’s overgrown with weeds, the windows are all shattered, there’s a hole in the ceiling and bare walls from end to end. There isn’t even a light bulb left behind.”

Tanya looked to Mallory, who now seemed much less irate.

“I-” Mallory began, and then, realizing that his missing time had uncovered something essential, lowered her gaze, begrudgingly. “It wasn’t like that when we were there.”

“Why would anyone go to all the trouble of making a fake shampoo factory?” Tanya asked.

“Fully functioning business with people an’ security means we wouldn’t just walk in.”

Mallory looked hard at the floor, contemplating. “No Mask means we couldn’t just take a quick look either.”

Tanya shook her head. “What could someone be hiding before that isn’t there now?”

Duke deflated somewhat, leaning against Drake One’s console. “That’s where I’m fallin’ short. All I know is it had the outward look of a full business when we were there, and now it looks like it was abandoned years ago.”

“Maybe you got lost,” Mallory suggested.

“Ah, I went to the wrong shampoo factory in the middle of no where,” Duke said, “how careless.”

Tanya tapped her fingers on Drake One’s console, much as Mallory had earlier, before turning and kneeling back down to finish her work.

“Unless you think I’m graspin’ at nothin’ here,” Duke said, leaning to watch her work over the rim of the console.

“No, I...I believe you,” Tanya said, pushing in the last screw, tightening it, then backing it off, just a little, before collecting everything to carry back to her lab. “Maybe...maybe you did go to the wrong place,” she suggested, and cut off his objection, “e-even if you went the right way.” They both stared at her, and she gestured vaguely in the direction of the corridor they had sprinted down with a monster chasing them. “The way we ran a straight line and dropped two floors,” she clarified.

“You think the road shifted somewhere else?” Mallory asked. “Like the Pond?”

Tanya sighed deeply, “I don’t know. I-I have no way to test it and there’s no trace when it reverts back. What breaks reality without any trace or evidence?” 

“If that’s what happened,” Mallory interjected. “Why would Canard be there?”

Tanya gave Duke a nod, remembering their earlier conversation. “Whatever it is could be your answer. How to make an impossible jailbreak.” She cleared her throat a little, standing straighter and adjusting her box of tools. “A-a-and we are not telling Wildwing, because?”

“Gotta say, if someone were out to get into Wildwing’s head, taking the Mask, givin’ him a walking identity crisis, and droppin’ Canard on him all at once would be just about the best way to go about it,” Duke said.

Mallory added, “And if we’re going to accuse Canard of anything we had better be damn sure we get it right.”