The data breach had been consensual—and yet it was still a breach.
In the silence of her cubicle, Helen felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. In-game, the Star-Mite floated motionless. But she could feel Khepri's presence—not as a ship, but as a cold, alien consciousness probing the deepest corners of her data. It was like sensing a ghost surgeon inside her mind, promising to remove a tumor while demanding the right to touch every memory in the process.
The waiting was torture. Minutes stretched into eternity. Ishtar didn't dare move. She simply drifted there, a satellite in her own life, waiting for the code-oracle to finish its dissection.
At last, the presence withdrew. Khepri's distorted avatar materialized before her again, more solid this time, as if it required greater processing power to exist.
[Access terminated,] the text appeared in her mind.
[And?] Ishtar's word was a shot fired into the dark.
Khepri didn't answer right away. He transmitted a file. A single line from an SSL 3D Printing transaction log.
[Order ID: 734-AD-9B
Item: Custom Print (SKU: 0098)
Recipient: Helen Carter
Sender: null]
Ishtar stared at the final line.
Null.
Not "Unknown." Not "Anonymous." Not an empty field. The technical term—precise, cold.
[Is this an error?] she typed, the last thread of hope unraveling.
[No,] Khepri replied. And for the first time, Ishtar sensed something different in his tone. Not emotion, but deep, professional curiosity. The interest of a master craftsman examining another's work.
[Deleting a name leaves a vacuum—a data ghost. Like a scar in the code. I can find scars.]
The text paused.
[This is different. The field isn't empty because it was wiped. It's empty because it was never filled. It's a null. An intentional black hole in database reality. Whoever did this didn't edit the record. They manipulated the very creation of the entry. That… should not be possible with user-level access.]
Ishtar's hope collapsed into icy dread. She had chased a lead only to discover that her enemy didn't just cover their tracks—they rewrote reality to ensure there had never been tracks at all.
[So there's nothing,] she said, the sentence a dead weight in her chest.
[I didn't say that,] Khepri replied, and sent another line from the same record.
[Payment Status: Invoice Open
Outstanding Balance: 74.50 cycles]
Ishtar frowned. [What does that mean?]
[It means,] Khepri said, [the transaction was never paid.]
Her dread deepened into something far worse. An abyss.
She had been wrong the entire time. Her enemy wasn't just a wealthy client. A client pays for a service.
A null sender. An unpaid invoice.
This wasn't a contract.
It was an order.
Raul Smith Lee, the owner of SSL 3D Printing, hadn't been paid to send that threat. He had been forced to do it. Or he was a willing accomplice to someone so powerful that the very concept of payment was an insult.
Who could command the loyalty—or the fear—of a real-world businessman strongly enough to make him send a personalized threat, risking a crime, without even receiving payment?
The answer hung in the air, obvious and impossible all at once.
Someone with a personal connection to the company.
Her search for a name had led her back to the starting point, but now the dead end had terrifying depth. Her enemy wasn't just a power player in a game. It was someone who could manipulate the real world as effortlessly as a hacker bent code.
And she had let them into her system.