By all official metrics, Hannah’s KPIs for this quarter were, to quote Tar, “Off the chain, yo. 100% Headshot Conversion Rate? C’mon. Numbers don’t lie, sweetie.”
Eureka fidgeted with her 9-volt battery between her fingers and flicked it, pretending the sparks from the leads were ashes. Some cheap imitation of digital tobacco.
“Let me show yew something.”
Time To Kill: 105 milliseconds slower than average.
Okay, foine. Mac’s cooking is making her fat. LOL. LMAO, even.
Decision Latency Variance: up by 1.9 standard deviations.
But why is she second-guessing this much more now?
Mission Outcome vs. Emotional Exposure Index: 0.98 correlation.
Flagged. Hannah’s raising flags. Da type thet leads ta bad endings in spicy visual novels. Da ones fer da male gaze.
She clicked yet another pen against her sparking forehead and fried it, filling her single-cubicle office with the acrid perfume of burning gel ink. Hitting a 58-key shortcut, she snapped four panels to each corner of her screen in her working instance of My Immortal 2.0, flagging the critical anomalies for Tar.
“But 100% Mission Success Rate? We’re fi—”
Eureka interrupted. “Mum. I haven’t known her for as long as yew, but yew know thet these numbers don’t add up when stacked against da long-term baseline.”
Tar pursed her lips. She nudged her glasses up, causing the glare from her displays to reflect back into Eureka’s eyes. “But if the numbers are fine, then that means…”
“Owr assumptions…”
“…Were wrong.”
“Take foive?” Eureka suggested, shakily taking a drag from her 9-volt battery. It tasted like ash.
“That bad, pumpkin?”
“Worse. This warrants a Kit-Kat Break.”
Tar sighed, caressing the creases between her tired, wandering eyes. “We’re in for a long day…”
Eureka sprang into action, deploying every cup on a string hidden under her desk: Tar had finally upgraded from Microsoft Teams. “Get Gordo on da line. Get me fahkin’ Gordo!”
---
To Eureka and Tar’s relief, Gordon picked up right away. “This is Gordon. Weird hour to call. What’s up?”
Eureka drew the cup labeled “Gordon” under her desk and pulled it to her mouth, tugging the string taut. “Where ahr yew now, Unc?”
“Home. Had to get out of bed.”
“Yew’ve been married a long time, roight?”
“Uhh…”A scuffle on the other side of the line. Muffled conversation. Then a woman’s voice picked up the slack in the conversation.
“Oh yeah, what are you wearin’, ‘Eureka and Tar’ from work?”
Aww. It’s Gordo’s wife!
Eureka played her cute niece voice script. “Hi, Mrs. Gordons! I’m wearin’ khakis. Glad yew could make da call as well. We’ve actualleh been lookin’ fer a marrehd couple wiv’ a healthy relationship ta give us some advice…”
“About Mac and Hannah? Oh! I’m a HUGE fan. I’ll put ya on speakerphone so we can both talk.”
Tar briefed them, explaining her insights into the metrics Eureka flagged. Hunched over at her desk, she squeezed a red neoprene stress ball, gently tossing it up and catching it every so often.
The conversation rested for a fleeting moment as Gordon’s wife pulled him aside for an indistinct side conversation [99% sure].
Mrs. Gordons returned with her answer. “Gordon, dear… that sounds like they’re just getting outta their honeymoon phase.”
“Hmm. I was thinking the same thing, Batman. But we should elaborate,” Gordon replied.
Fishing out a legal pad and an uncooked pen from one of the 755 cabinets under her desk, Eureka jotted down a few notes:
Mac and Hannah out of “honeymoon phase.”
Meaning?
After some time to think, Mrs. Gordons continued explaining. “Lemme put it this way girls. Something like this happened at home…”
Eager to hear her story, Tar pushed her glasses up and steepled her fingers together as she pressed Mrs. Gordons. “Tsudzukete kudasai… Go on…”
Eureka swore she heard Gordon and the missus share a silent smirk.
Gordon offered up a codeword. “Do we do… The Big Shart?”
“…Yeah” Mrs. Gordons confirmed, “The Big Shart.”
Eureka stood up from her office chair and paced around, kicking up asbestos dust with every step.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The Gordons launched into a long, untethered ditty she and Gordon agreed to never tell anybody who didn’t have the friend clearance level—a road trip, bad timing, a wrong exit to a paper town, a lack of toilet paper, and a moment that made Gordon groan even more than his first and only DNF when she brought it up.
Halfway through, Eureka and Tar’s tears stained their notes as they wrote in their best guesses for the allegory.
Toilet paper = crisis mitigation under love???
Driver is the one making decisions… Passenger comfort a primary factor… Related to Hannah’s dynamic with Mac?
Prioritizing another slows you down.
Care sometimes results in hesitation.
“Guess what I’m trying to say is that nothing’s wrong with them. They’re just learning for the first time that they’re truly entangled.”
Eureka clapped, wiping the 1s and 0s streaming down her cheeks and smearing her snot with her sleeve. “That wos byootiful, Mrs. Gordons.”
“Please, call me Deedee. That’s what all my friends call me.”
Tar perked up at this. “Deedee, huh? What’s that short for?”
“Daisy Duke,” Mrs. Gordons said, checking it off.
“Thanks fer da advice!”
“You’re welcome, dears… Thank you for taking such good care of my husband at work. Bye bye, now!”
“See you around, Deedee,” Tar said.
Click! Eureka hung up.
“Now, who should we call next, Mum? Who’s da next one up?”
Rubbing her hands together, Tar smirked at Eureka. The evil one that always made Eureka bust up in laughter. “Oh, hun. I know who. Julia and Rowcols.”
“YAAAAAAS!”
---
On the first ring, Julia picked up. “’Sup betches! Where’s the fire?”
“The usual, Mrs. Coutts. Who else but our favorite friend?” Tar replied, the smugness in her voice sharpening like the blade of a mezzaluna.
Flashing back to the Massage Table Heist, Eureka’s cores warmed as the memory hit cache.
Thet lovesick dummy still hasn’t noticed thet et’s missing. That’s fer stealing Mum’s first edition print of Trace. Spoils of The Great Office Prank War. Yew got da boy, but we got da Pizzatron 9001 AND owr record back.
“Oh? New tea at 2:30 in the morning? GIIIIIIRL.”
Eureka joined in the fun, booming her voice through the paper cup with Julia’s name on it. Autographed in silver Sharpie, of course.
Eureka fired off an instant message to Rowcols in hexadecimal.
“4E4F5448494E472057524F4E4720425554204954204645454C53205745495244”
Translation: “NOTHING WRONG BUT IT FEELS WEIRD”
Da dreaded three dots…
Then relief. “You know we can just speak in vernacular, right? Yeah. It’s weird. But I’m gonna let Julia interpret what those numbers mean. I’m just a quant guy in an old Amazon Kindle.”
Tar cut the greetings short. “Let’s talk biz, chicos y chicas. Julia. Rowcols. Eureka’s got some anomalies in the quarterlies. As subject matter experts, can you please help us parse what they mean? I’ll pay triple.”
Julia reassured them. “For Hannah? Don’t sweat it. Love that girl.”
Eureka beamed the spreadsheets over to Julia.
She took a beat, giving the new information a glance, then continued. “But yeah—This is the kinda thing that gets ya dead if you misread it.”
Then, Julia found the key correlations. “Ah. Here they are.”
For the next twenty minutes, Julia dove into an anecdote that involved robot strippers who owned five houses, immaculate KPIs, a “no touching” policy enforced by armed drones, and a body count nobody noticed until the checks stopped clearing.
“Write that down, write that down!” Tar urged Eureka.
Power Draw: 34,329 Watts | Temperature: 85° C | RAM Usage: 118,962 GiB / 119,209 GiB
At her workstation, her body blurred, almost going supernova as her hands jittered at 50,000 miles per hour—calling Bloomberg Himself from a séance—as she painstakingly logged every last one of Julia’s words. Mac and Hannah’s lives depended on it.
“Aaaanyways, the candles were big and green… until they weren’t,” Julia concluded. “Anything else I can help you with?”
Rowcols offered little reassurance. “I hope this helps, ladies.”
Eureka and Tar exchanged a four-hour conversation in a single glance.
“No further questions,” Tar said.
“Okay, smell ya later, girls!”
The line went dead.
In solemn agreement, Eureka and Tar said the line. “Yeah, there’s a bubble.”
---
A face-to-face meeting at Yoked Abe Lincoln’s office the next day wasn’t much help either.
“You’re overthinking it. After we bagged them and told them to get back to work, the Breakfast Council’s never seen such performance before.”
“BUT—” Eureka protested, her hair starting to smoke.
Abe dismissed Eureka’s concerns with a wave of the hand. “But what? The straw purchases are going fine. Hannah herself signed off on the doctrine. Our raid on Shadow Poach Island will proceed as planned.”
Eureka and Tar looked at each other once again. “Mum?”
“I got this shit, dear.”
Trolling for some earplugs in her cavernous desk, Eureka found a set, and put them in.
Tar crashed out. “We have tried everything, Abe. Referencing our standard operating procedures. Wisdom from older married couples. Structure. Precedent. Quantitative analysis… And you’re suggesting we stay the course. Mac and Hannah are in danger.”
Abe didn’t raise his voice.
“I hear you.”
He folded his hands on his desk.
“What you’re describing is slightly elevated risk. And we’re comfortable carrying it.”
“This meeting is over.”
---
On Eureka’s infinite couch, Eureka and Tar wept for Mac and Hannah’s impending demise.
The television flickered Euro-Trash Fiance across their tear-stained faces.
Eureka slammed down her 362nd tub of Ben & Jerry’s on another AMD Radeon RX 7000-series GPU repurposed as a coaster. Her coffee table made of floating heat tiles wobbled in the air before dipping anyway.
“M-Mum, wot dew we dew?” She cuddled up to Tar, taking comfort in her mother.
“I-I don’t know. For the first time in my life, I don’t know.”
Feeding Eureka’s NPU all the files in Tar’s homelab and cloud didn’t help them much, either.
Then, it hit them. On screen, the climax of Euro-Trash Fiance played out.
An airport confession. A bad one… Wait… THAT’S IT!
“Mum.”
“Eureka.”
“Ahr yew thinking wot I’m thinking?”
“Oh yeah…”
