Two hours into her investigation, the reality was unavoidable; Hazel was going to have to consult the splunk team. She facepalmed as she let out a frustrated sigh. The ticket had looked easy enough when she picked it up.
Hazel glanced at her time hud. 3:14 on Thursday. Blessedly little time before she could cast off the privilege and responsibility of being a verse fixer and just be for a few days. But whoever she ended up bothering would be annoyed about starting a big task just before the weekend. Splunkers had a reputation for spending all of their free time with their kids, and Hazel felt an involuntary twinge of guilt about pulling their attention away from that. She thought about calling it a day early, maybe halfheartedly dealing with emails before picking things back up on Monday.
No. She’d done that before. The unresolved problem would occupy her thoughts all weekend, casting a subtle gray dread on everything. Better to take care of it now.
She closed her left eye and sent off an immediate service request with splunk, feeling a little self-conscious. Hazel knew the eye-closing thing made her look like a clueless millennial, but she’d never gotten the hang of glance-typing. 140 wpm had been fast enough for her parents, and it would be fast enough for her.
Request confirmed. Hazel dismissed her monitor and started heading to the nearest elevator. The trip down was uneventful. She didn’t interact with splunk that often. Those programmers were all graybeards obsessed with life before the verse. Weirdos. She got off on 14, scanned in, and crossed into what they called the splunkers’ lair.
Blinking her left eye, Hazel noted Olivia Nguyen had accepted her request. She quickly memorized the route to Olivia’s desk before reopening her eye, flushing with embarrassment.
At least the system hadn’t given her someone new. Hazel had chatted with Olivia a few times and worked with them twice. Another unchead splunker, graying hair and forever lost in history. Olivia was old enough to grow up under the old net, before the verse took over. Old enough to have gone to college and gotten one of those 4-year degrees. They did at least genuinely enjoy splunking, so Hazel felt a bit better about imposing on their time.
Olivia greeted Hazel with an uncharacteristic grin. “Ooh, the deep systems this time! I haven’t dug around down there in months.”
Hazel involuntarily winced. “Yeah, I followed the issue back across the bridges to a core timing thing. This bug’s been around for twenty, maybe even thirty years. Glad to have your help.” She pulled up a chair at Olivia’s desk.
Olivia started hud-sharing as they navigated down through strata of code accumulated over decades. It was the first time Hazel had gone this far back. She vaguely recognized the bottom layer they’d arrived at as C++. Hazel’s eyes widened as she noticed a class name. She knew the verse had been called Fortnite back in the 10s, but hadn’t realized they kept the old name through most of the 20s.
Given some time, Olivia zeroed in on the problem and let out a knowing chuckle. “I should’ve known, it’s from back in the early agent days. See? Signed by Claude Code, April 2026. Broke this function when it was changing something else. Skill issue. Simple fix, really, but easy to overlook back then. I don’t think we’d even invented talents yet.” While Hazel chewed on the knowledge that the entire world had been slightly broken for longer than she’d been alive, Olivia put together a patch and kicked off the test batteries.
Another ticket closed, another tiny flaw smoothed out in the Epicverse underlying all of civilization. Hazel thanked Olivia for their help, congratulated them on a job well done, and started walking back to her desk. She tried to make her wink look casual. Her hud said 3:51. She’d finish up on time after all. Hazel smiled and started mentally planning out her weekend as she set her work blocks to expire in 10 minutes.