Chapter 101 - Real Reason For The Error

**A few hours later**

"This is impossible," Jason muttered as he went through the logs. In theory, he shouldn't be doing this at all. In theory, all the people that Peter brought from the Incubator should be more than enough to solve the problem. 

But they followed Peter's decision, not the protocol or honesty. 

'To think I would struggle with bootlickers even in this line of work,' Jason thought, shaking his head as soon as he cast a glance at the mess beyond the glass panel that separated him from the rest of the room. 

Normally, the sea of cables, computers, and servers was Jason's private domain. At its best capacity, it could house up to even fifty people without lacking any comforts. 

'Is that how developed nations felt during the first wave of the global migration?' Jason thought, casting yet another scornful glance at the people swarming the desks. 

The original manpower of Jason's department was limited to twenty people. They all knew each other, each other's weaknesses and strengths, allowing them to form a great and coordinated team. Being the IT freaks they all were, even the social anxiety that by standard was ever-present in this group didn't stop them from enjoying their work together. 

But now, it was all gone. 

"What is the meaning of this?" One of the newbies rose up in anger, smashing his hand into his desk. Or rather, a desk that Jason was responsible for sharing with him. 

"I didn't spend my last three years in that damned Incubator to be now crunching those stupid numbers!" One of the 'refugees' or rather the freshly injected manpower in the department protested. 

'Well, it's no wonder they are angry,' Jason thought, leaving the problem to one of his coworkers. This was one of the few advantages of being a manager that he could find in his current situation. Thanks to this, he was now able to pretend he didn't see or hear anything, focusing back on the task at hand. 

"It doesn't look like a self-destruct at all," Jason muttered, scanning a wide array of numbers with his very own eyes. 

For an IT technician like him, going all down and personal with the numbers was a sign of respect. But there was nothing else he could do at this point. 

Whether it was just a fluke or an insanely well-written algorithm, the bug managed to terminate its presence right as they were about to single it out. Jason's knee-written code proved more than sufficient for that task, especially when all the newbies shamelessly stole his code and modified it to their own desires, introducing a wide array of hunting bots that looked for the initial error. 

But what they found out instead was a massive chunk of data already fully corrupted. It looked as if some sort of overload went through the wires, frying just a few selected spots in the massive sea of servers that made up the Online's Hub lifeblood. 

Singling out those corrupted regions and then trying to piece them together was what the newbies were doing currently.

"It's Kira. May I come in?" A voice appeared in Jason's intercom. As he looked down at the cell mounted on a special slot near his main computer, the middle-aged man could see the figure of the girl standing right at the doors. 

Whether or not she was putting her cleavage on a perfect display of the camera on purpose or not has yet to be decided. 

"Come in," Jason pressed the button at his chair, releasing the magnetic look on the doors. 

Ever since the disaster at his department started, he didn't want to invite anyone in that he didn't have to. Sadly, Kira's case was different, as she didn't even need to ask his permission to enter in the first place. 

"Huh, you got quite a mill here," the girl said as soon as she got past the glass doors. Dropping down her thin cloak, she unceremoniously sat down on Jason's chair, forcing him to stand by one of the many shelves in the room like some kind of student about to be scolded. 

"I want to hear what you think this entire thing actually was," Kira said, gently smiling at Jason. At this moment, the middle-aged man couldn't help but swallow a mouthful of saliva, as the memory of the reason why he allowed this mess to start in his kingdom in the first place. 

"I don't have any proofs, only insinuations," Jason shook his head, refusing to just feed this girl a set of prefabricated lies that Peter decided to be the solution to the problem without even knowing what the problem was. 

"That's fine with me," Kira smiled once again, slightly revealing the whites of her teeth. Sitting with her legs crossed, in an extremely exposing outfit for a young woman like her, she should be the epitome of sexiness, one that, if filmed, would be the icon of filmography for the next several generations. 

But the strange, icy atmosphere that emanated from the girl killed all the hots that Jason could ever have for her. 

"I don't think we had any bug, to begin with," Jason said outright, not bothering to hold his words back. 

This was the conclusion that he repeatedly arrived at in the last few hours. No matter how much he tried to figure out what kind of bug they were looking for or what its intended purpose was, nothing seemed to click. No possibility appeared to fit the pattern. 

"What do you mean by that?" Kira asked, squinting her eyes. 

The official version of the story that the freshmen in the department prepared was that a random bug appeared in the system due to some minor data corruption. In a sense, this was a pretty plausible explanation, as the energy readings of the Vortex didn't like to behave the way people expected them, making it quite easy for some bits to switch under its influence. 

This kind of problem was uncommon but normal. Back in the prenuclear era, when there still were people who believed that going nuclear was a bad idea, the computers had a rare chance to encounter this kind of bug when a random strand of radiation could change the energetical value representing a bit. 

This kind of unprovable and unexpected bug first came to the public attention when a gamer of the old generation achieved the impossible. In a speed run of a certain classical game, his character made a jump that shouldn't be possible. 

The same player attempted to replicate the same move over and over again but never succeeded at it. Only the latter study revealed that rather than an exploit, it was a bug of a nuclear nature. 

And this was exactly the kind of explanation that Peter opted to use for their current problem, despite being perfectly aware that it wasn't the case at all. 

"If it wasn't a bug, then what it was?" Kira asked, leaning her head to the side for a bit. She moved her left leg down, only to hang her right over it, effectively turning her cross-legged position around. 

"Outside interference," Jason muttered softly, lowering his eyes. Even though he was almost entirely sure that it was the case, the lack of evidence for this theory made it hard to present it with confidence. 

"You mean that someone attempted to crack our system?" Kira asked. Her eyes showed signs of curiosity for the very first time since she entered the place. 

"I think someone managed to wire themselves directly into the system," Jason corrected Kira's understanding. In this single moment, some kind of strange courage entered his body. 

He walked forward and grabbed the edge of his own seat. 

"Huh?" Are you..." Kira squinted her eyes, "making a move on... what?" she attempted to ask, only to wait powerlessly as Jason pushed the seat away, getting his access to the keyboard back. 

"Don't be silly," Jason chuckled. "I do not want to eat my own balls," he added, furiously typing on the keyboard. 

As his fingers did their magic, the windows on the main monitor in the room started to shuffle before a massive array of numbers appeared on it. 

"Look here," Jason brought his finger towards the screen, stopping it just a tiny bit away from the screen. For an IT technician like him, smearing the screen goodness with his filthy fingers was akin to sacrilege. "Those numbers are perfectly normal," he said, moving his finger to the side. "But when you look at them here, barely a minute later, they no longer make a single shred of sense," he explained before turning around and taking a long look at the girl.

"And how is that proof that someone connected directly to our system?" Kira asked, not showing any reaction to Jason's explanation. 

"If it were some kind of bug, the data would get corrupted from one of the entry points, like... Or never mind," Jason said as he gave up on the idea of explaining the detailed inner workings of the system. "In simple terms, it doesn't make any sense for a bug to appear here first. If it was somehow uploaded to the servers, it would appear way quicker," Jason finished his explanations, sitting back on the edge of the desk. 

"Didn't the data get corrupted when that bug killed itself?" Kira asked, proving that she knew at least this little about the situation. 

"Do you really think I'm so inept as to not keep the backups?" Jason asked before tapping at the frame of his monitor. "Those numbers got recorded in real-time. Sadly, that means I can't access anything that I didn't check back then.... But I don't think it will be necessary," he said before looking at the girl with a strange look in his eyes. "The question now is, do you know who could connect directly to the Hub's system and why?"