The Feed Hole: Heaven's Bombing Is Even Worse

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Originally Published on January 30th, 2494
The Feed Hole/Huntsman Cairo Reporting

A feed site loads in during your media crawl, a line at the top of the feed welcoming everyone to the landing pad of the feed site:

"Whether its a fluke of the algorithm, malicious tampering, or dumb blind luck during a netcrawl rabbit hole, you've found yourself at The Feed Hole."

The header clears as the article loads, beginning to scroll downward as you peruse:

You learn a lot about how the corporate world works when you're sent out on an assignment where your bosses neither expect you to do your actual job, nor to survive the actual assignment... My name is Huntsman Cairo, and I was fired for doing both. Awkward segues aside, the attack on Heaven, Inc last night seems like a frightening event with soft after effects for the high pay tier clients Heaven boasts. People with a shred of humanity will note the death toll that currently stands with 21 killed, 19 wounded, and a hash tag exists to symbolize the strength we're all supposed to have pulling together, while keeping the body count in mind as we salivate for word that whoever did it was punished. What isn't being talked about is the loss of livelihood for some of those who worked the night shift last night who were fortunate enough not to be in a server room or standing next to an engram scanning unit. This morning as Heaven was prepping their public statement to release on ONN they let their security staff go as they brought in emergency security staff from other locations as newly contracted security personnel started arriving off the shuttles all morning. Some might say this was well deserved, considering the attack on Bunkr was so recent that every Corp on Cocoon station is patently stupid if they haven't scaled up their security protocols, and Arc-Sec's response to Heaven was certainly faster than it was for Bunkr. Those recently let go from Heaven are now in a tenuous situation and certainly blackballed from working in the security field for most any corp entity, with the mountain of NDAs they have along with non-compete clauses spelling out that their professional lives are over... looming destitution awaits them now. For us in the news, however, its a form of perfect storm. No future, means no hope. No hope, means a modicum of resentment, rage, and that feeling of having nothing more to lose, even if that's not strictly true. While prevented from speaking officially on the record they still wanted to speak, albeit anonymously. And what they saw last night builds a very different picture from what Heaven has put out on ONN. Deliveries and maintenance crews are a staple of most any building involved with technology as their principle marketable. They come with uniforms, corp branding, IDs, requisition orders and BOLs, but ultimately they're still faceless unknowns. You don't care to know their names, and you want to chat with them about as much as you want to talk to your taxi driver. Just flash an ID, have some sort of paperwork justifying your visit that looks legit, and you point the way to where they need to do whatever they came to do, quickly. And if all of that can happen with as little small talk as possible, their dead-eyed stares will only match your own. Such was the case last night when a van pulled up to Heaven, Inc a scant hour before the explosions. The five or six people that piled out of that van had jumpsuits, ID badges that no one took great note of, and a requisition order for work on two floors. Unplanned work, but not necessarily out of the ordinary. Many corps operate with one hand not knowing what the other is doing, working at cross purposes with sudden paradigm shifts and random whim appeasement for bosses who may be covering their asses, or chasing some new idea they think is 'synergistic'. So a quick look, the form looks official. Worth buzzing your director at night and interrupting their hedonistic pursuits for a thumbs up on the work? No, you've been chewed out for that before, not gonna happen again. Get them to where they need to do work, get the work done, get them out of here... Those paying attention to the foreshadowing probably realized the hypothetical I just described is a recipe for being compromised, and unbeknownst to the security staff who waved the work crew through, the compromise would prove the most costly. That the work crew didn't talk much, even to each other, wasn't suspicious. No one working at Heaven that night wanted social contact with nobodies, a common symptom of working nightshifts. Accesss was granted, and the crew dispersed across the two floors to get to work. Of course they brought cases with equipment and parts with them, it'd be suspicious if they didn't. Maybe one or two cases were given a quick glance-over at the bay doors for delivery, but it all seemed banal and drearily standard, what was hidden in those cases, was anything but. The crew kept to themselves, setting up to do maintenance work on the engram scanners and help setup infrastructure for new servers. They didn't interact with staff and were self-sufficient in their task, a dream situation for what's desired for outside personnel working in the building. So unremarkable and dull were the crew that staff quickly lost interest in them, returning to what would be for many of them their last actions taken in life. The explosions that came later were not synchronized, but followed one after another in such rapid fashion that staff could barely process the shock of one before the next hit. The blasts that came spread across the floors, engulfing the environment in burning kinetic death. The server rooms locked down and sucked the oxygen out of the room to put out the fire, a proverbial medical shuttle at the base of the cliff for servers that were already fragmented and scattered across the room, those wounded but still alive in the server rooms would asphyxiate shortly thereafter. The Engram Scanners had vital rare, expensive, and built-for-need parts ripped from them and thrown around their rooms in flaming twisted chunks. The work crew was gone, seemingly the first victims of each blast. The van outside? Already gone before the show had even started, smart money says it will be found somewhere on Cocoon Station as a burned out husk of itself. What was left behind was death, destruction, and fear. Not the basic fear we are all accustomed to with any terrorist attack, but one Heaven is virulently committed to keeping under wraps. In the hours that followed, Cocoon responders arrived to put out the fires and get survivors out of the building, Trauma Team and arriving locals followed to treat and evac the wounded, and Arc-Sec secured the perimeter with the real possibility of further attacks incoming at any time. Heaven Security Staff would, in those final hours before being terminated, follow Responders as they moved through the building to assess the damage... what they saw, was much more extensive than Heaven has reported thus far. The Engram Scanners are in need of complete replacement, the delicate and sensitive equipment being smashed with an explosion-sized hammer. The time to get the parts and new scanners built, shipped, and installed after the rooms have been repaired and cleaned are likely to take one to two months. The Engram storage servers, however, are the worst of it, many smashed beyond any salvage, the rest super heated and damaged to certainly compromise the backups they stored. Heaven, Inc would have an easier time if they'd stated they would reach out to their clients who even had a backup that wasn't lost entirely or corrupted, as what I have learned from off-record sources' initial examinations says that it may be less than a dozen, and an unknown timeframe for when those backups could be successfully restored to a useable form. What follows next is not likely to affect most of us. Most of us will never have platinum coverage at GTT, we will never have a contract for backup cloning, and we certainly can't pay for regular engram backups to make sure we lose as little life as possible. But for those whose wealth has granted them immortality, it would seem they've been brought down to our level for a single promised lifetime, at least for a few months. So I will say what Heaven, Inc was derelict in duty for not saying to their clients in the aftermath of this: You'd best be damned careful, you only live once (for now).