“Ah. Lukas. You weren’t saying anything. I thought for a second there … that you were someone else.”
“No, it’s me. Just getting my headset adjusted. Been a busy morning.”
“Yeah. Boring stuff. Committee meetings. We’re a bit thin up here at the moment. A lot of reassignments.”
“But things have been settling down? No uprisings to report?”
“No, no. Things are getting back to normal. People get up and go to work in the morning. They collapse in their beds at night. We had a big lottery this week, which made a number of people happy.”
“That’s good. Very good. How’s the work on server six coming?”
“Good, thanks. All of your passcodes work. So far it’s just more of the same data. Not sure why any of this is important, though.”
“Keep looking. Everything’s important. If it’s in there, there has to be a reason.”
“You said that about the entries in these books. But so many of them seem like nonsense to me. Makes me wonder if any of this is real.”
“Why? What’re you reading?”
“I’m up to volume C. This morning it was about this … fungus. Wait a second. Let me find it. Here it is. Cordyceps.”
“That’s a fungus? Never heard of it.”
“Says here it does something to an ant’s brain, reprograms it like it’s a machine, makes it climb to the top of a plant before it dies—“
