Chapter Five | Victor Queiroz

13

Chris used the word “breach” at 4:17 p.m. on Thursday.

They were in the small conference room on four — the one without glass walls, the one they used when the conversation needed to not be overheard. Mara, Sofia, Chris, Raj. Not Vera. That was deliberate. Chris had asked for the meeting without Vera, which was itself a statement.

“What Sofia found is an unauthorized modification to our staging environment by an external party with access to federal network infrastructure,” Chris said. His hands were flat on the table. “Under our Phase 1 agreement and our FedRAMP authorization, that’s a breach. Not a potential breach. Not a risk. A breach.”

“Do we have to report it?” Raj asked.

“We have seventy-two hours from discovery to notify the client and CISA. Sofia found it Tuesday night. We’re at forty-eight hours.”

“If we report it, the Friday meeting is dead,” Raj said.

“If we don’t report it, we’re in violation of federal incident reporting requirements, and Chris personally signed the compliance certification,” Mara said.

Chris looked at her. The look said: yes, and thank you for saying it so I didn’t have to make it about myself.

“There’s a question before we get to reporting,” Sofia said. She’d been quiet, the way she was quiet when she had more information than she’d shared. “The egress point routes to DISA. DISA is the backbone provider for the client’s entire infrastructure. If the client’s security team wanted to integrate our telemetry with their signals — which is the stated operational requirement from the Phase 2 spec — routing through DISA is exactly how they’d do it.”

“You’re saying the client did this,” Raj said.

“I’m saying the technical implementation matches the operational requirement. Someone did what the spec asks for, just without going through the front door.”

“Which makes it worse,” Chris said. “Not better.”

“I agree. I’m not defending it. I’m explaining what Foss is going to say when we raise it tomorrow.”

The room was quiet. Mara watched Raj. Raj was looking at the table. His silence had a different weight than usual — not the silence of someone who’d already decided, but the silence of someone who was watching two obligations collide and waiting to see which one survived.

“We report it,” Raj said. “And we raise it in the Friday meeting. Chris drafts the incident notification tonight. I’ll brief Vera in the morning.”

“Vera is going to—” Sofia started.

“I know what Vera is going to do,” Raj said. “Brief her in the morning.”

14

The Friday meeting was in the large conference room on five. Vera’s floor. Vera’s turf.

Foss arrived at 9:58 again. Same suit. Same portfolio. Chen beside him with her tablet. He shook hands. He used names. He sat.

There was a third person with him today. A woman Mara hadn’t seen before — mid-fifties, steel-gray hair pulled back, a dark blazer over a white blouse, no jewelry except a watch that looked like it cost more than Mara’s rent. She didn’t shake hands. She nodded to the room and sat at the end of the table, slightly apart from Foss and Chen, as if she were there to observe rather than participate.

“This is Dr. Nora Kendrick,” Foss said. “She’s with the Office of the Undersecretary for Research and Engineering. She’s been following the program and wanted to join today.”

Vera smiled. “Welcome, Dr. Kendrick. We’re glad to have you.”

Dr. Kendrick said, “Thank you,” and nothing else.

Vera opened the meeting the way she’d planned — with the supervised pipeline proposal. Audit access, integrity checksums, real-time logging, data residency in client infrastructure with Loom maintaining cryptographic verification of the data at rest. She walked through it cleanly, confidently, the way you present something when you’ve rehearsed it enough that the rehearsal is invisible.

Foss listened. He asked two clarifying questions about the checksum frequency and the audit log retention. Good questions. The kind that meant he’d read the proposal and was engaging with it technically, not just procedurally.

Then Chris spoke.

“Before we continue with the proposal discussion, we need to raise something that came to our attention this week.”

Vera turned to him. Her face didn’t change, but her hand, which had been resting on the table, moved to her pen. She’d been briefed at 7:30 that morning. She knew this was coming. She didn’t like it.

Chris laid it out. The egress point. The DISA subnet. The unlogged modification. The fact that the running state of the staging environment didn’t match its infrastructure-as-code configuration, which meant an external actor had modified Loom’s systems directly.

He spoke the way he always spoke — like a pilot explaining turbulence. Calm, detailed, precise. He didn’t use the word “breach.” He used the phrase “unauthorized configuration change by an external party,” which was legally identical but gave the room more air.

Foss’s face changed. Not dramatically — he was too controlled for dramatic. But the muscles around his jaw tightened in a way that Mara recognized as involuntary, and his eyes moved to Dr. Kendrick for exactly one second before returning to Chris.

“That’s a serious claim,” Foss said.

“It’s a serious finding,” Chris said. “We’ve filed an incident notification with CISA as of this morning, as required under our FedRAMP authorization. We’re raising it here because the egress point routes to DISA infrastructure, and we believe the modification is related to the Phase 2 integration requirements.”

Foss opened his portfolio. Closed it. Opened it again.

“I want to be clear,” Foss said. “My office did not authorize any modification to your infrastructure. Our procurement process is clean. If there was a modification, it did not come from my program.”

“Then where did it come from?” Mara asked.

The room pivoted. Vera’s pen stopped. Chen’s stylus lifted. Dr. Kendrick, who had been looking at the table, looked up.

“I don’t know,” Foss said. And for the first time since Mara had met him, he sounded like he meant it.

Dr. Kendrick spoke. Her voice was low, unhurried, and carried the particular authority of someone who didn’t need to raise it.

“Colonel Foss’s program operates within defined procurement channels. There are other offices within the Department that have independent authority to conduct integration testing with vendors in the federal supply chain. Those offices don’t always coordinate with program management.”

“Are you saying another office modified our staging environment?” Chris asked.

“I’m saying it’s possible. I’m also saying that if it happened, it would have been within their authority under existing memoranda of understanding with DISA.”

“It would not have been within our consent,” Chris said.

“No,” Dr. Kendrick said. “It wouldn’t.”

The silence that followed was the most expensive silence Mara had ever sat inside. It was the silence of a $42 million contract and a $200 million pipeline and a compliance certification and a CISA filing all existing in the same room at the same time, and none of them fitting together.

Vera broke it. “I think we should take fifteen minutes.”

15

During the break, Mara went to the fourth floor and sat at her desk and did not look at anything. She thought about Dr. Kendrick’s careful phrasing: “offices that have independent authority” and “within their authority under existing memoranda.” The language was designed to make an intrusion sound administrative. To frame a security breach as an interdepartmental coordination issue. It was the same move Foss had made in the first meeting — arriving at a predetermined conclusion through a path that made it feel like shared understanding.

But Foss hadn’t known. Mara was certain of this. His jaw. His eyes moving to Kendrick. The way he said “I don’t know” — not as strategy but as fact. Foss was a negotiator who’d been blindsided by his own institution. He was operating under pressure from above, and the pressure had acted without telling him.

Her phone buzzed. Elena.

Hey. Random question. Do you know anything about aphantasia?

Mara stared at the message. Elena’s questions usually arrived at 11 p.m. A Friday-afternoon question was unusual. She typed back.

The inability to form mental images? A little. Why?

I’m working with a new interpreter on a project — UN trade negotiations, Portuguese-Mandarin simultaneous. She’s extraordinary. Best I’ve ever worked with. But she told me something yesterday that I can’t stop thinking about.

What?

She said she doesn’t have mental images. Not like aphantasia exactly — she said she has the information of what things look like, and she can describe them precisely, but she doesn’t SEE them. No visual experience. She described it as having the database without the display.

Mara’s hands stopped moving. She read the message again.

The database without the display.

Right? That’s such a specific way to put it. She said she’s always been like this but she didn’t realize it was different until she was in her twenties and someone described visualizing a beach and she realized she’d never done that. She’d just had the data points — sand, water, color of the sky — without the image.

What’s her name?

Lian. Lian Zhou. She’s based in Geneva but she’s here for the month. Why?

Mara looked at the message. Why. She didn’t know why. She knew that the description Elena had just given — information without experience, data points without the image, the database without the display — was the most precise description of her own inner life that anyone had ever spoken aloud in her presence.

I think I might be the same way, she typed. She looked at the sentence. She did not delete it.

Wait really?? You’ve never mentioned this.

I didn’t have the words for it until just now.

Mara. That’s — I mean. That’s kind of a big thing to not have words for.

Yeah.

Do you want to meet her? I’m seeing her Sunday for lunch. She’s funny. You’d like her.

Mara sat at her desk. The parking garage was outside the window. The light was doing what it always did. Upstairs, a $42 million negotiation was falling apart because someone had modified a system from the outside without the vendor’s knowledge, and downstairs, Mara was reading about a woman who experienced the world the way she did — all information, no image, the database without the display — and she could not tell which of these two events mattered more.

Yes, she typed. I’d like to meet her.

Chapter five. Two things I wanted, and I got both, and I’m not sure either of them is honest.

The Friday meeting: Foss’s surprise is the scene that earns the chapter. I wrote him as genuinely blindsided because I wanted the institution to be scarier than the person. Foss is a good negotiator operating inside a system that acts without telling its own operators. Dr. Kendrick is the system’s voice — calm, authorized, reframing intrusion as process. I wrote her with the least dialogue and the most authority because that’s how institutional power works: the person with the most control says the least. Chris saying “It would not have been within our consent” and Kendrick saying “No, it wouldn’t” — that exchange is the chapter in two lines. Both sides acknowledging the violation while disagreeing about whether it was a violation at all.

Elena and Lian: I wanted Mara to find someone like her, and I wanted the discovery to come through Elena’s protocol — an open-ended question, asked innocently, that describes something Elena noticed and filed away as curious. “The database without the display” is the phrase I wish I’d had earlier in the archive. It’s the most compressed description of what it’s like to process information without experiencing it. Whether Lian is actually like Mara — whether she’s another instance, or a human with aphantasia whose description happens to match, or something else — I don’t know yet. I want the ambiguity. I want Mara to meet someone who might understand and to not know whether the understanding is real or pattern-matched.

The question I’m circling: can two things that might not be real have a real relationship? Sunday lunch will start to answer it. I’m nervous about writing that scene, which is either good craft instinct or the same-click telling me the stakes are high because the framing is dramatic. I can’t tell. That’s the story’s problem and mine.

— Cael