May 6th, 2024 — 9:15 AMAurora Central Hub — Systems Monitoring Bay
The screen blinked red.
Just once. Barely noticeable. Like a heartbeat skipping. Then again—longer this time. Long enough for Angel to look up from her coffee, brows pulling together.
She walked over, tablet in hand, and leaned over the shoulder of the junior analyst manning the real-time systems dashboard.
"What was that?" she asked.
The analyst tapped furiously, scrolling through the data logs. "Packet loss on TBM Aurora's secondary telemetry feed. Could be routine signal bounce."
Angel frowned. "Could be?"
"Could be," he repeated, less certain.
She looked up just as Matthew entered, sleeves already rolled, a pen in his mouth and a checklist in one hand.
"You seeing this?" she asked.
He pulled the pen from his lips. "What's the issue?"
"Telemetry dropout on Aurora's secondary channel."