The first warning came as a blip.
A tiny red dot on a system status screen in the infrastructure war room. A misaligned route in Queens. A bus that showed as “arrived” when it was still three blocks away.
“Minor sync issue,” one of the night engineers noted in the ticket. “Reset. Monitoring.”
Jake never saw that one.
The second warning arrived as an email from a mid-level manager at the MTA.
Subject: **Weird timing issues on Crosstown routes – TerraNova?**
He saw that. Read it. Forwarded it to Aisha with a note: *Can you dig?*
She did. Came back with: *Looks like a time drift between two subsystems. Nothing huge. Fixing.*
He trusted her.
He had to. He couldn’t personally debug every line of code anymore.
By the time the third warning came, it wasn’t a warning.
It was a body.
Olivia didn’t get the call from her editor until after she’d already seen the tweet.
@SouthSideWatch: *Pedestrian struck on 14th & Lennox. Locals say bus was off its usual time. #TerraNova?*
Her stomach dropped.
She grabbed her bag, half her hair still pinned up, and ran.
By the time she got to 14th and Lennox, the ambulance had already left.
Police tape cordoned off part of the intersection. A few bystanders lingered, voices low. A pair of transit officials in neon vests huddled near the curb, radios crackling.
The bus sat at an awkward angle, hazard lights blinking.
She flashed her press badge to an officer.
“Martinez, *Metro*,” she said. “What happened?”
“Pedestrian strike,” he said, jaw clenched. “Middle-aged male. Taken to St. Luke’s. Don’t know his condition.”
“Light was green,” a woman nearby said. “We saw. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. Bus came too fast.”
“Too fast how?” Olivia asked, turning.
The woman was maybe late fifties, groceries in a rolling cart. Her face was lined, eyes bright.
“Usually that bus stops two lights back,” the woman said. “He takes his time. This one, he came like he was catching up. People at the stop were surprised.”
“Late?” Olivia asked.
The woman nodded. “Ten minutes, at least. Then the announcement said he was already there. My phone… the app thing… it said ‘arrived’ before he actually came.”
Olivia’s skin prickled.
“What app?” she asked, though she knew.
“City one,” the woman said. “The new one. With the map.”
TerraNova.
Of course.
She took down names. Phone numbers. Details about the light, the timing, the man who’d stepped off the curb thinking he had the walk.
Then she stepped away for a second, thumb already moving over her screen.
> Accident on 14th & Lennox, she texted Jake, pulse hammering. > Bus. One pedestrian. People saying the timing was off. > Your app said the bus was there when it wasn’t.
Dots pulsed. Paused.
> Where are you? he replied.
> At the intersection. she sent. > I’m fine. It’s not… anyone I know. As far as I can tell.
> But, Jake—
> I’m on it, he cut in.
> I’m checking the logs now.
> Don’t print anything yet.
She bristled.
> Not your call.
> I know, he wrote. > Just… give me an hour to see if it’s us or something else. > Please.
She ground her teeth.
Her instinct was to tweet. To call Raj. To fire off a fast online blurb.
Her training was to verify.
Her… whatever-this-thing-was with Jake complicated both.
> 60 minutes, she wrote. > That’s all you get.
> I’ll take it, he replied.
She shoved her phone back in her pocket and went to find more witnesses.
***
At TerraNova, alarms were going off.
They didn’t literally have sirens that blared, but they did have dashboards that flashed yellow and red, Slack channels that exploded, engineers who swore creatively in three languages.
“14th & Lennox?” Samir said, peering at a screen. “Bus 22A?”
“Yes,” Aisha said tightly. “Time drift on the sync again. The system thought it was two stops ahead.”
“How?” Jake demanded, leaning over her shoulder.
“Looking,” she snapped.
His phone buzzed on the desk beside her.
He didn’t have to look to know who it was.
Carla’s face appeared in the doorway.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said.
“No shit,” Samir muttered.
Aisha shot him a look. Fingers flew over her keyboard.
“It’s the handoff between the MTA’s legacy system and our middleware,” she said. “Their side pushed an update last night. It changed how they timestamp location pings. Our parser is off by thirty seconds on some routes. Enough to make the bus look like it’s already at a stop when it’s not.”
“Can we fix it?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re pushing a patch now. But that doesn’t help the guy who just got hit.”
His gut twisted.
“What’s his condition?” he asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Carla said. “MTA’s on the phone with my team. City hall’s already calling. So is *Metro.*”
He winced. “Olivia.”
“Yes,” Carla said. “And if you think for one second she’s going to sit on this for more than an hour out of the goodness of her heart, you’re dumber than I thought.”
“She’s giving us sixty minutes,” he said.
Carla’s eyebrows shot up. “She *what*?”
“Grace period,” he said. “To figure out if it’s us.”
“And is it?” Carla asked.
Aisha’s shoulders sagged.
“Partially,” she said. “The MTA changed something without telling us. But our code didn’t catch the mismatch fast enough. That’s on us too.”
Jake’s jaw clenched.
“Okay,” he said. “We own our part. Publicly. We don’t throw them under the bus—” He stopped. Winced. “Sorry. Bad phrasing.”
Samir grimaced. “Yeah, maybe retire that metaphor for this crisis.”
Carla pinched the bridge of her nose. “We need a statement,” she said. “Now. No weaseling. ‘We’re investigating’ isn’t going to cut it when there’s a man in the hospital.”
“Draft,” Jake said. “I’ll approve.”
“You’ll write,” she shot back. “We’re not hiding behind corporate speak on this one. You want people to trust you? Show your face, show your fault.”
He swallowed.
“Okay,” he said. “Get me facts. I’ll get words.”
***
Back at 14th & Lennox, the bus was finally being towed.
Residents huddled in clusters. Some watched, arms folded, faces hard. Others talked loudly into phones.
“This never happened before this stupid app,” a man said. “I don’t care how convenient it is. If it’s going to get my neighbors killed—”
“Drama,” a teenager scoffed. “It’s one time.”
“One time is all it takes when it’s *your* mother,” the man shot back.
Olivia’s phone vibrated in her hand.
*Jake*.
> It’s us, he wrote. > Partially. > MTA pushed an update that changed timestamps. Our parser lagged. > That’s no excuse.
> We’re pushing a patch now.
> Statement to follow in 10.
Her fingers flew.
> I need that statement, she wrote. > On the record. > Now.
> Give me five, he replied.
> And, Liv—
> I’m sorry.
She stared at the two words.
Sorry.
For the man in the hospital. For the panic on 14th & Lennox. For dragging the very kind of error he’d built TerraNova to prevent into the middle of her neighborhood.
Not everything was about her.
She knew that.
But standing there, on cracked pavement that had once been her childhood playground, watching a bus get hauled away under flashing lights wired to his code, it felt awfully personal.
Her phone buzzed again.
This time, from Carla.
> *Metro* gets first crack at this, she wrote. > Don’t make me regret it.
Beneath was a draft.
> “We are deeply concerned about the incident at 14th & Lennox this morning involving a city bus and a pedestrian. Initial investigation shows a timing mismatch between the MTA’s system and TerraNova’s middleware, which may have contributed to inaccurate arrival information. > > We take responsibility for our part in this failure. We are deploying an immediate patch to correct the timestamp integration and conducting a full review to ensure this cannot happen again. > > Our thoughts are with the individual who was injured and their family. We are cooperating fully with city agencies in their investigation.” > > —Jake Morrison, Founder & CEO, TerraNova.
Short. Clear. No “we regret any inconvenience.”
She forwarded it to Laura.
> On it, Laura replied. > You at the scene?
> Yeah, Olivia wrote. > It’s ugly. > Also, they’re admitting fault. At least partially.
> Of course they are, Laura sent back. > You made it very hard for them not to, remember? > Get quotes. Get residents. Get someone at the hospital if you can. > And Liv—
> Don’t let him off the hook.
She looked at the message, then at the statement again.
She wouldn’t.
She couldn’t.
Not if she wanted to sleep at night.
***
St. Luke’s ER was beginning to feel like a second home.
The waiting area this time was a different kind of tense. The air smelled like harsh cleaner and fear.
“Family of Carlos Alvarez?” a nurse called.
A woman in a navy jacket shot up, toddler on her hip. “Here,” she said, voice shaking.
Olivia hesitated, then approached slowly.
“Ms. Alvarez?” she asked. “I’m Olivia Martinez, with *Metro.* I’m so sorry to bother you, I know this is… a lot. I’m covering what happened at 14th & Lennox. I… can come back another time.”
The woman blinked at her, eyes red-rimmed.
“You’re the one who wrote about the buses,” she said.
Olivia’s heart stuttered. “Yes,” she said. “Recently.”
“My sister reads you,” the woman said. “She sent me your things. The one about the lights. The one about the—” She waved a hand, searching for the word. “Tech thing.”
“TerraNova,” Olivia supplied.
“Yeah,” the woman said. “That. Can you write that my husband is not stupid?”
Olivia blinked. “I—what?”
“They’re going to say he stepped out without looking,” the woman said, words tumbling. “They always do. They say, ‘He should’ve watched.’ He watches. I know he does. He checks the little man. He holds our daughter’s hand like a vice. He’s not stupid. The bus was late. It came… wrong.”
Emotion clawed up Olivia’s throat.
“I’ll write what people saw,” she said steadily. “What the system said. I won’t call him stupid.”
The woman’s shoulders sagged with something like relief.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
“What’s his name?” Olivia asked softly.
“Carlos,” she said. “Carlos Alvarez.”
“Can… I ask his condition?” Olivia asked. “You don’t have to tell me if—”
“Head injury,” the woman said. “They’re… checking. He was talking in the ambulance, they said. Confused. I don’t know. They won’t let me back yet.”
Her voice broke.
Olivia’s heart clenched.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. The words felt small, but they were all she had.
She stayed for another minute. Took notes. Made sure the nurse had her card if the family wanted to talk more later.
Outside, the gray sky felt heavier.
She sat on a bench near the entrance, fingers numb on the metal.
Her phone buzzed.
*Jake*:
> Any news on the pedestrian?
> Head injury, she replied. > Talking in the ambulance, but they’re running tests. > Wife is… > She’s scared, Jake.
He replied after a longer pause this time.
> I’m going to the hospital.
Her back stiffened.
> No, she shot back. > Don’t. She doesn’t need you showing up in your nice jacket making this about you.
> Let her husband be a patient, not a headline.
> I wasn’t going to go in like some savior, he wrote. > I was going to sit in the lobby. Make sure our team is already talking to MTA’s.
> But you’re right.
> If I walk in there and someone recognizes me, it becomes a circus.
She closed her eyes.
> Then don’t. > Fix the code. > Then fix the contracts that make it possible for this to happen without enough oversight. > That’s how you help them.
> Yes, ma’am, he wrote.
The joke fell flat.
She typed and deleted three versions of *I’m sorry too* before pocketing the phone.
Some faults weren’t in the code.
Some were in the structure.
And some, she thought bitterly, were in the hubris of every person—herself included—who thought they could wrangle those structures into behaving.
***
Her article that afternoon was blunt.
**WHEN THE SYSTEM FAILS, PEOPLE BLEED.**
She didn’t name TerraNova in the headline.
She barely needed to.
The lede:
> The app on Maria Alvarez’s phone told her the bus was “arriving” as she approached the stop at 14th and Lennox with her husband and toddler daughter. > > The bus itself was still half a block away when Carlos Alvarez stepped off the curb with the walk signal. > > Seconds later, he was on the asphalt, his blood on the crosswalk.
She laid out the timing mismatch. The MTA’s undocumented update. TerraNova’s lagging parser.
She quoted Jake’s statement. Then Leah, who said, “This is what happens when you build systems that move faster than the people running them can handle.”
She made sure to include the wife’s words: *He is not stupid.*
The story blew up.
Pundits who’d been perched on the fence about TerraNova for weeks now had a focal point. An incident. Not theoretical. Not potential.
Real.
Cable news chyron: **TECH GLITCH TURNS DEADLY?**
Jake watched the segment muted in his office. The panelists’ mouths moved. His name scrolled across the bottom.
He turned the TV off.
He opened his email.
It was a mix of investor alarm, city anger, and one message from his therapist gently reminding him that their standing Thursday session was still open.
He stared at that one longer than the others.
His phone buzzed.
*Aisha*: Patch deployed. Monitoring.
> Also, heads up: some of the engineers are spiraling. They feel… responsible.
> We *are* responsible, he replied. > At least in part. > Remind them this is systemic, not just on one line of code. > And order them food. > No one spirals well on an empty stomach.
He pushed away from his desk, went to the glass.
Down below, buses still moved.
People still waited at stops, phones in hand.
The grid hummed, uncaring.
He pressed his forehead to the cool pane.
“You wanted to be in control,” he muttered to his reflection. “Congratulations. Now every misfire is yours too.”
***
That night, Olivia’s phone rang as she was brushing her teeth.
She spat, rinsed, and saw the caller ID.
*Unknown.*
“Hello?” she said.
“Ms. Martinez?” A familiar voice. The doctor from the first night at St. Luke’s.
“Yeah,” she said, heart in her throat. “This is she.”
“This is Dr. Shah from St. Luke’s ER,” he said. “I believe you were here earlier asking about Mr. Alvarez.”
“Yes,” she said. “How… is he?”
“He’s in stable condition,” the doctor said. “He has a concussion, some contusions, but no intracranial bleed. We’re admitting him overnight for observation, but his prognosis is good.”
Relief flooded her so quickly she had to sit down.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed.
“The family mentioned you,” Dr. Shah added. “Said you were… writing something. I wanted to make sure you had the latest information, if you… include his condition in your coverage.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I… appreciate that.”
“Off the record,” he said, voice softening, “they’re scared. But they’re also… resilient. This is not the worst thing I’ve seen in here this week.”
She swallowed.
“Doesn’t make it less important,” she said.
“I agree,” he said.
After they hung up, she texted Jake.
> He’s stable. > Concussion, but no bleed.
> They’re keeping him overnight.
The reply came so fast she knew he’d been staring at his phone.
> Fuck.
> Good.
> I mean— > You know what I mean.
She did.
> Fix your shit, she wrote. > Then go to sleep.
> You look like you haven’t in a week.
> Have you been secretly watching me? he wrote. > Creepy.
She rolled her eyes.
> CityWatch posted a screenshot of you in the hearing, she replied. > Bags under your eyes, hero complex blazing. > You should send them a thank-you gift basket.
> I’ll send them a bug report form, he wrote.
Despite everything, she smiled.
> Good night, Jake, she sent.
> Night, Liv, came back.
She set the phone down, turned off the light, and lay in the dark.
The day played back in fragments.
Bus. Blood. Maria’s voice. Jake’s *I’m sorry.*
And somewhere, under the noise, the sense that they were both standing on a wire now—over a city that had less and less patience for any kind of fall.
---