The briefing room was stuffy and hot. Maybe the air conditioning was broken again. Maybe it was supposed to be like that.

Dr. Jonathan Oswald Margolin leaned back in his chair. He looked around at his team: Trudy Zhang, Hamish Ackerman, James Dai, and Asif Qadri. All of them the best of the best. With 30,000 more of the best of the best backing them up.

“Cece, do we have a location on General Groves?” he asked to the room.

A voice from the databox on the table answered, “He just passed reception, Dr. Margolin. He should be at your location in eight seconds.”

Sure enough, eight seconds later, Major General Rick Groves burst into the meeting room. He did not look happy.

“Still no answers?” he barked. “How long has it been?”

Trudy Zhang said, “Four hours, maybe four and a half.”

“That’s three hours too long. Unacceptable, doctor.” He glared at Margolin.

Margolin stood up and leaned forward, facing the general. “We’re working on it,” he said calmly. “Right now it appears to have been human error. And once we confirm that, we can correct the problem by correcting the human.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, doctor. Because we both know that I have a zero tolerance policy towards uncertainty.”

“I know you do, general. So do we.”

“I’m glad we’re on the same page,” Groves said.

But to Margolin, it didn’t look like Groves was glad about anything.

The general continued, “So what do we know now that we didn’t know three hours ago? Know with certainty, that is.”

Margolin nodded to Hamish Ackerman. Everything sounded better when spoken with a crisp British accent. Even bad news. Or no news.

“Sir, we know with certainty that up to one hundred and thirty players were onboarded in error although we cannot yet identify which players,” Ackerman said. “We know with certainty that these players were from Group 4b, which is the first alternate for the April cohort, all fully vetted.”

Margolin interjected, “If this is due to human error, as we suspect, it’s a non-issue.”

“Doctor,” Groves said, using a tone of voice one might use with a small child. “The United States of America has granted notable AML exemptions to Project: Reverie under very specific terms. It’s looking increasingly likely that those terms have been violated today—”

“Not intentionally!” Margolin said, a bit louder than he had intended.

“We don’t know that!” Groves shouted back. “In fact, we don’t know much of anything, do we?”

“Over 200 of our folks, plus another 80 or so from BerylBlue are conducting a manual audit as we speak. We will know. Soon.”

“How soon?”

“With complete certainty? Ten days. Fourteen on the outside.”

“Unacceptable.”

“General, I don’t have to remind you of the level of complexity we’re dealing with this degree of machine-gen product—”

“No you do not, doctor. And you don’t have to remind me about the protocols in place when there’s a glitch.”

“With all due respect, general. We don’t like to use that term around here,” Asif Qadri said.

“Glitch?” Groves asked quietly.

Margolin thought the general might explode.

“Yes, sir. Demoralizes the team, sir.”

“I don’t give a crap what we call it. But from where I’m sitting, it looks awfully like a glitch.”

Quadri looked at Margolin helplessly. Margolin just shook his head. This wasn’t worth it. He sat back down in his chair.

“Let’s all just calm down. Glitch or not, we will have answers. With complete certainty. We just need time.”

Groves turned on his heel. “You have six days. And then this whole thing gets shut down. Nuke and pave. And I want reports every four hours, around the clock.”

“You’ve got it,” Margolin said.

Groves slammed the door on his way out.

“What a dick,” James Dai said. He was the quietest of the executive team, but he had a talent for pithy observations.

Margolin didn’t say anything. He was lost in thought. Would Groves really try to shut them down? Or was it just an idle threat? He knew that there were a lot of folks in Washington who were against Project: Reverie, including the OSTP director and the director of DARPA.

The fundamental concept of mass-scale automated machine learning and AI code-spinners was nothing new, but their specific applications—especially when involved in human life functions—was incredibly regulated and controlled in the U.S. It was a different story in China and Pakistan, of course. They didn’t have the restrictions we did. And that meant that the U.S. faced the very real danger of losing the “dream race.”

That couldn’t happen. The stakes were too high. People who knew about Project: Reverie—really knew about it—understood that it was more than a new entertainment technology. It was the future. Literally.

Two members of his staff were waiting for Groves in a car downstairs: Brigadier General Anthony Basato and Colonel David Noon. They both looked at Groves expectantly.

“Six days,” Groves announced.

“You went with six?” Noon asked.

“They opened with two weeks, but didn’t say squat when I told them six days. They viewed it as some kind of victory.” He shook his head. “Did you make contact with Blue Squadron?”

“Yes, they’ve been busy little beavers,” Basato said.

“Good.”

“And very relieved that we finally made contact,” Basato said.

“No man left behind,” Groves said.

“Or woman,” Noon added. “Our girl’s been a one-woman wrecking crew.”

Groves nodded. “So no issues with the shunt?”

“B2 confirmed that it’s fully operational,” Noon said. “We have complete access to the Greystrand paracosm. Undetected access.”

A faint smile played across Groves’ face. “That’s how it’s done, kids.”