The forward screen was back on, now subdivided into four neat boxes. Each was cycling through live feeds of unfathomable destruction. Alice tapped away aimlessly on her tablet, trying to make sense of whatever had just happened. Increasingly less often came the chime and the simpering voice:

"Destination beacon unreachable, waiting to retry"

"It's not coming back," she mumbled, "London, Moscow, Washington, and Beijing are smoldering craters. That beacon was in the heart of Soho, it's gone. So is the office. So is my flat. My neighbors. Our co-workers, and... oh God, my son. He's studying at King's College this semester–" Alice whipped out her phone and punched in her son's number. Knuckles clenched white as it rang.

And rang.

And rang.

"Hello, this is Julian. I can't talk right now, leave a message and I'll call you back."

The color drained out of Alice, the tension left her body. She collapsed forward on the table in front of her, sobbing. Her phone dropped to the floor.

"No wait, that's good," tried Robert. "If his phone was destroyed it wouldn't have rang - it'd have gone straight to voicemail."

Alice's phone buzzed twice from the floor. She turned it over slowly, almost afraid to look. A text message.

> Julian (offline): Haagendaaz. Help?

A strange voltage passed through her body. She shook. She wept. She read the cryptic message twice more, trying to make sense of it.

"Are you... is he...?" started Robert

Alice took two deep breaths. "I'm fine. He's fine. I mean, he's alive at least." She tried calling him again, this time it did go straight to voicemail. Another mystery.

She pulled a tissue from her purse, wiped her face, checked her makeup on the selfie camera, and gradually put herself back together. Her breakdown could wait until she was clear of the current predicament. As they used to say on airplanes, put on your own mask first before helping others. "How do we get this thing moving? We need to get out of here before the fallout reaches us."

"Fallout - wait, you think someone nuked London?" a look of horror spread across Robert's face. Strange that the annihilation of 80 million people alone wasn't enough to do it.

"It's the only explanation. Four cities were wiped off the Earth in a span of 10 minutes. No other weapon system can do that. It's that or alien invasion, and frankly I'm not a believer in little green men"

"But who would do that? China and America have been in a cold war for decades, I could see them swapping nukes, but why would they stop at four? It also doesn't explain why England and Russia were targeted so early."

"I don't know, but my money's on nukes, and the way the wind is blowing any fallout will land right on us. Let's get away from here first and then figure out the geopolitics."

"Fair enough. The copter is programmed to revert to air traffic control after a beacon failure. Ordinarily they'd have taken over by now, but I bet there's hundreds of pilotless vehicles stranded like us. We just need to get someone's attention to re-route us."

"Who controls this airspace?" Alice asked

"Umm, let me check," Robert punched away at his laptop. "Looks like this part of the channel is English domain... air traffic control routes out of... Shit, London."

"So now what happens?"

"Airspace doesn't ‘fail over' to the next zone, I never considered a whole city blowing up. Only London has authority over this craft right now, and we can't change the flight plan without approval from local air traffic control. I think we're stuck. We'll just hover until we run out of battery."

"What, and then plunge into the ocean?" A fresh wave of dread swept over Alice. The feeling of helplessness welled back up. She squashed it down.

"If an airfield is in range, the copter will make a controlled descent once it's at 5% battery. Otherwise it'll descend to 2000 feet and deploy the emergency parachute. The cabin is water-tight and rated for 20 foot waves. We can float indefinitely while we wait for rescue."

"You pack any provisions in that hoodie of yours? I think we might be waiting a while." Alice gestured to the devastation on the screen. "Also, fallout."

"Right... right. Okay, I've got something else we can try. See if you can pry off that trim panel," said Robert, pointing at the place Alice had kicked in frustration earlier. "We're going to need physical access to flash the firmware. For security reasons the copter won't take an over-the-air update."

"Back up. You want to reprogram our helicopter while it's in flight? That's like a bad business cliche."

"It's not as risky as it sounds," said Robert while typing rapidly, "there's already a debug module in the code-base for manually sending the helicopter to a GPS coordinate. We use it in our test suite to simulate air traffic control takeovers. It's disabled in the production build, but I can turn it on by flipping a single flag..." The typing stopped. "Like so. I'm already building the new firmware, should be ready in a couple minutes. Now we just need to load it into the copter."

"Can't we just spoof an air traffic control command and re-route ourselves without the risk of you killing us with a bad build?"

"Air traffic control instructions are cryptographically signed. I can't re-route us without their key - our nav system would reject the instruction. Incidentally firmware updates are also signed, I just happen to have that key. Don't tell the security team." Robert glanced down at his screen, "Plus we've got a robust automated test suite, which this build just passed. I'm 99% confident it's safe. C'mon, let's get that panel off." Robert unbuckled himself and began ineffectively poking at the panel.

"So there's a one in a hundred chance you brick it? This little box we're trapped in, two kilometers up in the air."

"Even if we lost power, the parachute would auto-deploy at 2000 feet and we'd float down to the sea. It might be a rough landing, but we'd survive. And then we're no worse off than if we had done nothing."

"Fine. Stand back," Alice commanded. Two more swift kicks and the panel buckled, exposing big enough gaps at the sides to get a grip on. "Never thought those Tae Kwon Do classes would come up on the job, but here we are. Grab your side and pull." Working together they were able to pry off the panel. Behind the gap was a featureless steel plate.

"Well damn," said Robert, "I was pretty sure there'd be an access port under that. I know it's somewhere, I wrote the code to support it."

"Can you pull up a schematic of the copter? I don't have that kind of clearance on the aviation side, but maybe you can work some of that co-founder magic?"

"Good idea. Let me look." Robert spent a few minutes of urgent tapping. "Here we go. Plans show it being right under the windshield, left side of the plane. But that's where we just looked"

"Let me see," asked Alice.

Robert tapped a few keys. An exploded diagram of the copter appeared on the big screen. Robert zoomed in to show the relevant point. The access port was clearly labeled, just beneath the windshield.

"See, should be right here." Robert pointed to the steel plate.

"Almost, but you're looking at it wrong. See how the windshield curves away? The port is on the outside."

They both looked at the door uncomfortably.