Alice was late for her press conference - the 9AM corporate quadcopter flight from the Paris to London office was running over an hour behind. The CEO had pulled rank to commandeer a dozen of the craft late last night and the aftershocks were still propagating through the reservation system, a slowly degrading wave of inconvenience.

She sipped water gingerly from an immaculately-machined aluminum bottle. A crushing hangover was her only memento from last night's big celebration. The little white packet of painkillers she downed while waiting in the micro-terminal were slim defense against the onslaught, and the persistent whine of the copter's electric motors weren't helping. She tried her best not to think about all those trays of slender glasses brimming with mid-tier British Fizz. She'd clicked off her restraints shortly after takeoff, the constriction was unwelcome in her current state.

The cabin was as bright and airy as possible for a 4'x6' box. The floor was a sheet of matte white plastic, which curved and continued up the walls to knee height. Above it was a continuous curve of glass wrapping around to the doors affording a panoramic vista. Alice had lightly opaqued this windshield against her mild acrophobia. Her fellow passenger had reclined and was snoring faintly, she didn't think he'd mind.

Without warning the helicopter lurched to a stop and she almost lost her two-saltine breakfast. Flailing, she steadied herself with the safety handle above her seat to keep from pitching forward. The windshield switched to display mode and brought up a map rendered in cheery pastels. A lightly pulsing arc connected Paris and London, with a smiling helicopter icon resting partway across the English Channel. That plus the flight speed readout of "0km/hr" told Alice they were now hovering motionless over the ocean. "You've got to be kidding me, what the actual fuck is going on?"

Alice directed a swift kick at the plastic under the screen, scoring a solid hit with the ball of her foot and lightly creasing her flats. The panel dented obligingly, marring the otherwise pristine lines of the cabin's interior.

The man reclining next to her opened his eyes long enough to hazard a nervous glance at the destructive outburst. His face and neck were covered in short black stubble, marching up to his temples where they met a pair of tortoise shell sunglasses that had slipped halfway down his nose. The whites of his eyes just visible over the rim were shot through with red veins, contrasting against the warm brown of his skin. Hair of indeterminate length, color, and composure was hidden under a dark grey hoodie. By all appearances his night had only recently ended, Alice had figured he'd sleep through the flight.

A gentle polyphonic chime filled the cabin, followed by a too-soothing voice at odds with a blunt error message written by an engineer: "Destination beacon unreachable. Waiting to retry."

"Perfect," snapped Alice, "I'm an hour late already and I get the chopper running the beta build." She finished the water and chucked the bottle at the flight map. It bounced harmlessly and clattered to the floor.

Again came the chime and accompanying voice: "Destination beacon unreachable. Waiting to retry."

"Plus the buggy thing is going to repeat itself every three seconds."

"It's using exponential backoff, give it a few cycles and the warnings will peter out." The man sounded a little hoarse, but otherwise surprisingly composed given how bad he looked. "The navigation code in this helicopter is literally flawless," he continued, "there's no way this is a navigation bug, something must be physically wrong with that beacon. I'm sure they'll sort it out."

"Literally flawless? My clothes dryer can't spin a load without seg-faulting," retorted Alice, "I designed that beacon system to be rock solid. Look, I'll pull up the status dashboard on my tablet," Alice folded out a table from the chair housing and plopped down her device. The screen immediately mirrored to the windshield, replacing the map. "See, we're all green and the network is fine. It's a buggy copter."

"Your dashboard is buggy, I'm telling you the nav software is perfect."

"How can you possibly be so sure? Do you have any idea how complex that system is?"

"In fact I do, I wrote about half of it. And the formal proof of correctness."

Alice deflated. There were only two people at Space Core higher than her on the org chart: Lynch, the CEO, and his technical savant co-founder. Her companion apparently was the latter.

"Ah. So you must be Robert Angstrom. I uh, I'm sorry. It's been a rough morning and I'm late to present at the most important event in your company's history. Let's start over, I'm Alice Yang, chief architect of terrestrial logistics. I apologize Mr. Angstrom, I'm surprised I didn't recognize you."

"I've been keeping a low profile for the last, oh... decade or so," Robert admitted, "I'm more of a ‘lurks in the shadows' kind of leader. Truth be told I'm in a bit of a bad way this morning myself, no need to apologize. And Robert is fine, thanks. Mr. Angstrom is my dad's name."

Alice smiled politely at the lame attempt of a joke. Then one of the lights on the still-loaded status board blinked from green to red. London.

"Shit. Okay, looks like the problem is the beacon. Do you have a laptop? I only brought this thing," Alice gestured at the tablet, "I wasn't expecting to get my hands dirty today."

"Oh. Yeah, sure." Robert unhooked his harness, reached inside his sweatshirt and pulled out what appeared to be a solid slab of aluminum. He grabbed the top 1/4" of metal and pulled, unspooling a 14" display.

"The upper half of the chassis is a keyboard, the bottom is all one giant trackpad. Hope you're a touch typist." He said the last with a smile as he handed the device to Alice.

Alice moved her tablet to her lap and replaced it with the laptop. With the device under her hands she could detect the light curvature of key caps on the otherwise featureless slate. She took her best guess at the home row and dove in. The keys were faintly warm, the action smooth and satisfying.

"Wow, these keys are amazing"

"Vintage Silent Alpaca switches. Soldered the board myself. Heavily modded, obviously."

Alice popped open a console and got to work. She'd been out of the code monkey game for years, but insisted on staying technically fluent on all systems she was in charge of. She established a secure connection and logged in to the beacon's system.

"No recent changes to the software," she muttered, "unsurprising given Lynch's moratorium on development in the lead-up to yesterday. Let's take a look at the event history... That's funny–"

"What?"

"Well, the London beacon was humming along fine all morning, everything looks totally normal. Until about 5 minutes ago, when there's a disconnect event and the history log just... stops. No errors reported, no reconnect attempts, it's like the whole thing was just wiped off–"

Her voice was cut off by a deafening howl as fierce winds engulfed the copter. The rotors whined crazily as they struggled and failed to keep the craft steady amid the brutal turbulence. Alice's water bottle and tablet ping ponged about the cabin. She clutched Robert's priceless computer with one hand, grabbing the safety handle with the other. Her head whacked the ceiling in one of the more tumultuous bumps, and somewhere along the way her right shoulder impacted the door with an alarming crunch.

Finally the copter found clear air and she used her good arm to push herself up from the floor. She raised her head and froze, transfixed at the scene out the window. The screen had turned off in the chaos, leaving a panoramic view through glass. Whitecaps whipped across the water below them, twin pillars of fire rose in the distance directly ahead.

Robert still had his harness on and kept his seat. He had pinned her wayward tablet under one foot partway through the onslaught; the screen was cracked but it seemed otherwise whole. He picked it up and proffered it to Alice. Behind the spider web of broken glass, three more status lights had turned red.

Destination beacon unreachable. Waiting to retry.