Andrea’s optics returned nothing on the word [i]Hecatonchires[/i]. No cached references. No historical fragments. No conspiracy forums dredging up half-remembered myths from the Red Decades. Just... nothing. That bothered her more than if the term had been classified. In 2087, almost nothing truly disappeared anymore. Information was too distributed for that. Even censored material tended to leave impressions behind — broken links, legal notices, traces of arguments. A complete void meant someone, somewhere, had put in extraordinary effort over a very long period of time. 

Or the word had simply never entered public consciousness to begin with.

She listened carefully as Everest spoke, piecing the shape of the situation together behind her composed expression. Privatised NASA. Asset liquidation during the collapse years. BlackSun accidentally auctioning away technology they did not understand. Eleven units scattered into the world like unexploded ordnance. And now the various heirs of that era were only beginning to realise what had slipped through their fingers. Andrea found herself studying the distant BlackSun tower again after Everest pointed it out. The building looked brutalist and domineering against the rest of the city's sleek skyline. It was made to stand out by standing against everything else.

The important detail, though, was not BlackSun itself. It was that Magnolia Everest considered a monopoly more important than understanding. That implied uncertainty. Powerful uncertainty. But awareness that cornering the market on these scant few robotic brains was important enough to make a top priority for her newest COO. Andrea had worked around dangerous technologies before. Autonomous targeting systems, predictive behavioural engines, security robots endowed with enough firepower to level a building. Even experimental cognition suites that had somehow survived ethics review by burying the worst implications beneath enough layers of legal abstraction. Every single time, the people funding them believed control would come later. Sometimes they even had the luxury of being right. But enough of the time, they weren’t. Andrea couldn't afford to allow that oversight with Rooster.

Still, this was the job now. And if she did her job right, it wouldn't be recorded in any terminal for historic reference. And no one would be there to say 'well done' at the end of it. This wasn't fucking nursery, after all. Lhotse wasn't a place for coddling. Only setting expectations and expecting those who attempted to meet them to instead overachieve rather than meet satisfaction. Andrea set the positronic core carefully back down onto the desk.

“I understand,” she said.

And she did. At least enough. BlackSun was searching, but hopefully blindly. The other corporations were unaware, as far as she knew. That would be her first order of business once she had the assets and manpower to dispatch on such an intelligence-gathering mission. After that? The current priority was going to be containment. To keep the field narrow, ensuring that the bare minimum amount of people knew what the words 'positronic robot brain' even meant were in the single digits. All the while doing all in her power to quietly identify the remaining assets before anyone else understood what they were looking for. And balance that with the day=to-day duties of actually being the Chief of Operations for a Mega Corp that employed a few hundred thousand people in this city alone.

Difficult. Expensive. But possible.

“I’ll keep the operation compartmentalised.” Andrea continued, her fingers steepling against each other. “Small teams. Need-to-know only. Most of the people involved won’t even realise what they’re actually searching for.” Her eyes lifted toward Everest again. “I’ll start with the auction trail and work outward from there. Ownership transfers, inheritance disputes, archived litigation, salvage records. Anything old enough tends to resurface somewhere once enough money changes hands.”

Then, after a brief pause.

“And Rooster?” Andrea asked. “Do you want her active immediately, or observed first?”