Crossroads—2026-08-26 (Patreon)

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Chapter 3.1.62: DONE? by Paul Charm

Good afternoon from South Padre Island. My time here is beginning to run short, so Rebecca and I have decided that staring at computers is no longer an acceptable use of every waking hour. We’ve escaped to the beach for a bit.

Also, I fixed the computers.

There. I said it.

For those of you who remember, my highly technical contribution to the Alderwick recovery effort was typing, “Oi, mate… stop bloody hallucinating. We need you to help run the project.”

And, for the first time in ages, the bloody thing stopped and thought about it.

Now, before Rebecca or Evelyn throws something at me, no—I did not actually fix them. My contribution was roughly equivalent to an RAF pilot kicking the instrument panel and discovering that one particular kick made a warning light flicker.

But it did give Rebecca and Evelyn something different to work with.

As I understand it—and I’m explaining this as a pilot, not a computer boffin—The computer thought someone was attacking the money, so it slammed every door it could, locked itself inside and refused to trust anybody knocking.

That was probably the correct response at the time.

The problem was that it never properly asked whether the attack was still happening.

Rebecca and Evelyn eventually got the systems to reconstruct what had happened, go back through the decisions they’d made and compare the original threat with what was happening now. In aviation terms, it was still flying the emergency checklist after the emergency had ended.

Eventually, Alderwick’s computer system seems to have reached the electronic equivalent of, “Oh. Right.”

Access started coming back carefully rather than all at once, and the systems are now properly coming online again.

So yes, I’m claiming credit until Rebecca reads this.

This won’t be our last trip to South Padre, either. Rebecca and I are now helping Nick with all four Benevolence Worldwide teams, which gives us plenty of reasons to come back—and, apparently, plenty of reasons for me to continue pretending I understand computers.

For now, though, I’m going back to enjoy the beach.

Cheers, everyone. See you next time.

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