James noticed the chatter. Someone on another floor disciplined, teams reshuffle, new oversight protocols. Nobody he knew by name, he didn’t care to learn much more. Just another memo across his screen. Another note stamped with a reference code. Logged, filed, already history.
Daichi heard his colleagues whisper. A manager suddenly transferred, family leaving Yokohama quietly, quickly. He kept his head bowed as he listened, eyes still on his work, watching the numbers. It was raining again.
Their cargo kept moving. The ships docked, the cranes lifted, the containers were stacked, unstacked, restacked. They watched manifests roll across their screens, a steady flow across the dim light.
They told it a little differently down on the docks. There was a guy on the line who said he’d seen a shipment vanish off the ledger just before they unloaded it. Another one claimed there’d been a container unloaded and reloaded on the same night, no questions asked. Someone else’s story. Always secondhand.
Felt like people wanted it to be bigger than it was. A trick played on Halcyon, a small theft they were trying to dress up like brilliance. A bit of defiance against the grind that they could toast in the Liverpool pubs. You’d see the tag left in the code in the arcades of Yokohama. In the high score tables, as tribute.
Different names depending on who told it, and when. Sora, Skye. Sometimes just a symbol scrawled on a wall, or spotlit in neon on a lone warehouse screen.
James didn’t repeat the name. Didn’t ask after Skye outside work, either. He still saw it in his sleep sometimes. And Daichi never wrote it down, tried not to let it surface. Pondered it on quiet nights in the office.
Promotions carried them forward. Better pay, better desks, a neat, incremental, corporate uplift.
The tag survived, too, somehow. Somewhere a container moved. A manifest shifted. A story grew.
Part 4 of a four-part story from the Static Drift universe.