Chapter 2: Null and Void

The rain hadn’t let up by the time Dash D. Board arrived at the Data City Data Warehouse. It loomed like a fortress in the mist, rows of blinking servers standing sentry. This was where all the city’s information lived, breathed, and sometimes died. Tonight, it felt more like a crime scene.

Dash stepped inside, shaking the water off his trench coat. The place smelled like burnt silicon and stale coffee—signs of an overworked engineering team. At the far end of the room, he spotted Eddie T. Loader, the warehouse admin, nervously fiddling with a tangle of Ethernet cables.

“Eddie,” Dash called out. “You got a minute?”

Eddie looked up, his eyes wide behind thick glasses. “Dash! I didn’t expect to see you here. What’s the story?”

“The story is missing KPIs,” Dash said, crossing his arms. “And unless we find them, the whole city’s going to grind to a halt.”

Eddie swallowed hard. “Yeah, I heard. It’s bad. I mean, we’re talking null values everywhere. Dashboards are throwing errors left and right. The execs are freaking out.”

Dash pulled the flash drive Annie had given him out of his pocket and held it up. “I’ve got the logs. Tell me where I can plug in.”

Eddie gestured to an empty terminal. “Over there. But I’ve already been through them. Nothing out of the ordinary—no failed jobs, no unauthorized access.”

“Then you missed something,” Dash said, sliding into the chair. He plugged in the drive, and rows of log entries flooded the screen. He started typing, filtering, and sorting, his eyes narrowing as patterns began to emerge.

Minutes turned into an hour as Dash sifted through the noise. Eddie hovered behind him, chewing on a fingernail.

“Anything?” Eddie asked nervously.

“Something,” Dash muttered. He highlighted a series of entries. “Look at this. Here’s the last successful pipeline run. Everything processed fine—tables populated, metrics calculated. But then…” He pointed to a timestamp. “This job triggered.”

Eddie squinted. “cleanup_metrics_temp? That’s a maintenance script. It runs nightly to clear out old temp data.”

Dash leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled. “What happens if someone modified it?”

Eddie’s face went pale. “You’re saying…?”

“I’m saying someone might’ve used the cleanup script to delete the KPIs.” Dash’s voice was grim. “They masked their tracks by making it look like routine maintenance.”

Eddie scrambled to the keyboard. “I’ll check the script history.” His fingers flew across the keys, pulling up the audit logs. “Here it is. Looks like the script was updated yesterday at 11:42 PM… by Hugo McCoy.”

Dash’s jaw tightened. He wasn’t surprised, but the confirmation still hit like a rogue data point. “Where can I find McCoy?”

“He’s in the Data Tower,” Eddie said. “Top floor. They say he’s been in meetings all day with the cloud migration team.”

“Of course he has.” Dash grabbed his coat and headed for the exit. “Eddie, lock down that script. No one runs it until I say so.”

“You got it, Dash. But be careful. McCoy’s got connections. People who don’t like questions.”

Dash turned back, a shadow of a smirk on his face. “Good thing I’m not a fan of answers.”

The Data Tower was a skyscraper of glass and steel, its fa?ade glowing with real-time analytics. Dash pushed through the revolving doors, nodding at the receptionist who didn’t even glance up from her tablet. The elevators were sleek and silent, whisking him to the top floor in seconds.

When the doors opened, the air smelled of money and power. The walls were adorned with charts and graphs, all perfectly color-coded, all meaningless without the missing metrics. Dash stepped into the corner office without knocking.

Hugo McCoy was exactly as Dash remembered: sharp suit, slicked-back hair, and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He looked up from his laptop, a tablet in one hand and an espresso in the other.

“Dash D. Board,” McCoy said smoothly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“The KPIs,” Dash said, stepping closer. “They’re gone. And your name is all over the script that deleted them.”

McCoy didn’t flinch. “Deleted? That’s a serious accusation. I hope you have proof.”

“I’ve got logs,” Dash said. “And a warehouse admin who’ll back me up. You’ve been pushing for a cloud migration for months. Seems to me like you’d have a lot to gain if the current system failed.”

McCoy leaned back in his chair, his smile widening. “Dash, you wound me. I want what’s best for Data City. A migration isn’t about failure—it’s about innovation. Efficiency. Scalability.”

“And sabotage?” Dash shot back. “Because that’s what this looks like.”

McCoy stood, adjusting his tie. “Careful, Board. Throwing around accusations without evidence can be dangerous. For your career. For your… health.”

Dash didn’t blink. “I’ve faced worse than a missing index key. You don’t scare me, McCoy. If you had nothing to do with this, you won’t mind me taking a closer look at your recent activity.”

McCoy chuckled, a low, cold sound. “Be my guest. But I think you’ll find you’re chasing a ghost.”

Dash turned to leave but paused at the door. “If you’re lying, I’ll find out. And when I do, you’ll wish you’d stuck to Excel.”

As the door clicked shut behind him, Dash’s mind raced. He didn’t trust McCoy, but he needed more than suspicions to bring him down. Somewhere in the data, the truth was waiting. And Dash D. Board wasn’t going to stop until he uncovered it.