The website loaded in ASCII-art slow motion. First the header, then a cascade of grey boxes, then finally the login screen. He typed his credentials. Incorrect password. He reset it. The reset email arrived forty-five minutes later. He clicked the link. The link expired.

Then came the license manager.

Aris looked at his bandwidth monitor: 0.3 Mbps down, 0.1 up. Estimated time: 34 hours.

Dr. Aris Thorne hadn’t slept in forty-two hours. The red dust of the Pilbara had infiltrated every seam of his tent, every crease in his knuckles, and most likely, his cerebral cortex. The magnetic survey data from the Greenstone belt was singing with a resonance he couldn’t ignore—a deep-seated, bullseye anomaly that suggested a massive sulfide deposit. But the processing script he’d written in Python had crashed, corrupted by a stray cosmic ray or his own trembling fingers.