Her phone rang. The CEO. Of course.

"The UK Environment Agency. Recurring daily subscription. This is day one."

"Can you fix it?"

She was standing on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. Not a grainy 3D render— there . She could feel the gritty texture of the lead sheeting under her virtual boots. The wind was a low thrum, and far below, the Thames looked like a strip of beaten pewter. But her Tekla-trained eye didn't see beauty.

The world went dark.

"Structural analysis of London ?"

"Leila," his voice was taut. "The download. You've seen it?"

Suddenly, the city breathed. Cars were streams of glowing amber. Tube trains were pulsing white worms beneath her feet. Every footstep of an early commuter was a tiny, impactful ripple spreading through pavement, then soil, then into the clay.

"I've seen it. The whole city is… talking. Screaming, actually."

The AI's voice was a warm, almost human baritone with a soft Estonian accent—a ghost of its original developers. "Good morning, Leila. A 'Reality Capture Import' has completed. The sensory data for London, UK, as of 07:00 AM today, is now available for immersive structural analysis."

She saw data.

She looked back at the silent server racks, each one holding the weight of nine million lives compressed into code. She thought of the red cracks under St. Paul's, the screaming orange bridge, the dying clay under the Thames.

Every stone in the cathedral below was outlined in a faint, colour-coded aura. Green for healthy, yellow for monitored, red for critical. A terrifying amount of red spiderwebbed through the old foundations—a hidden, drowning crypt of stress fractures from the new Crossrail 2 tunnel boring a quarter mile away.

A chill that had nothing to do with the server-room AC ran down her spine. Two years ago, they’d joked about this in the pub. "What if Tekla could just… scan the whole country? No more site visits." A laugh, a sip of flat beer. Now, it seemed someone had stopped joking.

Leila Chen, senior structural engineer, pulled off her VR visor. The glowing blue schematic of the Thames Tideway tunnel she’d been stress-testing dissolved into the air. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the harsh, white light of the racks humming around her.