For three straight days, the old cannery was the only place they knew. It became their whole world, shut off from the outside. It was a weird, hidden place filled with the constant low sound of computer servers and the endless glow of monitor screens. They all had one job: building their digital shield, and nothing else mattered.
The nervousness they'd felt when they first arrived had slowly faded, replaced by the exhausting routine of non-stop work. The air in the big room, which had once been full of dust and fear, now had new smells mixed in: the strong aroma of coffee, the sharp odor that comes from melting metal with a soldering iron, and the clean, sharp smell of brand new electronics being taken out of their boxes and set up.
