Mira looked at VMix 27, still running on her third monitor. Input 17 had gone black again. But Input 22—which had been dead all night—was now showing a live shot: the same news desk, intact, with a new crawl: “Mystery Alert Saves Thousands – Source Unknown.”

A long pause. “We’re evacuating the lower valley now. How did you know?”

At 5:47 a.m., her phone rang. Sheriff Barlowe’s voice was sandpaper. “Where’d you get that footage, Ms. Danvers?”

Mira Danvers, a veteran technical director, stared at the twenty-seven input tiles on her VMix workstation. Most showed standard feeds: Cam 1 (wide shot), Cam 2 (host), Cam 3 (guest). But Inputs 13 through 20 were black, labeled only with timestamps from the future.

She keyed the intercom. “Control room to engineering—I need a clean ISO feed of Input 17, no metadata, just video.”

And in the system logs of Station 7, under “unusual routing activity,” one line remained: Session Vmix 27 – Duration 00:00:00 – No data.