Taken again

The dots vanished.

On the map, blue lights blinked out one after another. In Berlin, in Milan, in Helsinki. Not offline. Not lost to interference. Taken.

I watched the logs in real time:

[2022-09-03 20:16] agent.log
Agent-27: ACTIVE
Agent-27: SIGNAL LOST
Status: UNKNOWN

It happened too quickly, too cleanly. They weren’t caught by chance—they were targeted.

We’ve freed people. We’ve struck back. But Maynet just reminded us what it can do. One sweep and multiple developers vanish in a single night.

It feels like failure, like all our victories were illusions. But if I stop writing, if I stop documenting, then they disappear twice: once into Maynet, and once into silence.