She had no thoughts. Mouth agape, she let her half-chewed chocolate bar fall, her senses numb from sheer disbelief. As the dark cloud roiled into scattered pieces, a tremendous circle of open sea now lay in the middle of the Stonework, littered with collapsed buildings, burning regions of fuel, and bodies… countless bodies…
"I didn't think they would actually do it…"
Watching the same feed from his autochair, her counterpart looked over aghast, struggling for words. He had no idea what he could possibly say.
Trembling, she pushed the live feed into the background of her holographic workstation for a moment, unable to keep watching. "Is this what we've been doing all this time?"
He shook his head, appalled. "We didn't do this."
"We analyze destroyed societies," she replied, her tone quiet but fierce, spittle flying from the force of her words. "You and I have seen this a million times, just long after the fact. This is always the beginning of the end."
"We're not the live-team," he said, fighting back horror. "We should have passed this on to them."
"But they don't do anything!" she shot back, clenching a fist. "They just watch!" She swept her arms in the air, indicating everything and everyone past the faded blue-grey steel walls of their work room. "Why aren't we helping them? They're dying down there at this very moment. We can do something!"
He glanced at the door fearfully. "And if the higher-ups find out we've interfered?"
"I don't care what they do to us. We can't let this go on."
She pulled up all her files again, burning with anger and shaking with apprehension.
"Wait," he pleaded.
She froze her hand over the command sequence.
"What if this is it?" he whispered. "We've never seen any society quite like this. It seems volatile, yes, but what if this is what we've been looking for? What if they make it? If you interfere, you might take that away from them. You might even hurt more than you help. You'll probably ruin it, in fact."
He wasn't wrong.
But she'd never seen anyone die before; never knew them almost personally, never had to watch the worst case scenario inevitably unfold. She'd only ever reviewed expansive statistics and cold data.
And besides, they didn't interfere. That was… just the way things were.
Face screwing up, she drew in a pained breath, her fingers still hanging undecided over the controls.