Chapter 123. The Grounding

“Come on. Fucking work, damnit!!” Beck muttered under his breath, his jaw tight as another error flashed red across his screen.

The office was dim except for the cold, blue glow of multiple monitors casting shifting light across his haggard face. Code scrolled down one screen. Facial recognition mapping grids blinked on another. A live camera simulation ran in the corner, feeding sample images into the system he had built from scratch.

Built. Broken. Rebuilt.

The problem wasn’t the mapping; it was the crowd density variable. Over three hundred faces moving at once gave different angles and shadows, not to mention the chaotic reflections from champagne glasses and jewelry. He had to account for every single distortion. If Edward stepped into that hall, the system had to recognize him in under a few seconds. Those seconds could mean the difference between catching