Either his robots had crashed or someone had hacked the system. He rebooted the system and rolled it back to the state from the night before and watched the robots begin to bring the props back from offstage. How the hell could it have happened? He dumped the logs and began to sift through them. He kept getting interrupted by riders who wanted to know when the ride would come back up, but he didn't know, the robots' estimates were oscillating wildly between ten minutes and ten hours. He finally broke off to write up a little quarter-page flier about it and printed out a couple hundred of them on some neon yellow paper stock he had lying around, along with a jumbo version that he taped over the price-list. It wasn't enough. Belligerent riders who'd traveled for hours to see the ride wanted a human explanation, and they pestered him ceaselessly. All the hawkers felt like they deserved more information than the rubes, and they pestered him even more. All he wanted to do was write some regexps that would help him figure out what was wrong so he could fix it. He wished that Death kid would show up already. He was supposed to be helping out from now on and he seemed like the kind of person who would happily jaw with the marks until the end of time. Eventually he gave up. He set the sign explaining what had happened (or rather, not explaining, since he didn't fucking know yet) down in the middle of the counter, bolted it down with a couple of lock-bolts, and retreated to the ride's interior and locked the smoked-glass doors behind him. Once he had some peace and quiet, it took only him a few minutes to see where the changes had originated. He verified the info three times, not because he wasn't sure, but because he couldn't tell if this was good news or bad news. He read some blogs and discovered lots of other ride-operators were chasing this down but none of them had figured it out yet. Grinning hugely, he composed a hasty post and CCed it to a bunch of mailing lists, then went out to find Kettlebelly and Tjan. He found them in the guesthouse, sitting down to a working breakfast, with Eva and the kids at the end of the table. Tjan's little girl was trying to feed Pascal, but not doing a great job of it; Tjan's son sat on his lap, picking at his clown-face pancakes. "Morning guys!" Suzanne narrowed her eyes and looked away. The table fell quiet -- even the kids sensed that something was up. "Who's watching the ride, Lester?" Tjan asked, quietly. "It's shut," he said cheerfully. "*Shut*?" Tjan spoke loudly enough that everyone jumped a little. Lyenitchka accidentally stabbed Pascal with the spoon and he started to wail. Suzanne stood up from the table and walked quickly out of the guesthouse, holding on to her phone as a kind of thin pretense of having to take a call. Lester chose to ignore her. Lester held his hands out placatingly. "It's OK -- it's just down for a couple hours. I had to reset it after what happened last night."