He tapped the printed stack of green-bar spreadsheets and SQL logs on the table. “This is how you know you’re not dreaming. This is how you save the world—one cell and one query at a time.”

Later, at the post-mortem, the director asked Aris why he hadn’t trusted the automated diagnostics.

Meanwhile, Aris himself took the . It felt almost quaint. He exported a raw, unsanitized CSV of the suspect buoy’s last 10,000 readings into a blank Excel workbook. No pivot tables. No charts at first. Just rows and rows of floating-point numbers.

She stared at the ugly, beautiful grid of numbers. “So… no ghost?”

“No ghost,” Aris said quietly. “Something real just happened out there. Something fast.”

Within an hour, the anomaly was escalated. Satellite tasking was reoriented. A research vessel changed course. Three days later, they found it: a previously undetected subsea volcanic fissure had opened, spewing superheated freshwater from ancient seabed aquifers directly into the deep ocean current. It was a new class of geological-climate interaction—one no model had predicted.

Aris shook his head. “No. We validate first. Run the 6.3.3 test using spreadsheets and databases.”

He started with conditional formatting—turning cells deep red if they fell outside three standard deviations of the buoy’s own historical mean. A cascade of red appeared at row 8,432. He then used a VLOOKUP to cross-reference each anomalous reading against a secondary database dump of maintenance logs. No overlaps. The buoy had not been serviced. No storms had passed over it.