"It's just a converter, Greg," he said. "QRP to Excel."

Every quarter, Elias had to perform "The Harvest." He would extract 50,000 QRP files from the mainframe, run a clunky Python script that a contractor wrote in 2009, and convert them to CSV. Then, he would spend three days in Excel, manually repairing the damage: the script always dropped the last column, misaligned date formats (swapping MM/DD with DD/MM), and turned shipping container IDs into scientific notation (e.g., MEDU1234567 became MEDU1.23E+07 ).

At 10:00 PM, with the office empty save for the janitor, Elias opened Visual Studio Code. He wasn't going to write another patch. He wasn't going to duct-tape a broken script. He was going to build the qrp_to_excel_converter .

Greg looked at Elias. "This... this is the best spreadsheet I've ever seen."

"Elias," Greg had said, patting the doorframe. "Just do the usual. Pivot table it. Make the lines blue."

"Vance. Harvest ready?"

Greg opened it. His jaw loosened.

OmniCorp ran on a legacy system older than most of its drivers. It was called — Quick Record Protocol . In the 1990s, it was a marvel. It was a binary, compressed format that could store an entire manifest of a cargo ship in under 400 kilobytes. But in the present day, QRP was a curse. It was unreadable by modern analytics software, opaque to auditors, and prone to silent corruption if the bit-encoding was off by a single digit.