Strange Horizons, February 2026
Nanea, an IT worker at a Hawaiian organization called a panakō, is assigned to overnight on-call duty during a major system upgrade for her team, Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke. Having stayed up too late the previous night playing the online video game Graceful Gamble with her cousins, she falls asleep at her desk — missing a cascade of urgent alerts. She wakes to her phone buzzing with 23 unread emails, 45 messages on the office messaging app ʻElele, and an incoming call from her exasperated manager, Maʻa.
Maʻa informs her that testers can’t access client data following the upgrade — specifically, genealogical records (moʻokūʻauhau) are inaccessible for a range of users. He reminds her sharply of a similar incident the previous month when her falling asleep led to a partial organizational shutdown, warning her not to repeat the mistake. Nanea, still groggy but increasingly alarmed for her job security — having been let go from her previous position for chronic lateness — springs into action.
Checking a digital map of the organization’s server infrastructure, she notices red and yellow warning signals concentrated in the greenhouse responsible for storing data under the Ka- through Kū- surname range. The data in this world is stored not in conventional servers, but in pūʻolo — bundles of ti leaf containing ʻike (knowledge/data), wired together and housed in temperature-controlled greenhouses. Nanea bikes to the facility in the pre-dawn hours, where she discovers that a fallen Albizia tree — an invasive species prone to collapse — has propped open a greenhouse door, letting in cold air and toppling several pūʻolo, dislodging their wires.
She rights the fallen bundles, reconnects the wires, and flags an aging pūʻolo to the Hui Kupuna (the knowledge custodians responsible for the bundles’ deeper maintenance). She also emails the groundskeepers about the tree and the broken lock. After resyncing the system, the signals turn green — but the problem isn’t fully solved. Users can now access data, but page loads are painfully slow, suggesting a cable issue.
Nanea borrows a work vehicle and drives to the Puʻuloa cable station near the ocean, where she meets Benny, a longtime cable line steward whose family has maintained the physical infrastructure for generations. Benny leads her along a forest path where the cables run beneath a low stone wall (pā), flanked by ti plants. They discover a fallen branch has displaced stones and disturbed the cable beneath. Together, they clear the debris and restore the line.
Back at the station, everything reads as normal. Nanea messages her team lead confirmation, then heads to the office for her 8 AM meeting with Maʻa. Braced for a reprimand, she’s relieved when he simply acknowledges her hard work resolving the crisis and gives her the day off. She bikes home, showers, and falls into bed — drifting to sleep with images of roots, cables, and earth merging in her mind, a quiet meditation on the deep, organic infrastructure underlying the digital world she tends.
Maʻemaʻeolehua Matsumoto is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a lifelong reader and writer of speculative fiction. You can find her at lehuamatsumoto.com or on Instagram @lehua.uila. (she/her)