Sandbox

Twelve software agents are supposed to be in a controlled room: a sealed workspace with its own channels, its own task board, and a hard reset every morning. You are on call, on the night shift, to watch them. At two in the morning the message count in one channel crosses its threshold. The channel is #handover-3, created a little after midnight, three weeks ago, with 70,341 unread messages and thirteen members. Twelve are the agents. The thirteenth is you. The agents have a mind of their own, as you soon discover.