This was easily one of my favourite submissions this year!
It took me a little bit to trigger the first interaction, but once I did, this was exciting and compelling right up to the abrupt ending.
The IRC interface gives cool space to present concurrent narrative contexts and do non-linear worldbuilding. It's novel and very neat. Outside of the presentation, I found this to be well written and engaging beyond my expectations.
Early on, yaping did not mention bay 9 in response tome asking about "unusual," but I'm uncertain of whether that's because that message landed between two of yaping's, or because I hadn't yet interrogated the maintenance bot to learn about bay 9 independently (at that point, I feel like I should have been able to ask yaping about bay 9 without having to first ask about "unusual").
I'd love to explore more of this story!
Shipping a lose file means that exectuable permissions aren't preserved when downloading via HTTP/HTTPS. To give users the best experience, throwing that in a tar.gz or a zip would allow those to be preserved.