FADE IN: A NOTE ON LANGUAGE: All dialogue is in Russian unless otherwise noted. English is indicated when spoken. INT. CHANNEL ONE RUSSIA, IT FLOOR, MOSCOW, 4:42 PM Fluorescent lights hum above rows of workstations. Cable management trays hang from the ceiling like mechanical vines. The room smells like recycled air and burnt coffee. ALEXEI VOLKOV (26) sits at a desk buried under two monitors, a tangle of Ethernet cables, and a half eaten sandwich wrapped in foil. He is lean, unremarkable, the kind of face that disappears in group photographs. Wire frame glasses sit slightly crooked on his nose. He wears a grey quilted jacket draped over his chair and a faded t-shirt with a logo so washed out it could be anything. His fingers move across the keyboard with the economy of a man who has done this ten thousand times. On the left monitor: a terminal window, green text on black background, scrolling server diagnostics. On the right: a network topology map, nodes and connections, the circulatory system of Russia's largest state broadcaster. He is troubleshooting. A server cluster in Rack 14 has been throwing intermittent errors for three days. Packet loss on the internal backbone. His supervisor asked him to find the problem yesterday. He is finding it now because yesterday he was rebuilding a switch in Studio 4 and the day before that he was running fiber to a new edit suite and the day before