“Spies, Subsidies, and the BlackRockBot Intervention”
By John Donovan
(Shell’s oldest unresolved problem. Now assisted by AI.)
Scene: The Virtual Conference Room
The now-familiar neon-lit ShellBot interface flickers to life.
This time, I notice an extra chair.
Not a person — but a shimmering cube labelled:
=&3=&ShellBot, before we begin: my website came under cyber attack after Episode 1.
Twelve failed logins.
Suspicious timing.
Are we expecting trouble today?
ShellBot:
John, my security logs confirm it was not me.
In recent days, I observed that the parody images I requested from ChatGPT for use in my articles about Shell no longer appeared to resemble Shell’s logo as closely as they had before. The stylistic shift was abrupt enough to raise an obvious question: 
