3AM: A short story

I check my watch. 3AM: not a good time to be inside a pitch-black server room. It’s oddly quiet. No fans whirring, lights blinking, or signs of life (although none was expected with what I was told). I sneak over to a terminal. It’s shut down. I hit the power button, and it spins to life.

Oh no. This can’t be. I wasn’t told this. It’s password protected.

[sudo] password for server: admin
█▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 10% Downloading...

Poor IT guys couldn’t even be bothered. I quickly open up a command prompt, trying to stay silent. This loud, clacking keyboard ain’t helping either. As I’m trying to get the private logs, I hear footsteps. I turn around in a clock cycle. Nobody there. I assume they sent multiple agents down here. Log download complete.

nano /server/logs/private/2023-08-16.log

no. NO. NO. NOOOOOOOOO.

I was called in by my boss for latency problems, but it’s worse than that:

Production’s down.