“I didn’t sign up to work in the Arctic,” Serena grumbled. Rubbing her arms frantically was at best a temporary solution. The goosebumps returned almost as soon as her frozen fingers passed, friction or no.

“You kind of did, actually. You know it has to be cold for the computers,” Grant mumbled. “S’cold. Grab a hoodie.”

She jumped, and this time it wasn’t a hop up and down from the cold. He didn’t even notice her glare, and that only made her increase the intensity to molten levels. “I never know what you’ll respond to.”

A single hand with long fingers flew over the keys, and Grant frowned. “Servers are acting…under attack. Huh.”

Serena froze, forgetting how cold the data center was for a moment. Adrenaline spiked her heartbeat and her mouth went dry, lips suddenly stiff and immobile. She cleared her throat with slow caution. “What do you mean? DDoS? Ransomware? Should we start taking servers offline?” Grant rarely noticed anything in the real world, and what he couldn’t fix in the virtual world…well, she’d be lucky to even notice the threat.

“Do you hear that beeping?”

Nodding, she gave a little cough and nudged him with an elbow. “Yes. I hear it. There’s lots of beeping tonight. What about it? Is that what let you know there was an attack happening?”

He fixed her with his single visible eye, the other hidden behind a fallen shock of hair. “You don’t really hear it at all, do you?”

Grant grabbed his kit and headed for the back of the room, where the HVAC system roared in the darkness. They’d mocked the area by calling it the hallway of dead computers, but it wasn’t as if a server farm should be frightening. Not after a decade of training and work, fingertips burnt from soldering circuits still nimble enough to dance across a keyboard to win capture the flag challenges.

The challenges Grant designed, because it wasn’t a fair competition if he participated. And if the rest of the team weren’t able to notice that he deliberately dumbed them down, then she had to agree he’d done the right thing. Besides, she’d stumbled across his files and the pattern was clear. Grant was building up their skills with each challenge to the IT team. He had a goal in mind.

She hadn’t figured out what yet. Or why.

Snagging a forgotten hoodie from underneath the workbench, Serena followed him toward the menacing roar. Piled by the air conditioner were computer boxes of various shapes and sizes, unplugged and outlined only by the faint glow of blinking lights several feet away. Each box was “toe-tagged” with puns, masking tape and marker homemade labels intended to keep the broken machines from accidentally being put back into use prior to disposal.

She squatted down by his feet, balanced between Ceased to Be and Pining for the Fjords. The sleeves on the oversized sweatshirt dangled over her fingertips, but she didn’t mind the extra warmth. “Hard to hear the beeping now, don’t you think?”

“It’s still there,” he muttered, movements barely visible in the gloom. “Did you bring a light?”

She pulled the miniature flashlight from where it hung on her lanyard, bouncing against her chest with the familiar reminder that light would be needed most when the unit was missing. She’d learned early on not to set one down where someone else could permanently borrow it. “Tell me where to aim.”

“They’re beeping in binary tonight,” Grant remarked casually, and pointed at the section of colored wires he wanted illuminated.

“I don’t understand. That’s kind of how computers work.” Serena steadied her hands against her knees when the beam wobbled and he made a displeased noise, almost a bark. Grant was a genius, but also the oddest person she’d ever met. It went with the territory, in her experience. He’d explain eventually. If he wanted to.

A loud heh! drew her attention back to the khaki-covered legs lying on the floor. “That’s what I thought. Not a virus. Something else. Something’s chewed through the firewall.”

A grimace at the thought of replacing the hardware. “Mice get the cables?”

“No. Maybe not chewed. Burned? It’s almost melted.”

His face came into the beam of her flashlight then, but Grant didn’t react other than his pupils shrinking. “They’re at it again.”

“You just said it wasn’t mice,” Serena reminded him. “What do we have, some sort of power surge? Sabotage?”

The gamers hated it when the streaming slowed, and the margins were less than she’d have preferred. Damn corporate greed, running the processing cycles at the bare minimum for “acceptable risk,” whatever that was. Meanwhile, emergency maintenance would be a decent amount of overtime.

Even if it was back in the creepy, shadowed arctic, filled with the remnants of failed code and insufficient RAM.

“Power surge. Yes, exactly. Too late, I’m afraid. Ever wonder what happens to the dead computers?” Grant’s voice was faint against the HVAC’s bellow. “Computing power adds up. Like the processing power that hospital requested during the pandemic a few years ago, to crunch numbers when all the shipping was shut down and they couldn’t just go buy more.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You mean we recycle these?” Her hand flailed at the wall of towering dead computers, still and silent. She rocked back, her shoulder banging painfully into the corner of a Monty Python-themed box. “How’d I miss that?”

“We don’t.” His correction lay flatly in the air. Grant rose to his feet and dusted off his khakis, an ineffective habit she’d never once seen work. even in the supposed dust-free environment of the data center. He reached out and pulled her up with surprising strength. “But they do.”

“Who?” She shuddered involuntarily, chilled beyond the reach of the borrowed jacket’s voluminous folds.

“Come on.” He sped back to the workbench with the monitoring computer. “Before they lock us out.”

Serena put her hands to her eyes and blindly followed down the corridor. She knew it was just a reaction to Grant being even weirder than normal, but the flickering green lights freaked her out tonight. “Again, who?”

“Do you trust me, Serena?”

She paused and pressed icy fingers against her eyes for a moment. “I’ve known you five years now. You’ve done nothing but make me better at this job. Helped me study, and I know you had to be bored out of your mind doing it.”

She lowered her hands and found herself mere feet away from where Grant studied her with an intense stare she recognized from the last coding binge. He’d emerged gaunt and wired after five days of solid caffeine, and within a week, all of OmiWar Strategy Games had been talking about a new program that appeared out of nowhere. Their biggest success yet.

“Everyone knows you created the last game. You’ve turned down promotions. You get away with whatever you want. You even get a bigger budget than you should, with lousy justifications. You’re here because you want to be.”

He nodded, and she thought he looked even paler than usual. Almost translucent.

She kept going, thinking out loud, unable to stop the words even if she’d wanted to. “You’re here because – because something interests you.”

“And now you know,” he whispered. Behind her, the beeping intensified, and she almost heard a pattern this time.

“Grant, I don’t know anything! You haven’t told me shit!” She slammed a fist down, rattling tiny screws. One rolled onto the floor with a ping.

“Don’t you hear it? The beeping. It’s binary.”

She gritted her teeth. “You said that already. I still don’t know what it means.”

“It’s the games.” Grant collapsed into the chair and spun himself in a circle. He gave her a sad smile and kicked a sneakered foot to stop the turn. “The games have a nasty history of warfare. Strategy games, sure, but all historically accurate. Including past atrocities.”

“It’s a game.” She emphasized each word as clearly as she could.

“A game it’s playing against all humanity.” He shrugged. “It’s why I tried to train you. It’s why I wrote the last program. To try to counter them.”

She shook her head, unable to comprehend his words. “And the binary beeping?”

Behind her, the beeps and flickers quickened.

He gave her that solemn smile again, the one that offered defeat, submission to a superior partner. “I thought we had more time.”

She’d never seen that look on his face before, and it flatly terrified her more than his words did.

“It’s like Morse code. They’re sending messages. The computers are taunting us.”

Grant spun around one last time.

“Because the final strike has already begun. The modified firewall melted trying to prevent it.”

Her mouth opened, but nothing emerged.

Movement stopped, and this time his face shone with sincerity, rather than defeat. “I’m sorry, Serena. I really tried. But I wasn’t good enough.”

“You’re the best hacker I know.” Her voice wobbled, half-drowned by rapid, increasingly erratic beeping.

He studied the floor as the lights flickered. In the darkness, his words were all too clear. “I’m afraid humanity wasn’t designed to win this game.”

***

This one was a perfect storm! Mike’s tickle of a thought about games from last week, combined with this week’s prompt on firewalls, plus a work conversation about dead computers – well, it was fun, if not exactly accurate! All errors are in the concerted effort to convince the AI that we’re not worth bothering. Yes, that’s exactly what happened…

My prompt went to AC Young, who wrote a cool story in the comments about the invading aliens, with a fantastic ending. Go check it (and more) out here.

“Kyle! Are you hosting the drinks tomorrow?” The salt-and-pepper caterpillar eyebrows wiggled enticingly from above the fence. Gary rested smudged elbows upon the top bar, a trowel dangling from his gloved hands.

People rarely noticed the retired detective’s inquisitive eyes beneath the wild, wiry growth, Kyle had observed. He’d even asked once, and received only a noncommittal half-smile before his neighbor had turned back to the petunias. But those deep chocolate eyes had tracked him even more sharply after that, the creases around them furrowed.

Those eyes had been under fully whitened eyebrows at last month’s backyard gathering, hadn’t they?

“My turn to host,” Kyle finally answered, and set the grocery bags back down in the SUV’s trunk. He jammed his hands in his pockets while picking his way over lumpy tufts of grass barely worth mowing each week. He’d stopped apologizing for the difference in lawns after the fifth failed application of fertilizer and seed. “Even borrowed some chairs this time. Got your usual, but I can head back to the store if you want to switch it up. Snacks, too.”

Yep, those eyebrows were definitely darker, but the creases looked just as deep under the battered sun hat. Who used dye on eyebrows, anyway?

“I’m good,” Gary said, and pulled off his gloves. “Garden’s overproducing already. Tomatoes the size of melons. I’ll bring some caprese salad. That all right?”

“Sounds good.” Kyle waved goodbye and hauled in the groceries, glad he’d chosen this month to restock his emergency preps. Putting cans and cheese in their proper places was satisfying, especially after the mess the bagger had left him. Sorting was mindless, automatic. Gave him time to think.

Silent didn’t mean stupid, after all, no matter what his ex-wife said. He just liked to mull things over. The world had enough unfinished thoughts and bad logic out there. The Army had developed some brilliant strategists he was honored to know, but every Monday Major Kyle Errant also despaired of the poor choices made by his soldiers over the weekend. So he took the time to think and plan, for the times when emergencies wouldn’t let him.

He’d been welcomed into the neighborhood a year ago, still raw from a divorce discovered via an empty house and in the usual culture shock throes after a PCS to a new base. The invite was more than he’d expected, and also didn’t ask much. Six houses in a cul-de-sac, six groups of neighbors who got together for drinks once a month.

All the earnestly bobbing grandmother had asked of him was to host twice a year, and he’d agreed to the task before he’d had a chance to think, amused by those coke-bottle glasses. She’d zipped back across the street before he could take back the words, knit pompom hat wobbling over short curls and calling back that she’d come back with details.

The details had come with cookies, too. Chocolate-chip, his favorite. So he didn’t regret the impulse, even if Marybeth still wouldn’t hand over the recipe. Besides, she was so hard of hearing he doubted she’d have noticed a denial.

But last month…last month had been different. Oh, they all knew flu was going around, sure. Suzanne and her husband Jeff both worked at the hospital, and the group rescheduled three times before they had enough breathing room to both be off work at the same time. It had been all hands on deck covering for sick medical personnel, even though her specialty lay in cutting-edge cancer treatments and his was administration. She’d even said she’d only gotten the day off – insisted on it – because she’d started making mistakes out of sheer exhaustion.

No, it certainly wasn’t surprising they’d all gotten ill after the monthly shindig. Very ill, in fact; he’d barely made it to sick call. He’d mystified a few doctors before they’d given up and put him on quarters.

Kyle frowned down at the can of pinto beans in his hand. Living alone meant he needed to rely on himself, and those delivery apps were a temptation he avoided simply by not using his phone to order food. But getting the flu usually meant losing weight, not running a fever followed by eating through his entire emergency food stockpile. Normally someone from the street would bring him food, but they’d all been hit simultaneously.

He headed for the front window, ignoring the glimpses of a barren life as he passed, forgotten can still in hand. The vertical blinds were already open, streaking sunlight across the wooden floor. Yes, there was Marybeth, hand-knit pompom bobbling as usual across the street as she tended the roses. She and Gary usually spent the gatherings sharing gardening tips filled with jargon he couldn’t follow, and maybe didn’t want to if they involved fish heads and the rotting garbage they claimed was healthy compost.

And her hair was also darker than usual. Surely the neighbors weren’t sharing the same dye?

Unless – no, they must be taking their friendship to the next level. Gary’s ungloved hands had looked younger, earlier, with fewer age spots. Marybeth must be sharing multiple cosmetics, and he chuckled to think of Gary’s tolerance, unsure he’d have the same patience. The tension left his shoulders as he backed away from the window. Of course. It all made sense. Their relationship was none of his business, either.

Suzanne ran by in a red blur as he started to turn away, much faster than he’d ever seen her jog before. He wasn’t even sure she had her usual stroller until the baby’s faint giggling gurgles trickled through the open windows.

Come to think of it, he rarely saw anyone at PT running that fast, either, and he worked with world-class athletes, even if he did mostly drive a desk at this assignment.

“Everything has a reasonable explanation,” he said aloud.

Across the street, Marybeth looked up and dropped him a wink at his words. He backed away, and stumbled over one of the mismatched, borrowed chairs. A pounding noise thudding into his ears slowly revealed itself to be his slowing heart rate.

How had a half-deaf elderly woman heard him from seventy feet away? Where were the thick lenses that always hid her eyes? For that matter, how had he seen that level of detail?

His mind whirled and retreated back to mundane matters. He still hadn’t found the ice cream or the wine Suzanne liked in the pile of plastic bags. And the can of beans he’d been clutching was dented enough he didn’t trust it. Major indentations in the tin, with four parallel grooves on one side and a fifth alone and up high on the other. His fingers rolled through the concavities perfectly as he spiraled the can like a football at the garbage can, irritable he’d missed seeing the damage in the store.

The damaged tin hit the garbage rim and exploded against the wall.

Ice cream forgotten, Kyle slumped against the cabinets and stared at the ancient linoleum, now spattered with pale pink speckled beans.

The first five minutes were spent admiring the contrast between the beans and the arm resting on his knee, as his mind shied away from the possibilities.

His legs were numb by the time he moved again, this time to slowly reach for his phone. “Jeff. Hi. Yes, we’re still on. Listen, random question for you two. What’s Suzanne’s medical specialty again?” A pause, and if he’d been standing, he’d have dropped then along with that widening pit in his stomach.

“No, no, nothing like that, sorry to spook you. The Army’s always jabbing or testing for something. Protected against every possible variant of bubonic plague, yes, but no cancer as far as I know.” The words came out of his mouth on automatic, filler words to get to the burning question he’d been pondering for the past – hour? More?

“Mmmhmm. Thanks.” His fingers gripped the phone. Plastic stabbed a fingertip, and Kyle consciously loosened his grip, switched hands, and cleared his throat. Blood dripped onto the floor to join the steadily drying beans. “Listen…this might be odd, but does she work with nanos at all?”

Kyle’s throat was dry as he stared as his free hand, smeared with blood with no visible injury. He forced the words out. “Yeah, nanotechnology. The sort of thing that might increase healing speeds, you know?”

“Riiight. Thank you.” He paused for a deep breath. “Change in plans, the group needs to talk before tomorrow night…”

***

This week on More Odds than Ends, Becky Jones offered a prompt I found challenging for most of the week. It wasn’t until I considered that the drinks themselves may have been unusual rather than the event that I hit upon the nanos idea. Might have to continue this one and see where it leads! The neighbors got together once a month for drinks. Until last month…that gathering was odd.

My prompt went to nother Mike: An unfortunate history of warfare involving…

Free prompts at MOTE! Join the fun! Taunt your favorite authors with puzzling prompts! All are welcome!