“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.
