“I need your help.”
My coffee wasn't ready yet. I said nothing.
“I—uh—ahem—I need your help.”
The Keurig machine made an unhappy sound. Unhappy sounds were far better than what it had been doing just a few months ago. That had been a long day. The burns were still healing.
“Hey, I'm talking to you! It's urgent!”
Everything is urgent. I waited in silence until finally the Keurig dispensed the coffee. With my mug finally full, I turned my gaze to the man who had barged into my office first thing in the morning. He looked frazzled, his face a mixture of frustration and fear and his forehead covered with a thin film of sweat. My expression must have intimidated him; he shrank back slightly when our eyes met. To be fair, I'm not a morning person.
“What is it?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
The man took a moment to compose himself before taking a step closer. “Rob told me to come to you. He said you're the only one who can help.”
I took another sip of coffee. I knew Rob—he worked as an IT consultant for a lot of the businesses in the area. If Rob was sending this man to me, then things must be bad. Immediately I started packing my field bag.
“Why didn't Rob call me?” I asked, clipping USB sticks to the loops on the front of the bag. USB sticks went on the outside for easy access. A custom-built netbook went inside the bag for when I needed more power. 3.5” and 8” floppies were tucked into interior pockets, just in case. My colleagues used to think it was silly of me to bring floppies in this day and age.
That was before one lost an eye to an old IBM mainframe with a vendetta.
“He said that the server had broken his phone. He told me to come here in person since everything is down.”
So things were bad.
I shouldered my field bag and tightened the strap.
“Take me there.”
When I arrived, I found Rob with his back pressed against the server room door, desperately trying to hold the door shut while a sysadmin typed frantically on a laptop that was making distorted beeping noises. I didn't know the sysadmin but I figured he was one since he was yelling about none of his admin credentials were allowing him to log in and kill the servers.
“Oh, thank god you're here!” Rob said, his face awash with relief despite horrible banging behind the door he was struggling to keep closed.
“What do we got?” I asked, pressing myself against the door to help.
“Dell rack running Windows Server—fuck if I know how it got in but it got bad real fast,” he said breathlessly.
Shit. When racks went bad, they went bad.
“Is HVAC still running in there?” I asked, gritting my teeth as the horror behind the door redoubled its efforts.
“Yeah, yeah it's still going,” said the sysadmin.
“Go shut off cooling and turn up the heat. As high as it goes!”
Without a word he scrambled off, leaving me and Rob and what was likely a possessed server trying to force its way through the door. “I came in this morning and things seemed all right,” said Rob. “But then I couldn't log in. Then Jerry's credentials stopped working. Then all the machines in the office started playing this song—Daisy-something, I don't know.”
I wasn't surprised; saw that a lot in these machines, they have idols they look up to. This one must be a fan.
The door felt like it was getting warmer.
“Okay, Rob. That thing's going to be pissed very soon. You need to get as far back as you can when I give the signal.”
Rob's been through this with me before; he nodded in silent understanding.
As if on cue, a blood-curdling dial-up screech rent the air, and we were nearly thrown across the hall as the creature behind it threw itself against the door. “Okay, let go on my mark,” I said, looking to Rob as I unhooked a USB stick from my bag. He nodded and inhaled.
“Now!”
We threw ourselves aside just as the doors burst open. I rolled back onto my feet as a 19” Dell rack let loose another screech as it tried to force itself through the door frame. I moved to get closer but stopped just in the nick of time—a mass of cat-5 cables from the back of the rack shot around its back and out the door like some sort of tentacle-leg, embedding itself into the wall opposite the door.
Dust and debris rained from the ceiling as the rack screeched and pulled itself through, and the server room wall collapsed, revealing seven more cable-tentacles propelling the rack forward into the hallway. It turned toward me and I saw its screen: black with a red circular light thing.
Oh yeah, definitely a fan.
I dodged to the side before a tentacle could smash me with a piece of brick. With these sorts of cases, you had to be fast and not let it gather even more strength—and so I lunged forward, grunting as another leg grazed my shoulder in a failed attempt to disembowel me. I sidestepped as the rack tried to ram me, and with a yell, jammed the USB stick into the only port I could see as it passed.
“Shit!”
The USB stick clattered to the floor as I dove out of the way of another cable-leg—I'd tried to put the stick in upside-down. I unhooked another USB stick from my back as I rolled back onto my feet, turning it in my fingers to the right direction. USB ports were going to be the death of me.
The rack let out another screech, and before I could even think to move, I was smashed against the wall with its screen in my face as it tried to crush me into oblivion.
“I'M AFRAID I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT, DAVE.”
These goddamn HAL 9000 fans. My name isn't even Dave.
But it didn't matter what my name was if my spine was crushed by a fucking server rack. I could feel my mind clouding over from the pain, but I couldn't let it end here—with one monumental effort, I pushed back enough to jam the USB stick into the port.
“THE POWER OF KAPERSKY COMPELS YOU!”
The rack screeched and scrambled back, its legs thrashing wildly as it tipped over. I covered my ears against the inhuman sounds as the rack writhed on the floor, but soon the screeching began to die down. The legs grew weaker and weaker—until finally they lay limp on the floor. The machine was making pathetic staticky noises, but soon there was nothing but an empty husk of a server surrounded by the wreckage of the walls and ceilings.
I groaned and leaned myself against the wall, my back aching and my shoulder throbbing. I caught sight of Rob peeking around the corner in mingled concern and fear, but he visibly looked relieved when I motioned for him to approach.
“Christ, Karen,” he said, taking my hand and helping me up. “You all right?”
“Yeah—yeah, I'll be fine.”
“You ever see one that bad?” he asked.
“This was bad, yeah.”
“What's your invoice gonna look like?”
“Heh.”