I come in to the office abnormally early, my mood black as my nerdy t-shirt, a relic of a defunct corporate handout. The once flashy logo cracked and faded on the sleeve. My sleep, plagued by jittery dreams as if sourced from a scratched phonograph endlessly skipping back seconds to replay what would be my final act.
I am granted admittance through the act of swiping my ID, a near meaningless hi-tech sacrament repeated without reflection. I avoid the elevator and turn counter clockwise, winding up the stairs numbering each tread in my mind. 13 stairs to a flight, 2 flights to a floor, 5 floors to my level. I pace an additional 14 steps to the second carded gate I must pass. 144 paces in all. 12 squared, and the 13th Fibonacci number. I must pass this portal with more than a perfunctoral scan of my badge. I place my thumb on the altar of plastic, “I am me”.
With a tinny click corroborating my existence I push into the priory of geekdom. I’m not as old as some, but I remember a time when the pre-dawn glow would have been a greener monochrome. Out of the corner of my eye I see the sleeping monitors their surfaces reflectively dull and speckled with dust. I pass another old-timers cube, his monitors’ sleep function overridden and dancing with a simulated waterfall of Matrix code.
I turn counter-clockwise once more at the end of the aisle to my low-traffic station. My monitors alive and endlessly drawing and redrawing what would seem to be a layout of aged European cities. As I fall into my Aeron Chair the screens awake seemingly in anticipation. I drop my hands to the keyboard in another holy rite and my fingers affirm my password without the aid of thought.
For the first time I hesitate. I have little inkling what derangement led me to this juncture, but I find my inquisitiveness overrides all caution. Maybe it’s the endless knocking of near-do-wells and outlaws at my digital gates. Somehow I got the idea in my head that maybe there was more to the endless, mindless probing. Possibly it was one too many Laundry novels; some Pratchett predilection that posited the path I now undertake.
Many things are unnatural, and most have consequences. I begin my work of undoing to weaken the world. Opening an xterm I use secure shell to connect to another machine and invoke the virtual machine manager. The manager spawns a Windows minion in a new screen. Inside the virtual windows machine I call upon xming and SSH back to my desktop completing the unholy circle. Machine alerts begin to register in my task bar and I see the load begin to spike under a deluge of requests for admittance. I feel I can hear the nameless horrors I’m about to receive. One last command to type before my newly profaned processors perish. My hand hovers over the enter key…