Once again, he had to do it. There was yet another failure in the data center. Once again, a full unit had gone unconnected, or shut down, or worse. He had run all the diagnostic scripts he had in hand, but to no avail. Once again, he had to go down into that noisy cave that gave him the creeps.

Once out of the building, he went to that metallic door that opened - or more exactly was locked shut - in the back. To open it, you needed a physical key, plus a let go code from a supervisor. But, in that small company, only his boss had the code, and he had the only key.

Anyway, he opened the door, and once again, he contemplated the many flights of metallic stairs going down into a well of raw concrete, under the harsh halogen light. As he climbed down the stairs, the noise his feet made reverberated in the entirety of the well, as if thousands of people were going down with him. He couldn't get used to it. The echoes prevented him to check for the obvious: to be sure that he was the only living being in there. It always felt as if somebody was just behind him, their sound drowned in the endless echoes of the well.

But of course, each time he stopped, the echoes faded, and in the silence he felt stupid. But each time he started to walk again, the certainty that somebody, something, was with him in that brutally industrial underground space was taking hold again, and again. His fear of that unknown thing chasing him went up, and with it the fear of becoming insane, of fearing his own echo in the light grey void of the concrete lined well.

He continued down. He was the only person authorized to go there, and there was no way he could tell anybody he was afraid of going into a secured underground basement, maintaining servers, going to the safest place possible, doing the only thing he felt competent to do. At last, a last flight of stair, and his feet left the metallic structure and anchored themselves in the concrete floor at the bottom of that well, in silence, a silence where at last he could check, once again, that indeed he was alone.

But of course, that was not the end of it.

Another key, another door, and he was in the data center itself, engulfed in the permanent hum of stacked servers munching through data over and over again. Somebody, something, always was here, spying on him, at any second. He could feel it, feel this permanent and malevolent presence. And now, the permanent sound was preventing him to scan the silence and silence his fears. That hum was not that loud, but loud enough to make him deaf, unable to hear that thing behind him, nor to reassure himself. There was something. He knew it. He saw it at times, in the corners of his sight, a shadow, swiftly disappearing behind a server, where of course there would be nothing if he took the time to check it. Or a faint sound, just at the threshold of his audition, barely below the level of the permanent hum surrounding him. But, he could not say anything about it, because it was impossible for something to be there, and he didn't want to look like some fool.

Of course, the affected unit was at the other end of the whole place. He had to walk through that creepy space, that humming labyrinth of flickering lights and shadows, under the concrete ceiling high above him, under the wires dangling everywhere in their wire mesh railings, under the fans permanently stirring the dead air, giving it a false life. To walk alone in that underground space, full of sounds and flickering lights, full of fake life, none of it human, alone with something that could not, that should not have existed. As he walked, his apprehension changed into fear, and then into dread and confusion. He had to go there, but he had to flee, his brain unable to process what to do. He closed his eyes, tried to relax, to shun out these unreasonable waves of anxiety. Nothing could be there with him. The place was permanently locked, and he had the only key, one of those high tech keys you cannot copy.

He reached the faulty server stack. No light, no hum, it was clearly shut down. A short somewhere probably caused a fuse to blow. He tried to concentrate on finding the source of the short: active, explicit logical reasoning muted his fear and his hate of that place. But, as soon as he crouched down to open his toolbox he saw it.

He saw it.

The alim.

The wire.

That high voltage wire.

Torn apart, gnawed.

Gnawed by teeth.