# Cold Iron and Colder Light

The servers never slept, and neither did I. I walked the raised floor tiles of Colossus Data Center at three in the morning, the hum of ten thousand machines pressing against my skull like a migraine with ambitions, blue LEDs casting everything in the color of a bruise that hadn't finished forming. The cold aisle hit me at minus twelve Celsius — the kind of cold that doesn't care about your feelings, the kind management uses to protect silicon instead of people, which told you everything you needed to know about this outfit. I was looking for a dead man's files, or maybe just a dead man; the distinction had gotten blurry around midnight when someone wiped his access credentials four hours after HR recorded him as still employed. A rack door hung open at the far end of row seven, which is the data center equivalent of a revolver left on a kitchen table — it means someone was here, it means someone left in a hurry, and it means whatever they were protecting is already gone or already watching you. I pulled my jacket tighter, checked the ceiling cameras out of habit, and reminded myself that in a place where everything is backed up and redundant and failsafed to death, it's always the one thing with no copy that gets you killed.
