The server room hummed its cold, electric dirge as I walked the aisle between the racks, their blinking lights like a thousand eyes that had seen too much and would never talk. Somewhere in this cathedral of silicon and secrets, a dead man's data still lived—bank accounts, love letters, the coordinates to a shallow grave in Nevada—all of it spinning on platters at seven thousand RPM, waiting for someone with the right password or the wrong intentions. I ran my fingers along the cold steel chassis of rack 47, feeling the vibration of a hundred thousand lies being backed up to the cloud. The AC unit kicked on overhead, breathing frost down my collar like the whisper of a ghost who'd been deleted but never quite purged from the system. In this business, everybody thinks they can hide behind encryption and offshore mirrors, but data doesn't forget—and neither do I.
