The data center hummed like a guilty conscience, rows of black server racks stretching into the blue-white gloom while the air conditioning breathed cold down my collar. I’d come looking for a missing packet and found a dead man’s access badge swinging from a cabinet handle, still warm with someone else’s fingerprints. The LEDs blinked in tight little rhythms, green and amber confessions no jury would understand, and somewhere behind the raised floor a cable clicked like a revolver being cocked. She was waiting in aisle C-17, all red lipstick and root credentials, her shadow sliced into bars by the cage door. “You shouldn’t have traced it,” she said. Maybe she was right. But in this town, even the ghosts leave logs.
