The server racks hummed their electric dirge as I made my way down the narrow aisle, fluorescent lights flickering overhead like a dying man's last breath. She was waiting by Row 47-C, just like she promised, her face bathed in the cold blue glow of a thousand blinking LEDs—beautiful and dangerous as a corrupted database. "You got the backup tapes?" she whispered, cigarette smoke curling through the recycled air that tasted like copper and broken dreams. I should have known better than to trust a sys admin with legs that went on for days and root access to every dirty secret in this godforsaken facility, but here I was anyway, holding two LTO-9 cartridges that could destroy half the C-suite executives in the city. The cooling fans kicked into high gear, drowning out the sound of my heartbeat as she reached for the tapes with one hand while the other stayed hidden behind her back, and in that moment I knew that in this business, just like in this temperature-controlled tomb of silicon and steel, everyone's got a failover plan—and I wasn't part of hers.
