The server room hummed like a dirge, cold air biting through my jacket as I followed the blinking trail of amber LEDs deeper into the stacks. Somewhere in this labyrinth of black monoliths, a petabyte of someone's secrets was bleeding out through a backdoor nobody was supposed to know about—nobody except the dame who'd hired me, and whoever put two slugs in the night-shift admin found slumped over a keyboard at 0300, his dead hand still resting on the F5 key like he'd been refreshing his way to salvation. I lit a cigarette out of habit, then crushed it underfoot when the smoke detector gave me a warning chirp; even the building was a snitch in this town. The fans roared louder as I rounded rack 47, and there she was—a fiber tap no bigger than a matchbook, spliced clean into the backbone, patient as a spider. Whoever planted it knew the wiring diagram by heart, knew the camera blind spots, knew the badge rotations. It was an inside job, the kind that always is, and as I pocketed the device and the cooling system kicked into a higher gear, I could've sworn the whole damn data center exhaled, like it was relieved someone had finally come looking.
