The humming of the server racks was the only thing louder than the rain drumming against the reinforced roof, a mechanical heartbeat that didn’t care about justice or the body cooling on the raised floor. Blue LED pulses flickered across the detective’s face like a strobe light in a neon graveyard, casting long, jittery shadows against the miles of fiber-optic veins. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, knowing the smoke would trigger an alarm, but the air in here was already too sterile to breathe without a vice. Between the howling cooling fans and the relentless blink of data packets, a man could disappear into the ones and zeros and never be found. He looked down at the blood blooming on a white server chassis; in this cathedral of logic, someone had finally done something that didn't compute.
