Ghost in the Server Room

The **palm** of my hand sweated against the cold server rack as the third page tonight lit up my phone. 2:47 AM. Somewhere in the building, a database was hemorrhaging data, and somewhere outside, the palm trees lining the corporate campus were swaying in a wind I couldn't feel.

I'd been **running** on caffeine and spite for three months since the layoffs. We used to be a team of twelve. Now we were four, doing the work of twelve while management called it "optimization." I watched my colleague Sarah nod off at her desk again, her face that familiar **zombie** gray that comes from too many 14-hour days, too many "urgent" deployments, too many nights sleeping under your desk because commuting home feels pointless when you'll be back in four hours.

"You still coming to **padel** tomorrow?" Marcus asked, not looking up from his terminal. His voice sounded like it was traveling through water.

"Wouldn't miss it." The lie came easily now.

We played every Saturday at 6 AM—before the servers started crashing, before the incident reports piled up like snowdrifts. For an hour, we were alive. We sweated and swore and hit balls with a violence that terrified us, and for sixty minutes, we weren't ghosts haunting a dying department.

But standing there in the server room, watching the error logs scroll past like rainfall, I realized something that made my stomach hollow out: I'd forgotten how to want anything else. This exhaustion had become familiar. This slow death felt safe. And somewhere in that thought, in the fluorescent hum of machines that would keep running long after I quit or burned out or died, I understood that the real tragedy wasn't that they were killing us.

It was that we were starting to like it.

I opened another **water** bottle and checked my watch. 3:01 AM. The database could wait five more minutes. I closed my eyes and imagined I could hear the ocean.