Riddles in the Server Room

Maya hadn't slept properly since the layoffs. She moved through the office like a zombie—present, functional, but somehow not entirely there. Her coworkers stopped asking if she was okay around week three. The answer was obvious in the dark circles under her eyes, the way she jumped when the elevator dinged, the silence where her laugh used to be.

The data center hummed with the collective breath of a thousand machines. She crawled under the raised floor, dragging a replacement fiber cable behind her. The old one had been severed during the merger—literally cut through by some contractor who didn't understand what "don't touch anything" meant. The corporate reorganization had been brutal, efficient, and completely senseless. Like most things lately.

Her phone buzzed. Again.

"I know you're angry," Alex's text read. "Can we talk?"

Maya stared at the message until the screen dimmed. They'd broken up three weeks ago—Alex couldn't handle her depression after her mother died, couldn't understand why grief wasn't linear, couldn't comprehend that some things don't get fixed. He wanted answers, timelines, closure. He wanted her to be a sphinx he could solve—mysterious but ultimately knowable. Instead she was just a woman who cried in server rooms and forgot to eat lunch.

She connected the cable. The status lights flickered from red to green. Something restored.

Outside, the corporate sphinx guarded the entrance to the building—some executive's pretentious idea of mythological grandeur. Maya passed it every morning, its stone eyes staring blankly at commuters who were just trying to survive. She used to find it ridiculous. Now she related. Guarding secrets. Asking riddles no one could answer. What do you hold when you've lost everything? What grows when it's fed sadness? When does the end begin?

The server room door clicked open.

"Maya?"

She turned. It was Marcus from accounting, holding a coffee.

"Heard you got the network back up," he said. "Thanks. That deadline was gonna be a disaster."

Maya nodded, not trusting her voice.

"I know what it's like," Marcus said quietly. "Lost my brother last year. Some days you're just—"

"A zombie," Maya finished.

"Yeah." He set the coffee on the server rack. "But even zombies eventually find something to chew on."

He left, the door clicking shut behind him.

Maya picked up the coffee. It was still warm. For the first time in weeks, something inside her—not the network, not the job, not the grief—flickered from red to green. Some cable, somewhere, had been reconnected.

She texted Alex back: "No."

Then she deleted his number.

The sphinx would keep its riddles. Maya had answers enough for one day.