The Server Room – Part 1: On Call

The sticky note on the server rack said: Backup ran at 3. Do not touch the blue cable. —A.

Beneath it, in a different hand: I touched the blue cable. It was fine. —L.

Beneath that: It was not fine. I fixed it. Please stop touching things. —A.

Liisi grinned. She was thirty, an infrastructure engineer at a Tallinn software firm, with a short dark bob, a hoodie and a laptop sticker that said Have you tried turning it off and on again. For a year, she and Andrei had shared the night on-call rota and had never once been in the same room. They communicated by sticky note, like ghosts.

At 2:07 a.m. on a Tuesday, the alarms went off.

She ran. The server room was in the basement, cold and humming, all blue light and white noise. A figure stood at the main rack, laptop balanced on one arm, typing furiously. He was thirty-five, tall, thin, in a grey wool jumper, with sandy hair on end and a steady, unhurried voice.

"Liisi," he said, without turning. "The blue cable."

"I didn't touch it!"

"I know. It's the database. Can you restart the load balancer?"

"On it."

They worked in silence for forty minutes, rapid and wordless, handing each other cables, reading each other's screens. At 2:47, the system came back up, green lights blinking across the rack. They sat on the cold floor and let out their breath.

"Andrei," he said at last, offering a hand.

"Liisi."

"I thought you'd be taller."

"I thought you'd be angrier."

"I was angry in the notes. I was never angry in person."

She laughed, and he laughed, the first time she had ever heard it. It was deep and slightly rusty.

"Can I ask you something?" said Liisi.

"Yes."

"Why do you leave the notes?"

"Because I like reading your replies," said Andrei, quietly.

"Green?" she said, a status light.

"Green," said Andrei. "Very green."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Uptime.