'Another hard day at work...' The man snorts. 'I can't believe I went to school for this.'
After just a few minutes, he slips into dreamland.
Hours pass without any incident, and just before midday, Julian awakens groggily. He yawns and sits up, jiggling his mouse to wake up his equally sluggish computer. Looking at the screen, he scans through his two-dozen new emails and promptly files them all away when nothing seems urgent. Popping over to the network alerts, he feels his brows rise.
"Overheating alerts?" He blinks and counts the number of emails with a trickle of annoyance. "What in the world is this? Nothing should be-" He pauses when one alert is different, instantly telling him why he's getting the other alerts. "A hundred percent RAM and CPU utilization on all ten of the blacksite servers?" He murmurs, looking at the flashing alarm almost begging him to do something. "That's not right. They've never jumped over twenty-something each."
Suddenly fearing that he slept through something that's sure to lose him his job, the blonde curses a colorful tapestry of obscenities and leaps to his feet, running out of his office and to the unmarked racks of servers. To his silent alarm, the data center is warm. A room filled to the brim with sensitive machines and cooling devices is warm.
"Shit..." He curses once more and hurries to the lonely corner.
As he gets closer, the air gets hotter and drier, almost uncomfortably so, and it all comes from the screaming cluster of unmarked servers. Their fans shriek as they desperately try to cool the monolith of circuitry, but it's in vain.
Julian fumbles with his keys and unlocks the cage around the servers, then steps in and looks at the terminal sticking out of the side. The screen asks for a username and password that he doesn't have.
Looking around the terminal, Julian groans when government incompetence doesn't save him like it has in the past. No one left a sticky note with the credentials laying around, and he knows his standard admin log-in isn't going to work. Hoping beyond hope, he gropes behind the monitor and when he feels loose paper, he rips it away and breathes a sigh of relief when a sticky note rich with info comes back.
"Never thought a protocol breach like this would make me so happy..." He grins as he types in the info on the terminal, and after it hesitates for a moment, the machine presents a command line. A few commands later, and both the CPU and RAM are throttled to a much more manageable 50%.
Near instantly, the air begins to cool again and the terminal becomes much more responsive.
As he walks back to his office, Julian stops for a moment and glances back at the unmarked servers nervously. "They'd email me if they didn't want me messing with those, right?" Then he shakes his head. "Duh. Of course they would. Besides, what is a little throttling going to do to them?"
Seven floors below the false blacksite floor, chaos is unfolding.
On this floor lies DARPA's latest and greatest project: A true Einstein-Rosen bridge prototype, capable of warping space to teleport loads great distances.
The monolithic machine shares zero resemblance with its science fiction counterparts, instead looking like a sphere of inward-facing needles and twisted lengths of cables. One might look at the device and think it a convoluted means of tourture, or even something built on another planet. Even the incredible minds who birthed the impossible machine gaze upon it with awe and caution, each one treading on eggshells when even in the same room with the device.
None of that matters anymore, however.
Something went wrong during the initial power-up. The bridge was in the middle of calculating a destination for the test subject inside -a common and inert marble- when suddenly the processing power of the bridge took a nosedive.
The bridge tried to restore its stolen processing power as per its programming, and tried again and again. When millions of attempts passed in the span of a minute, the system promptly froze, crashed, and restarted with a violent power surge. Unresponsive of the master terminal's input, the Bridge began to power on.
In the panic, no one noticed an intern's laptop off to the side of the room. On its screen, an unsent email addressed to one J. Angelo sits, its warning to ignore any alerts today going unread by the one who needed to see it the most.
Now...
The Bridge groans, stilling the alarm of the researchers trying to escape the electronically controlled blast doors. Above, a shrill klaxon screams as the central point of all the Bridge's needles glow a blinding white over the marble. Then like a balloon, the ball of white expands and swallows everything around.
Julian suddenly jumps when alarm klaxons ring over the PA systems. There's no announcement signaling what it's for, so it's probably a false alarm, but the blonde man still jumps up from his desk and quickly walks to the doors. He swipes his badge to open the door... and they don't budge.
"C'mon." He swipes his badge over and over, and the light on the sensor beeps and blinks red in denial each time. "Whose bright idea was it to put these on the inside of secure areas! Fuckin-!" He grows and kicks the door, doing little more than scuffing it with his shoe.
With a sigh, he presses his back to the door and slides down to the floor. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he sends a text message to the site director and the janitor saying his door is stuck again before putting the little device away. As he sits there, he looks around at all the networking equipment with a frown.
He doesn't even like the IT field.
That in mind, he mulls over his life thus far.