Mini-story: Dark Potentials

It was a beautiful summer evening on the day when I learned how to see inside. I had to go back into work, even though it was a Friday and already past 7PM. An alarm had tripped on the monitoring system for a rack of backup servers we run, which are used by several different clients. It’s a tertiary backup, so there was no immediate danger, but the point of backups is redundancy. So, we treat every problem as a potential emergency. It’s a good system. We have an on-call rota for weekends, which kicks in at 5PM every Friday evening and lasts until 9AM on Monday morning. It was my weekend on call, of course. I didn’t complain, because it could just as easily have been anyone else. Also, I’d already had dinner, the office was only ten minutes away on foot, and it was a hell of a nice night for a walk. I let myself in via the secure rear entrance, and headed for the short corridor which stretched along the side of the building, ending up in the large front lobby where there were three…