“You’re the last one in the building, just finishing your thesis in a forgotten computer lab where the network doesn’t reach and the printer never forgets. The job in the queue before yours? It’s still printing… twenty-three years late.”

Mr. Delaney always called it “The Graveyard Shift,” though no one had actually died in the North Annex Computer Lab. Not officially, anyway.

The lab was ancient—by tech standards, that meant anything older than five years. But the North Annex still ran a patchwork network of beige Dell towers and boxy LaserJet printers wired into a master queue server called ZEUS. No one knew why it was named that. ZEUS hadn’t seen a firmware update since 2007.

Vince, a sophomore with too many caffeine-fueled all-nighters under his belt, manned the lab after hours. His job? Monitor the queue, clear paper jams, and reset machines when students panicked mid-term and punched the print button fifteen times.

By 1:45 AM, the lab was dead quiet. The hum of cooling fans filled the fluorescent gloom, and the only sound was the clatter of a single dot-matrix printer still in use by some stubborn engineering professor.

Vince was about to cue up a podcast when ZEUS beeped.

Job 4032: User Unknown – 3 pages – “DO NOT DELETE”

He blinked. The queue interface was locked. No user ID, no IP, just “Unknown.” And the warning. It wasn’t a normal document name—more like a plea. Or a threat.

Curious, Vince hovered over the job. He’d seen weird stuff before—drunk students submitting memes, entire Bibles in Comic Sans, even someone’s therapy journal mistakenly uploaded from Google Drive. But this was different.

“Probably just a corrupted file,” he muttered.

He tried to delete it anyway. The button greyed out. “Permission denied.”

The printer in the far corner—an old HP 4050 nicknamed Bertha—whirred to life. Vince didn’t send the job there, but ZEUS had a mind of its own sometimes.

He walked over slowly. The lights dimmed for half a second.

Page one slid out.

It was a high-res scan of a handwritten note: “You’ve seen it now. You can’t unsee it.”

“What the hell…”

Page two followed.

A photo—blurry, grayscale. It showed the lab. This lab. From above. Except… there was no camera on the ceiling. And no one was sitting at the console. Yet there he was, in the picture, looking up at nothing.

Goosebumps rose along his arms.

Then page three.

It was a timestamp.

September 29 – 2:04 AM

He looked at his phone.

2:03 AM.

Vince backed away from Bertha. The paper was hot. Not just warm-from-printing hot, but hot like it had come from a furnace. He dropped it.

From the far side of the room, another printer stirred. Then another. Printers Vince had disabled. Printers that shouldn’t even have drivers installed anymore. They were all waking up.

ZEUS beeped again.

Job 4033: SYSTEM RESTORE – 666 pages – Queued

His heart pounded.

The printers began churning. Pages spilled out in bursts—reams of gibberish code, pages of names, some crossed out in red ink. Diagrams of circuit boards that looked like arcane runes. One page had a child’s drawing of a stick figure on fire.

Vince pulled the plug on Bertha. She kept printing.

He reached for the main breaker.

The lights went out.

Not all at once, but one by one, down the long line of ceiling panels, as though something were walking beneath them, killing them step by step.

The room filled with the sound of printing—relentless, mechanical, demonic.

Then came the smell: ozone and something coppery, like a thunderstorm and a bloodied nose.

Vince turned, phone flashlight on, and saw what he thought was smoke.

But it wasn’t smoke.

It was something crawling out of the pages.

Long, flat, paper-thin limbs unfolded themselves from the stack. Faces inked in toner twisted and moved, blinking in reverse. And they were watching him.

Then came the last page. It hissed from Bertha’s maw like a tongue:

“You cleared the queue. Now you’re in it.”

The lights snapped back on. The printers stopped.

All was still.

Vince stood in the center of the lab, heart hammering, surrounded by thousands of pages littering the floor like fallen leaves.

The documents were gone. All of them. No trace. The machines were off.

His phone buzzed.

2:07 AM

He checked ZEUS’s console. The queue was empty.

Then, just for a moment, something flickered at the bottom of the screen.

Job 4034: Vince Reynolds – 1 page – ETA: Unknown

He ran.

And behind him, somewhere deep inside the server’s flickering heart, ZEUS began to hum.