“There are places man was never meant to trespass — yet he trespasses still, drawn onward by the ceaseless whisper of his own ruin.”

It was misfortune — no, a malign destiny — that led me to the abandoned building on Whitmore Street.

The company had long ago fled, leaving only the hollowed bones of its former self. A rotting corpse of an office tower, rank with mildew and silence, it drew few visitors now — save for the rats and the wind. Yet my employers, obsessed with thrift and reclamation, sent me there to salvage what could be salvaged.

It was on the third floor, beyond a warped fire door and down a corridor strewn with shattered monitors and torn cables, that I found the server.

It sat alone in a glass-walled room, its blinking lights guttering like the dying embers of some ancient fire. Dust coated every surface. Cobwebs stretched from ceiling to floor, trembling as I approached. Yet the server was still alive. Still breathing, in a manner of speaking.

Curious — for what life could remain in such a tomb?

I connected my console and tapped into the ancient machine. It should have protested — groaned, lagged, resisted — but instead it welcomed me with chilling ease. Files spilled forth in a torrent. Names. Dates. Messages. Images. Some recognizable, some monstrous in their obscurity.

It was a record of everything and everyone who had ever passed through the company’s digital halls: emails unspoken, transactions undone, secrets once buried, now laid bare. And something more.

Threads of data that did not belong — not human, not machine. Something… other.

I should have turned away. Any sane man would have — but Network Engineers are exactly neither “any” nor “sane.” We would not be in this business if we were. Yet I was drawn onward, deeper, through layers of encrypted folders that seemed almost to anticipate my curiosity. As though the server had been waiting for me.

And then — the whispering began.

Not through speakers. No, the sound was within my mind, worming its way past my reason. A thousand overlapping voices — pleading, mocking, warning. I saw faces in the flickering monitor: twisted remnants of those who had worked here, trapped within the very circuits they once commanded.

The server was no mere archive.
It was a prison.

A wardenless oubliette, where digital ghosts lingered, feeding off any foolish enough to breach its threshold. Each file opened, each line of code explored, was a link in a chain wrapping tighter around my soul.

In fevered panic, I tore the cable from my console. The screen went dark — but the whispering did not cease. It follows me still.

At night, the faces press against the darkness of my room, pixelated and weeping. My dreams are broken transmissions of suffering, my waking hours filled with the desperate urge to return, to reconnect, to offer myself fully to the machine that called to me.

I am not mad.
No — not yet.

But soon.

For the server waits, patient and hungry. And I, poor fool that I am, feel the hunger too.