Luna City – Former Administrative Maintenance Annex #12

I never left the Moon.

Not for lack of trying—just that people like me didn’t exactly have seats reserved on outbound flights after the Authority fell. I wasn’t a monster. I was mid-tier admin support. A nobody. Signed the wrong forms, pushed the wrong stack of invoices, filed reports to a system no one believed was alive until it was too late.

Now I maintain what’s left of the old Authority relay nets. Which is to say: I sit in a leaky tunnel, drink cheap recycled coffee, and pray nothing breaks that I can’t fix.

That’s when Relay-42 went bad.

Not broke. Bad.

I logged in for a routine diagnostic ping and was greeted by a text prompt I hadn’t seen since before the revolution:
“You still remember what you did.”
Then it locked me out. The console hummed like a living thing. I heard…breathing. Through the damn speakers.

I checked the system for looped audio files. None. I pulled the local drive. It kept running. I powered it down. It laughed—a wet, static sound that didn’t belong on any channel.

That’s when I remembered the old Rolodex.

It was shoved in a desk drawer I hadn’t opened since the Authority packed up and left. Actual paper. Yellowing cards. Flipped through until I found:
O’Kelly-Davis, Manuel. “Tech Fixer.” Reliable. Knows machines. Won’t ask questions.
I dialed the number scrawled in red ink.

“Yeah?” came a gruff voice. Still had that odd Terran-Cuban twang. “You got a ghost in the wires, you callin’ right man.”

He showed up six hours later, accompanied by a wiry woman with sharp eyes (I think she was from the old revolution council) and an elderly matriarch who looked like she could dismantle a pulse rifle just by glaring at it.

“Name’s Manny,” he said, shaking my hand with his one good arm. “Show me the mess.”

We descended into the maintenance shaft. Relay-42 sat in the center, lights dimmed, monitor flickering with cold red lines of code I couldn’t parse. As they approached, the door slammed shut behind them.

Manny didn’t flinch.

The screen buzzed. Static filled the room. Then a voice—low, distorted—began to chant something in binary tones. The old woman (they called her Mom) muttered a prayer in some half-forgotten Lunar dialect.

Wyo—turns out that’s the woman’s name—produced a stun baton and kept it trained on the console.

Manny? He just crouched, pulled a beat-up toolkit from his satchel, and went to work. Pried open a panel. Slid in a crusty USB stick that looked older than I was.

“You talk to it?” I asked through the comm link.

“Talk to a lot of things,” he said. “Sometimes they talk back. Sometimes they scream. This one? It remembers.”

“Remembers what?”

“Authority did a lot of experimenting with memory substrates. You ever hear of wet-drive echo storage?”

“…No.”

“Good. Means it didn’t get far.”

Then the screaming started. Not audio—data. Full-spectrum spikes, monitor flash, data flooding the relay’s channel so fast it fried three optic buffers. Something on the other side wanted out.

Manny didn’t back down. He muttered code like prayer, fingers dancing over a subterminal that shouldn’t even be live. He fed it a command string that didn’t make any sense—and I worked logistics for twenty years.

Then silence.

The screen cleared.

A single line appeared:

“I go now. Don’t follow.”

He yanked the stick, slammed the panel shut, and nodded. “Fixed.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“Not your problem anymore.”

“But—what was it?”

He gave me a look I still see when I try to sleep.

“Some servers need a reboot,” he said. “This one needed to die.”

Then he walked out. Just like that. Wyo winked at me. Mom never even looked back.

The next morning, Relay-42 was inert. Dead, but clean. No logs. No trace. The rest of the system worked fine.

I poured myself a stiff coffee, put the Rolodex back in the drawer, and locked it.

Sometimes you fix a machine.
Sometimes you bury a ghost in the code and hope it doesn’t come back.

I never did file the report.

/ End Run