Watching the Wires
Brandon's new job began with a buzz—not the electric thrill of arrival, but the literal hum of fluorescent lights echoing off server racks.
Orientation was daytime, the city on the other side of the smoked-glass windows humming through perpetual morning drizzle. The building was corporate practical—a fintech fortress straddling the slow, silt-brown river. It smelled of burnt coffee, ozone, and lemon wipes; its rows of card-locked doors and hushed security lobbies made Brandon feel like a ghost in business casual.
His trainer was Mina, a fast-talking, sleep-deprived analyst with braided hair and an endless supply of energy drinks. She walked him through network monitoring dashboards, incident logs, firewalls painted in blinking mosaics, and the relentless churn of ticket requests from panicked clients.
"Day shift's easier," Mina confided behind a fourth can of Volt Cherry, watching him absorb it all. "Half panic, half lunch chatter. Night's different—you see weird stuff. Not just in the code. The city's got its own rules after dark. Stay sharp, document everything, and always keep an eye on the camera loops in Sector Eight. Trust me."
Brandon smiled, lighter now, his knack for pattern recognition and technical perfection feeding off the team's quiet rigor. He shadowed a few seasoned analysts, learning their shorthand—the jokes, the in-jokes, the warning signs behind the data. At lunch, they gathered around screens filled with traffic maps and flood warnings, swiping through glitches as if trading ghost stories.
His favorite was Jamal, all dry wit and sardonic laughter. "Remember: no such thing as coincidence in New Ashara. If three firewalls trip in a row, it's a pattern. If your coffee tastes weird and your badge door doesn't open twice in an hour, go home. Call IT. Don't be a hero."
Brandon took notes, tuned in, found his groove quick.
The first night shift was a different world—city light bleeding through the glass, the river muttering along the far shore. Brandon's hours ran from late afternoon into midnight, sometimes later if a server went sideways or a client couldn't sleep. Mina had been right: the night belonged to the insomniac, the paranoid, the careful.
The office emptied to a skeleton crew, the low hum of the air system now a tide of silence. At his desk, Brandon monitored live alerts: DDoS probes skittered over the edges of networks, flagged accounts popped up in orange. He countered threats, reset privileges, filed incident reports—each task a bead in the string of the shift.
Interactions became echoes in the quiet:
Jamal rolling his chair over at 10 p.m. "You see the spike in port scans from Sector Eight again? That's three nights running. Same signature, changing IPs. Run a deeper trace, would you?"
Mina dropping by on her way out, jacket slung over one shoulder. "Don't fall into the ticket queue rabbit hole. If you get stuck, call. Nights here are a team sport."
Maria from the compliance desk IMing at 11:50, asking if he could help scrub a log—her smiley face always a little ironic at that hour.
Between alerts and incident reviews, Brandon found moments of camaraderie, tiny islands of real talk in the sea of screens:
Swapping ghost sighting rumors and rumors about the CEO's aversion to mirrors (it's always half-joke, half-dare).
Learning the unspoken rituals—Friday night pizza in the breakroom, three sharp taps on the rack door to announce presence to the "server ghost" (another joke, or maybe not).
Quick, sincere compliments: "Good catch on that reroute, man," or "Nice escalation notes—you'll have the workflow down in a week."
Most nights, he left tired but clearheaded—sometimes later than planned when a critical patch needed eyes or a rogue process refused to die. On those walks to the parking deck, with New Ashara's city lights flickering in weird sync and the hush of post-midnight settling in, the world felt different—like the city, and the system, were both watching back.
But that was fine.
Brandon was learning to watch, too.