My story, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” has been published in the magazine The Rake, including the online edition. You may remember the earlier podcast of the story, which tells the tale of gangs of sysadmins stuck in the world’s data-centers as a string of nuclear, biological and conventional attacks herald the end of the Earth. The story will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked, which will be published later this month.
“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.
“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.
Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.
