Please Stand By Official

“You shouldn’t be here,” the woman said without turning around.

Lena pulled back. She’d worked nights at Meridian Data Solutions for eleven years. She cleaned the toilets, emptied the trash, knew which vending machine gave you two candy bars if you pressed B7. She was not supposed to be the last person standing.

Outside, through the tinted windows, Lena saw the city skyline. Every light was on. Every screen she could see—from the traffic monitors to the billboards to the distant office towers—glowed the same two words.

Lena didn’t drop the mop. She walked backward to the door, kept the woman in sight until the last second, then ran. She took the stairs three at a time, burst onto the roof, and scrambled down the rusty fire escape into the empty, silent street below. Please Stand By

“And me?” Lena asked.

“Who are you?” Lena gripped her mop handle like a weapon.

Lena had been mopping the third-floor hallway when it happened. At first she ignored it—corporate IT was always pushing updates at the worst times. But when the lights dimmed to a soft, constant twilight and the emergency doors sealed themselves with heavy, final-sounding thuds, she stopped pushing the mop. “You shouldn’t be here,” the woman said without

The servers weren’t humming. They were singing. A low, harmonic chorus, like a thousand tuning forks struck at once. In the center of the room, a woman stood facing the main processing tower. She was dressed in a sharp gray suit, her hair pinned perfectly. Lena had never seen her before.

Twenty minutes later, Lena found the security office. The guard, Mr. Hendricks, was slumped in his chair—not dead, but not quite awake either. His eyes were half-open, tracking something invisible on the ceiling. His badge dangled from his neck, and on his chest monitor, the green words pulsed softly.

On the fifth floor, she found the server room. The door was ajar—unusual, because it required two keycards and a retinal scan. She pushed it open. She cleaned the toilets, emptied the trash, knew

“Hendricks?” She shook his shoulder. He didn’t respond, but his lips moved. She leaned closer.

“I just clean the floors.”