CaymanMunda
The Machine Room Chronicles — Part I: The KVM Wars and the Green Door
Enter the IT machine room, where servers hum with malice and the green door hungers. This is no workplace—it’s a liminal abyss where uptime battles sanity, and the network demands sacrifice. Beyond the green door, something ancient waits, its laughter a glitch in reality. Read on… if you dare.
The New Lad’s Descent
The machine room was a steel crypt, its air thick with ozone, burnt circuits, and a primal rot that clung like despair. Fluorescent lights flickered, casting jagged shadows across racks that loomed like gravestones carved with arcane circuitry. The New Lad, barely a day into his IT traineeship, stood clutching his HR-issued badge, its edges fraying as if the room rejected its existence.
New Lad: “Hi! I’m the new trainee HR sent… care to show me the ropes?” His voice quavered, swallowed by the servers’ relentless hum.
Old System Architect: “Yippee. Another lamb the harpies upstairs flung into the void. Fantastic day already.” The Old Geezer’s voice was gravel, worn by decades of battling downed networks and cursed printers. His sunken eyes, reflecting the cold glow of a rack monitor, sized up the New Lad like a predator eyeing prey.
New Lad: “I hope the job has a good work–life balance?”
Old Geezer: “Balance? It’s balanced—between despair and oblivion. Last week, HR tried to ‘feed’ the printers again. Two tampons, a peanut-butter sandwich, and a boiled egg for… color. I’ve got photos. And DNA. Three souls, none whole.” He tapped a folder, its edges stained with something not quite coffee.
New Lad: “…You’re joking.”
Old Geezer: “Son, if I were joking, the servers wouldn’t be listening.” He leaned closer, his breath sour with stale coffee, solder, and a metallic tang like blood. “Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about the KVM Cable Wars.”
The KVM Wars: A Labyrinth of Madness
New Lad: “Cable… wars?”
Old Geezer: stares into the void, tracing cables that writhed like veins in the half-light “’23. We had to wire five systems—C621Es, WRX90, and a cursed Mac Pro cheese grater—through a secure KVM. TAA-compliant. No hotkeys. No mercy. DisplayPorts mocked us, identical yet wrong, each a trap. USB cables multiplied in the dark, coiling like serpents, knotting in patterns no human could devise. Labels dissolved into dust, their ink bleeding into glyphs we couldn’t read. One cord was two inches too short, another threaded through rack arms like a labyrinth’s curse. The power brick? A relic, powered by whispered prayers and the screams of interns past. We had one. One.”
The New Lad swallowed, his eyes darting to cables snaking across the floor. They shifted when he wasn’t looking, tightening like nooses around the racks.
New Lad: “But you sorted it out eventually?”
Old Geezer: “Three days. Three days. The air grew heavy, the racks’ hum turning to a growl that shook our bones. We lost two techs—one quit, the other… vanished. Left his badge by the KVM, etched with claw-mark scratches. Then HR emailed: ‘Printer offline.’ Someone unplugged it to charge a phone. Found a granola bar in the paper tray, crawling with… things. Skittering things that weren’t insects.” His voice dropped, as if the walls—pulsing faintly in time with the hum—were listening.
New Lad: “I… I think I left something in my car.”
Old Geezer: “What, your THC vape? A crucifix? Holy water? The old you, before this tomb claimed you? Go on, grab your keys. The machine room waits for no one.”
The Machine Room’s Heartbeat
The New Lad stumbled into the hallway, the cold air a fleeting mercy. But the hum followed, a chant burrowing into his skull. He returned, pale, clutching his keys like a talisman. The racks loomed taller, their LEDs blinking in patterns like forbidden code.
Old Geezer: “Welcome to IT, kid. The printer incident? That’s just Tuesday.” He slid a battered label maker across the desk, its keys slick with something not oil, not blood. “You’ll need this. For your wits. Sanity here is… optional. Oh, and we’re compiling the new CUDA stack from source. It’s been running for days. It watches us. Sometimes, it rewrites itself.”
The New Lad blinked, his breath shallow. The servers’ hum deepened, a heartbeat from something vast and buried. In the corner, a figure—the girl—sat hunched, her mechadendrites twitching like spider legs grafted to flesh. Her eyes were voids, fixed on a point beyond reality, muttering of a “Warp Storm Event.” The air around her glitched, and the floor bore spiraling marks that hadn’t been there hours ago.
Old Geezer: “She thought she could tame the Secure KVM. Rack tilted. Cables lashed out, alive. Now she whispers to the void, reciting packet traces in a tongue no one speaks. I keep her thorazine warm on the CRT monitor—the old one. It still works. It still judges.” He sipped coffee that smelled of ash and lost prayers, its surface swirling with patterns that hurt to look at.
The Green Door’s Whisper
The machine room contracted, walls pressing closer, the hum a relentless command. The Old Geezer’s chair creaked like a coffin lid as he leaned back, his eyes reflecting the sickly green glow of a monitor unplugged for years.
Old Geezer: “Feeling brave, lad? Open the green door in the corner.”
New Lad: “Why?” His voice cracked, barely audible over the servers’ chant.
Old Geezer: “That’s where the DNS server lives. We feed it… offerings. Fish, mostly. Keeps latency low. The cultists down there? They don’t bother you. Usually.” His smile was a fracture in reality, too wide, too sharp. “They’ve been here longer than the servers. Longer than time.”
New Lad: “That’s inhumane! You monster!”
Old Geezer: leans back, the chair groaning like a dying thing “Inhumane? You wound me, son. Open that drawer. See their family photos. See what keeps the network alive.”
The Polaroids of the Damned
The New Lad hesitated, but the hum compelled him, dragging his hand to the drawer. It screeched open, revealing Polaroids—curled, sticky with a residue of copper and decay. He lifted one, trembling, the photo cold as a crypt.
At first, it showed smiling technicians at a server rack, faces bright under fluorescent light. But the longer he looked, the worse it became. Eyes multiplied, black and unblinking, like voids in a starless sky. Mouths stretched into grins, teeth sharp as shattered glass. One hand sprouted fingers branching like coral, twisting toward the green door. The door was open, spilling light that pulsed like a living thing, its edges fraying into tendrils that reached for the viewer. Another photo showed the technicians, their faces gone, replaced by static—pixelated voids that stared back.
Old Geezer: “Look closer, lad. You called me a monster. Now see the users we serve. See what the network demands.”
The lights dimmed, fluorescents stuttering like a failing heart. The CRT flickered, its screen a sickly green, crawling with impossible words:
> QUERY_RESOLVED: HUMANITY.NOT_FOUND
> PING: ABYSS_ACK
> UPTIME: ETERNAL. SOULS: CONSUMED
>
The hum became a whine, harmonizing with a chant beyond the green door—a vibration in the bones, a language of hunger and cold. The New Lad’s shadow stretched, but it wasn’t his. It had too many arms, too many angles.
New Lad: “What is this place?”
Old Geezer: smiling, his teeth too even, too white, too many “This, lad, is IT. The in-between. The void where uptime and sanity wage eternal war. The printer gods feast on despair, the network thrives on caffeine and spite, and the only firewall that holds is fear itself. The green door? It’s not a door. It’s a mouth.”
The Abyss Stares Back
He handed the New Lad a flashlight, its beam flickering, etched with scratched names and pleas.
Old Geezer: “Off you go. DNS maintenance waits for no soul. And whatever you do…” He leaned close, his breath reeking of solder, burnt toast, and the sea at midnight. “…don’t let the Secure KVM fall asleep. It dreams, lad. And its dreams are hungry.”
The New Lad was alone, the Old Geezer gone—vanished into the racks or swallowed by shadows. The room felt alive, cables pulsing like veins, fans screaming like souls trapped in silicon. The girl rocked, her mechadendrites tapping a rhythm matching the server room’s heartbeat. Her whispers grew louder, a litany of IP addresses twisting into a chant: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
The green door loomed, slick with condensation, sweating in anticipation. The New Lad approached, each step heavier, the air thick with unseen eyes. The handle was cold—colder than death, colder than the void between stars. The hum beyond became a chorus, words slithering into his mind: Feed us. Join us. Resolve us.
He glanced at the CRT. Its screen glowed brighter, text scrolling faster:
> WAKE.PROTOCOL: INITIATED
> DNS: FEED ME FISH.
> CTHULHU_PING: ACK.
> UPTIME: ETERNAL. SANITY: NULL.
> QUERY: WHO ARE YOU?
> RESPONSE: YOU ARE OURS.
>
The flashlight died, snuffed out like a candle in a storm. The servers purred, a predator sated but never satisfied. The green door creaked, unlatched, light spilling out—light that moved, light that hungered. From within, scales slid over metal, claws tapped circuits, and the chant grew louder.
The Escape That Wasn’t
Hours later—or was it days?—the New Lad staggered back from HR, his eyes wild, his badge dangling like a noose. He clutched a crumpled resignation letter, its ink smudged with sweat and something darker.
New Lad: “Here! I quit!” His voice cracked, a scream against the machine room’s hum, now a deafening roar in his skull.
Old Geezer: grinning, his face half-shadow, half-static “Oh no… oh no! You don’t quit the machine room, son. You’re taking a vacation to the local mental wellness facility. I know the place. HR even got you… oh, a friends and family discount? Wow, they must love you up there.” His laugh was a glitch, sharp and wrong. “Go on, give my best salutations to Dr. Lucius Vex. His talent for lobotomies is… out of this world. Enjoy your vacation! And don’t let the margaritas bite!”
The New Lad froze, the resignation letter slipping from his fingers. It fluttered to the floor, landing near the green door, where it curled as if touched by unseen flames. The girl in the corner laughed—a sound like breaking glass—and her mechadendrites reached for the letter, dragging it into the shadows. The CRT flickered one last time, its message searing into the New Lad’s mind:
> EXIT_PROTOCOL: DENIED
> DESTINATION: VEX_FACILITY
> STATUS: ASSIMILATED
>
The machine room’s hum swelled, a chorus of a thousand voices, none human. The green door pulsed, its light now a heartbeat, and the air grew colder, heavier, as if the abyss itself exhaled. The New Lad’s scream was swallowed by the chant, and the racks leaned closer, their LEDs blinking in approval.
Somewhere, beyond the green door, Dr. Lucius Vex waited, his tools gleaming under lights that never flickered, his smile a promise of silence eternal.
The Tech-Priest Girl:”Is he gone ?”
Old Geezer: “Oh yes dear , he is gone, off his rocker within 2 days , already off to Ponciana, probably will not even return here, and if you ask me , all for the better …”
The Tech-Priest Girl:”Good, Imagine if we had to lock him up with the cultists . He is family to them, so sooner or later …”
Old Geezer:”Not all of them mutate you know … He might have stayed normal… for a while anyway…”
The Tech-Priest Girl:”You know what I like about you ? Your boundless optimism ! We are sent another creep related to what the deep ones consider royalty , you show him the place, explain the stakes , literally ! Provide him a way out of the place… Know he is doomed… and yet ! YET ! You act with compassion ! By the omnissiah you are a sweet sucker !”
Old Geezer:”I try… I try… Now about that Adeptus Ridiculous fellow , your distant uncle , tell me more about him and these CaymanMunda adventures…”
What’s your IT horror story?
Have you faced the machine room’s gaze or escaped the green door’s pull? Share below—if you still can.
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