What more could you ask from life?

The drive to work was about as uneventful as usual; a long 15 mile highway drive to the next state over while blaring my favorite metal album. I spend my drives warming up my voice in like fashion. I may be a system admin, but I spend a lot of my time talking to customers and fellow technicians. 8 hours a day of long phone calls and conference calls with installers gets exhausting. One of these days, I’ll properly thank my music teacher for teaching me how to project and maintain my voice.

“We are the rust worshiping the RAI–” my voice cuts out as my throat closes. It’s too early in the morning to attempt that scream. Oh well, I’m getting off the highway anyway; 5 more minutes and I’ll be at the office.

I begin to wonder where it all changed. I was a musician in the day, but my mother insisted I go to engineering school. Many of my other friends went to similar colleges and it’s not like I dislike my engineering work; I love the challenge, but I also love creating things. But for now, I settle for my 9 to 5 job as a system admin for a security company. It’s simple work; manage and build camera systems, maintain servers, tell the occasional entitled client to kick rocks, it’s not bad.

I pull into the parking lot and approach the tall tower at work. The Monday air is nice and cool as I walk towards the tower; keycard in one hand and a thermos of cold water in the other. As I walk through the doors, I see one of the lieutenants for our security guard side; a stout middle aged hispanic woman who looks friendly but won’t hesitate to bust your kneecaps if provoked. We hit it off immediately when I served under her as a field officer before a knee injury put me out of commission.

“Yo Mike!” she calls out to me in a booming voice, her Jersey accent heavy in her voice.

“Ortiz!” I respond in kind and we share a brief fist bump, “anything exciting going on today?”

“Oh, the usual,” she replies. “People inappropriately calling out and leaving us short handed with more and more contracts to fill.”

“I feel that,” I reply understanding her pain; the instability of the world lately has resulted in more people buying more cameras than my servers can handle. “But we make do; shortages and hardships and all. That’s what sets us apart.”

We share a brief laugh as Ortiz heads for her patrol office and I call the elevator to go up. “Oh, one thing!” I call out to Ortiz, “I’m taking the network down for like 5 minutes at 17; phones and internet won’t work for a bit but it’ll be brief”

“Why you gotta do that to me?” Ortiz responds sarcastically as I hear the elevator ding.

“I have a firewall update to do,” I answer heading into the elevator car, “It’ll be really fast; I already have it downloaded and just need to hit a switch.”

“Hey, you’re the IT wizard,” Ortiz responds and heads for her office.

I chuckle and scan my badge and hit the button to go to the second floor. This is a normal day as usual; nothing too exciting and nothing to go wrong. Even my plans before the network update were simple and just required me going back over a few camera analytics. Par for the course, really.

Of course, as any programmer can tell you, that never goes to plan.

My whole shift was a brain wracking nightmare. The camera analytics actually resulted in the cameras being defective and needing to order new ones. I had to program 3 new panels, but 1 hadn’t arrived and the other two had issues communicating and took hours to be programmed. 5pm couldn’t come soon enough, and I still had that damn firewall update.

At least I know what I’m doing; the firewall update is ready and I just need to hit a reboot button. I warned everyone on my side of the office and finally hit that button. As expected, everyone’s computer lost connection and I can see the firewall installing the update.

I lean back in my chair and watch the progress bar go to completion. I normally warn 5 minutes but the update is usually done in a minute. No problems.

The bar stopped moving for a good 3 minutes. That’s weird. Usually it’s pretty smooth and the hardware isn’t old.

“Damn thing’s probably frozen,” I sigh. I get my keys and walk over to the IT closet and find the SonicWall box, the machine that manages our firewall. Normally, there should be a solid blue light and 2 blinking green lights. But all of the lights were red. I had never seen this model do this; I didn’t even know it had red LEDs in it.

I pull out my phone to look up the device sheet and see what this means.

No signal.

What? The IT closet isn’t isolated or anything; I should have some signal at least and the office is in a 5G Ultra Wideband area so this shouldn’t be a problem.

I stepped out of the closet to try and get my phone working and that’s when our HR manager popped her head out of her office down the hall from the closet.

“Hey Michael?” she calls to me in a concerned tone. “Is everything okay?”

“Damn firewall isn’t rebooting and I can’t get any signal,” I replied, starting to grit my teeth. “Is it not coming up for you?”

She thought for a moment and gestured for me to go into her office. This can’t be good. I go into her office and she simply points to her computer monitor and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Static.

That’s it, just static. Like an old tube TV with no signal. This is all modern equipment; it shouldn’t be doing anything like this. I close my slacked jaw and head back to the SonicWall to see if maybe something got shorted. The only thing that greeted me were those same red lights.

I looked up the server rack to a monitor that shows the office cameras but each of the cameras had static. Static. Static. If these cameras go offline, they only show a blue screen or a still of the last image they displayed; not static. But it only got weirder.

I could hear the server fans start spinning up to max and an electric hum filled the IT closet. I touched the case of one of the servers but I got hit by the strongest static shock I’ve ever felt in my life. It reminded me of that time I crossed wires and got a taste of mains voltage. What the hell was going on?

I looked back up to the monitor and the static remained but I could see patterns in it; weird shapes and symbols covering the screen of each camera.

A cyberattack, and I was slow to respond.

I started pulling the plug on the networked machines, trying to mitigate the attack as each of the servers protested with a nice bite of an electric shock. I unplugged the power to the camera NVR and it fell silent, but the strange patterns remained.

I kept pulling power where I could; this isn’t the best way to mitigate this kind of attack but it’s all I can do from here. It could be some kind of denial of service attack; someone sending random data to our servers to slow them down or damage them. A server IP address may have gotten leaked.

I pulled out the SonicWall, where in theory the attack should be hitting, and it went quiet. But the strange distortions in the cameras remained.

“Fuck this!” I shout, having enough. I resort to the most desperate attempt; unplugging the uninterruptible power supply. This would kill power to all of the machines simultaneously at the risk of causing a power surge later or even some machines needing to be defaulted and lost configurations.

I hit the switch and pulled the plug and the UPS alarm briefly sounded before going quiet. Now, I studied mechanical engineering for 6 years and I’ve been running servers for almost a decade now. I’ve seen almost everything there is to see when it comes to managing a network and only a few times have I been caught off guard. This is one of those times.

Even without power going to the servers, they were still running! Their fans running even faster!

I could only stand and stare, mouthing various expletives as I tried to process just what I was looking at. The spectacle lasted only a few seconds before all of the machines finally fell silent.

It took almost an hour to put everything back together, all the while various employees popping into the IT closet, asking questions, offering help, stating their concerns.

I could only put in my earphones and drown them out as I worked. They wanted an explanation but I could provide none. They had questions but they were drowned out by my own. They wanted to help but this was best left to me.

The one saving grace is that the office closes at 5pm so by the time this all happened, everyone was leaving for the day. All I could tell them was “temporary issue; I’ll have it fixed by morning.” I’ve always had a track record for fixing the impossible so that bought me some time; time to figure out just what exactly happened.

I finally got all of the machines running again, this time no weird hiccups or glitches. Thankfully, because I ran a backup before the update, I just rolled back to that update and the machines and their configurations were all back to normal by 6pm. I can only assume that the firewall update had some kind of glitch or virus in it so it’s best to stick with the last stable version.

I return to my office and decide to stay a couple extra hours. I don’t have anyone waiting for me at home anyway and I’m not doing anything tonight; I can stay and watch the system to make sure nothing like that happens again. But I’m already so drained that all I can do is bury my face into my desk. I have to figure out if this was a breach and take the necessary action.

A quiet knock comes from the doorway and Ortiz enters my office.

“You alright Mike?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’m good.” I respond, taking my glasses off and rubbing my eyes. “I’ve just seen some shit; that’s all.”

“Nah bud,” she responds and sits at one of the chairs across from my desk. “I’ve seen you handle an active shooter in the ghetto with less gray hairs.”

Part of me really wanted to tell her what happened but there’s no way she would believe me though. Plus, if it’s a breach, the last thing I want to do is announce it to everyone. It hit the keyboard of my computer to wake it back up and wait for my desktop to load.

“Trust me, I’m good,” I reply while putting my glasses back on. “Just a technical issue I should have prepared for.” I realized my computer hadn’t fully booted up yet so I hit the enter key to make sure I woke it up.

“Maybe this job is getting to you,” Ortiz suggested. “You were thinking about taking a vacation a while back; what stopped you?”

“Because I get bored,” I replied. “The last time I took a vacation was for a big game release, but I spent the last couple of days of it taking apart my air conditioner for maintenance.”

Ortiz chuckled. I watch my monitor in my peripheral vision but it’s still black. I groan and face it, ready to hit the power switch. I realized then that it was on the whole time. It displayed a black screen with only three words on it.

I could only stare at the screen. This is NOT what this computer is configured to do. Was this a virus? I quickly jump below my desk and unplug the ethernet cable just in case.

Ortiz saw my sudden movement and looked over and put on her glasses to read the text, glitching like some stereotypical distortion glitch shader effect in games. I climbed back up to my chair and stared at the screen, both of us in complete silence.

“Is it a virus?” Ortiz finally asked.

“I think so,” I responded. It hit the spacebar on the keyboard and the display changed. It displayed one of the symbols from the IT closet monitor briefly along with static and other symbols as a loud technological screech bellowed from my computer speakers before the weird display cut out and returned to the original text.

“‘It has begun,’” I read aloud, “what could that mean?”

Ortiz gave me a confused look. “That’s what it says?”

I looked back at the very clear yet glitchy text and turned to Ortiz. “That’s clearly what it says,” I tell her.

“Uhhh Mike, I don’t think so,” Ortiz answered, adjusting her glasses. “It says ‘ha comenzado’.”

I turn back to the very obvious English text. “No, I guarantee you it doesn’t,” I tell her, refusing to be tricked. “It very clearly says ‘it has begun’.”

“Well, that’s what that phrase means,” Ortiz tells me, “but it’s clearly in Spanish.”

I could only stare at the text on the screen. ‘It has begun’ is very clearly displayed. How could I see English but she sees Spanish? That doesn’t make sense. I decided to test something for science. One of my MMO raid partners is from Japan; maybe Ortiz is playing a joke with me and my friend can prove it.

I take out my phone and see it has signal again. I pull up his number and video call him. Of course, he rejects the call so I call him again immediately.

The screen blinks and shows a very tired man rubbing his eyes. “Nani ga hoshii no ka, omae?” he asks in an accusing voice.

“Oi, need your help Satoru,” I tell him and change to the rear camera facing the monitor and focus on the text on the screen. “What does this say?”

Satoru in the phone screen squints at the screen, trying to read the weird text. “It says ‘hajimatta’, meaning ‘it’s started’.”

I nod and begin to move the phone away. Suddenly it hit me.

“Wait, it says ‘hajimatta’?” I ask, my anxiety rising, “word for word?”

“Yeah bud,” Satoru answers, “it’s Japanese.”

Nothing adds up; the display shows ‘it has begun’ clear as day. I even watched the screen and it didn’t change or anything. How can the same English text be shown in another language to two others?

“Thanks Satoru, I’ll talk to you later,” I told him and hung up the phone and threw it on my desk. My eyes are starting to burn and I could only rub them. Is this all an elaborate prank being played?

Ortiz must have seen my frustration and took off her glasses with a sigh. Great! Hopefully this means she’ll confess to playing some kind of prank on me and the jig is up!

Ortiz takes to her original seat and rubs her eyes too. “None of this makes any sense,” she laments. I guess she’s not confessing.

I decided enough is enough for today; the computer is not connected to the internet so I’ll just wipe the hard drive when I come back in the morning. A little display virus is simple compared to what I’ve fought.