The Data Center
Chapter 07 - The Data Center
The data center sat beneath Lumen’s west annex, two floors below the loading dock.
Claire had not visited in almost a year.
The elevator opened into cold air and the steady mechanical rush of fans. Blue lights blinked along black server racks. The floor tiles flexed slightly under her shoes.
Tom handed Claire and Priya visitor jackets.
“You remember when this was eight machines and a folding table?” he asked.
“I remember the folding table collapsing.”
“That was a design flaw.”
“You built it.”
“Then it was a rapid prototype.”
Priya zipped her jacket.
“Engineers are exhausting.”
Tom led them through two secured doors.
At the end of the third aisle, he stopped beside a terminal mounted on a rolling cart.
“This is the clean-room copy. Read-only, hashed, and logged.”
Priya checked the evidence form.
“Show us the export sequence.”
Tom opened the timeline.
Each transfer began with a maintenance ticket, followed by a permission escalation and a compressed archive created under a name that resembled routine diagnostic output.
“The files were split into small packets,” he said. “Nothing large enough to trigger the old threshold alarms.”
Claire leaned closer.
“How often?”
“Monthly at first. Then weekly after the funding round.”
The screen showed the acceleration.
Before the round, each export contained narrow model samples. After Richard’s ownership increased, the packages grew broader and included roadmap files.
“He bought more influence and took more data,” Priya said.
“Looks that way.”
Tom pulled up authentication records.
“Owen Pike’s privileged credential created the archives. Marcus’s cloned badge opened the executive floor on nights when Richard’s office submitted the tickets.”
“Could Owen have acted alone?” Claire asked.
“He had the access. He didn’t have the business reason or the destination credentials.”
“Could Richard’s team have remote access?”
“Not without someone inside.”
Claire walked between the racks.
The cold brought back the old years with sharp clarity.
She and Tom had spent one January weekend here before the room had proper cooling. They aimed box fans at borrowed servers and ate crackers from a vending machine that returned Canadian coins.
At three in the morning, Claire had lain on the floor with her coat under her head.
Tom had said, If this works, nobody will ever know how stupid this part was.
It had worked.
The company grew around those machines, then replaced them one by one. Nothing visible remained from the original system.
Still, Claire knew where it had stood.
She put one palm against the cool metal of a rack.
“They used the maintenance channel because it was the one place everyone trusted.”
Tom nodded.
“Routine traffic gets ignored.”
“Like resentment,” Priya said.
Claire looked at her.
Priya shrugged.
“Sorry. Legal poetry.”
They returned to the terminal.
Tom displayed the first transfer after the funding round.
The date was two days after Richard’s shares closed.
“Not subtle,” Priya said.
“It was subtle for seven months,” Tom replied.
Claire traced the timeline with the capped end of her pen.
“Richard didn’t discover an opportunity after joining the board. He increased his position because he already had a plan.”
Tom opened a second file.
“There’s another piece. North Gate reserved cloud capacity six weeks before the funding round.”
Priya’s eyes narrowed.
“So the receiving system existed before Richard had the larger stake.”
“And before Marcus’s consulting invoice,” Claire said.
The vote and the leak were not separate events. One had protected the other.
Richard needed access first. Then he needed Claire removed before the scale of the exports surfaced in an audit.
Marcus’s resentment had given him the mechanism.
Tom opened one more set of logs before unplugging the evidence drive.
“This is the part that kept bothering me,” he said.
The maintenance jobs always began nine minutes after a routine backup completed. That timing ensured the exported files existed in a clean, recently synchronized state. It also reduced the chance that an engineer would notice additional system load.
“Who knew the backup window?” Claire asked.
“Everyone in infrastructure. Richard could’ve learned it from any operations report.”
Priya pointed to a line of green text.
“What is that?”
“A failed export. Somebody canceled it after forty seconds.”
The cancellation came from Owen’s personal administrator account, not the shared credential. The date was three weeks before his leave.
Claire studied the event.
“He tried to stop one.”
“Or test whether he could,” Tom said.
The next day, Richard’s office opened a human-resources ticket criticizing Owen’s reliability. It had never resulted in formal discipline, but it was enough to frighten an employee with a sick child.
Priya photographed the screen for her notes.
“That is coercion with corporate stationery.”
Claire looked down the aisle. She remembered knowing every early employee’s spouse, favorite takeout order, and planned vacation. Growth had turned people into names on reports, leaving space for Richard to use their private worries as controls.
“We pay for Owen’s independent lawyer,” she said.
“Already drafted,” Priya replied.
Tom unplugged the evidence drive and sealed it in a numbered bag.
“We can prove the route. We still need a witness for intent.”
“Owen,” Claire said.
“If he’ll talk.”
Priya checked her phone.
“He might.”
She showed them a message from outside counsel.
Owen Pike had responded from a temporary address in Arizona. He would speak under a confidentiality agreement, but only if Lumen guaranteed legal representation.
Claire read the final sentence twice.
Richard said the transfers were authorized by the CEO’s office.
Tom swore softly.
“He told Owen you approved it.”
Claire clicked her pen.
“Then Richard wasn’t only preparing to remove me.”
May you like
She looked down the long aisle of blinking machines.
“He was preparing to leave my fingerprints on the theft.”
