I was 5,000 miles deep into the Pacific Servers. Billions of computers, stretching thousands of miles in all directions. We used to have stations on Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa. But the land was all cannibalized by the continuous need to host even more servers.
I’ve seen a handful of dried corpses from previous Repairmen, scattered on the metal ground, where their bikes probably broke down.
I parked my bike and unlocked the cable from the back, hooking my harness onto it. I set the timer. 3 hours. That should be enough time to make the repairs and get out. The hole I dove into was badly damaged, jutting out into awkward, sharp spikes that nearly pierced my cooling suit. I secured myself and dropped down below into the dark.
Millions of layers of metal and wire and plastic surrounded me. There used to be an organized system to find what servers belonged to where, but it was deemed too expensive. The demand for new technologies, new AI systems, new and faster products. We needed more computing power, so we just threw new computing capabilities on top of the old ones and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, that lead to these repairs more often, where we had to dive into the old servers for specialized systems.
50 meters, 500 meters, 2000 meters. The further down I went, the older the technology looked. In the distance, I could hear the massive streams of the ancient ocean roaring through the server depths, funneling down and attempting to cool the roiling heat pulsating off the rusted machinery. This ocean has far passed its usefulness. The computer burns far too hot, and the cool liquid is now a roaring stream of boiling water. According to the beeping on my belt monitor, I was getting closer to the spot I needed to fix.
I noticed an old, withering sign in the distance. A sign for human eyes, which hasn’t been necessary in a long time. I scanned the unfamiliar lettering, and the computer told me it said “OHIO”. Wow. That place hasn’t existed in decades. Someone’s device was still connected to an _Ohio_ port.
I crawled into the dark, broken ruins. The lights meters above looked like blinking blue and red stars. The plastic and metal cracked underneath my boots. I found the damaged server chip and replaced it. The red light began to blink. Huh, looks like “Ohio” is still going strong, after all.
The cord began to pull me back. Just in time. I made my way back up through the server tunnels towards the surface. Hopefully this repair was worth it all.
.
6,000 miles away, in an area that used to be Sandusky, Ohio, an elderly woman noticed that her phone was back online. This model hasn’t been used in years, but she found it nostalgic. She asked her AI companion to send her daughter a message, where it generated a crude image of a dancing giraffe, where it is then promptly ignored.