My story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, about the last days of the Internet as seen from a data-center after a series of terrorist attacks, has been published in Baen's Universe magazine. Baen's Universe is a tremendous experiment in short sf publishing: $30 gets you six issues over the course of a year, each issue bearing several novels' worth of verbiage from top writers. The stories are all vigorous adventure tales, and I share issue number two with the likes of Garth Nix, Brian Herbert and Catherine Asaro (issue one included an original story by Charlie Stross, along with Greg Benford, Elizabeth Bear, John Barnes and Alan Dean Foster).
He piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/modafinil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.
It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.
Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.
