Tuesday 18 November, 07:00
Teodor Lunde’s polishing machine was going in the corridor when Viktor came in, a low drone moving in long slow arcs over the floor outside the operations room. It was one of his mornings. Nobody had suggested he change them.
One week, give or take an hour, since he had opened a door onto a red room.
Kristin had asked Viktor to come and he stood at the back of the meeting room by the door, with a coffee from the machine Mona used to switch on at half past seven. Ten of them round the table. Someone had bought a bag of rolls from the Rema at Kokstad and put it in the middle, and nobody had touched it.
The whiteboard had been wiped. Not completely; in the top corner the ghost of DO NOT TURN ANYTHING OFF still showed through, grey, where the cleaning spray hadn’t reached.
Kristin didn’t make a speech. She picked up a marker and wrote, in a column down the left-hand side, the names of every server they had that was past its support date. There were nine. She had them from memory.
Then she went down the column and wrote a date next to each one.
FN-SRV01 — 15.12.2025
FN-SRV05 — 31.01.2026
FN-SRV07 — 31.01.2026
“Those are real dates,” she said, with her back to them. “Not someday. If one of those boxes is still on after its date, I want to know whose fault it is, and I want it to be mine.”
Jonas had his laptop open on the table and a list on it: thirty-four service accounts that nobody in the building could explain.
“Next thing,” Kristin said. “Jonas.”
For each one he asked the room the same three questions. Who owns it? What does it do? When did the password last change?
svc_backup_old. Silence. Jonas disabled it.
svc_ftp_kommune. A woman from support said she thought it had something to do with Alver, years ago. Nobody could say what. Jonas disabled it.
At the eleventh name the big screen on the end wall, the one that showed the operations dashboard in green and amber all day long, went black.
Ten people looked at it.
Somebody laughed, a short nervous sound, and then two or three others did.
“That one was the dashboard,” Jonas said. “Who owns the dashboard?”
“You do now,” said Kristin.
He wrote it down. He didn’t turn the account back on.
Kristin turned back to the board and wrote 14 DAYS in the middle of it, large, and drew a box round it.
“Security updates go in within two weeks of release. Every month. If we can’t manage it, somebody says so, in this room, out loud, and I find the money or the people.”
“And if you can’t find it?” said one of the backend developers. He was not being cheeky. He wanted to know.
“Then I sell the foosball table,” Kristin said, and a few people breathed out. “And after that I start on my own salary.”
Then she held out her hand to Jonas, palm up, as if asking for a pen.
“Mine,” she said.
He didn’t understand. Then he did. “You’re Domain Admins.”
“I know. I’ve needed it twice in four years, and both times I could have asked. Take it off.” She waited while he did it, with the whole room watching his hands. “Anyone who has keys they don’t use gives them back this week. Especially me.”
She wrote DRILL under the box, and two dates, one in spring and one in autumn.
“Twice a year we turn it all off. On purpose. And we find out whether a nurse in Askøy can still find out how much insulin an old man takes, without us.” She didn’t look at anyone. “Siri Mjelde kept a paper folder in her car for two years against our advice, because a fallback was always next year’s budget. It’s this year’s budget.”
There was one thing she didn’t write on the board.
“And if any of you is ever in trouble,” she said, “money, family, anything, you come to me. Before somebody else finds out and offers to help.”
She said it to the table, not to the room, and quickly, like something hot put down before it burns. Nobody looked at anybody. Everybody knew why.
“Mona will be charged,” Kristin went on, steadier. “She’s told the police everything. On Thursday night she sat in Allehelgens gate and talked to that thing until four in the morning so that we could catch him. I don’t know what a court will make of her. I know the twelve years were real.” She stopped. “I’m not going to stand here and call her a monster.”
Through the glass wall Viktor could see the reception desk. The coat hooks. The third one empty.
“Geir’s funeral is on Thursday, in Florø. I’ve hired a bus. It leaves from here at seven.” Kristin’s voice went thin for a moment and came back. “And if nobody objects, the new build server is going to be named after him. The clean one. The one Jonas built last week and read every line of. Twice.”
Jonas put his hand up.
“Can we have his label on it?” he said. “From the tape drive.” He cleared his throat and read it off the inside of his own head. “Do not unplug. Ever. This means you, Jonas.”
The room laughed. All ten of them, helplessly, for longer than the joke deserved, the way people laugh who have been holding their breath for a week. Jonas laughed with his hand over his eyes.
In the corridor the polishing machine stopped. Teodor Lunde stood in the doorway in his grey work jacket, looking in at them, and didn’t ask what was funny.