A work of fiction …
Mitch looked up from his half-packed suitcase, perched where he could reach it on the cot in his quarters at the South Pole Data GigaCenter. He had just finished dumping the contents of his sock drawer into the suitcase, and was in the process of restoring the drawer to its place and grabbing the handle of the one next to it, when the view from the window caught his attention.
That window scanned the 90º East meridian, a direction that, once it left Antarctica, would be water water everywhere until it came ashore somewhere along the coast of Bangladesh. The Sun sat at the center of the view, low and orange on the flat horizon, a frozen moment in its seemingly endless circle around the south polar sky. The clouds had momentarily parted for it, and its liberated beams had poked Mitch in the eye.
Low it was on the horizon, Mitch mused, because today was the 15th, the Ides of March. In a week, the equinox would arrive, the Sun would slide below that flat horizon, and he, and all the other staff, would shut down the South Pole Data GigaCenter for the winter season, and be boarding transports bound for the North Pole Data GigaCenter.
And all because of a Caesarian dictum.
Mitch shook his head at the memory. A Global Council had taken charge of world governments, just at the point when the Great Crash seemed poised to thrust the planet into a thousand-year reign of famine, disease, and terror. At the head of the Council sat a towering, glowering Spaniard, César Delgado by name. He ruled by decree, always in the name of the Council and with the eight other Councillors present and nodding assent during his pronouncements, but none were fooled except those who willfully fooled themselves. Not least those who called their Great Leader (where he and his minions could not see or hear) “DelGodo.”
Nevertheless, Mitch hollered in joy with everyone else when Delgado and the Global Council rose to power. For after years of government by lies, conspiracy theories, and raw emotions manipulated by social media billionaires for their own profit had led to the collapse of economic and social structures throughout the world, the new regime promised order, and hard-headed sense, and language that meant exactly what it said. Promised, and delivered. The world began pulling back from the brink, and those, like Mitch, who worked in the information technologies that were essential for the recovery, and were recognized as essential, rejoiced.
Then came the Sunshine Decrees. Which pronounced that the word “data” was to mean what it said, therefore work on data was to proceed only during daylight hours. Complaints against the inaccurate etymology, and the unreasonableness of restricting data access in this way, to a world that desperately needed all the information it could get, right now, were quickly silenced, the silencing abetted by the abrupt disappearances of the noisiest complainers, and by the assertion of the Council that the Sunshine Decrees were emplaced to assure work-life balance for those in the IT workforce.
Efforts to achieve the constant data flow needed to prevent the planet from sliding back into Catastrophe by a “follow the sun” strategy, in which data centers were strategically placed so that the sun never set on all of them at once, failed promptly. Countries claimed ownership of data processed on their territories, and put tariffs and restrictions on data transmissions. The solution was to place the data centers at the poles, where the sun didn’t set for six months of the year, and no country could claim sole jurisdiction.
Hence, the suitcase. Mitch reached for the drawer that contained his T-shirts.
“Yo, Mitch!” The call, from a low-pitched female voice, came from outside Mitch’s door. He opened it, and a shortish, plump, twentysomething brunette walked in.
“How’s the packing, bro?”, she asked.
“SOS, Martha”, Mitch responded. “No fun, but gotta be done. At least it only happens twice a year.”
“Ya think?” Martha quizzed, ominously.
Mitch picked up on the tone. “What’ve ya got?”
“Won’t be opening the Santa Center”, Martha used the nickname for the North Pole Data GigaCenter. “Icecap won’t sustain it. Too thin, too unstable.”
“Oh wow”, Mitch eeyored. This day had been coming, but ‘next year’, the data workers had always assured themselves. Shipboard options had long ago been dismissed, for a submarine on North Pole station saw no more daylight than the South Pole in midwinter, and therefore didn’t qualify as a location for a data center. This was …
“Did you just say ‘oh wow’?”, Martha whined.
“Sue me”, Mitch challenged.
A chorus of shouts reached the pair through Mitch’s open door. “Word’s out”, Mitch said. Martha rolled her eyes. The pair left Mitch’s quarters and headed down the corridor to the common room of their wing of the GigaCenter building, where the noise was coming from.
They got there to find a mass of humanity milling around and talking, with more arriving from the maze of hallways that led into the space. Individual conversations could not be sorted out from the hubbub, but each one was almost certainly a variation on the theme of ‘What do we do now?’
For a few minutes, the hallways were empty. All of the residents of that wing of the building were in the common room, or obeying their mandated “sleep” hours. Then, from one of them, a sole figure emerged, walking steadily but slowly. He was wearing a greenish-gray, loose-fitting woolen robe, with a hood that almost completely concealed his face. He climbed onto a small stage at one end of the room, pulled a microphone from an alcove in the wall, tapped into it. Gradually, the tapping registered with the room’s other occupants, and the hubbub settled down enough for the hooded figure to speak over it.
“Hey”, he said. There were scattered “hey”s in response. One woman called out “What’ve ya got, Eric?” For the hooded figure was Eric Frankenarnest, the facility’s Operating Officer. “And where’d ya get that loony outfit?”
Eric chuckled, then focused his attention on the room as a whole.
“Y’all got the news, yeah?” The room mumbled agreement. “I’ll give you the X version anyway, just in case. The Santa Center’s been ordered closed and abandoned because the icecap’s no longer strong or stable enough to support it. This day’s been coming for awhile. Now it’s here. And you’ll all be asking where do we go now, what do we do now, how are we going to keep data flowing, keep IT from collapsing and the world with it?
“I have answers for you. We are going to stay where we are and do exactly as we have been doing. If that violates the Sunshine Decrees, so be it. If we are unable to generate data, so be it. We will generate nighta, and the world will love us for it.”
There was silence for a beat. Then someone called out, “Nighta? The dark side of IT?”
Eric chuckled into the microphone. The sound came out hollow, booming. “The world shall come to know the power of the dark side”, he rumbled. Then he laughed, a normal, human, Eric Frankenarnest laugh. The hood got pushed back enough so that enough light reached Eric’s face for it to be recognizable to the crowd in the room. “Everybody back to normal duty stations. Belay packing, none of us is going anywhere. Don’t fret about provisions or the Sunshine Laws, that will all be taken care of.”
“Believe that when I see it”, Mitch said to Martha as he slipped through the door back into his quarters, and started pulling his socks out of his suitcase.
But it was. When the transports came on schedule in the days before sunset, they bore, not empty seats for the GigaCenter’s employees, but provisions for their stay through the long south polar night. Provisions, indeed, in greater plenty and higher quality than any of the GigaCenter’s staff had seen before, at either station. There were rumors that DelGodo had quietly suspended the Sunshine Decrees, others that DelGodo had, even more quietly, named Eric Frankenarnest a “shadow Councillor”, with direct access to, and influence on, the Great Leader himself. The importance, in both substance and perception, of the renamed Polar GigaCenter increased as the polar night deepened, and its staff prospered and preened, some a little nervously, as they saw less and less of their Operating Officer and wondered what would become of this.
Indeed, Eric Frankenarnest became progressively more invisible to the staff of the GigaCenter, claiming ‘essential business’ as the reason for missing meetings and social events. But, if one had chanced to look, on the night the last of the transports departed that supplied the GigaCenter for its first months of nighta production, a hooded figure could be seen, watching the departures from a newly-opened refuse processing area. As the last blip on the meridian to New Zealand vanished, the figure chuckled, a deep, hollow, booming chuckle.
And then, it winked out.
“Apparently it started among the boys in the kitchen, laundry, and janitorial staffs. It seems a bunch of kitchen workers were cleaning up, loading the sink for dishwashing, and one of them held up a bottle of dishwashing liquid, pointed to the label, and asked his coworkers ‘why are we here, when even the tools they give us disrespect us?'”
