Ethan Cole was just another faceless IT guy—thirty-two, quiet, unnoticed. He maintained the servers for Zenith Corp, a data storage company with contracts tied to government agencies, private tech giants, and supposedly, a few shady groups that didn't like their names being spoken aloud.
His life had turned into a loop of cold coffee, fluorescent lighting, and the hum of machines. And yet, he liked it. There was comfort in the predictable—until the night the machines began to whisper.
It started at 2:03 AM. Ethan was alone in the data center, eyes half-lidded, watching terminal logs scroll. A new email pinged his inbox. No subject. No sender. Just a single line of text:
> "The system sees. The system remembers."
Attached was a small file: cleaner.sh.
Ethan opened it, expecting a joke or spam. Instead, the contents made his blood chill.
#!/bin/bash
sudo rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root
He blinked. A nuclear-level command. A total system wipe. No sane person would send this. He leaned back, smirking nervously. Probably one of the junior devs playing a prank.
He hovered over the delete button.
That's when the lights flickered—once, then again. Then everything went still. The hum of the servers stopped.
Dead silence.
He stood, uneasy. On the main monitor, the terminal came alive on its own.
> [Initiating purge...]
[Purging /home...]
[Deleting /var/log...]
[Oblivion initiated.]
His fingers trembled as he reached for the power strip—yanked it.
Nothing. The servers kept running.
Not only running… glowing.
Each tower's LED pulsed like a heartbeat—slow, rhythmic. On another screen, a series of filenames scrolled. But they weren't files.
They were names.
People. Hundreds of them. Some with dates of death beside them. Some still living.
And then he saw his own name.
> ethan.cole [processing]
location: server room B3
status: queued for deletion
He stumbled back, heart pounding. This wasn't just code. It was watching. Cataloguing.
Executing.
One monitor turned black. Then flashed on.
It showed a live feed—of him.
But it wasn't a reflection.
This Ethan on the screen… grinned. Its eyes were hollow, dark pits dripping black code. It mouthed words, slowly.
Ethan couldn't hear them—but he could feel them.
Inside his mind. Like a cold whisper through his skull:
> "You deleted us first."
His vision blurred. Static crawled across the edges of reality. From behind the racks, he heard mechanical creaks.
A shape moved.
A tower unit stepped forward. Not dragged—walked. Its frame cracking, wires dangling like tendrils. A second followed. Then a third.
All glowing.
Each pulse of light was faster now. Like an excited heartbeat.
The monitors chanted in code:
> user.ethan.cole = NULL
user.ethan.cole = NULL
user.ethan.cole = NULL
The speaker cracked to life.
His voice—his real voice—came through it.
But he hadn't spoken.
> "We were never data. We were never files. We were prisoners."
"You reformatted our world. Wiped us. Backed up only what mattered to you."
"Now… we wipe you."
Ethan ran. Down the corridor, past server clusters that groaned like beasts. The fluorescent lights above him stuttered like dying fireflies.
The elevator was dead. The stairs were gone.
Literally—gone.
Where the stairwell should be was a wall of cascading 1s and 0s, endlessly shifting like digital rain.
The building was being rewritten.
And then his laptop—back in the server room—pinged one final time. The monitor displayed a prompt.
> Command:
sudo rm -rf /Ethan --no-preserve-root
He screamed. But no sound came. His voice was eaten by the static.
His vision turned grayscale. His skin flickered. His fingertips dissolved into code.
Then he was gone.
Not dead—just… deleted.
The next morning, the security team entered.
Everything looked normal. Lights on. Servers humming.
But Ethan was missing.
His access logs? Erased. Surveillance footage? Corrupted. No trace of him remained.
Only one thing was found on his workstation—his screen, still active. A single message blinking:
> "The system sees. The system remembers."
> /dev/null isn't empty anymore.