You know what people say about the cloud? "That thing that stores your photos when you run out of space on your phone."
Yeah, lol. That's cute.
'The actual 'cloud' is everywhere.'
Invisible but omnipresent, much like oxygen of the digital age.
The Cloud holds your bank details, your social feeds, the cat memes shared every single day from each part of the world, and the secrets governments don't want anyone to know.
This seemingly abstract technology is the backbone of the modern era, and We, the people behind it, are the under-appreciated wizards.
Cloud Architects, our job title.
'We're the ones who design the foundations of your precious Internet.'
The servers, the storage, the virtual machines humming away in some frigid data centre you'll never see… we create systems that scale endlessly, handle billions of requests every single minute, and don't go belly-up when a server hiccups.
'But one may ask: what do we actually do?'
And the answer to that is simple— keep the world online!
Sounds glorious, doesn't it? As a matter of fact… it isn't.
The constant pressure, the CEOs breathing down your neck, developers throwing tantrums, one wrong configuration, and poof! Half the country's e-commerce dies.
'Don't even get me started on the customers.'
Still, I loved it.
In fact, I was good at this.
[Aria Cartethyia Solona, please reach the conference room. The meeting is about to begin. The meeting is about to begin.]
Having no fancy family name, no silver spoon to get me anything I had ever needed, orphaned at 12, and having practically raised myself alone, the path till now had not been an easy one.
I've had to work every odd job you can imagine— dishwasher, delivery girl, barista, the highest paying job before my graduation was walking dogs for the rich neighbourhood aunties.
Somehow clawing my way through the university on scholarships, surviving on instant noodles and cheap meals that I made myself, after months of hard work, I finally landed an internship at BlueSky Tech, one of the biggest cloud solution providers on the planet.
'Three years have passed, and I'm not surviving on the cheap meals anymore.'
Now, I'm architecting the future.
"And today is the day I take my final step towards an early retirement while still being in my twenties."
*
"Let's start with the new distributed architecture for the Phoenix Project."
I sat in the glass-walled conference room, trying not to smile too hard as the presentation began.
My heart thudded with pride. Phoenix was my baby.
Months of sleepless nights, debugging, and caffeine-fueled hallucinations had gone into this. I'd built a cloud system that could scale faster than anything BlueSky had ever deployed.
Auto-healing nodes, predictive load balancing, failover clusters so efficient they could survive a meteor strike— hell, I practically reinvented the backbone!
This was my moment. This is where I was supposed to get my promotion to the senior position that I had deserved for so long. But…
"Thank you all for coming," my team lead, Marcus Vane, greeted in his usual annoying tone, striding up front like he owned the world.
Thirty-seven, smug, and the kind of guy who wore cologne so strong you could taste it in the air.
His slide deck appeared on the room's main presentation screen… my diagrams, my configurations, my notes, all polished and perfect.
The name, Marcus Vane, was plastered across every single one of them!
'What the actual f…?'
My jaw tightened.
"As you can see," the bastard continued smoothly, "The Phoenix Architecture solves our scaling issues while reducing operational overhead by thirty percent. I personally developed this system—."
I blacked out for a moment there.
'Did he just say 'he personally'…? He did, didn't he?'
He stole everything.
Every. Single. Fkin. Thing!
By the time he was finished, the room had erupted in polite applause. My stomach was churning acid when these corporate pigs who knew the Vane bastard wasn't capable of any of this and still praised him because of his face value.
These bastards… they were in on this as well. None of their eyes were even glancing towards me, it was so freaking obvious.
"Any questions?" Marcus asked smugly, his eyes sweeping the room like a king granting favors.
…
The greatest humiliation I'd faced in my entire life.
-Thud!
"You're joking, right?" The last thread of my patience snapped as I stood up so fast my chair screeched across the floor.
Their heads swiveled towards me for the first time. "Aria? Something to add?" Marcus, still having the audacity to feign innocence, asked with a blank face.
"Add?" My voice was dripping venom by this point. "How about the fact that every single line in that architecture came from me? Every sleepless night I spent, every damn solution you just called your own— how dare you call any of this yours?!"
My scream echoed so loud that the room went dead silent. I could feel my pulse hammering in my ears, heat crawling up my neck.
Yet, that bastard had the gall to chuckle. "Aria, this is a team effort—."
I don't know how I did it or what happened to me, but I found myself right in front of his face and before anyone could react…
-SLAP!
A loud slapping sound crackled through the room like thunder.
"Team efforts, my ass!" My throat burned so hot it seemed like I was spitting fire at this bastard.
Gasps. Whispers. Phones discreetly raised to record… and my eyes ignored it all.
"Here's your damn credit," I spat, shaking with uncontrollable rage. "I quit!"
Marcus stood frozen, a bright red handprint blooming on his cheek as I turned on my heel.
"Now enjoy maintaining that damn system of yours without me, jackass!" I shoved past the stunned managers and dashed right to my desk outside.
-Tuk! Tuk! Tuk!
-Tuk! Tuk!
-Tuk!
Then, logging into the company server directly, with my hands moving on instinct, cold and steady despite the adrenaline in my veins, I did what I needed to.
-Tuk! Tuk! Tuk!
One click, two clicks, three… and gone.
Every blueprint, every automated script, every line of my architecture scrubbed clean.
The Admin access that 'we' were given by the company for this big project made it possible to clean everything: backups, trashed files, everything that I had ever worked on.
There was no mercy, not anymore.
-Click.
By the time security figured out what I had just done, I was already walking out the door, not of the floor, but of the building thirty floors below…
*
-Swiiiiiiiiiiiish…
The polluted city air slapped me in the face as I stormed down the sidewalk.
My mind was a cyclone right now, the anger, the betrayal, the bitter satisfaction of knowing they are screwed for a lifetime… it didn't calm the rage.
"Stupid bastards," I muttered, kicking a pebble so hard it ricocheted off a trash can. "You think you can just screw over Aria Solona? Think again!"
-Buzzzzz!
The HR was probably calling right now. But I just ignored them.
-Swaaaaaaash…!
But it was at this moment that the (bitch) fate decided to spice things up.
-Beeeeeeeeeeep!
A loud honk shattered the air. My head turned, but my body froze.
A truck.
A bright pink delivery truck barreling towards me at full speed flashed in my eyes.
The logo on the truck read:
"SweetiePie Cupcakes~! Death by Chocolate!"
I don't know why, but that logo flashed in my eyes especially clearly.
'Really? THIS is how I go? Death by freaking cupcakes?!'
Perhaps it was my body or perhaps it was my subconscious that didn't want such a sweet death for me, but somehow my body's Ultra Instincts kicked in and I leapt sideways, barely missing the front bumper of the pink truck.
-Shrrrrrrrrrrrt!
However, my bag wasn't as lucky as I was. The laptop, a big piece of my life, along with everything else in that expensive designer bag, was scattered on the asphalt, stunning everyone in the surrounding area.
"Watch where you're going, bitch!" The truck driver shouted, my life still flashing before my eyes, my heart still a rollercoaster.
The already spiked adrenaline must have saved me this time as well.
"Yeah, bastard! Blame the pedestrian!" I yelled back at that bastard, picking up whatever was left of my bag, belongings, and techs.
I was so angry, scared, thankful, and excited at the same time that I thought my mind was running a little too fast, but when I looked around, that wasn't the case.
The opposite was happening right now…
-Oooooooooooooooooooooooong!
The driver's cursed yelling, the shocked screams of the pedestrian, the water stream from the peeing dog on the side, everything had visibly slowed down.
When I turned my head around to make sense of the situation, I saw something even more absurd…
"What the hell?"
Right in the middle of the road, a white door stood upright. There was no frame, no wall, just… the door.
It was white, glowing with a light and soft moonlight. There were intricate murals on it, and rune characters I could not make sense of.
Every sound in the surroundings had vanished like static, the world around me was blurring out visibly, and every color was being bleached to white.
-Ta-ring~!
The door cracked open, the endless brilliance beyond it almost blinding.
I couldn't run, I could not scream, I could not even take a damn selfie with this cool phenomenon!
One moment passed like that… and then I was eaten alive by this vacuum cleaner of hell.