The digital clock on Mark's computer glowed a sickly green: 2:17 AM. The office felt like a tomb—an endless maze of identical cubicles swallowed by darkness so thick it seemed solid. His desk stood as a lone island of light in a vast sea of silence, the hum of his computer a weak substitute for a heartbeat.
He was alone. Officially. The last one on the 14th floor, finishing a quarterly financial report that his boss had optimistically labeled "a quick Friday task." The janitors had come and gone hours ago, their rattling carts and whistled tunes now just distant memories. Now, there was only the hum, the faint, electric breath of the air conditioning, and the oppressive weight of emptiness.
Mark sipped his cold, bitter coffee, wincing. As he stretched, the sound of his chair groaning echoed like a gunshot in the silence. That's when he heard it.
*Click-clack. Click-clack.*
It was faint but unmistakable. The sharp, percussive strike of fingers on a mechanical keyboard. Mark froze, his ears straining. The sound came from somewhere deep within the cubicle farm, to his right.
"Hello?" His voice was a dry croak, swallowed by the carpeted walls and the hung ceiling. "Jen? That you?" Jen from Accounting sometimes stayed late, but she'd waved goodbye at nine.
The typing stopped.
Silence rushed back in, thicker and more menacing than before. Mark held his breath, listening. Nothing. He forced a shaky laugh. "Just the building settling. Or a server rack." He tried to focus on his spreadsheet, but the numbers blurred into gray, meaningless symbols.
*Click-clack. Click-clack-clack.*
It returned, louder this time. Faster. Someone was typing with frantic urgency. It was the sound of someone facing a deadline, deeply focused on their work. The rhythm was all wrong for idle tapping. This was intentional.
A cold knot tightened in Mark's stomach. He stood slowly, peering over the fabric-covered walls of his cubicle. The darkness beyond his halo of light was absolute. He fumbled for his phone, turning on the flashlight. The beam was weak, cutting a jittery path through the gloom, illuminating empty chairs, blank monitors, and the lonely personal effects of his coworkers: a wilting plant, a family photo, a forgotten sweater draped over a chair.
He took a few steps out of his cubicle, the beam dancing ahead. "Is someone there? This isn't funny, Dave." His voice sounded small and pathetic.
The typing ceased the moment he spoke.
He swung the light towards the source of the sound. Cubicle 14B. Martin's cubicle. Martin had been let go three weeks ago. HR had cleared it out the same day. It was empty.
Mark's heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He walked forward, each step muffled by the industrial carpet. The beam of his phone shook as he rounded the partition.
The cubicle was indeed empty. The desk was clear, the monitor dark, the chair pushed in neatly. Nothing. He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. A nervous laugh escaped him. He was losing it. Sleep deprivation and bad coffee were conjuring ghosts.
As he turned to go back, the motion sensor for the bank of lights above him detected his movement.
*Click.*
The fluorescents directly above him flickered once, twice, then buzzed to life with a painful, sterile whiteness.
And in that sudden, shocking glare, he saw it.
Every single monitor on the entire floor was on.
Each screen glowed with the same stark, blue-white light, displaying the same thing: a blank document in Microsoft Word, the cursor blinking with a steady, hypnotic rhythm on page 1, line 1.
Mark's blood turned to ice. He spun in a slow circle, his breath catching in his throat. A thousand blank pages. A thousand blinking cursors. All waiting.
*Click-clack.*
The sound no longer came from one place. It echoed from the speakers of every computer, a dry, synthetic reproduction of typing. The cursor on the screen directly in front of him began to move.
Letters appeared, typing themselves one after another.
**Subject: Your presence is required.**
Mark stumbled backward, his phone clattering to the floor, its light snuffing out. He didn't need it. The glow from the monitors provided a cold, hellish daylight.
*Click-clack-clack-clack.*
The typing intensified, a frenzied, synchronized cacophony from a thousand ghostly keyboards. He watched, paralyzed, as text scrolled rapidly up the screen in front of him, and he knew, with a soul-deep certainty, that the same thing was happening on every other screen.
**The quarterly evaluation of your continued employment is now commenced. Parameters: endurance, focus, compliance. Failure to meet performance metrics will result in termination.**
This wasn't a prank. This was something else. Something that lived in the wiring, in the servers, in the very architecture of this late-capitalist nightmare. A spirit of endless, meaningless labor that had gained a terrible consciousness.
"No," Mark whispered.
The word on the screen changed instantly.
**Subject: Mark. Response: 'no' is not a valid parameter. First task: re-index the server log files. Time allotted: until sunrise.**
A path on the carpet between the cubicles began to glow, a faint, phosphorescent line leading towards the server room at the far end of the floor. It was a leash.
He turned to run, to flee to the elevators, to the stairs, to anywhere but this fluorescent purgatory. The moment he took a step away from the glowing path, a searing, static shock erupted from the keyboard on Martin's empty desk. It arced through the air and struck his hand, not with electricity, but with a deep, bone-aching cold that felt like the touch of death itself. A sharp, chemical smell of ozone and something older, like dust and rot, filled the air.
A new message flashed on every screen, red text on white.
**Deviation penalized. Resume your task.**
Trembling, cradling his numb hand, Mark looked down the glowing path. It pulsed gently, waiting. He thought of his mortgage, his family, but those concepts felt distant and unreal, belonging to a world of sun and people and time. Here, there was only the task. The endless task.
With the leaden steps of a condemned man, he began to walk. As he did, the typing resumed, not frantic now, but steady, purposeful, and horribly familiar. It was the sound of work. The sound of a late shift that never, ever ended.
He reached the server room. The door was unlocked. The cold air that washed over him was arctic. Inside, the racks of servers blinked their countless lights, a galaxy of mindless, demanding activity. In the center of the room, a single workstation was set up, its monitor displaying the same blank document.
**Begin.**
Mark sat down. His fingers, moving with a will that was not his own, found the keys. He began to type. The click-clack of the keyboard was the only sound now, a metronome counting down the hours until a sunrise that he knew, in his heart, he would never see.
Outside his circle of light, in the vast, monitor-lit office, he occasionally heard it—another faint *click-clack* from the cubicles. He was never alone again. There were always others, working their late shifts, their eternal shifts, just out of sight, their typing a constant reminder that the company always had a use for you, even after you'd clocked out for the last time. Especially then.