The Conduit

The fiber optic cable should have run straight to the server room. Should have been a simple Tuesday morning job—trace the dead connection, splice in a new run, bill the client. But three floors down from the Meridian Corp lobby, the cable disappeared into a wall that wasn’t supposed to exist.

I’d been running network cable for fifteen years. Started in Devon, moved to Chicago when the work dried up back home. Buildings don’t surprise me anymore. But this wall was different. The blueprints showed empty space behind it, yet my cable finder was pinging like mad, tracking the line straight through what should have been air.

The maintenance panel came off easy enough. Too easy. Behind it, a narrow access tunnel stretched into darkness, lined with more cable than I’d seen outside a data center. Hundreds of runs, all perfectly organized, all humming with data. The air tasted metallic.

I should have called my supervisor. Should have backed out and marked it as ‘client infrastructure—do not disturb.’ Instead, I grabbed my headlamp and crawled in. The tunnel was just wide enough for my shoulders, dropping at a steep angle that made my knees ache against the concrete. Every few feet, junction boxes sprouted like tumors from the walls, each one labeled with employee ID numbers I recognized from the building directory.

The tunnel opened into a chamber that belonged in a different century. Victorian brickwork formed perfect arches overhead, but the floor was modern concrete poured around something that looked like subway tracks. Not tracks, though. Rails, but too narrow, too precise. They disappeared into smaller tunnels that branched off like arteries.

Meridian Employee Monitoring Station 7-Alpha. Authorized Personnel Only.

Sign mounted above a bank of servers

The servers were running hot, their fans screaming in the enclosed space. Dozens of them, each one labeled with floor numbers from the building above. Real-time data streams scrolled across mounted displays—heart rates, stress levels, productivity metrics, location tracking. Every employee in the building, mapped and measured in real time.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the collection system. Those narrow rails led to pneumatic tubes, and those tubes led to storage tanks. Hundreds of them, each one labeled with an employee name and a substance I didn’t recognize at first. Clear liquid, slightly viscous, with an oily sheen that caught the server lights.

EXTRACTION LOG - STATION 7A
DATE: CURRENT
SAMPLE: CORTISOL/ADRENALINE CONCENTRATE
PURITY: 97.3%
YIELD: 847.2ML/EMPLOYEE/WEEK
STATUS: WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS
NEXT HARVEST: AUTO-SCHEDULED

I found my own tank in the third row. Half full of that clear liquid, with my name printed in neat corporate font on a label that looked exactly like the ones we used for network equipment upstairs. The tube leading to it disappeared up through the ceiling, following the same path as the data cables. Following the same path as the ventilation system.

The sound started then—a rhythmic pumping, like a heartbeat amplified through concrete. The collection system was cycling, drawing its daily yield from the floors above. From the people who came to work every morning, sat in their cubicles, felt their stress levels spike during meetings, felt their adrenaline surge during deadline crunches. All of it flowing down through hidden tubes into this Victorian nightmare beneath their feet.

I backed toward the access tunnel, but the pumping sound was getting louder. The displays showed elevated readings across the building—heart rates spiking, stress hormones flooding the system. Something had triggered a mass response upstairs. Something like an IT worker not returning from a simple cable run. The tanks were filling faster now, and I realized they knew exactly where I was. They’d always known. The building was watching, measuring, collecting. And now it was collecting me.

Glossary