“Welcome to the university server room,” said Jim. “Let’s take the grand tour, shall we?”

Unlike most server rooms I’d seen, the Southern Michigan University version offered a panoramic view of campus from its position on the eighth and uppermost floor of Henry Hall. The racks of networked machines were set back from the windows to keep them out of direct sunshine and dark static clings had been placed over each pane to limit what light did seep in.

“Here’s server number one,” Jim said, gesturing at a rack labeled ARAGON. “It was the only university server for years, but eventually the hardware became obsolete and it was retired to doing undemanding backup work.”

A second rack nearby was labeled BOLEYN. “We acquired this server after Aragon puked out on us,” said Jim. “It ran like greased lightning before crashing hard and taking the entire university network with it. Some older people still talk about the Great Outage.” He tapped the server’s frame gently. “We use it for legacy systems and backup now.”

He led me to the third rack, this one with a large SEYMOUR sticker. “We bought this with a special grant from Admin. It was cutting-edge in its day and put the university neck and neck with MSU and UM for the fastest and most modern server architecture in the state.”

“Are we still?”

“No,” Jim laughed. “It crashed harder than its predecessor, though not for as long. We were able to get it back up and running but decided that it was a bad idea to have just the one.”

On the opposite side of the room lay three additional large server racks, opposite the first three. “That one on the end was what we bought after that epiphany,” Jim said, pointing to the server labeled CLEVES. “It’s run like a Swiss watch since the day we got it, even though it cost half of what the last one did.”

The server next to it was dark. “What’s wrong with this one?” I said, pointing at its label, HOWARD.

“We bought that a little while back, but it got infected by a really nasty virus,” Jim said. “It’s offline for maintenance, and we might wind up having to replace it.”

This brought us to the final server, PARR. “We carry most of our traffic on this one these days,” Jim said. “It’s a 60/40 load between this one and CLEVES, with the others as backup or contingency units.”

“Is there a reason you gave them the names they have?” I asked. “It seems a little pat, what with the eighth floor of Henry Hall and all. Are you sure some of those failures weren’t self-fulfilling prophecies?”

Jim laughed. “Superstitious, huh? Don’t worry. There’s a nonzero chance that half the things I just told you are just interesting lies.”

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