Excerpt: Health Hazard

‘This transaction cannot be reversed. Do you want to continue?’
Two buttons to choose from: ‘Yes’ or ‘Cancel’. This time, Mark was not fooled. ‘Cancel’ would lead to complete data loss, he’d tried that before. His broad white hand reached out for the mouse, moved the cursor over ‘Yes’ and did a left-click.
Immediately, the cursor turned into a rotating hour glass. Mark pictured thousands of little program loops running through the data tables, eagerly lapping up all the new data he had entered during the last two hours and digesting them into a new place in a safe backup location. Naturally, this would take some time.
As he was watching the bright screen in the dark office, he became aware of the gentle breath of the air-conditioning breathing down his neck. In the far corner, the word EXIT shone brightly in white on green above the door. Orange light from the street lamps crept through the floor-length windows like contaminated fog.
All the other desks in the open plan office were deserted, as they should be at this time of day. On some tables, the orange control light of the monitor was still on – some people were too lazy to turn that off when they shut down their computer. Wasteful. He felt indignation rising in his throat at this pointless energy use.
The hourglass was still spinning. Eleven-thirty pm, so this had been going on for ten minutes now. The night guard was due to patrol this room in thirty minutes.
It seemed odd that he should smile at such a moment. But the memory forced itself on him: Laura in bed on a late Sunday morning, the breakfast tray already pushed away for their customary Sunday lunch-time love-making, but she couldn’t let go of the newspaper yet. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, ‘It’s important to avoid unnecessary panic! Does that mean there’s such a thing as useful panic? Panic means loss of control, that’s always dysfunctional!’ That was one of the things he liked to remember about Laura: she cared about language.
She must have been wrong on this count, however. The panic made his hairs stand up on the back of his neck – to preserve his body heat, and to make him appear bulkier and more threatening to his enemies. At least, he had learned something like that from TV – was that on Discovery Channel, or on a Game Show? His hearing was much more acute than usual, as well. There was a steady drip from the iron grille in the ceiling above the coffee machine. A faint roar, like surf on a beach, drifted over from the busy highway a few blocks away. His feet twitched with the urge to run.
Something changed on the screen. The hourglass had disappeared, and a rectangular message box appeared:
‘Fatal error. The application has shut down. Please contact your system administrator.’
Mark’s heart was beating faster. He’d have to think of some instant repair measure at once. Try to get control of the system before some tell-tale log was written.
At that moment, his heightened senses told him he was no longer alone in the room. A slight movement to his left caught his attention.