I'm a happy little troll who works in a cave instead of under somebody's bridge.  My cave is the second door from the end of the hall in a building lined with halls and devoid of windows.  Once inside my cave I can't tell what season it is, let alone the specifics of the weather, but it's always comfy and it doesn't rain or snow, and since my light is artificial, I never worry about sunburns or premature aging of my skin. 

Two other trolls share my cave:  Ed (short for Edgar) and Maxwell (never Max). My name is Sally, though it is permissible to call me "Sal" for the purpose of making a 2010 reference.  Jokes about Edgar Allen Poe, Maxwell House, and Maxwell's Silver Hammer are also allowed.  These are obvious and generic enough that they cause us no discomfort. 

No decent cave is complete without a treasure, and ours sits behind the last door at the end of the hall.  Precious beyond price - the company's servers live there.  These machines let offices in thirty-two countries talk to each other; they serve webpages to millions of visitors each month. They are awe inspiring and remarkable and we are the ones who tend and watch over them. 

By any sensible logic, we three trolls should be paid truly extravagant salaries for performing such sacred duties.  This being the real world, that's not going to happen.  But we get paid pretty well, and people leave us alone.

As you can probably tell, I like my job, really enjoy going to work.  I had to miss a day for jury duty about seven months ago, and I hated it. After that, nothing kept me away until the flu knocked me out for most of last week. I reluctantly went home before noon on Wednesday, stayed out Thursday and Friday and didn't even log in until Saturday afternoon. 

I almost went back on Monday. I tried but faltered at my front door and had to stay home another day.  I still got some work done, but I was able to do it in my pajamas, and while the dress code in the cave is relaxed, pajamas aren't yet accepted as business casual.

By ten-thirty Tuesday morning, I was back at work, but Maxwell hadn't come in.  "Is he sick, too?"

Ed shrugged.  "He seemed kind of tired, yesterday."

I didn't give it another thought, since Maxwell's absence wasn't really my business.  Later in the day I ended up getting distracted by things that were my business.  The Coyote load balancers failed to balance loads, and I had to work some fifth level IT mojo to restore order. 

"You should go home," Ed said around five.  "You still look sick."

Another woman might have been offended by the implication that she looked bad.  I was a little offended by the implication that I wasn't a diligent little troll.  "Nah.  I'm on a roll." 

Ed left at around six, and I imagined a night filled with his banal conversation between he and his wife Caroline. I'm not quite sure what pair-bonded domesticity looks like, but it's probably not that much different from my solitary weeknights. Having a "personal life" is, in my opinion, highly over rated. 

Wednesday arrived; Maxwell didn't.  I was tempted to call him at home, but I wasn't his boss and as far as I was concerned workplace friendships shouldn't travel beyond the parking lot. If Maxwell didn't want to come to the office, he wouldn't want the office barging into his home, taking his temperature, asking him when he planned to get out of bed and telling him to eat chicken soup. 

"You're in early," Ed said.  It was only quarter to nine, so I assumed he was just making conversation.

"I wanted to catch up from last week," I shrugged.  "How are our babies?"

He'd been in the server room, had probably gone in there as soon as he got in the office.  Entry requires a keycard and there's a log of entries and exits.  In theory it's for security purposes, or at least to facilitate finger-pointing if anything goes seriously wrong.  In practice we nip in there if we get in early or stay late.  That way there's a record of our diligence, even if nobody ever notices.

"They're fine," Ed said. 

The servers are coddled.  The floor in that room is raised about a foot, and beneath the floor tiles is equipment that provides cooling, ventilation and power.  It is very important to keep the servers comfortable.  Trolls are expected to be more resilient.

Sam came in sometime during the afternoon to ask if either of us had heard from Maxwell.  "There's no answer at his house."

We didn't have anything more intelligent to offer him than a couple of shrugs, but he got me thinking.  The last time Sam ventured down to our end of the hallway, it was to let us know that his supervisor had gotten sacked and departmental reorganization was forthcoming.  He must think something significant was wrong.

I checked the keycard logs.  It was just idle curiosity, since Sam could've asked if he thought the information would be useful.  The fact that he hadn't asked, and that our phone hadn't been ringing off the hook, would seem to indicate that Maxwell hadn't blown anything up the last time he was in there.  I expected to see normal traffic into and out of the room, and that was more or less what I saw, except that according to the log, Maxwell was still in the server room.

"What's funny?" Ed asked when I laughed.

I pushed back so he could read the screen.  "Maxwell's not a big guy, but you'd still think we'd have noticed if he moved in with the equipment."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot.  The log was screwy Monday. None of the entries and exits registered the way they should have."

Troubleshooting efforts would explain the half dozen "ins" and "outs" the log said Ed had made on Monday night. "Did you figure out what was wrong with it?"

Ed shrugged. Of all the things that can go wrong, a bug in the entry log wasn't a serious concern. 

I spent some time thinking about locked door mysteries and sniffling over my coffee, then decided to check the server room myself.  It's comforting to visit the physical machines every so often.  People who name their cars can understand that impulse. 

Everything looked normal, no sign of Maxwell hiding in a corner.  I grinned at the thought, and scraped my heel on the floor.

One of the other benefits of working in a cave is that it's footwear optional.  Shoes are required for meetings, and I always put them on before venturing to the bathroom or other work areas, but in the last two rooms at the end of the hall my little piggies can wriggle freely.

I scraped my heel on the corner of one of the floor tiles, which wasn't flush with its neighbors, and that's when I knew that something was wrong. A couple of weeks before I got sick I'd been dancing with the servers and I'd done my best Tom Cruise Risky Business impression, sliding across the floor in my socks, strumming the hell out of my air guitar.  Believe me, I'd have noticed if any of the tiles had been uneven.

I bent down, pulled out my multi-tool and worked it under the corner of the major offender. It popped up more easily than it should have, and Maxwell's gray, dead face stared up at me. 

I wondered if, without a stuffed up nose, I'd have been able to smell him.  That was my first thought, before it occurred to me to be sad or scared. 

There was blood and hair on the bottom of the heavy floor tile, presumably from the messy wound on the side of Maxwell's head.  It hadn't been an accident. 

Obviously, it hadn't been an accident.  

I picked up the phone and suddenly realized I had no idea whom I should call.  I only knew the extensions for Ed and Sam and poor dead Maxwell, and presumably the operator was at 0.  I wasn't even sure if 911 was a viable emergency number in real life.  Did I still need to dial 8 to get an outside line?

People deal with stress differently.  Some panic, some take charge.  I think about smells and telephone protocols. 

The door opened and Ed just stood there, looking at the gaping hole and the displaced floor tile and me with the phone in my hand.  Then he started crying.

After a few seconds my fight/flight response kicked in.  Too late to be much use, if it had mattered, but I've always suspected I was an evolutionary dead end.  All the same, I was grateful that I didn't need to defend myself with the multi-tool.

"He and Caroline," Ed snuffled.  "They--"

I'm not a genius when it comes to interpersonal relationships, but I could read between those lines.  Like I said before, workplace friendships should end in the parking lot.     

"It's okay, Ed," I said, which was a pretty dumb thing to say.  "Monday night?"

He nodded.

"Were you just planning on leaving him there?  What about when he started to smell?  Does he smell already?"  I was having a tough time getting off the olfactory tangent.

"I didn't--Monday--after--" Ed shook his head.  "Figured I'd deal with it Tuesday."

Except I'd come back to work, and had the bad grace to stay late.  If Ed had been thinking clearly, he would've just stayed later.  That sort of thing didn't get noticed, and wouldn't have been nearly as suspicious as finding a corpse under the floor. 

It was sort of reassuring that Ed hadn't been thinking clearly.  Nice to know that even if he was a murderer, he'd at least been upset.  Nice to know he hadn't felt compelled to get me out of the way, even though I'd thrown off his schedule and noticed the logs nobody ever noticed.

Ed lowered himself into a chair.  Having produced a corpse and then hidden it, he evidently didn't feel up to any further action.

"You're a decent guy, Ed, and I really appreciate that."  I thought about sitting at my desk all day, with him coming in and out of the room and me barely even noticing.  "Sam's going to freak out, right?  So we should give him the heads up first."

"I guess so. Right." 

Calling Sam was standard operating procedure.  If something blew up, we called Sam.  Then we fixed it and let him field all the phone calls.  By the time I finished dialing his extension, my finger had stopped shaking.  I didn't know how to react to finding a body and confronting a murderer.  But I knew what was called for when we faced a staffing crisis. 

"Sam, could you come down here a minute?"

Don't panic, that's the important thing.  Let marketing people deal with marketing, and management people deal with management, and website people deal with the website, and tech support deal with stupid users, and police deal with murderers.  Be a good little troll and handle the things you handle best. 

I made myself a task list, all the things a staff of three was supposed to do to keep things running smoothly.  It was a long list, but I could manage until Sam found replacements.  I already knew the keycard log was working just fine, so that was one less thing I had to worry about.

Copyright(c) 2003 by Megan Powell