I grinned. "Don't worry, Officer. The only thing I'll be zapping is your network switch."
The server closet at the Serenity Springs Police Substation was less of a closet and more of a vertical coffin. It was cramped, smelled of dust and overheated plastic, and was lit by a single flickering fluorescent bulb. A rat's nest of blue and gray Ethernet cables spilled from the walls and ceiling, a testament to two decades of neglect and quick fixes. Officer Miller hovered nervously in the doorway behind me, casting a long, wavering shadow.
"Oh, my sweet Lord," I whispered, taking in the scene. My professional soul wept. "It's a graveyard."
Stacked in a cheap, wobbly rack were ghosts of technologies past: a Dell PowerEdge server from 2008, its fans grinding with arthritic protest; a Netgear switch that looked like it had been salvaged from a high school computer lab; I was pretty sure I saw a dial-up modem. It was a digital atrocity.
"Is this bad?" Miller asked, his voice echoing slightly in the small space.
"Bad?" I scoffed, pulling my own ruggedized laptop from my backpack. "Officer, this isn't bad. This is a cry for help. This is what happens when you let the lowest bidder handle your IT for twenty years. I'm surprised you guys could run Solitaire, let alone a criminal database."
I got to work. Miller watched me as if I were performing a strange and arcane ritual—which, in a way, I was.
First, I located the station's primary network switch. It was warm to the touch—a bad sign. I traced the dead fiber optic line from the wall plate and unplugged its connector from the port. It was like pulling a life support plug from a patient who was already dead.
Next, my eyes scanned the switch panel, and there it was, just as the public infrastructure blueprints had indicated: a single port set apart from the others, covered by a bright red plastic dust cap. A tiny label above it, almost faded to illegibility, read: DHS COOP E-LINK.
This was it: the secret passage, the gateway to the good stuff. This port didn't lead to the local ISP. It led to a hardened, shielded conduit that snaked its way to a discreet satellite dish on the roof.
I unplugged the dust cap, blew on it for good measure, and plugged the station's main fiber line into this new port. Nothing happened, as expected. The physical link was there, but the port wasn't provisioned. It was asleep. Time to wake it up.
I popped open my laptop. My own connection was long gone, so it was time for Plan B. I tethered my laptop to my phone's 5G signal, the last bastion of connectivity in this digital wasteland. A black window with green text popped onto my screen: a Secure Shell, or SSH, terminal.
"What is all that?" Miller whispered from the doorway, mesmerized by the cursor blinking in the dark void. "Is that code?"