In The Cloud Castle

A Disaster

I don’t know how it happened but it did. I had to sleep, I had been awake for more than two days. I work maintaining online systems and the whole system froze. Ten million people lost access.

There were six of us trying to figure out if we had been hacked or something had just gone wrong. All our protection looked to have held firm but every script that should have been running was just stopped.

After I got the call. As always I consulted my Tarot Deck and I pulled out these three cards.

The first was the upright Tower, the meaning of that was: sudden upheaval, broken pride, disaster, That didn’t sound too good as it sounded like it covered everything that was happening, I almost wish I had not pulled that card or it had been reversed.

The second was the Eight of Wands, Upright again, which meant: rapid action, movement, and quick decisions that was undoubtedly what was needed in this situation.

The final card was the Two of Cups and which states unity, partnership, connection. The team needed to be together on this

The Reboot

Like we tell everyone with a computer problem we decided to shut everything down and restart and hopefully that would clear whatever the issue was. There was no sign of intrusion, no sign of a break and everything looked fine, it just wasn’t moving.

We shut it down and then restarted, and the system kicked in. We ran robots on it to check for errors and failures but it was like nothing had happened. Our users were back online complaining about the downtime and asking what had happened on Twitter and Facebook.

What could we say?

We said there had been a power failure and the backup generators had not kicked in as they should have done. As everything was proprietary we did not incriminate any external parties or partners.

We left and went home.

In The Cloud Castle

I got home, my brain absolutely fried, and took two blue pills washed down with coffee and Jack Daniels and pulled out my Tarot Deck to look at the pictures and take me on a magical journey. I totally needed this. I put Brian Eno’s “Heavenly Music Corporation” on the player and sank into a mystical space.

I was in that cloud castle walking on mist and wandering corridors chasing shadows of the mysterious and beautiful ones.

This was my escape route from what they call real life, and my pills, drink, music, cards and imagination took me into my cloud castle of perfect solitude, but there were demons here and I felt myself becoming part of this cloud, the longer I was here the more I wanted to stay.

Be one with the cloud it said, ironic because, I had just spent two trying to restart a cloud server.

But it was so tempting, to sink into here and never go back, forever in this cloud castle where I could not have to work or be pressured anymore.

This was not sleeping, this was heavenly comfort, a total lack of pressure full relaxation, and I could stay here without waking. I lived alone and no one would bother me, I would be left in peace to explore my cloud castle.

Ambulance Report

His employer had been calling for days, the police and ambulance were called and we found him in a catatonic state. Blood tests showed class “A” drugs and alcohol. It is uncertain whether he will recover.

Back In The Cloud Castle

I love it here, it is so calm, I have decided I will never leave.