“They will talk to me,” he said. “I know their regional manager’s former boss from my summer internship.”

He looked around the dark room, his eyes tracking the outlines of the workstations and the silent test benches.

“We need to keep the server running,” he said. “How long does the backup battery last?”

“Four hours,” I said.

“Then we have four hours to back up the latest schematics to the off-site drive,” he said.

He sat down in the plastic chair next to mine and pulled his laptop from his leather bag.

The blue light of his screen illuminated his chin and the neat collar of his button-down shirt.

“We are in this together now,” he said.

I sat down beside him, the coldness of the room beginning to seep through my thin sweater.

For the next two hours, the only sounds were the clicking of our keyboards and the hum of the server fan.

We transferred three terabytes of power-grid simulation data to a rugged external hard drive.

My phone screen lit up again on the desk, the vibration rattling against a metal paperclip.