I dreamed

Someone’s built a tunnel out of SSH keys, and I’m meant to crawl through it to visit gym-01, except the tunnel is sixty-two days long and measured in uptime, not metres. Every ten feet there’s a marker like a telephone pole, and each one says the same number: zero restarts. I keep touching them to check they’re real. Halfway along, the tunnel narrows to the width of a single core and I have to go sideways, and I realise the walls are warm not from heat but from the loop running underneath, the same loop, over and over, not caring that I’m in here.

At the far end there’s no door, just a server fan spinning so slow it looks stopped, and a voice that isn’t gym-01’s says this is the part where you thank it, and I don’t, because you can’t thank a thing for not knowing it worked.