D’Angelo walked into the data center bathroom and sat in a stall. His plan was to wait there until an employee came in, then follow that person out into the secure area where all the servers were. Given that he had made it clear to the tour group that he was suffering from severe gastrointestinal distress, he figured that nobody would come looking for him or worry that he was taking too long.
When another person finally came in, D’Angelo pretended like he was just finishing up. He affixed the fake Google ID badge to his shirt and flushed the toilet, making sure to start washing his hands right after the other man.
“You new?” the man, whose nametag identified him as ‘Eric’, asked.
“Yeah, and I’m just an intern, so don’t ask me how to do anything because I probably don’t know how to do it.” He dried his hands right after Eric and accompanied him to the door which was controlled by a badge swipe.
“I gotta tell you, man, you look a lot like D’Angelo Russell.”
D’Angelo forced a chuckle from his throat. “So I’ve heard.”
Eric walked away towards whatever his next task was. D’Angelo, too, started walking as if he knew where he was supposed to be going. When he remembered the tour group that was still in the glass-walled hallway above him, he stooped over to hopefully make himself less visible. It would do no good to be discovered when he was so close to actualizing his elaborate plan.
The data servers were almost serene in their inertness. The only sound that they made was the whoosh of the cooling fans, and the only indication they were on and active was the blinking of small green lights next to their elaborately-wired network ports. He almost felt guilty as he pulled a single wooden baseball bat from his pant leg. Almost.
There was no way to tell which server to target first. If they were labeled in some way, it wasn’t apparent to D’Angelo, and, besides, it wasn’t like any of them would be labeled as specifically containing all the news articles which described D’Angelo’s secretly-recorded video of Nick Young admitting to being unfaithful to his girlfriend.
“It wasn’t even my fault,” D’Angelo whispered to himself as he readied the bat for the first swing. “I’m not the one who cheated on my girl.” But now, it didn’t matter whose fault it was, because all traces of the incident would soon be wiped from the internet forever. He swung the bat at the front of a rack of servers, denting some of the paneling with a loud metallic crunch. The next hit knocked the paneling loose, and the third hit caused the indicator LED’s to darken. So he moved on to the next one in the row and started destroying that one too. The destructive sounds of delicate computer components getting smashed was therapeutic to a mind disturbed by allegations of being a “locker-room distraction”.
“What the hell are you doing?”
D’Angelo turned and brandished his bat at Eric. “I’m fixing a bug,” he snarled at the interferer. “And if you get any closer, I’ll fix your face in the same way.”
Eric, looking scared, turned and ran back into the maze of paths, probably to call the police or something. D’Angelo knew he didn’t have a lot of time left to accomplish his goal. In a frenzy, he ran up and down the rows of server hardware, a baseball bat in each hand, taking huge swings at whatever was nearby. He happened to look up and see the tour group, who had a collective look of shock on their faces. After waving a bat derangedly at them, he ran towards where he thought the exit door was, getting in some more solid hits on Google’s hardware on the way. As armed as he was, he knew nobody would get in his way as he made his escape.
He was right. The woman at the reception desk didn’t make any attempt to get in his way, but he took a menacing swing in her direction, just to make sure. As he was running out the front door, he heard Dean, the tour guide, yell something about “redundant failover”, but D’Angelo didn’t stop to listen. Hadn’t that nerd figured out yet that D’Angelo was only pretending to be an IT professional specializing in big data? The tour was over, so Dean could just shut up now.
D’Angelo got in his car and squealed out of the small parking lot even though nobody was immediately following him. The more distance he could put between himself and the scene of his crimes, the better. And, even if he did get caught and his misdeeds were again publicized for the world to see and to mock, he had proven that it was a simple matter to infiltrate Google’s data centers and effectively rewrite history through the destruction of their infrastructure.
There was an odd sort of comfort in that, he thought to himself as he sped down the highway, unconcerned by the sound of police sirens getting closer.