They Stole My Songs

Chapter 9

The old server room was in the sub-basement of the Sterling building, behind a metal door that still bore the word ARCHIVE painted in stencil letters older than the current company logo.

Noah's keycard shouldn't have worked. That was the first thing he said in the basement corridor at eleven o'clock on a Thursday night. "They cut my access to the live systems after the concert," he whispered, stepping up to the black plastic reader. "But the archive network is so old IT forgot it has a door."

He tapped the badge against the sensor. The small indicator turned green with a dull mechanical click. He pushed the heavy latch, and we stepped across the threshold into the chill of the lower vaults.

Inside stood tall racks of machines running under cold fluorescent tubes. Hardware from older corporate configurations lined the concrete room, humming against the back wall. Noah moved down the narrow central aisle until he stopped before a low rack near the ventilation shaft. He knelt before a squat black tower with a strip of yellowed masking tape fixed across its casing. On the tape, written in faded marker in his younger handwriting, was a label: 2019–2021 / DEMO — DO NOT PURGE.

"I worked down here when I was a junior," he murmured, his fingers tracing the edge of the tape. "I archived half this shelf myself, back when archiving meant keeping things safe."

He pulled a folding keyboard tray out from beneath the rack and keyed the power sequence. The ancient terminal flickered, rolling through legacy diagnostics before presenting a drive directory that had sat untouched since the studio upgraded its main network. Noah brought up the project index, sorted the directory by creation date in ascending order, and scrolled down the list until the display stopped on three entries:

ST_BLOOM_DRAFT — Mar 14 NH_DEMO_VOC_GTR — Mar 29 NH_DEMO_VOC_GTR — Apr 02

NH stood for Neon Heart. Weeks before Scarlett Vale ever sang a note of it — before, if the dates were true, the famous dream she claimed to have dreamed it in.

Noah double-clicked the March 29 entry. The raw tracks loaded into the vintage editing interface, displaying two audio lanes across the screen: one acoustic guitar, one lead vocal. My guitar. My voice, recorded through a worn condenser microphone in the demo room that had once been a closet, tracked during hours when only the night security guard was in the building.

The file properties panel opened in the lower corner of the monitor. Created March 29, three years ago. Modified: never. Author account: MREED. The same login I had seen once before, on a screen in Studio B, two days before that drive was wiped.

Noah tapped the side of the casing. "Creation dates inside their own system, on their own servers, weeks before Scarlett ever heard the song. This is the bottom of the ladder Elena wanted. They can't call your notebooks forged when their own machines agree with them."

He inserted a portable storage drive into the front port and initialized a local copy of the folder. On the screen, the progress bar moved steadily across the window, transferring the multitrack files and their metadata packet.

Then the file names in the left pane flickered.

A line in the directory queue turned grey. Beside it, the date stamp vanished. A second file disappeared, then a third, wiping out file headers in descending chronological order. A system alert window snapped to the center of the glass: PURGE IN PROGRESS — 214 FILES QUEUED.

"Someone is in the console remotely," Noah said, his fingers hammering the keyboard shortcuts. "They flagged the card at the door or noticed the volume mount. It's wiping backward through the directory. It'll reach March in under a minute."

"Can you cancel the script?" I asked.

"I can do one thing." Noah dropped flat onto the concrete floor behind the rack, reaching into the heavy cable bundles clustered along the baseboard. "Hold the door and tell Elena—"

I turned and pulled my phone from my jacket. I dialed Elena's private mobile number. She answered on the second ring, her voice clear and alert. "Elena," I said into the receiver. "We are in the sub-basement archive. Someone initiated a remote wipe. Noah is cutting the lines right now."

"Stay with the hardware," Elena said. "Do not leave the room until I arrive."

Behind the server rack, Noah gripped the primary power cables and the blue Ethernet line in both fists. With a single sharp pull, he yanked the plugs from the wall distribution block.

The cooling fans whined and wound down to nothing. The terminal screen cut out, the purge window freezing at the final number rendered before the power failed: 61 percent. Noah stood up from the floor, his shirt streaked with grey floor dust. In his hands he held the internal archive drive, freed from its mounting bracket — warm to the touch, carrying whatever data survived the interrupted wipe.

The police arrived eleven minutes after the alarm company called Dylan. Elena Ruiz walked through the lobby doors three minutes after the patrol officers, wearing a wool overcoat over an embroidered nightgown, holding a stiff legal binder under her arm.

Dylan Cross was already standing by the security turnstiles, gesturing toward Noah and me as two officers took down our names. "That is company property," Dylan told the patrol sergeant, his voice sharp and carrying across the marble lobby. "Those two broke in to steal it."

"The drive belongs to Sterling," I said, stepping between Noah and the officers before Dylan could speak again. "The voice recorded on it belongs to me."

Elena stepped forward, unhurried, positioning herself directly between the patrol sergeant and the hard drive in Noah's hands. She unclasped her binder, pulled a stamped document from the front sleeve, and presented it to the officers.

"Before anyone touches that drive, look at this filing," Elena said, her tone level and crisp. "This is a preservation filing, lodged this afternoon. It covers the metadata of every demo file on that hardware. That hard drive is now evidence in the federal copyright action I am filing for Miss Reed. If it changes hands, or changes at all, before a judge sees it, someone is going to have a much worse night than the one they're having now."

Dylan stared at the filing stamp on the front sheet, his mouth pressed into a thin, colorless line. Behind him, the lobby clock ticked past midnight, with the metal drive sitting wrapped in Noah's jacket, its remaining contents unverified and frozen at sixty-one percent.