Odyssey Of A Cloud Fight

By Małgorzata Hernik

The night was thick as ink… and my only companion was a humming machine that had already betrayed me six times. Seventh day at its side now… sometimes sitting, sometimes lying next to it, wondering what exactly is wrong with me.

The keyboard that used to make everything glide—softly, cleanly… is it really not helping now?

I drum my short nails against the Lenovo’s shell. The sound is more like a horse’s hooves on asphalt than the drama of a loyal, shell-shocked detective from the thirties hunched in his office, peering at a black-and-white photo through an oversized loupe.

The air carried the tang of scorched circuits and singed wires… though I hadn’t burned a thing. Yet. Yet. If I stare hard enough at what’s on the screen… maybe I’ll sear a hole through it with my eyes. Very Superman. Kryptonian gaze. Only instead of red laser beams, my look ran on despair.

 Somewhere far off, across the ocean—probably New York—some man was sipping his coffee, unaware that on the other side of the Atlantic a certain familiar-stranger of a woman was losing her last nerve to a mutinous cloud on her laptop screen.

It isn’t about the cloud itself, of course… it’s about what it might do for me.

Fighting it day after day felt like Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants… or were they Oliphaunts? I don’t know. I’ve heard things.

 A server in the cloud… a cloud not for everyone—only for those who believe machines exist to be turned toward good ends.

My good end was simple: a project begun should have been finished ages ago. Something like sixty-seven hours back. But no. It didn’t want to finish… or even fasten shut.

And me—adrift in unfriendly weather—spinning my tale from beneath the black brew known simply as coffee.

I lit an imaginary cigarette. Relax, I don’t smoke—but in noir, you have to. ☁️🔥 The smoke curled like broken promises.

The machine blinked at me with cold, loveless eyes.

Those little lights could hypnotize… and I caught myself thinking I might be talking to them. Not to the laptop—it’s silent as the grave. Somewhere between year two and year three it stopped making any sound at all. I checked. Nothing. Quiet as a corpse already in the ground.

So yes, this is about the cloud. The cloud that helps… as if it didn’t want to.

 Crime scene—right in front of me. Evidence—on the screen. And the cloud… the cloud sat like a mafia boss in a high-backed chair, cigar smoldering, an ironic smile under half-closed lids… as if to say it couldn’t care less about my priorities or my contemplation. It only cared about what I had in the database. 

Period.

And there—limits, folks. Limits that—if I paid—might suddenly loosen. But with a single lonely pound left in the account… I won’t pay to lift them. You know how the mob is: they only want one thing—the numbers to add up. I can have projects, grit, bite, a plan that matters… and what then? Zilch. They don’t care.

Try arguing with a machine that ignores commands and yells in red type: limits. And: you must wait.

I wrote; it refused. I pleaded; it froze. This wasn’t work anymore. This was an investigation… the sort that starts with a junior clerk at a desk in some bureau and ends with a Director tugging every string in town. The sort you don’t cross.

If Homer penned epics… and Dante mapped Hell… I was writing The Survival Manual for an Extremely Stubborn Program—one gagged by limits and wheezing on a mute, mulish laptop 

Seventh circle of hell: “Error 404.”

And when it all felt buried for good, when I had no hope the thing would ever function again… I realized life is more than disobedient source code. That irony—and a laugh—sometimes do the heavy lifting.

Because honestly—who else fights shadows and servers at the same time, the kind whose limits can jam even the best project in a holding pattern… in the cloud?

Only me. A noir heroine whose coffee went cold long ago, and whose imaginary cigarette burned down to ash… in an ashtray I never actually set on the table.

By Małgorzata Hernik