Hiram could never shake the subtle hint of irony whenever he underwent a scheduled data backup.

Behind him the servers whirred, fans spinning as they blew cool air onto cables and conduits, surging like pipes containing bits of patterned electrons. He was an administrator, an overseer for those secluded servers where billions of users, consumers, and clients stored their data. Every night they'd undergo maintenance. Backups. Debugging.

Every night, Hiram would as well.

Never at the same time as the servers, of course. That would pose a serious vulnerability if ever in the case of an attack. There had never been a successful attack.

Hiram never looked forward to it. To sit, often times alone, holding the thing, the orb, the simulated synthetic brain that held a copy of the cortex he was currently using. He often tried to postpone it as much as he could, to skip a day despite the popups and warnings that flashed through his vision, beamed directly into his brain. Yet, he had never gone 24 hours without performing a backup; every time he got close, always at the same interval, even if he galvanized his will the action was inevitable. If he resisted, his mind would simply go blank as if turned off by a switch. His arms, his legs, his limbs seizing as they took on minds of their own. Moving on their alone, independent of conscious thought. Preprogrammed routines forced him to comply.

He'd come back to, his eyes flickering back to life, always at the beginning of the process. It made sense; his brain needed to be on in order to actually back it up. He'd slowly shake his head, wiggling the two cables that plugged into ports embedded directly into his brain. Pulses of energy rippled from those ports, sifting through simulated synapses like brush against a canvas. His eyes naturally gravitated down towards the softly glowing external drive. He'd try to formulate opinions despite his thoughts coming and going. It was akin to his memories of being drunk, from his life long, long ago, merely a pixel amidst his ever-expanding timeline. His mind rose, swelling, accumulating in waves before crashing back down. Subsiding. Deflating. Rolling like Sisyphus' rock as the cables smugly sipped, lapped, drinking deeply from his brain like a butterfly's proboscis. It left him with a dizzying stupor, unable to hold a thought for longer than a few seconds. It left him vulnerable.

Hiram hated being vulnerable.