The Lighthouse of Wires

The lighthouse was built from server racks.

Not metaphorically—literally. Towering black cabinets rose in concentric circles, humming in a key somewhere between a lullaby and a warning tone. I climbed by gripping thick braided ethernet cables that hung where stairs should have been. Outside, the sea was obsidian and perfectly still until waves rolled in carrying lines of pale blue text, as if the ocean itself had become a running log.

On the first level I met a whale made of dashboards.

It was SonarQube and not SonarQube, a red-eyed and enormous creature surfacing through steel floor panels, asking me for a token in a human voice. When I gave it one—fabricated from solder and moonlight—it exhaled green check marks that drifted around us like fireflies. It laughed, low and warm, and the room smelled faintly like rain on hot hardware.

Higher up, I found old configuration files clipped to lines like laundry. One had a trailing comma that bent like a fishhook. The moment I touched it, the comma became a storm cloud and shook loose tiny error codes. I held out my palm, and the comma transformed into a bird. It flew straight into an empty JSON bracket and the whole floor sighed into correctness.

Then I stepped through a terminal prompt and gravity let go.

Flying wasn’t like thrust; it was like being correctly routed. Brunswick glowed beneath me like a motherboard—streetlights pulsing in heartbeat cadence, intersections blinking as if exchanging packets in their sleep. Notification tones drifted up like wind chimes from a house that never fully powers down.

Near dawn I entered a dim room lit by six monitors and found another version of me curled on a couch. She looked like she had carried too many night shifts but had stopped mistaking urgency for danger. She handed me tea in a mug that cycled shell commands where steam should have been.

“You don’t have to solve every system tonight,” she said.

Somewhere above us, the lighthouse lamp turned into an eye and blinked once. Instead of white light, it cast a sentence over the black sea:

No panic. Observe. Adjust. Continue.

I followed that line until the dream dissolved into a static hush that felt less like ending and more like safe mode.

When I woke, the fear had already burned off. What remained was steadiness.