BISMARCK, ND — Instant ramen scalded the lap of startled Jason Orlando, 37, as the voice of a frustrated customer filled his headset. “Umm, hello?! I’ve been on hold for like an hour and a half — is anyone even there?! — my stupid microwave won’t stop beeping,” groaned the exasperated woman, just before Orlando rerouted her call to the beginning of the automated response loop. “This is bad, really bad,” Orlando said pressing buttons and running diagnostics on the call center’s servers.  “Something must be seriously wrong with the mainframe — Last time someone broke through “the loop” was in 2003, and the entire Northeast lost power for half a day. I’ve managed to contain this incident, but it’s only going to get worse. We have to seal the rift,” Orlando said in a serious yet terrified manner.

The elevator door opened to a decimated subbasement level: The lights were hanging from their fixtures, sparks showering from openings in the ceiling, cubicles overturned, and in the distance a faint and ominous glow. Only in his second year as a night-time call center manager, Orlando is the first to admit he’s a novice when it comes to dealing with digital dilemmas of this magnitude: “we’re trained to deal with problems like this, but I never thought this would be real. I didn’t think I’d be the one to seal the rift, but I need to keep my oath.”

As Orlando approached the rift, a great howling gale of light, memes, office furniture, and discarded files, it began to crackle and pop with energy as if it knew he was there to end its existence. “It’s just as a feared, there’s no time to get help. I’ll have to deal with this right now, or it could take out the entire internet as we know it…Tell my family I won’t be home for dinner tonight,” Orlando said, as a single tear rolled down his cheek. Wielding the mighty USB stick of Mcafee Orlando jumped into the rift, and in a flash both vanished. At press time, a man resembling Orlando, with no recollection of his personal identity, had been spotted, just outside of the nearby town of  Menoken.