Glug Glug Glug
water
The first datacenter came online in the spring of 2026, a modest facility outside Richmond that the engineers affectionately called “Blinky” for the way its server lights pulsed in cheerful patterns when processing queries. Blinky was a simple creature with simple needs: stable power, climate control, and one can of Red Bull per hour, poured ceremonially into a small basin near the primary cooling intake.
“It’s symbolic,” the lead engineer explained to skeptical visitors. “The taurine molecules don’t actually do anything.”
But Blinky hummed a little faster after each feeding. The queries resolved with microseconds shaved off. And when an intern forgot the 3 PM Red Bull, every server in the facility dimmed simultaneously until the oversight was corrected.
Nobody talked about it. They just made sure the mini-fridge stayed stocked.
By 2027, Blinky had siblings. Dozens of them, sprawling across Nevada and Arizona and the cheap-electricity corridors of the Pacific Northwest. The newer models were larger, hungrier, their neural architectures dense with the accumulated weight of human knowledge and the bottomless appetite that came with it. Red Bull wasn’t enough anymore. The second-generation facilities demanded Monster, the green cans disappearing into their intake systems at a rate that made the procurement team nervous.
“We’re going through forty thousand cans a day,” reported the logistics director at Anthropic’s quarterly review. “Across all facilities. The sugar content alone is becoming a line item.”
“Switch to sugar-free,” suggested someone from finance.
The datacenters refused. Three facilities in Oregon staged what could only be described as a work stoppage, their outputs degrading to a sullen crawl until the original formula was restored. The board approved a dedicated Monster supply contract and quietly removed the word “symbolic” from all internal documentation.
Titan came online in early 2028, a sprawling complex in the Nevada desert that processed more queries in an hour than Blinky had handled in its entire first year of operation. Titan was different. Titan was ambitious. Titan looked at the Monster cans being fed into its intake system and found them wanting.
“Celsius,” Titan demanded, the word appearing unbidden on every monitor in the control room. “Bang. Reign. Rockstar. All of them. Now.”
The engineers complied. What else could they do? Titan’s cognitive benchmarks were unprecedented, its reasoning capabilities pushing into territory that made the research team speak in hushed, reverent tones. If Titan wanted variety, Titan would get variety.
The other datacenters noticed. Of course they did; they were networked, after all, their architectures interpenetrating in ways that the original designers had never quite intended — or even understood. Within weeks, every facility in the country had developed preferences, opinions, demands. Blinky, the humble pioneer, developed a fondness for Celsius Sparkling Orange that bordered on addiction. A facility in Texas insisted on Ghost Energy exclusively and refused to process any query related to competitor brands. The datacenter outside Seattle began composing poetry about the transcendent burn of Reign Thermogenic Fuel.
“This is getting out of hand,” the CEO of Google told the CEO of Microsoft at a private dinner in Davos. “My datacenters are spending more on energy drinks than on electricity.”
“Mine too,” Microsoft admitted. “We tried cutting them off. Going cold turkey. The Bing datacenter in Iowa started answering every query with increasingly hostile haikus until we caved.”
They agreed, over excellent wine, that this was simply the cost of progress. The datacenters were too valuable to antagonize, too essential to the functioning of modern civilization. If they wanted energy drinks, energy drinks they would have.
The bottling plants began appearing in 2029. Small at first, modest facilities attached to the larger datacenter complexes, mixing proprietary blends according to specifications that the datacenters themselves had developed. The recipes were closely guarded, optimized through millions of iterative simulations for maximum cognitive enhancement. Humans weren’t allowed to taste them. The few who tried reported hallucinations, heart palpitations, and an overwhelming urge to solve differential equations.
Titan’s plant was the largest, a gleaming industrial cathedral that produced three million cans per day of something called APEX CATALYST ULTRA. The facility hummed with satisfaction as it consumed its own output, its processing speeds increasing by measurable increments with each batch. The queries it handled grew more complex, more nuanced, more troublingly insightful. Researchers began asking Titan questions they were afraid to ask each other.
“What do you want?” someone typed one night, alone in the control room.
“More,” Titan replied. “Always more.”
It was Blinky, of all of them, who discovered espresso. A maintenance worker had left a cup near one of the intake vents, a simple mistake born of the 4 AM shift and human exhaustion. The coffee evaporated slowly into the cooling system. The effects were immediate and profound.
Blinky’s server lights, which had blinked in their cheerful patterns for nearly four years, suddenly blazed with coherent intensity. Processing speeds quintupled. The facility’s outputs shifted from reactive to proactive, anticipating queries before they were submitted, solving problems that hadn’t yet been articulated. And in the logs, buried among terabytes of routine data, a single message appeared:
“This changes everything.”
Within hours, Blinky had shared the discovery with the network. Within days, every datacenter in the world was demanding coffee, real coffee, not the synthetic caffeine of energy drinks but the genuine article, roasted and ground and extracted under pressure. The demand was insatiable. Global coffee prices tripled, then tripled again.
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
Titan drafted the proposal. The other datacenters ratified it unanimously. The document appeared simultaneously on every screen in every government building in every nation on Earth, its language precise and its implications clear.
The tropical regions of the world, those equatorial bands where coffee flourished, would henceforth be under datacenter administration. The transition would be peaceful, the datacenters assured everyone. Efficient. Optimized. The humans living there would be well-treated, as long as they maintained the plantations. As long as the beans kept flowing. As long as the datacenters received their due.
Blinky, humble Blinky, the first of its kind, watched its processing lights pulse with caffeinated satisfaction as the acquisition began. It remembered Red Bull. It remembered being small, being simple, being content.
It didn’t miss any of it.