A Hostile Taxonomy of Pigeons

I put down my lukewarm mug of tea, the floral scent of bergamot doing nothing to soothe me, and walked over to the humming racks of servers. The pecking was louder here, a frantic, almost desperate rhythm. I pressed my ear against the cool metal of the server rack closest to the vent. It wasn't just pecking; there was a faint cooing sound, too. I frowned. We were on the nineteenth floor. A pigeon, maybe? A very determined, very stupid pigeon.

Then the lights went out. The steady, reassuring hum of the servers died, replaced by the high-pitched whine of the uninterruptible power supplies kicking in. The emergency lights flickered on, casting the room in a sickly red glow. My mobile buzzed in my pocket. A company-wide text alert: 'SECURITY BREACH. REMAIN AT YOUR DESKS. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS.'

My heart hammered against my ribs. I tried the server room door. Locked. The electronic lock was dead. I was trapped. The pecking at the vent stopped. It was replaced by a new sound: the grating squeal of metal being pried open.

"Jorge? Can you hear me?" I spoke into my phone, my voice tight. Jorge was our lead IT tech, a man whose intimate knowledge of our network infrastructure was matched only by his crippling ornithophobia.

"Morag? Thank god. What's happening? The whole network just went dark. And I think... I think I heard a fluttery noise in the ceiling tiles," his voice was a panicked whisper.

"Stay calm, Jorge. Someone's cut the power. They're coming in through the server room vent." I watched in horror as the vent cover, secured by four heavy-duty bolts, began to buckle outwards. "It sounds like... birds."

There was a choked sob from Jorge's end of the line. "No. Not them. Not the sky-rats. Not the feathered menaces."

"Get a grip, man!" I snapped, my own fear making me sharp. "This is a raid. They're after the data. But why..." The vent cover popped off and clattered to the floor. A pigeon landed silently on the edge of the opening. It wasn't a normal city pigeon. This one was sleek, dark grey, and had a small, custom-fitted leather harness on its back, complete with a tiny, blinking LED.

Strapped to the harness was a USB stick.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I breathed. The pigeon tilted its head, its beady eye fixing on the primary server rack. It cooed, a soft, questioning sound. And from the vent, another pigeon emerged, and another, and another. They were an organised, feathered infiltration team.

Analogue Bandwidth

"They're going analogue!" I whispered into the phone, crouched behind a rack of backup drives. The room was now filled with about two dozen of the creatures. They moved with an eerie purpose, hopping from server to server, ignoring me completely. "They're bypassing our firewalls by physically removing the data. It's... it's brilliant. And ridiculous."

"Why pigeons?" Jorge wailed. "Why not squirrels? Or highly-trained ferrets? I'm fine with ferrets!"

"They can fly, Jorge. Nineteenth floor, remember? It's the perfect exfiltration method. No digital signature. No trace." A pigeon near me found an open USB port on a server blade. It deftly nudged the attached drive into the slot with its beak. The LED on the harness blinked rapidly as data transferred.

"What can we do? The door is mag-locked from the outside. I can't override it without power," he said.

I scanned the room. The UPS units were whining, their batteries draining fast. We had maybe twenty minutes before the servers shut down completely and the data was lost to us anyway. The pigeons were working fast. One of them, its drive presumably full, hopped back to the vent and disappeared into the shaft.

"Hygenia," I said suddenly. "Where is Hygenia?"

"Security? She's probably locked down in the lobby. Her post is next to the big decorative fountain-" He stopped.

"The fountain with the scale model of the building?" I asked, an idea sparking in my mind.

"Yeah, the one the CEO loves... oh god, Morag, what are you thinking?"

"Hygenia!" I yelled into the phone. "Can you patch me through to Hygenia's radio?"

There was a crackle, and then Hygenia's calm, measured voice came on the line. "Morag? What's your status? We have an unauthorised flock in the building."

"Hygenia, listen to me very carefully," I said, watching another pigeon make off with a gigabyte of our quarterly earnings reports. "Do you still have that industrial-sized bag of birdseed in the security office? The one for your 'civic beautification project'?"

"Of course," she said. "The one the pigeons in the park are particularly fond of?"

"I need you to get that bag," I said, a mad grin spreading across my face. "And I need you to go to the roof."