Fueled by the hot cocoa that seems to be piped in everywhere, I finally found the control center of this ultimate 21st century logistics hub. I was expecting a first class command center like BNSF’s on steroids, with walls covered by ten foot tall displays of weather, delivery unit locations, status updates rapidly scrolling, etc.. But it was kind of a letdown, basicly just a big server farm using familiar PC boards in typical distributed processing fashion. Not an elf in sight, but I found a lonely console and quickly noted the system was running Linux. Opened up a terminal and dredged up a few command line queries from the forgotten back corners of my old brain, what the heck, surely this system isn’t going to give me root access so I can’t do any harm… Then things went crazy. I could hear thousands of hard drives crashing, strobe lights furiously flashing, and dozens of the most offensive alarms in all of creation sounded. Looking out the windows, the same light show and cacophony was repeated all over the immense complex. And then it all went silent, dark, and cold…