‘Hidden like a bunker in the low hills of west Arkansas ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats.’ They’ll tell you this isn’t the case, but it is. Much of what is said about the facility is speculation. For instance, it has been suggested that the hill masks a massive faraday cage, enclosing the hidden servers and protecting them from access and attack. It’s been said that a small army of private contractors guards ‘The Place,’ and it’s been said that only one man, very skilled and discreet, has access. Maybe both rumors are true, for it has also been said that ‘The Place’ is needlessly layered and it’s been said that the low hills of Arkansas don’t actually conceal ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats’ at all, but a complicated decoy. 

What has to be true, assuming such a place exists at all, is that the MSN chats are intact and that they are carefully archived, tied, as though with tacks and yarn, to those frivolous handles millennials donned in order to spill their secrets/desires/fears to each other and to men much older than them just before it felt like the world was going to end at 2000 and just after, when it didn’t. Why else would such a ‘Place’ exist if there weren’t important secrets, there? 

There is a scrap of footage taken from inside ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats.’ It sometimes makes the rounds and then disappears, as though by some silent but concerted effort. The footage shows a room of humming servers. It swings around to a human-sized statue of the MSN chat logo as it existed in 2001. The statue seems to pulse with internal light. A door slides open with a chime like an incoming message and then the footage ends, hardly 10 seconds in a darkened room. It is frustrating short and poorly filmed, but these aspects seem to lend it some credence. 

The closest a traveler might get to ‘The Place Where They Keep the MSN Chats’ is the foot of the hill. With an ear pressed to the dirt, one can hear the chiming of those doors, opening and closing as the army or the man patrols the secret hallways below. The sound of it leaves a listener wanting and hopeful, but the existence of ‘The Place’ is a danger to us all.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside