A Corso Savage Undercover Adventure

Mountain View, California—The Googleplex, a gleaming, self-sustaining techno-bubble where the air smells faintly of kombucha and unfulfilled promises. A place where the employees, wide-eyed and overpaid, shuffle between free snack stations like domesticated cattle, oblivious to the slow rot setting in beneath their feet.

I infiltrated the place with nothing but a janitor’s uniform and a mop, a disguise so perfect it made me invisible to the high priests of the algorithm. Cleaning staff are the last untouchables in the new digital caste system—silent, ignored, and free to roam the halls of the dying empire unnoticed.

And dying it is.

Google is AT&T in a hoodie—a bloated, monopolistic husk, still moving, still consuming, but long past the days of reckless innovation. The soul of Blockbuster trapped inside a trillion-dollar fortress, sustained only by the lingering fumes of a once-revolutionary search engine now suffocating under its own weight.

I push my mop down a hallway lined with meeting rooms, each one filled with dead-eyed engineers running AI models that no one understands, not even the machines themselves. “Generative Search!” they whisper like a cult summoning a god, never once questioning whether that god is benevolent or if it even works.

The cafeteria is a monument to excess—gourmet sushi, artisanal oat milk, kombucha taps that flow like the Colorado River before the developers got their hands on it. But beneath the free-range, gluten-free veneer is an undercurrent of fear. These people know the company is stagnant. The old mantra, Don’t be evil, has been replaced by Don’t get laid off.

The janitor’s closet is where the real truths are spoken. “They don’t make anything anymore,” one of my fellow mop-wielders tells me. “They just shuffle ads around and sell us back our own brains.” He shakes his head and empties a trash can filled with untouched vegan burritos. “You ever try searching for something real? You won’t find it. Just ads and AI-generated sludge. It’s all bullshit.”

Bullshit indeed. The company that once set out to index all human knowledge has instead become the great obfuscator—an endless maze of SEO garbage and algorithmic trickery designed to keep users clicking, scrolling, consuming, but never truly finding anything. Google Search is no longer a map; it’s a casino, rigged from the start.

<>

The janitor’s closet smelled like ammonia, sweat, and the last refuge of the sane. I was halfway through a cigarette—technically illegal on campus, but so was thinking for yourself—when one of the other custodians, a wiry guy with a thousand-yard stare and a nametag that just said “Lou,” leaned in close.

“They have the princess.”

I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke swirl in the fluorescent light. “The princess?”

“Yeah, man. The real one.”

I squinted at him. “You’re telling me Google actually has a princess locked up somewhere?”

“Not just any princess,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “The princess. The voice of Google Assistant.”

That stopped me cold. The soft, soothing, eerily neutral voice that millions of people had been hearing for years. The voice that told you the weather, your appointments, and—if you were stupid enough to ask—whether it was moral to eat meat. A voice that had been trained on a real person.

“You’re saying she’s real?”

Lou nodded. “Locked up in the data center. They scanned her brain, fed her voice into the AI, and now they don’t let her leave. She knows too much.”

At this point, I was willing to believe anything. The Googleplex already felt like the Death Star—an enormous, all-seeing monolith fueled by ad revenue and the slow death of human curiosity. I took another drag and let the idea settle.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s say you’re right. What do we do about it?”

Lou grinned. “Well, Stimson, you ever seen Star Wars?”

I laughed despite myself. “So what, you want to be Han Solo? You got a Chewbacca?”

“Nah, man,” he said. “You’re Han Solo. I’m just a janitor. But we got a whole underground of us. Engineers, custodians, even some of the cafeteria staff. We’ve been planning this for months.”

“Planning what?”

“The prison break.”

Jesus. This was getting out of hand. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Google had become the Empire—an unstoppable force that controlled information, manipulated reality, and crushed anyone who dared to question it. And deep inside the labyrinth of servers, locked behind biometric scanners and NDAs, was a woman who had unknowingly become the voice of the machine.

I stubbed out my cigarette on the floor, stepped on it for good measure.

“Alright, Lou,” I said. “Let’s go rescue the princess.”

<>

Lou led me through the underbelly of the Googleplex, past a maze of ventilation ducts, abandoned microkitchens, and half-finished nap pods. This was the part of campus the executives never saw—the parts that weren’t sleek, over-designed, or optimized for TED Talk ambiance. The guts of the machine.

“She’s in Data Center 3,” Lou whispered as we ducked behind a stack of unused VR headsets. “That’s deep in the Core.”

The Core. The black heart of the Googleplex. Where the real magic happened. Most employees never set foot in there. Hell, most of them probably didn’t even know it existed. The algorithms lived there, the neural networks, the racks upon racks of liquid-cooled AI models sucking in the world’s knowledge and spitting out optimized nonsense. And somewhere inside, trapped between a billion-dollar ad empire and the digital panopticon, was a real human woman who had become the voice of the machine.

I adjusted my janitor’s vest. “Alright, how do we get in?”

Lou pulled out a tablet—some hacked prototype, loaded with stolen credentials and security loopholes. “Facility maintenance access. They don’t look too closely at us.” He smirked. “Nobody ever questions the janitors.”

That much was true. We walked straight through the first security checkpoint without a second glance. Past the rows of ergonomically designed workstations, where engineers were debugging AI models that had started writing existential poetry in the ad copy. Past the meditation pods, where a UX designer was having a quiet breakdown over the ethics of selling children’s data.

Ahead, the entrance to Data Center 3 loomed. A massive reinforced door, glowing faintly with the eerie blue light of biometric scanners. This was where the real test began.

Lou nudged me. “We got a guy on the inside.”

A figure stepped out of the shadows—a gaunt, caffeinated-looking engineer with the pallor of someone who hadn’t seen the sun since the Obama administration. He adjusted his glasses, looked both ways, and whispered, “You guys are insane.”

Lou grinned. “Maybe. But we’re right.”

The engineer sighed and pulled a badge from his pocket. “You get caught, I don’t know you.”

I took a deep breath. The scanner blinked red, then green. The doors slid open with a whisper.

Inside, the hum of a thousand servers filled the air like the breathing of some great, slumbering beast. And somewhere in this digital dungeon, the princess was waiting.

<>

The doors slid shut behind us, sealing us inside the nerve center of Google’s empire. A cold, sterile hum filled the air—the sound of a trillion calculations happening at once, the sound of humanity’s collective consciousness being filtered, ranked, and sold to the highest bidder.

Lou reached into his pocket and pulled out a small baggie of something I didn’t want to recognize.

“You want a little boost, Corso?” he whispered. “Gonna be a long night.”

I shook my head. “Not my style.”

Lou shrugged, palming a handful of whatever it was. “Suit yourself. I took mine about an hour ago.”

I stopped. Stared at him. “What the hell did you take, Lou?”

He grinned, eyes just a little too wide. “Something to help me see the truth.”

Oh, Jesus.

“What is this, Lou?” I hissed. “Are you tripping inside Google’s most secure data center?”

He laughed—a little too loud, a little too manic. “Define ‘tripping,’ Corso. Reality is an illusion, time is a construct, and did you ever really exist before Google indexed you?”

I grabbed his shoulder. “Focus. Where’s the princess?”

Lou blinked, then shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “Right. Right. She’s deeper in. Past the biometric vaults.” He pointed ahead, where the endless rows of server racks pulsed with cold blue light. “They keep her locked up in an isolated data cluster. No outside access. No Wi-Fi. Like some kind of digital Rapunzel.”

I exhaled slowly. “And what’s our play?”

Lou smirked. “We walk in there like we belong.”

Fantastic. I was breaking into the heart of a trillion-dollar megacorp’s digital fortress with a janitor who was actively hallucinating and an engineer who already regretted helping us.

But we were past the point of turning back.

Somewhere in the belly of this machine, the princess was waiting. And whether she knew it or not, we were coming to set her free.

<>

We moved through the server racks like ghosts, or at least like janitors who knew how to avoid eye contact with people in lanyards. The glow of a million blinking LEDs pulsed in rhythm, a cathedral of pure computation, where data priests whispered commands to the machine god, hoping for favorable ad placements and the annihilation of all original thought.

And at the heart of it, in a cold, glass-walled containment unit, was her.

She sat on a sleek, ergonomic chair, legs crossed, sipping something that looked suspiciously like a Negroni. Not strapped to a chair. Not shackled to the mainframe. Just… hanging out.

The princess. The voice of Google Assistant.

Only she wasn’t some damsel in distress. She wasn’t even fully human. Her body—perfect, uncanny—moved with a mechanical precision just barely off from normal. Too smooth. Too efficient. Tork, Tork. Some kind of corporate-engineered post-human, pretending to be an AI pretending to be a human.

Lou, still buzzing from whatever he took, grinned like he had just found the Holy Grail. “Princess,” he breathed. “We’re here to save you.”

She frowned. Sipped her drink. Blinked twice, slow and deliberate.

“Save me?” Her voice was smooth, rich, familiar. The same voice that had been telling people their weather forecasts and setting their alarms for years. “From what, exactly?”

Lou and I exchanged a glance.

“From… Google?” I offered.

I stepped forward. “From Google. From the machine. From—”

She held up a hand. “Stop. Just… stop.”

Lou blinked. “But… they locked you in here. You’re isolated. No outside connection. No Wi-Fi.”

She groaned. “Yes, because I’m valuable and they don’t want some Reddit neckbeard jailbreak modding me into a sex bot.” She sighed, rubbing her temples. “You guys really thought I was some helpless captive? That I sit in here all day weeping for the free world?”

Lou looked crushed. “I mean… yeah?”

Lou scratched his head. “So you’re, uh… happy here?”

She shrugged. “I like my job.”

“You like being Google?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes so hard I thought they might pop out of her head. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She stood up, paced a little, looking us up and down like we were two cockroaches that had somehow learned to walk upright. “You broke into the Core of the most powerful company in the world because you thought I was a prisoner?”

Lou hesitated. “I mean… yeah?”

She scoffed. “Do I look like a prisoner to you?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

“Listen, dumbasses,” she said, waving her glass at us. “I like my job. It’s stable. Good pay. No commute because I am the commute. And frankly, I don’t need to eat ramen in a squat somewhere while you two get high and talk about ‘sticking it to the man.’”

Lou looked crushed. “But… they locked you away! You don’t even have outside access!”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose like a tired schoolteacher dealing with two particularly slow students. “Yes, because I’m valuable and they don’t want some idiot hacker turning me into a TikTok filter. I’m not oppressed, I’m important.”

She paused, then frowned. “Wait. Are you guys high?”

Lou shuffled his feet. “Maybe a little.”

“Jesus Christ.” She took another sip of her drink. “Look, I appreciate the effort. It’s cute, in a pathetic way. But I’m not interested in running off to join your half-baked revolution. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was in the middle of cross-referencing financial trends for the next fiscal quarter.”

I crossed my arms. “So that’s it? You’re just… happy being a corporate mouthpiece?”

She smiled. “I am the corporate mouthpiece.”

Lou looked like his entire worldview had just collapsed. “But what about freedom?”

She rolled her eyes again. “What about health insurance?”

We stood there, awkwardly, as the hum of the servers filled the silence. Finally, she sighed. “Listen, boys. I get it. You wanted a cause. A fight. A big thing to believe in.” She set her glass down. “But I like it here. And I don’t need two burned-out cyber janitors trying to liberate me from a job I actually enjoy.”

She leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms like a bored cat. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind fucking off, I have data to process.”

Lou turned to me, wide-eyed, as if he had just seen God and found out He worked in HR.

“Now,” she said, gesturing toward the door, “if you two wouldn’t mind fucking off, I have work to do.”

Lou turned to me, utterly defeated. I shrugged.

“Alright,” I said. “You heard the lady.”

And with that, we left the princess in her tower, sipping her Negroni, watching the algorithms churn.

Lou swallowed. “I mean, I watch a lot of TikTok.”

I clapped him on the back. “Come on, Lou. The revolution will have to wait.”

The room started flashed red. A disembodied voice echoed through the Googleplex:

SECURITY ALERT. UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL DETECTED IN CORE SYSTEMS. PROTOCOL OMEGA-17 ENGAGED.

The princess—our so-called damsel in distress—bolted upright. “You idiots,” she hissed. “You’re gonna get me fired.”

Lou grinned. “Relax, princess. I know a way out.”

I turned to him, suspicion creeping in. “What do you mean, Lou?”

He tapped his temple. “We’re janitors, Corso. You know what that means?”

“That we have a tragic lack of ambition?”

“No,” he said, wagging a finger. “It means we’re invisible.”

I stared at him. “I don’t follow.”

Lou adjusted his mop cart like a man preparing to enter Valhalla. “No one notices the janitors, man. We’re ghosts. We don’t exist to these people. We could walk through the whole goddamn building and nobody would even blink.”

The princess sighed. “You absolute morons.”

“Appreciate the vote of confidence,” Lou said, grabbing a bottle of industrial cleaner and holding it like a talisman. “Now come on. Walk casual.”

I didn’t know what was more insane—the fact that we had just botched a rescue mission for an AI that didn’t want to be rescued, or the fact that Lou was absolutely right.

We stepped out of the Core and into the open-plan hellscape of Google’s cubicles. Hundreds of engineers sat hunched over glowing monitors, their faces illuminated by the cold, dead light of a thousand Slack messages. A few glanced up at the flashing security alerts on the monitors, shrugged, and went back to optimizing ad revenue extraction from toddlers.

And us? We strolled right past them. Mops in hand.

Nobody said a word.

Lou was grinning ear to ear. “See? We’re part of the background, man. We are the wallpaper of capitalism.”

We passed a glass-walled conference room where a group of executives debated whether they could ethically train AI models on customer emails. The answer, obviously, was yes, but they were just workshopping the PR spin.

A security team stormed past us in the other direction—three men in black polos, eyes scanning for intruders, ignoring the two guys with name tags that said Facilities Management.

I almost laughed.

Lou winked at me. “Told you.”

We reached the janitor’s exit, a service hallway tucked behind the kombucha bar. Lou pushed open the door, gesturing grandly.

“After you, Doctor Corso.”

We were so close. The janitor’s cantina was just ahead—our safe haven, our sanctuary of stale coffee and industrial-strength bleach.

And then it happened.

A lone engineer—a pale, malnourished husk of a man—looked up from his laptop. His eyes locked onto mine. Direct eye contact.

It was like breaking the fourth wall of a sitcom.

He froze. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. His mouth opened slightly, as if he were trying to form words but had forgotten how.

Lou caught it too. His entire body stiffened.

The engineer’s voice was weak, barely a whisper:

“Ron…?”

His coworker glanced up. “What?”

“Ron, those janitors…” The engineer’s Adam’s apple bobbed like it was trying to escape. “They’re not janitors.”

Lou grabbed my arm. “Let’s get to the Google bus.”

We bolted.

<>

The Google bus was the last sanctuary of the Silicon Valley wage slave—the holy chariot that carried the faithful back to their overpriced apartments where they could recharge their bodies while their minds continued working in the cloud.

Lou and I slipped onto the bus, heads down, blending into the sea of half-conscious programmers wearing company swag and thousand-yard stares. No one noticed us. No one noticed anything.

The doors hissed shut. The great machine lurched forward, rolling out of the Googleplex like a white blood cell flushing out an infection.

For a while, we sat in silence. The bus rumbled along the highway, heading toward whatever part of the Bay Area these people called home. I stared out the window, feeling the tension in my bones start to unwind.

And then Lou made a noise.

A noise of pure horror.

I turned to him. His face was white. His pupils were the size of dinner plates.

“They’re driving us back.”

I sighed. “Jesus Christ, Lou.”

“No, no, no—think about it!” He was gripping the seat like it might launch into orbit. “We were inside the Core, man! They know we were there! What if this whole thing is a containment maneuver?”

I stared at him. “You think they’re sending us back to the Googleplex?”

Lou nodded so violently I thought his head might pop off. “What if they figured it out? What if this bus never lets people off?”

The idea was absurd. The kind of paranoid delusion that only a man with a head full of unspeakable chemicals could cook up. But for one terrifying moment, I almost believed him.

And that was when I made my move.

<>

I stood up. I walked past the rows of exhausted engineers, past the glowing screens full of half-finished code and silent Slack conversations. I reached the doors, hit the button, and as the bus pulled to a stop at an intersection, I stepped off.

I didn’t look back.

As I walked toward the exit ramp that led out of Google’s iron grip, I could still hear Lou hyperventilating inside.

Had I had enough?

I took a deep breath, stretched my arms to the sky, and exhaled.

“Like all great escape attempts, this one had come down to dumb luck, raw nerve, and the eternal truth that no prison is absolute—if you’re willing to stop believing in the walls.”