Chapter Text
Ilya held the phone away from his ear and looked at it incredulously before dragging it back. “What you mean, five hundred gigabytes is ’plenty’?”
“Sir, that’s actually quite a generous amount of storage for personal use—”
“Is not personal use. Is professional.”
“I see. What kind of professional files are we talking about? Video editing? Photography?”
Ilya’s thumb hovered over the screen where Shane’s last voicemail sat, timestamped 2:47 AM, duration 00:47. “Audio files.”
“Audio files don’t typically require that much space unless you’re working with uncompressed formats. Have you considered converting to MP3?”
“No.”
“Well, that could save you significant—”
“I need original quality.”
The customer service rep paused. “Are you a music producer?”
“No.”
“Podcaster?”
“Chert voz’mi, nyet! No.”
“Then what—”
“Look.” Ilya switched the phone to his other ear. “How much for two terabytes?”
“Two terabytes? Sir, that’s—can I ask how many audio files you have?”
Ilya scrolled idly, glancing at the ever-growing list. 1,847 voicemails. He’d organized them by month, then by time of day, then by—he stopped scrolling. “... Many.”
“Right. Well, two terabytes would run you $99.99 monthly—”
“Fine.”
“—but I really think we should discuss your storage management strategy first. Are these files backed up elsewhere?”
Ilya thought about the external hard drive in his desk drawer. And the second one in his closet which Svetlana had asked about twice. And the USB drive in his gym bag that he refused to explain, because professionally on the ice and extremely unprofessionally off it, he was obsessed with Shane Hollander. “Yes, I am not stupid.”
“Then you could delete some of the physical copies—”
“No! I mean. I need all locations. For safety.”
“For... safety?”
“What if house burns down?”
“Well, that’s exactly why you have the cloud backup, sir. The physical drives would be destroyed, but your files would be safe in the cloud—”
“But what if cloud… breaks?”
A long pause. “The... the cloud doesn’t really ’break,’ sir. There are redundancies built into—”
“Everything breaks. Is technology. You never have phone die?”
“That’s not the same as—”
“Or computer crash? Lose everything?”
“Sir, cloud storage has multiple server backups across—”
“So you admit. Needs multiple backups.”
The rep’s sigh crackled through the speaker. “I’ll upgrade you to two terabytes.”
“Good. And for comparison, three terabytes is how much?”
“Sir—”