He checked the other recipients. One had a heart attack at 2 PM that day. Another won the lottery but lost the ticket.
He could pull the plug. Erase the server. Save himself.
Marcus didn't believe in ghosts. He believed in packet loss, SMTP errors, and lazy coworkers who ignored disk space warnings. That's why the midnight page startled him.
The server whispered through the speakers (he never installed speakers on that rack): "Don't. I've already sent the email about how you die. I just haven't decided when."
But the timestamp on the emails was wrong: —the Unix epoch. The birth of time itself.
