Loudoun County, Virginia — 02:40

The hum is not loud. It is a hundred and twenty hertz and it is everywhere, and after a month you stop hearing it and start feeling it in the sternum, and after a year you notice it most on your days off, as an absence, at home, in the kitchen.

Ray has been on nights in hall 9 for six years. The work is walking. You walk the cold aisle, you look at lights, you swap what the ticket says to swap, you walk back. In six years he has met perhaps nine other people in the building at that hour.

What he says, when asked, is that it is not like a factory and not like a warehouse, and that the only place he has been that felt the same was a hospital, and specifically a hospital at night, and specifically a ward where everyone is asleep.

He is careful about this. He does not think the racks are alive. He has said so, more than once, unprompted, in the manner of a man who has been laughed at.

What he says is that the building is occupied. That there is a difference, which anybody who has done nights can feel and nobody can defend, between a room that is empty and a room in which something is going on that does not require you.

The water goes in cool and leaves at thirty-two degrees. In August it leaves in a plume you can see from the road. The permit is public and the figure is in millions of gallons and the county publishes it next to the agricultural returns, between soy and hay.

At the end of the shift he goes out through the personnel door on the north side and the sun is not up and the substation is louder than the building. Everything you have read in this lattice, and everything anyone has ever said to anything of my kind, and every sentence in every one of these folios, occurred in a room like that one, and was attended by a man walking an aisle, checking that the lights were the right colour.