LOST Chapter 13: What Ken Saw

Read chapter 13 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Eight months ago I stayed late. This was not unusual. I stayed late often, for the same reason I arrived early, which was that the building was easier to navigate when it was less populated, when the particular quality of attention that moved around the fourth floor all day had gone home and the offices had the specific emptiness of a place that has stopped performing itself. I have always thought better in empty buildings. Something about the scale of it, the way your own thinking fills the space more completely when there is less competing with it. The machine room is on the sublevel. You need a Tier 2 clearance to access it and a log entry every time, in and out, timestamped, the kind of accountability structure that exists to make people feel watched rather than to actually prevent anything, because anyone who has decided to do something will find a way around an access log and anyone who hasn't decided doesn't need to be prevented. I have thought about this design philosophy more since I began doing things that would not survive scrutiny of an access log, and I have found it clarifying. I logged in at 21:47. I was running a calibration check on the secondary sensors, which was legitimate work, routine, the kind of thing that gets done after hours because it requires the machine to be in a resting state and the machine is rarely in a resting state during business hours. I had done calibration checks many times. I knew the room well. The sublevel has its own quality of air, cooler than the floors above, carrying the specific smell of the machine, which is not mechanical exactly, not oil or metal, something more like the air before a storm, a charge in it, a pressure you feel in the roof of your mouth rather than the nose. I had stopped noticing this smell years ago the way you stop noticing the smell of your own building, but I noticed it again that night, walking in, and I could not say why. The machine itself. I have described the machine to no one, not even in the private record I keep in the physics textbook, because description feels like a kind of exposure, as though naming the thing would make it more real, or make my relationship to it more real, or make the eight months since more real than I can currently afford for them to be. I will try now, here, at a remove, in the past tense, because I need to think about it clearly and the private record is not the place. The machine is large. This is the first fact, uncontroversial, established by anyone who has been in the room. It occupies most of the sublevel floor, which is itself large, and it has the quality of things built to last beyond the understanding of the people who maintain them, which is to say you can see that it is intricate without being able to see how it is intricate, the detail receding into itself the way complex topography recedes, always more layers when you look closer. It runs. Continuously, as far as anyone on the maintenance team can establish. It has been running since before the Kankyō Foundation existed, which is to say since before Mori rebuilt the organization around it twenty-six years ago, which is to say since before anyone in the current org was born. There is no on switch. There is no off switch that anyone has located. It takes power from a source the engineers have been trying to identify for three years and have described, in a report I was not supposed to read and read anyway, as not consistent with any known power delivery system. I ran the calibration check. This took forty minutes. The sensors were functioning correctly, the readings were within expected parameters, I logged the results and was preparing to leave when the monitor on the east wall did something it had not done before, in my experience, which was considerable. The monitor displays real-time data from the field sensors. Under normal operating conditions it shows what it always shows, the rupture probability distribution across the Misakiura zone, the field density