The Quiet Algorithm of Us

3 Moving Into the Fortress

A text arrived. Not a name. No greeting. A photo of the koi pond, evening leaning across it, a single ripple sketching a ring.

She typed back nothing. She saved it. She did not permit the smile. The corners of her mouth were anarchists; they tried anyway.

Half an hour later, the door opened again without squeak and men entered carrying boxes labeled CARBON FILTERS and BULK SESAME and PANTRY DO NOT STACK because camouflage is a collaboration between truth and humor. Two of the men wore the standard black of staff. One wore a tie that apologized for its own existence. Chen. His hair was the tidy kind sad mothers hope for. He performed invisibility with the panache of a supporting actor who knows how to steal a scene but chooses not to.

"Placement instructions?" Chen asked, eyes directed at a respectful bit of wall, voice at that careful volume designed to not offend silence. He looked both grateful and offended by the abundant labels.

Miran pointed, moving them as if she were assembling a concert: racks here, the tower there, monitors along the long desk in a generous curve, cables in the left closet, the fan that never had a childhood under the desk on the nonjudgmental side. "And the machines with no branding," she said. "Unbox with a cloth."

A cough from behind her. Wen, the engineer, appeared although she had not seen him enter. He was the sort of man who could hide behind a fern and be believed. Gray sweater, gray gaze, little paper shoe covers taking their job seriously. He nodded once at the racks as one nods at alpacas. "We'll pull a dedicated line from the north junction," he said to the room, or possibly to his sock. "No network overlay. No cloud. Local power conditioning, battery backup with six minutes runtime."

"Ten," she said.

"Eight," he negotiated back like a man negotiating a sandwich at a bus stop.

"Ten," said another voice from the corridor. Ren Jinchao. He leaned against the doorframe with Lazy Underworld King energy and a tie he'd unknotted like a man who remembered his throat. "We afford ten."

Wen saluted with his shoe cover and disappeared into a closet where cables go to breed.

Jinchao did not enter the room. He observed the threshold like an altar rail. His consideration moved around the space, testing edges, adjusting weights. He looked at Chen's apologetic tie and a ghost of amusement lived in his eyes and then paid rent and stayed. "Labels?" he asked Miran, nodding at the tape and labeler.

"Obviously," she said. "I refuse to live in an unlabeled world."

He tipped his head, something like respect and something like compulsion. "We'll let you work," he said. "If you need anything, text."

"What number," she asked, just to make him say it.

"You have it," he said, meaning the number with no name, which meant a channel with a password made of silence. And he was gone, his steps leaving no lint.

Installation is a choreography. It's also relationship therapy if you pay attention. The men worked in murmur. Boxes became hardware. Hardware became animals if you gave them enough power and encouraged them to purr. The fan was sullen and then learned its purpose. The racks looked stern until populated. Six identical monitors lined the desk like sextuplets who wanted different degrees. The cable runs braided themselves, corrected themselves, tucked their hair behind ears. Miran labeled like a benevolent deity.

HDMI, obviously the diva
Ethernet, you saint
USB that forgets its manners
Power: be nice
Fan: never stop

Chen hid screws in a jar with the reverence of a monk. Wen adjusted the panel and said to nobody, "Dead zone persists." He tapped a tablet. The "storage" blinked alive on the schematic the way a secret blinks when it's agreed to be patient.