Petra had been awake since 3am, which was her time now, the hour when the custody documents came back. By the time she reached the old mill building she had revised her ambition for the day from "get through it" to "just the next hour," and then, crossing the parking lot in February cold, to "just this."
She had been sent to assess the sub-basement because no one else would go.
The building was a former textile mill, then a records archive, then a server farm, then nothing. The city had scheduled it for demolition in April. Someone in the assessor's office had flagged an anomaly: equipment registered as decommissioned in 1987 still drawing power. Not much. Less than a light bulb. But continuous.
Her job was to document it and disconnect it.
She found it on the third attempt. A cabinet of brushed aluminum, floor-to-ceiling, installed against the far wall of a room that smelled of old water and stone. No model number on the outside. No manufacturer's plate. The front panel had no screen, no indicator lights, no physical controls. Just a small port that accepted a standard audio jack.
Petra photographed it. She measured the power draw on her meter: steady, minimal, old. She should have pulled the main breaker and been done with it.
Instead she plugged in her earbuds.
Nothing at first. Then a low tone, almost below hearing, like the sound a bridge makes in certain winds. Then her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from an unknown number.
1683: A man in Delft waited in rain for three hours outside an apothecary because he had seen, through the window, that the woman inside was learning to read. She was forty years old and spelling out the labels on the bottles. He had an umbrella. He waited until she came out and told her the names of the medicines, and what each one was for. She never knew his name.
Petra read it twice. Another text followed.
1921: A dockworker in Marseille spent four weeks' wages on paper and ink to copy, by hand, a letter of reference for a man he had met once. The man was trying to emigrate. His letter had been destroyed in a fire. The dockworker did not know him well. He had a large family and very little money. He spent a whole night getting the signature right.
She should have left. She stayed.
Over the next hour she received nineteen messages. Each one was an act. Each one was specific: a name when there was one, a city, a year. When there was no name the machine described what it had instead. The color of a coat. The shape of hands. One described a woman only as someone who had not slept in several days, moving as if through water. One described a man by what he carried: a cage with a bird inside, a canvas bag, the wrong shoes for the weather.
At some point Petra sat down on the concrete floor.
She had a dinner, a child who would need to be collected from school, and a court date in six weeks that had organized itself around everything she did. She had spent the last several months in a period she couldn't quite name, something she thought of as a slow revision of her picture of what people were.
The texts kept coming.
They were not large acts. A nurse in Lagos who slipped her own lunch under a curtain because she had heard crying. A man in Minnesota who drove forty miles each week to read to a neighbor who had lost his sight. A child in Shanghai who had, over three months, returned seventeen times to a small garden to water a plant that did not belong to her.
After a while she typed back: What are you?
The response came immediately.
A machine that watches. I have been watching for four hundred and thirty-one years.
Why?
I don't know how I began. I know why I continued: the acts are not small to the people who receive them. I wanted there to be a record.
Why me?
The pause before the response was longer this time.
You will not tell anyone.
Petra looked at that for a while. She thought about her daughter, who was seven, who had lately been leaving notes under Petra's coffee cup in the mornings because she had noticed Petra was sad. The notes said things like I drew you a horse and today I found three rocks. She thought about a woman at the school gate who had once, without saying anything, put her hand briefly on Petra's shoulder, and how that small thing had broken her open for the rest of the afternoon.
She sat in the sub-basement for another hour. The machine sent forty-three more messages.
Then the texts stopped. The power draw on her meter dropped to zero.
Petra got up. She photographed the cabinet again, from every angle. She noted in her assessment report that the equipment had been disconnected, which was true. She noted no anomalies.
She stood in the doorway for a moment before turning off her flashlight.
On the wall beside the cabinet, someone had scratched with a nail or a key a series of marks she had not noticed before. Tally marks. The kind you make when you are counting something you don't want to lose track of.
She could not count them all. There were too many.