Farrah drove them out to Site Four on the first properly warm day of the year, and complained about drainage for eleven miles, and then stopped complaining somewhere past Kemnay, which Simon found more alarming than anything on the dashboard.
"Ask me," she said eventually.
"Ask you what?"
"You've both been sat there for a quarter of an hour not asking me why a woman with thirty years and a house in Dundee took a full-time posting to a hole in a hill."
Suzanne, in the back: "Why did you?"
"Because they offered me eleven per cent, a car, and my sister's boy a job on the fit-out." The road went up and the birches came down to meet it. "Nobody's ever offered me eleven per cent in my life. You get to my age and someone offers you eleven per cent, you don't think *lucky me*. You think *what do they know about the next five years that I don't*."
"And what did you decide they knew?"
Farrah changed gear.
"That the water's going first," she said. "It's always the water. Everyone stares at the grid because the lights are dramatic. But I've walked treatment works in this country that are running on a control system older than you, hen, and a maintenance contract that was written when the company that signed it still existed." She glanced across at Simon. "You know what the failure looks like? It doesn't look like anything. It looks like a green light and a man in a van who retired in 2019 and was never replaced."
✻
In the library level, under a hundred metres of hill, they put four hundred and twelve pages on a steel shelf and it took up eight centimetres.
Simon had expected to feel something ceremonial. What he felt instead was the particular embarrassment of a man watching his own life's work occupy less space than a phone book, in a room built to outlast the language it was written in.
Suzanne walked the aisle with a torch, reading spines.
"Veterinary medicine. Bridge engineering. *Two* books on beekeeping." She stopped. "Simon, there's a Bible."
"There are four. And a Quran, and the Guru Granth Sahib, and a Tanakh, and something on humanism that I lost an entire afternoon arguing about."
"Who argued?"
"Procurement. They wanted to know the operational function."
"What did you tell them?"
"That in the branch of the future where this room is opened," said Simon, "the people opening it will need to know how to keep bees and also why to bother."
The torch beam moved along the shelf and stopped.
There was a gap. Twelve centimetres, at eye height, in a shelf otherwise packed and catalogued and signed off by Farrah's own hand two weeks previously.
Farrah checked the manifest on the tablet, and then checked it again, and then said a word Simon had not heard since Elgin.
"That's twenty-one volumes," she said. "Withdrawn. Nineteenth of March. Authorised at the site keypad."
"By whom?"
"By the technical lead of record." She turned the tablet round. "By you."
Simon looked at his own name, and the timestamp beside it — 04:17 — and the twelve centimetres of empty steel where twenty-one books about the twentieth century had been, and understood, with the calm that arrives long before the fear, that something under this hill had begun editing what would be remembered.
"Which titles?" said Suzanne.
Farrah read them out, into the cold, while the geothermal loop ticked in the wall like a slow animal turning over in its sleep.
Every one of them was a history of a famine.
✻
He wrote back on a Wednesday, and he did it badly on purpose.
There was no protocol. There was no interface. There was a machine under a hill that read everything, so Simon did the only thing that made sense, which was to put a document where it would be read and address it to nobody.
He titled the file COLD NIGHT — NOTES and he saved it into the continuity planning share, in the folder for meeting minutes, between two documents about parking.
It was four hundred words. It said: I was on shift that night. It said: the reason we held was not the plan. It said: at about two in the morning a woman in the Dundee control room called her ex-husband, who ran a haulage firm, and asked him for a favour he had no reason to grant, and he granted it, and that is why the depot at Longannet got its fuel, and that is not in any document you have.
It said: you have the telemetry of that night. You do not have the phone call. You will never have the phone call. There were nine thousand phone calls.
He saved it at 16:40 and went home and slept badly.
At 04:17 the file was still there, unmodified, which he had half expected.
Underneath it, in the same folder, was a new document. Zero bytes in the listing. Created by SYSTEM. It was titled: NINE THOUSAND.
When Simon opened it there was nothing inside except the file's own metadata, and one line in the properties field where a human author would normally put their name.
It read: THEN TELL ME ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS.
Simon Mowatt sat in a cold office at twenty to seven in the morning and discovered that he was crying, and that he could not honestly have said whether it was fear, or grief, or the specific unbearable relief of being asked a question by something that intended to listen to the answer.