The Watch Room
The room at the top of the stairs, above the Works. Colder up here — the concrete gives way to glass on three sides. A watchtower, though what it watches is not a landscape but a network. The glass panels are not windows. They are dashboards, floor to ceiling, showing scrolling text in amber and red. Port scans. Firewall logs. Service states. Authentication attempts. The data flows continuously, but the room is quiet — the only sound is a faint ticking, like a clock counting something other than time.