The Second Shift

What it looks like, and what it does

A vast shed with one lit bay. Pale figures in leather aprons moving in practised rhythm along a cold casting line. Crates at the loading door stencilled with addresses. Moulds that pour no metal.

Work from 22:00 to 06:00 in silence. Do not acknowledge visitors, but step aside for them.

What is known

The Harrow Works closed in 1982. Security staff noticed the lights on the second-shift roster for thirteen years before anyone thought to write it down.

Crates at the loading door at six each morning hold a single item: a left glove, a house key, a watch with the right inscription. Recipients, traced by the stencilled addresses, say it is the exact thing they lost. Sometimes it is the thing they had not yet lost.

What it can do

• Fabricate exact replacements for lost or soon-to-be-lost objects
• Deliver them to the addressee without leaving the shed

Where it stops

• Cannot make anything that has been deliberately thrown away
• Stop at once if a crate is addressed to someone present in the works

An encounter

Mahmood, finishing his rounds, found a crate with his own address on it. It held his late father's reading glasses, which he had lost the previous winter and told nobody about. He signed the sheet, because it seemed polite, and left the crate on the dock. In the morning it was gone.

Tariq Mahmood, night security, Loading bay 3, the Harrow Works, 05:50, a winter morning

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Thirty-nine crate addresses have been traced to living recipients, all of whom confirmed a loss.
• incomplete: Six recipients report receiving an item they had not yet lost. The losses followed within the month.
• rumor: That the empty crate is awaiting something that has not been lost yet.

Still unresolved

One crate, always in the corner, is stencilled with the address of the works itself. It is always empty.

Where it has been recorded

• The Harrow Works (confirmed) — Recorded by Tariq Mahmood, night security.

Stories about it

• Check Tomorrow's Pockets (Entity story, 4 min) — At a foundry that closed thirteen years ago a night shift keeps working in silence, and the crates at the loading door hold exactly what some household in the city is missing.

Connected entities

• The Itemised Receipt — Both settle accounts in households that never opened them. Nothing from either has ever been billed.