Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Vallis Reach ·
The Green Eye of the Terminal
A decommissioned phosphor terminal blinks green once a night since the refit, and the blink file shows it logged as reading.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Petra Kone, signals engineer"
I signed for the re-fit myself, and I signed the rack out with it. Twelve bays of decommissioned signal gear, strip-tagged, declared dead on the inventory, cleared for scrap. Eleven went downriver on the Tuesday boat in April. The twelfth stayed.
It is a phosphor terminal from the old arrival room, green glass in a chrome bezel, a scrape along its shoulder where somebody dragged it in a hurry in some year before I was licensed. The cable is cut. The cut end is taped and tied back to the frame, and the socket behind it is dead. I have metered the socket myself, twice, and again after a second engineer metered it, and again after that.
Eleven days after the re-fit I went on nights. At 03:00 I looked up because the room changed, a small change, like a draught that has not decided where to go, and bay seven blinked green. One pulse, the length of a heartbeat. The glass was flat black, then a line of green across the middle, then flat black. Then it was nothing. I stood in front of it with the meter still reading zero, and I wrote in the night book that bay seven had given a phosphor event, source unknown, and that I would monitor.
I have monitored every night since. I have missed none.
The minute is not fixed. It is always inside the Thin Hour. Nine or ten nights it holds 03:00 exactly, then it moves — 03:24, 03:16, once 03:31, which came hard and bright at the far end of the hour, like something that had been waiting in the dark for its turn. The pulse never doubles. Never twice. Once, and the glass is dead again until the next night, and between blinks the phosphor is so flat that my own reflection will not live in it.
The logger in the next cabinet polls the bay on the half-minute. That is how the blink logs. The rig knows six status values: idle, fault, test, out, dead, and reading. Reading is the value for equipment that is taking something in. On the night of the blink, bay seven's poll line returns reading, and at no other time, and the vendor manual does not use that word for a bay with no feed, no return and no power.
I queried the vendor. A man with grey hands came and ran bay seven for an afternoon and left calling the rig healthy. At the door he asked me a question, and not in the way men usually ask things. He asked what the equipment was reading.
I said I would tell him when I knew.
Since then I have kept bay seven against its neighbours, same teardown, same boats, same decade of manufacture. Only seven blinks. Only seven logs as reading. Two colleagues have stood the Thin Hour through with me now and signed the night book after me, so the account is no longer mine alone; the foreman says that makes it corroborated, and files it in the green cupboard instead of the grey.
Last night the pulse carried a character with it. One character, the shape of a Y in no alphabet the manual lists, held for exactly the length of the blink and gone with the blink. I checked the old arrival-room boards from memory and then from photograph: that shape is the shape the boards used to hold for a vessel that did not arrive.
Tonight I will watch again from the doorway of bay six, which has never blinked, and I have decided not to learn what the reading is until someone wearing a better coat than mine tells me bay seven has to go on a boat.