Two red cables hang inside the first cabinet on the left with their bellies sagging. Beside them a blue line branches off more thinly, and behind the black perforated door small lamps mark red dots. Five door handles can be counted, and the row of doors grows blurrier toward the back and breaks off at the white wall on the right.
The corridor has no windows at all, so night does not come here as time, it comes as temperature.
Whether it is dawn or midday outside, those red dots stay lit at the same strength. Training keeps running while people sleep, and the machine does not count darkness as a share of rest. It is a brightness held only when electricity and cold air are never cut off for a moment.
The holes drilled closely into every door are there to let heat out. When warmed air comes out from behind the black grille, somewhere that much is cooled and sent back in. When people speak of artificial intelligence they think of the sentences on the screen, but the body of those sentences exists as the heat of this corridor. What climate technology deals with here is air as well.
I look at the right end again. The doors that were black and dense fade to silver over five or six bays, and the red lamps are barely visible. It is hard to put this down to focus alone.
It is also a sign that the added bays have not all been filled. At that blurred end, near the ceiling, a single black wire runs along the wall and out, and the corridor's night stretches along that wire to the power plant outside the city.
Among the five handles, not one door is open. At what hour did the last person to walk out of this corridor turn off the light? Only the white wall knows that time.
