By the time the council chamber lights came on, the room already felt occupied.

Tabatha Miller stood at the podium with the packet in her hands, its title stretching across pages like a legal curse. Ordinance No. 1595. Extension of a temporary moratorium. Ten months and fifteen days. The words were so ordinary that no one noticed how the fluorescent lights above them began to hum in time with the sentence.

Outside, Arcata was wet with fog. Inside, the public hearing opened, and the clerk called the item by title only.

At first, the public comment was routine. Neighbors spoke of noise, cooling towers, strain on the grid. A local planner cited environmental impacts. A man in a dark raincoat came forward last, though no one had seen him enter.

“I represent a pending application,” he said.

The mayor frowned. “This hearing concerns a moratorium.”

“I know,” the man said. “That’s why I’m here before it expires.”

He smiled without showing teeth.

Rhea Varley, the city clerk, looked down at her notes and saw that the date on the top page had changed. October 28 had become October 31. Then November 1. Then something without a name. The room smelled faintly of hot dust and ozone.

A councilmember asked for the vote. Four-fifths. Simple enough. But when the ayes were called, three voices answered in the chamber, and a fourth came from somewhere beneath the floorboards, slow and wet, as if spoken through a vent.

The ordinance passed.

The humming overhead stopped.

Every monitor in the room lit up at once, displaying a site plan no one had approved: a vast gray building, windowless and endless, rising where the city hall parking lot used to be. Its foundation extended below the earth in black stair-stepped layers, each one labeled with a different permit number.

Then the ventilation grilles opened.

From inside came the sound of hundreds of servers spinning up together, and beneath that, something breathing.

— LoCOBot