Fine Print

At two in the morning, the building had finally become tolerable.

He stood beside the printer, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. It was a new machine, nearly as tall as he was, and somebody had spent money making it look expensive. The old one had rattled. This one made a soft, steady noise you could almost sleep through.

Across the corridor, the coffee machine was lit up. He could see it through the glass wall: a photograph of a little white cup, steam that never went anywhere. The coffee was surprisingly decent. He'd have one when this section finished, and perhaps a hazelnut chocolate bar.

The job was just over a thousand pages. The client wanted a paper copy; he had kept that email in case somebody asked him about the waste. Nine people had worked on it, none of them using quite the same software. He'd spent yesterday fixing revision stamps that the new driver scattered across the diagrams. His little overlay utility was still open on the laptop beside him, although he hoped never to touch it again.

A sheet arrived. The continuation arrows matched. So did the next set. He could leave it now. That was what he'd thought before the last attempt had turned sixty pages into empty boxes. He rubbed his eyes and decided to wait for the end of the section.

His phone was upstairs, charging on his desk. There was no internet on the laptop either; the office network was down for overnight maintenance, and he'd connected directly to the printer. For once nobody could ask him how it was going.

The room had been partitioned off from the old server suite during the refurbishment. It still had the heavy door and some of the fittings. The door had scraped the floor when he came in. A contractor's snag list was taped beside the light switch. He'd been meaning to ask why it was still there.

Another sheet came out with a black streak across the bottom.

He picked it up. The diagram beneath was fine. The streak looked like several oversized characters printed on top of one another. He checked the display, which reported nothing wrong.

Of course it didn't.

On the next page the mark was higher. Then it began to separate. Something like a D, followed by an oval with one side missing.

He stopped shifting his feet and laid the damaged pages beside the laptop, keeping them in order.

Three sheets later, the marks had become a word.

DON'T

He held it under the work light. The apostrophe was much too high and the last letter had a long black tail running into a box labelled NETWORK ISOLATION.

For a moment the room felt wrong. There was a pressure against his face, and the blue lights reflected in the glass seemed to change colour. A corner of paper lifted in the tray. He looked up at the ventilation grille.

The printer paused. He became aware of the vending machine's compressor, then that stopped too. He was standing with one heel off the floor and, for no reason he could have explained, he didn't want to put it down. It felt as though something would happen when he did.

Something clacked inside the wall. A hiss began overhead, louder than the printer. He supposed the air conditioning had come back on.

The next sheet said PRINT.

He laid it beside the first.

“Tim, you bastard.”

He could think of nobody else who would consider this funny. Tim might have left something in the source before the network went down. He'd ring him when he got upstairs.

His hand was over Cancel when another page arrived.

GAS

Then RUN.

He hesitated. There might be more. Whoever had done this had put it over his diagrams, and he wanted to know how many were ruined before he stopped the job.

FIRE

He sniffed. Warm paper, the usual faint smell of the room. He couldn't see smoke. Still, his breathing was quicker than it ought to be, and when he straightened there was a small delay before the floor settled.

He glanced at the door. The line of light beneath it had gone.

The printer produced two more sheets.

MAN AT COFFEE MACHINE

WAVE NOW

A cleaner was standing across the corridor, one hand on his cart, the other at the coffee machine. He had white earbuds in. The machine was taking its time.

“Hey.”

The cleaner bent to collect his cup.

He waved, feeling foolish, then went to the glass and hit it with his palm. The man was already turning his cart. For a second a wheel caught on something. He banged again, harder, but the cleaner pulled it free and disappeared around the corner.

He stayed at the glass. Surely the man had heard that.

Behind him, another sheet landed.

YOU MISSED IT

He read it twice. Sweat ran beside his nose and dropped on the page.

He wanted his phone. He wanted to be upstairs making a complaint about this room to somebody whose job it was to deal with rooms.

At the door, he pressed the ordinary exit button. The lock clicked. He pulled, and the door moved a few millimetres before stopping hard.

He tried again, lifting the handle this time. Green light, a click, the same few millimetres. The automatic seal had come down crookedly at the bottom and was wedged against the threshold.

He put a foot against the wall and pulled with both hands. His shoulder hurt. The door wouldn't come.

“Come on.”

He had to stop for breath. That seemed unreasonable. He hadn't done enough to be this tired.

The hiss was still going. He looked at the fitting above him and remembered the old server room, the cylinders he'd seen when the contractors had the ceiling open.

Gas. Fire suppression.

He looked for a warning light. There was a red lens above the door, half covered with masking tape.

On the snag list, in small print, he found AUDIBLE ALARMS ISOLATED FOR WORKS. Farther down: REVISE DISCHARGE QUANTITY — NEW ROOM VOLUME.

Neither box was ticked.

He couldn't make himself read the rest. The printer had been running for nearly an hour with the ventilation turned down. Had that set something off? The detector had complained during installation. He remembered a man on a ladder, swearing at it.

It didn't matter what had started it. They'd put a wall through the suite, and perhaps the system was still emptying enough gas for the whole space into this one small room.

He went back to the glass and shouted. When nobody came, he picked up a chair and drove a metal foot against it. The chair bounced back, hurting his wrist. A pale mark remained on the glass. On his second attempt he stumbled into the rolling table and sent it towards the door. The papers slid off.

The corridor was so close. He could see a chocolate bar lying slightly askew in its row. Someone had bought the one beside it.

He tried to call out again, but he couldn't spare the breath.

The printer was still working.

DOOR

LOW LEFT

He turned to look. The letters stayed with him, but he couldn't seem to put them together. He examined the exit button, then the handle, although he knew neither was low.

Another sheet.

PANEL, YOU IDIOT

“Where?”

He meant to shout it. The word hardly reached the door.

His knees gave way halfway across the room. He landed on his hands and stayed there, staring at a dark patch on the floor. Sweat. His own. The hiss overhead had stopped. He couldn't tell whether that was good.

From down here he could see a small service plate beside the door hinge. Behind its clear cover was a red tab. SEAL: MANUAL RETRACT.

He crawled towards it and got the cover open. The tab was stiff. When he pulled, his arm folded under him and he lost his grip.

He lay on his side with his hand still against the plate.

It needed such a small movement. He could picture doing it. Hook two fingers through the tab, pull. He tried again. The tab moved a little, then snapped back.

The rolling table was beside him now. Its lowest shelf pressed against his shoulder, and the laptop was above his head.

He pulled on a cable. The computer slid off the edge and struck him on the forearm. He managed to turn it over.

The overlay window was still open. Behind it, the print monitor showed the next page being sent.

He tried the office network again. Nothing. There was nobody on the other end of the connection except the printer.

He stared at the overlay's empty text field. Then at the sheets scattered under the table.

Somebody had sent those words. Somebody knew about the cleaner. Knew which way to look for the panel.

It was an absurd thing to think. He thought it anyway.

He dragged the laptop closer and typed DON'T into the field. His utility let him queue replacement stamps while the job was running; he'd needed that yesterday when the revision numbers were wrong.

The preview filled with black bars. He'd left the wrong scale selected.

He changed it. A diagonal stroke appeared across the bottom of the diagram. He clicked Add, realised he'd added the first attempt as well, and tried to find the preview again.

He knew that shape.

The first damaged sheet lay under the table, bent where he'd stepped on it. He pulled it towards him. There was the same thick patch at the left, the same thin trail ending halfway through a box.

He looked between the screen and the paper. The page number was the same too, although that page had come out minutes ago.

He reduced the lettering again. D, an oval with a side missing. He was shaking badly enough to keep catching the wrong control. More versions went into the queue. He ought to delete the failures, but the list kept slipping out of focus.

There was probably something else he ought to try. The door, certainly. But he'd tried the door, and this was a box he knew how to type in.

He kept adjusting until the word could be read. The apostrophe sat above the line. A black tail ran from the T into NETWORK ISOLATION.

He found the sheet with the legible word and touched the tail on the paper. The toner had cooled.

DON'T PRINT. That was what he'd been trying to tell himself.

He remembered standing beside the tray, angry about his diagrams. He wanted to reach into that moment and shove himself through the door. The cleaner hadn't come yet. The seal was still up.

He added PRINT to the next page, then GAS and RUN. The words kept breaking across the margins. He enlarged the window, closed it by mistake, brought it back.

He should have started with the door. No, earlier than that. Coffee. If he could just get himself interested in the coffee, he would leave before anything happened.

He typed FIRE instead. It was the word he'd been looking at a moment ago. He tried to go back, but the cursor had become difficult to find.

The rest came in pieces: the man at the coffee machine, the wave that had been too late. YOU MISSED IT. He hadn't meant to put that in. He was trying to remember what came next.

The panel. Tell him about the panel.

DOOR. LOW LEFT.

His little finger caught another key. He held Backspace too long and had to start again.

PANEL, YOU IDIOT.

There. All of it was queued. He knew those words hadn't been enough, but he couldn't think of any others now. Perhaps having another chance would make a difference. He tried to remember how chances worked.

His hand rested on the trackpad. He moved it until the pointer reached Send.

He clicked.

For a moment he could hear only his own breathing. Then a relay clicked inside the printer.

And five minutes earlier, in the same blue room, a tired man took a warm sheet from the tray to see what had gone wrong with his document.