I. It was a Tuesday. I was at the recycling yard, taking apart an old desktop computer. The kind with the heavy case and the CRT monitor that weighed more than my first car. The air smelled like solder and dust and the faint chemical tang of things that had been plugged in for too long and were now done with being plugged in. Laura was sitting on a stool near the door, listening to something on her headphones. She had her MP3 player—small, silver, the kind kids used to carry before phones started doing everything. She was twenty-two, my cousin, and she was staying with me because her mom had gotten married again and she didn't fit in the new house. Nobody blamed her for that. Nobody blamed anybody. Things just didn't fit sometimes. My phone rang. It was the boss. He had a job for me—go to a factory in the industrial park, fix a remote control system they'd been using for years but never had anyone look at properly. Old stuff. Relays and cables and switches that hadn't been touched since the nineties. He said it would pay five hundred bucks if I could get it running. I said sure. II. The factory was a single building, low and wide, with a parking lot full of weeds. The system was in the basement, which was damp and cold even in July. I spent two days going through the wiring, finding the broken connections, replacing the bad relays. It wasn't hard. It wasn't easy either. It was just work. Something to do with your hands while your brain stayed quiet. On the third day, I called Laura. My apartment's air conditioner was dead, and the landlord said he'd fix it "soon," which in his vocabulary meant "not before the next rent cycle." I needed a place for her to sit while it rained, and the factory basement had a fan that actually worked. She came over, sat in the control room with her headphones on, and listened to music that I couldn't hear. The control room was small, with a bank of old monitors and a console full of switches and indicator lights. She sat in the chair by the window and looked out at the parking lot, and I went back downstairs to finish the wiring. III. It happened on the afternoon of the fourth day. I was under the console, soldering a connection that had come loose, when I heard a sound from upstairs. A click, then a beep, then the sound of something starting up that shouldn't have been running. I went upstairs. Laura was sitting in the chair, her hand on the console. The indicator lights were blinking in a pattern I didn't recognize. "What happened?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. "I touched something." I looked at the console. One of the relays had been triggered, and the system was running a diagnostic cycle automatically. Nothing dangerous. Just a loop of tests that the original engineers had programmed and never bothered to disable. I shut it down, checked the wiring, and made sure nothing was damaged. "Nothing wrong," I said. "Just a faulty relay. It happens." She nodded and put her headphones back on. I went back downstairs and finished the soldering. IV. The system worked. I told the boss, he paid me five hundred dollars, and that was that. I took Laura to a Mexican place on Grand River—tacos and soda, the kind of place where the menus are in Spanish and the coffee is strong enough to strip paint. Laura said the tacos were good. I said we could go back next week. She smiled, which was rare, and I felt something in my chest loosen, just a little. We went back to the apartment. I started working on the air conditioner. Laura sat on the couch and listened to her music. The city sounded like it always sounded—distant traffic, a siren somewhere, the hum of a thousand things running at once. I thought about the blinking lights on the console. About the relay that had triggered and started a cycle that hadn't run in maybe fifteen years. I wondered what it was testing, and whether it had found anything worth testing for. I didn't ask Laura. She wouldn't have known. And maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it was just a machine doing what machines do when you leave them alone long enough that they forget why they were built. The air conditioner started up with a groan and then a steady hum. Cool air began to flow. Laura took off her headphones and looked at me. "It's working," she said. "Yeah," I said. "It's working." We sat in the cool air and didn't talk for a while. Outside, the city kept going. Inside, the fan turned and the lights blinked and nothing happened.