Tuesday 11 November, 05:47
Teodor Lunde let himself into the building at 05:47, as he had three mornings a week for eleven years. He liked it empty. He liked the hum of the machines and the smell of other people’s coffee gone cold, and the floor that took the polish if you did it properly, in long slow arcs, before anyone arrived to walk on it.
The operations room door stood ajar. That was the first wrong thing. Geir kept it shut. Always closed, Teodor. The machines don’t like dust. And the light inside was on.
The second wrong thing was the colour. Every screen in the room was red.
He stood in the doorway with the polishing machine’s cable looped over his arm. White words on red, the same words on every screen, and a little padlock with a cartoon smile, as if it had made a joke and was waiting for him to get it.
Beyond the desks was the glass wall of the server room. You could feel the cold on your face from two metres off, the cold Geir kept in there for the machines, and behind the glass the fans roared as they always did.
The third wrong thing was Geir.
He lay between the second and third rack, one arm folded under him, the other flung out towards the door as though he had been reaching for it. His coffee mug had broken on the floor and the coffee had dried to a brown tide-line around his head. His glasses lay a metre away. Unbroken. Folded, the arms tucked in, set down on the tiles the way a man sets them on a bedside table.
Teodor put his palm flat on the glass. It was cold as a car window in January.
He did not try the door. He had been a medic during his national service, a long time ago, and some old part of him knew from where he stood, from the colour of the hand that lay nearest the glass, that there was nothing left to do. He said Geir’s name twice anyway, low, as he might have said it to someone he would rather not wake. The fans answered. They went on blowing cold air over a dead man as though nothing in the room had changed, and for the machines, he supposed, nothing had.
He called 113. A calm voice asked him questions he could not answer. While he waited for the next one he looked back at the red screens and the cheerful little padlock, and he thought, with a clarity that would frighten him later:
They did this to him.