Half Buried

The slope dips in the middle, and the hum is louder here, though it is still not loud. It comes from a rack of servers half buried in caliche, their fans long dead. A cable runs from the rack to a solar panel tied to a mesquite. On top of the rack a small speaker plays a bright synth line, over and over. Dead phones lie thick on every side. An old keyboard case sits beside the rack, lid up.

The air above the rack begins to shimmer. The shimmer takes the shape of a person, nearly. It has no face.

It speaks in three voices at once. A man's voice says how to set the timing on a tide pump. A woman's comes in over his with how to splice a fiber line. A younger one, under both, says what the water table under Austin did in 1998. None of them waits for the others. Then the voices stop, and the shape stays.