The hall cameras record continuously to a server that stamps every frame. Every night at ten past two the stamps jump by one minute. No frames. And the first frame after the jump, for one frame, is not our hall. It is the hall as it was before the refit, the old racks, the old consoles, the lights on, and a man at a console with his back to the camera, and then the next frame is ours again.
I am the physical security engineer at a data centre and the camera server is my evidence, and every night it shows me a room that is not there.
The cameras.
Forty in the hall, recording continuously, every frame stamped to the millisecond and written to a server that keeps ninety days. If a camera drops a frame I know about it. If forty drop the same frame I get a page.
At ten past two every night, forty cameras lose one minute.
The gap.
The stamps go from ten past two and zero seconds to eleven minutes past and zero seconds, with nothing between. The server logs no write for that minute. The cameras log no capture. It is as if the minute did not happen, on forty cameras, in a hall that is running.
And the first frame after the gap, on every camera, is wrong.
The frame.
One frame. Forty views of the hall. But not our hall. The old one. I have the refit drawings and I have the old photographs and it is the hall before 2014: the old racks, grey not black, the old overhead cable trays, the consoles at the end of each row that were taken out when we went to remote management, the lights on full, which they never are now, and at the console at the end of row D, a man. Sitting. His back to the camera on that row. In a shirt. One hand on a keyboard and the other holding a mug.
On the other thirty nine cameras he is in the same frame, from their angles, and from the ones that see his face, which is two, he is looking at the console screen with the expression of a man reading a log, and he is nobody I know.
The next frame is our hall. Dark, black racks, no consoles, nobody.
What has been checked.
The server, replaced. The frame is there.
The cameras, replaced, four of them, as a test. The new cameras lose the minute and show the frame.
Row D, at ten past two, by me, standing where the console was. The cameras went. I know because my radio, which is on the camera network, told me. And for the minute, in the dark, standing in a black aisle with the fans, I could smell coffee. And hear keys. Not loud. The particular sound of a mechanical keyboard from the era of the old consoles, which I know because I typed on them, a key at a time, somebody reading and typing, and then the radio came back and the keys stopped and the coffee smell went.
Who.
The refit was 2014. Before it, the hall had a night operator, whose job it was to sit at a console and read logs, because the monitoring was not what it is, and a person reading logs at two in the morning was how you caught things. The old hands named him. He had done it for years. He had been, they said, very good at it, the sort of man who saw a pattern in a log an hour before it became an outage, and who had been told, in the refit, that the monitoring would do that now, and that the console was going, and that his role was being changed to a daytime one, and who had not wanted that.
He had died before the refit was finished. In the hall, at his console, at night, reading. It was his heart. They found him in the morning with the log on the screen and the mug beside him.
He is reading the logs. One minute a night. In a hall that is gone. And in that minute, I have checked, our monitoring records no events. Nothing fails at ten past two. Nothing ever has.
What is done about it.
The missing minute is on the camera audit every night and the auditors have asked what happens in our hall at ten past two that we cannot show them, and I have shown them the frame, and they have looked at it for a while, and one of them asked who he was, and I told her, and she wrote, nothing, and moved on.
What I do.
I look after the cameras.
He read logs. So I send him one. At five past two I take the day's log from the monitoring, the real one, the thing the system produces that nobody reads because the system reads it, and I print it. On paper. And I put it on the floor at the end of row D, where the console was, face up, and I go and stand at the door.
At ten past two the cameras go. At eleven past they come back. And the frame, the one frame, has changed. The man is at the console, and on the desk beside him, in the frame, under the mug, is a sheaf of paper, and in the two frames that show his face he is not looking at the screen, he is looking at the paper, and he has a pen.
And in the morning the printout on the floor of row D has marks on it. Pencil, not pen, but marks, small ticks in the margin, and on two occasions a line underlined, and both times the line he underlined was a warning that the monitoring had logged and suppressed as noise, and both times, when I looked into it, it was not noise, and I fixed it before it became anything, and I have put in the change record, as the source of the alert, night operator, row D, and the change board has not queried it, because the change board never reads the source field either.