Nuclear Power Plant Control Room

Why are you raising such a fuss? I’ll come and shut down your reactor with my ass alone.

― Serhii Plokhy

Darius Ketch had worked power facilities for fifteen years, but nothing prepared him for the Meridian Station assignment. The control room stretched before him like a cathedral of blinking lights and humming machinery, each gauge and display a sentinel watching over the contained fury below.

The night supervisor, Gareth, spoke in clipped sentences during the handover. “Reactor Two’s been running hot,” he muttered, avoiding eye contact. “Nothing critical, but watch the neutron flux readings. Sometimes they… fluctuate.” He paused at the door. “And Ketch? Don’t touch the auxiliary panel. The one with the unmarked switches. Management’s orders.”

Three hours into his shift, Darius noticed the pattern. Every seventeen minutes, the background radiation detector clicked twice in rapid succession, then fell silent. The cooling system’s rhythm changed subtly, as if something vast was breathing in the depths below. When he checked the facility schematics, he found chambers that shouldn’t exist, spaces between spaces that the blueprints insisted were solid concrete.

At 3:47 AM, the auxiliary panel began glowing with symbols that weren’t in any manual he’d studied. The reactor’s core temperature held steady, but something else was warming up---something that registered on instruments that hadn’t existed when his shift began. Darius realized he wasn’t monitoring a power plant anymore. He was tending to something far older, something that had been waiting beneath the uranium and steel for someone to finally notice it was awake.

The last entry in his logbook read simply: “The atoms remember everything. They’re singing about what they’ve seen.”