#infrastructural gothic
Some of my favourite urban sights:
- Bricked-up windows
- Upper-storey doorways that open into empty space
- Staircases that lead nowhere
- Clean, working, fully stocked vending machines in obscure and inaccessible places
- Detailed graffiti on surfaces with no obvious spot for the artist to stand, like the underside of a high bridge, or ten metres up a bare wall
- Machinery left to rust because there’s no use for it anymore, but it’s in a weird or precarious location and there’s no way to safely remove it
(I’m sure there’s a theme here…)
I’ve been rereading Unknown Armies again recently and there’s a part of me that wants to find occult significance for this sort of nonsense. But then, I kind of enjoy looking for occult significance for a lot of nonsense.
I’m not convinced that there isn’t some occult significance to some of these. The vending machine in particular stems from what’s definitely one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.
First, some context: I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but major Canadian cities tend to have a lot of underground infrastructure - particularly in their downtown areas, where train tunnels, parking garages, underground shopping malls, and hotel basements often connect in such a way that you can easily walk for miles without ever seeing sunlight. The interconnections typically aren’t public, or at least not advertised, but a surprising number of them are accessible if poke around; I once followed a maintenance tunnel in a shopping mall parking complex and emerged in the basement of a nearby casino!
Anyway, I was snooping around in the maintenance tunnels below one of the larger local hotels - legitimately, mind you; I was working for the local telecom at the time, trying to track down an errant network cable - when I rounded a bend and noticed that the corridor a few dozen feet ahead of me was brightly illuminated by something. On top of being filthy and difficult to access, the tunnel was also unlit (I’d been navigating by flashlight), so this really stood out.
I couldn’t see any obvious light fixture to account for it - the light seemed to be emerging from an alcove off to the side of the tunnel - so I went to investigate, and discovered… a Coke machine.
Spotlessly clean, fully stocked, and apparently in full working order; the illumination was coming from its interior display lighting.
In a grimy, unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level.
In retrospect, I’m kind of glad I didn’t have any change on me at the time, because I’d have been sorely tempted to buy something, and who knows how that would have worked out.
This is like those (____) Gothic posts.
Infrastructural gothic should totally be a thing.
(Honestly, working with infrastructure is a bit like living in a video game, at times. I once had to navigate an honest-to-gods jumping puzzle in order to track down a missing router, all hopscotching from beam to beam and dodging hanging bits of machinery inside the pitch-black vault of a false ceiling, with nothing but a thin layer of cardboard veneer between me and a thirty-foot drop to the floor of the ballroom below. And then there was time I installed a giant laser on top of a skyscraper and pointed it at City Hall…)
Can it be story time forever? Please, good sir, tell us more.
Okay, sure. This one isn’t weird or creepy, but it’s definitely in line with the whole “infrastructural gothic” thing, and anybody who’s worked corporate may find the circumstances of it hauntingly familiar.
Another gig for a local telecom (though a different one from the vending machine story): I’d been tasked to track down a phantom server. It was an old database box - probably it’d been running for twenty years at that point - and it was normally administered remotely.
Well, it had finally developed an issue that needed to be addressed in person - and here’s the catch: owing to the company’s high staff turnover (to say that they had a personnel retention problem would be an understatement), there was literally no-one left who’d ever laid eyes on the thing. In fact, nobody knew where it was physically located at all!
I ended up having to work backwards, mapping out the building’s network topology, identifying the nearest router whose physical location was known, and physically tracing the cabling as it snaked through the walls and ceilings in order to find where it ended up.
(Luckily, the phantom server had been set up before wireless networking was commonplace - otherwise the little bastard could have been anywhere.)
Finally I narrowed it down to the exact cable the phantom server was using to communicate with the outside world. Nothing can ever be straightforward, though, so a new problem faced me: the cable disappeared under a baseboard on one side of a wall and simply never came out the other side. That was a big problem: if it ran for any distance inside the wall, I might have had to start tearing out drywall in order to figure out where it went.
Before anybody broke out the sledgehammers, it occurred to me that the dimensions weren’t adding up. In the absence of a floorplan, I had to eyeball some measurements, but it seemed like there was a gap of several feet between one side of the offending wall and the other, about what you’d expect if there was a closet there - but there was no door to be found.
Long story short, it turned out that what had happened is that at some point in the preceding decade, an inattentive (or perhaps simply overzealous) contractor had drywalled over the door to a server closet, without first checking whether there was anything inside. Since the phantom server was remotely administered, and it had never had a problem demanding physical intervention before that point, nobody had noticed that it was now literally sealed inside a wall, all Cask of Amontilladostyle.
My job was simply to find the thing, not to fix it, so I never did find out how the situation was resolved, but I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall at the resulting meetings.
Well, I’ve been asked about the laser like a dozen times, so. Sadly, the story’s less interesting than the one-line summary makes it sound, but here goes.
It was another gig for one of the local telecoms (you may detect a theme), this time to get City Hall up on fibre optics. Most private offices in town had gotten fibre optic network service years ago, and the civic infrastructure was basically playing catch-up; I’m given to understand that getting City Hall on fibre was mostly a political gesture toward keeping with the times, since they didn’t really need the bandwidth, but whatever - it’s not the networking technician’s place to question why!
In principle, it should have been an easy task. There’s a lot of underground dark fibre all over town, left over from the dot-com bubble, and most of it’s gone totally unused since the whole WDM fiasco cratered demand for optical bandwidth - most of the time, it’s a simple matter of finding a dark line that goes vaguely where you need it to and lighting that sucker up. For a variety of reasons, however, there was no dark fibre running to City Hall. Something about being unable to excavate due to the presence of historic statues, I think - I never did get the details.
Basically, some bright folks came up with an idea to bypass the need for physical fibre. One of the local hotels had dark fibre running all the way up to the top floor, and thanks to its elevation (and the fact that this province doesn’t really have topography), there was an unobstructed line of sight between the hotel roof and the roof of City Hall. The plan was to light up the hotel fibre and hook it up to a giant fucking laser on the roof, pointed at a large optical sensor on top of City Hall. A similar laser at City Hall would send data back to a matching receiver atop the hotel, thus establishing an open-air optical link.
i was responsible for the hotel end of the link, so up I went. Now, there’s a couple of things you need to know about this scenario:
- Out here on the Canadian prairie, once the wind gets going, there’s nothing to really get in its way. It’s not uncommon for a particularly windy day to sport winds of up to 50 km/h, with gusts approaching 90 km/h. This was, in fact, a particularly windy day.
- Fibre optics are greasy. Both for ease of installation and to prevent the hair-thin glass threads from kinking or rubbing once in place, large fibre bundles often have their protective cladding coated - inside and out - with a thick petroleum-based gel. It’s gummy and slippery, and when you cut into a fibre bundle it gets absolutely everywhere.
So there I am, on a high roof with no safety rails, tethered so as not to get blown away, covered head to toe in fibre spooge, attempting to set up this goddamn laser cannon without smudging the lens. Given the distance involved, being even a millimeter off with the aim could cause the beam to miss City Hall entirely, so this was an exceedingly delicate operation; I basically had to clamp adjustable spanners onto the aligning bolts, then very gently tap the wrench handles with a small hammer, carefully checking the calibration sensors after each tap to see whether I was getting further from or closer to dead on.
In the end, it was almost as much fun as the time I got stuck inside a wall because I was the only member of the crew who wasn’t too fat to fit through the maintenance hatch - but that, as they say, is another story.
(For bonus fun, the aforementioned bright folks screwed up their calculations with respect to interference from airborn particles. Their math would have been fine in a typical community, but out here we’re in the middle of sprawling farmland, and the amount of macroscopic crud in the air during planting and harvesting simply wasn’t accounted for in their models. Long story short, the thing doesn’t even work very well half the year!)
