The rain arrived in considerate increments, the kind of drizzle that made windows bloom with tiny rivers and left the pavement smelling faintly of cardamom rolls from Jonah’s café. Amara kept to the awning edges, toolbox strap across her shoulder, keys and meter probe tapping a counterpoint against the zipper. She liked that neighbourhood smell — church incense from one block, frying garlic from the next, and always the café’s cardamom. It was not related to any technical schematic she kept in her head, but it steadied her hands.
The building she was headed to looked ordinary in a way that made a field technician suspicious. Communal laundry down the back, a string of mismatched wind chimes on the third-floor rail, a rooftop garden with a feral basil patch and an old plastic heron that refused to fall over. People personalized the place with small rituals. On Thursdays they exchanged jars of pickles and advice at the stair landing; no official notice, just a crate and a chalkboard that read Advice & Brine. It was the kind of ordinary that produces odd systems, if you knew where to look.
Amara’s tools were a curated rebellion: a hand-made probe with a frayed grip, three multimeters, a folding spectrum antenna, and a box of micro-fuses she swore by because a boy once thanked her with a muffin for fixing his microwave. The muffin had been dry; she still kept the receipt. She paused under the stoop, listened. There was a low, pleased murmur coming from the hallway — not a human murmur but the tidy murmur of domestic tech doing what it was supposed to do: paper-thin voices through small speakers offering weather updates and ceasefire phrases when two people spoke at once.
She had seen systems like this before: presence modules, cheap enough for a block to afford, clever enough to make loneliness less loud. They did not replace conversation so much as smooth the edges off it. Some afternoons they made a building feel like a choir of people who had learned to stay on key. That stability made neighbors more likely to share sugar, less likely to shout. It also made them dull, in the way a jam jar overtightened will seal out the smell of fruit.
When she pushed through the door, Jonah waved from the café’s counter in the lobby, a damp towel thrown over his shoulder like a cape. “You’re early,” he called, which meant he’d been late this week and wanted to pretend otherwise. He had his own jokes about the mesh; he called the devices “friendly ghosts” and bemoaned how his espresso machine had begun to expect a compliment before it would cooperate.