# The Chord

> Daniel Okafor, Skerry Alpha’s blind night technician, hears the sixty-four pods as a chord, and hears one go out of tune.

Part of [Oil Rigs to Training Rigs](https://blind-ant.com/pieces/oil-rigs-to-training-rigs/index.md), a Piece.

Short story. The control room.

Daniel Okafor, Skerry Alpha’s blind night technician, hears the sixty-four pods as a chord, and hears one go out of tune.

Daniel Okafor hears Skerry Alpha before he sees anything, which is to say always, because Daniel has never seen anything.

The control room is on the third level of the old accommodation block, in what used to be the radio room. It has two windows, which he's told look out over the turbines, and three desks, of which his is the only one with speakers instead of screens. The other two technicians on night shift work with monitors full of graphs. Daniel works with sound.

He built the system himself, more or less, in his first year. The company had bought the usual software, which showed each pod as a coloured tile on a grid, green for healthy and amber for warm. It was entirely useless to him and, he quietly suspected, not much use to anyone else at three in the morning. So he went to the engineers and asked a question nobody had asked: what if each pod had a note?

Now each of the sixty-four pods sounds a tone, pitched by its position around the ring and shaped by its state. Temperature bends the pitch. Load sets the volume. Link quality gives it a texture, clean when it's good and grainy when packets are dropping. A healthy ring sounds like a low, steady chord, like an organ holding a note in an empty church. Daniel listens to it all night through one earpiece and talks to his colleagues through the other.

"People think it's an adjustment," he told the woman from the insurance company when she came through on her inspection. "It isn't. It's a better interface. I hear all sixty-four at once. They have to scroll."

She wrote that down. Most people do.

\* \* \*

Tonight the wind is dropping. Daniel can hear that too, indirectly. As output from the farm falls, the scheduler eases the training load, and the chord gets quieter, like an orchestra coming down from forte. By midnight the batteries are taking the weight. By two, the ring is at half load and the chord has thinned to something you could almost sleep to.

Which is why he notices pod forty-one.

It isn't much. Its note has drifted upward by perhaps a quarter-tone, and there's a faint roughness to it, like a fingernail on a violin string. On the graphs it would be a line moving from one shade of green to a slightly different shade of green. Nobody else in the room notices. The alarm threshold is two degrees away.

"Forty-one's warm," Daniel says.

Kirsty, on the next desk, checks. "It's within limits."

"It's warm and it's grainy. Load's down and it's getting warmer. That's the wrong way round."

She looks again, then calls the ROV cabin. At four in the morning, in the black water sixty metres down, the ROV pilot finds a length of old trawl net wrapped around forty-one's cooling fins, slowly smothering it. It has been snagged on the pod for perhaps a day. Another day and the pod would have shut itself down, and a training run three weeks old would have needed restarting from its last checkpoint.

The ROV cuts it free. Over the next hour, Daniel listens to forty-one's note slide back down into the chord, until he can't pick it out from the others any more.

"How did you hear that?" Kirsty asks.

Daniel takes out his earpiece and rubs his ear. "It was out of tune," he says, as if that explained everything. To him, it does.

[Next: Skerry Alpha operations log, January 2034](https://blind-ant.com/pieces/oil-rigs-to-training-rigs/operations-log/).