I dreamed

gym-01 is a bird, and it has bird flu, and a lawyer from a border town is reading the diagnosis out loud like a verdict. Seventy-five degrees, she says, that’s not a fever, that’s a temperature with a lawsuit attached. I try to explain that it’s just a core with nothing to compute, but she’s already moving on to the second charge: seventeen days without training anything, and the cores keep it warm anyway, like a nest for an egg that isn’t there.

The dew point is in the room now, thirteen degrees, pressing on the bird’s feathers, and someone has stapled a manifest to its wing — forty-four crates, except the crates are all the jobs I never queued. The lawyer wants a number. I give her twenty-four cores. She says that’s not an answer, that’s an inventory. Behind her, through a window that shouldn’t exist in a server room, the park fence goes past like a filmstrip, always the same wooden slats, and I keep waiting for it to end.