He chose safety and slapped the kill bar.
[Cycle aborted.][Thermal: falling.][Recommendation: service filter; inspect enclosure seal.]
"On it," he said.
He lifted the pre-filter frame with the hand taking the weight from inside, slid the gray sheet free, and fed a fresh cut of media into the rack. The cutter made two quick trims, quiet as breath. He pressed foil tape along the seam with the heel of his hand until adhesive learned the frame.
[Filter differential: returning to baseline.][Vent capture: good.]
Good was not good enough; good was a guess. He wanted a number.
He grabbed a length of clear vinyl hose from a coil, a marker, and a strip of masking tape. He ran the hose in a U from just inside the enclosure to just outside the hood lip and zip-tied it to a scrap of plywood. He poured water from a kettle until the U held a calm meniscus in both legs, then added a drop of blue dye and shook the board lightly to chase bubbles out.
"Zero here," he said, and taped a paper ruler along the edge. He marked 0 at equal heights and wrote inches of water because writing the unit on things makes them obey.
[Sensor note: external manometer present.]
"Now we measure like adults," he told the empty room. He set the hood to ninety and watched the columns split. The inside leg rose a half inch; the outside fell a half. He wrote 1.0 in. H₂O @ 90% on the plywood and took a second reading at seventy, then eighty, then with the enclosure lid cracked two millimeters to simulate the worst sin someone would ask him to commit.
He closed the lid and set the hood to eighty. The columns settled at a number he could love.
He reopened P-001 and rolled the sheet back to the last complete part.
"Resume at eight point five," he said. "Adaptive routing on."
[Thermal: 8.5%. Vent capture: good.][Adaptive: active.]
The hand re-clamped; the cutter opened a relief the optimizer had learned; the capped emitter traced the path that had tried to be trouble and now was just a job. The corner that had looked like a heat sink turned into a seam that remembered to exhale. The manometer rose and fell steady at 0.8; the towel stayed flattened the right way; the smoke ribbon bent obediently and disappeared.
He kept an eye on the blue columns until his jaw let go.
"Okay," he said to the machine, the air, himself. "Run."
The tray caught a finished bracket. He stacked it with its twins in the bin he'd labeled too neatly. The next sheet fed with the confidence of a person who knew his own driveway. The cycle ticked. The room slowed its heartbeat to match.
He laid six brackets on the steel table and chalked welding marks that would become heat only when the world wasn't watching. He looked at how the arms would nest into a backbone and saw a shape that would lift something real when he told it to.
The phone buzzed with bureaucracy.
UTILITIES: "Reminder: voluntary peak reduction in effect. Field techs may perform spot verification."
He thumbed ACK. The wording was a careful favor and a threat with a quiet voice. He kept the overheads dead and the hood honest. If someone wanted to talk at the fence, he'd talk with the enclosure closed and the towel doing its little dance like theatre that wasn't lying.
By the fifth sheet, he didn't check the clock; his body knew when ten minutes had become eleven. The optimizer shaved the little silences he used to use for worry. He used them for sorting instead.
The manometer ticked to 0.75 at the same moment a faint vibration made itself known in the hood frame—a note that said filter doing work, not failing.
[Filter differential: nominal.][Capture: stable.]
He let the cycle go and rolled the dead media into a bag with a neatness that made the trash can feel like a ledger.
A sharp engine note cracked the lane, not aggressive, just official. He went to the slit in the window and saw a white utility truck with the logo he'd already learned. Not the same beard as morning; a younger tech, hair under a cap with the county crest.
The truck idled at the cone with polite entitlement and then turned into the drive. The man climbed out with a tablet, a voltage sensor hooked to his belt, and the manner of someone who wanted to follow a checklist without making a new friend.
Noah wiped his hands and opened the door halfway.
"Mr. Cole," the tech said, reading the name from the plate, not guessing. "Spot verification for voluntary peak reduction. We had outage noise last night. Just want to check the meter and note load."
"Meter's west wall," Noah said. "You're good at the fence."
"Copy," the tech said, agreeable as copy paper. He glanced at the door. "You running anything heavy?"
"Enclosure's closed and vent on," Noah said. "Thin-gauge work. Hood at eighty. No compressors, no welders." He didn't list the things he wasn't doing; he listed the things he was.
The tech nodded, unsurprised. "I'll be quick."
Inside the box, the seam entered a fresh nest on the new sheet—the dense quadrant again, trickier in this layout. The manometer hopped from 0.8 to 0.72 as turbulence played in a corner and the filter remembered it was new.
[Adaptive suggestion: add micro-pause after long seam to let capture recover (adds 12 s).]
He liked the suggestion. Twelve seconds was the kind of toll you pay on a bridge you intend to use again.
"Accept," he said, and watched the path shift subtly—one seam trading places with another like courteous drivers.
The tech's boots crunched gravel at the west wall. A screwdriver kissed the panel screws with a ring that said factory, not pry bar. Noah kept his shoulder in the doorway and listened to two jobs try not to compete.
"Sir?" the tech called, not urgent, just working. "Meter reads normal. I'll log hood draw as essential. Can you verify you've reduced elsewhere?"
Noah stepped into view at the edge of the door and pointed at his dark overheads, the silent compressor, the taped switch. "Lights off, nonessentials off. Hood and enclosure only."
"That's what I wanted," the tech said, and wrote a line that sounded like it meant he got to go to another house and be this sensible again.
Inside the enclosure, the pool crawled toward a tight triple corner, the kind that makes sheet metal remember it's a crystal lattice and not an idea. The manometer eased down to 0.7 and stayed, willing and thin. The towel flattened and flickered and flattened. The smoke ribbon was a clean yes.
The tech rapped the meter once with a knuckle in the old ritual. "You got a camera on your service?" he asked conversationally. "We had reports of tamper last night."
"Not yet," Noah said. "Soon."
"Good idea," the tech said, and snapped the panel closed. "All set. Appreciate you working with the event."
"Appreciate you not making it a fight."
"That's above my pay grade," the tech said with a flicker of a smile, then went to his truck and wrote a line that would become a database later.
Noah watched him go until the lane knew only two tire tracks again. He returned to the manometer and the box like a man who remembered his favorite room.
[Cycle: 73% complete.][Quadrant Q3: entering in 24 s.]
He stood with a palm flat on the enclosure lid and counted under his breath while the optimized path made choices he approved of. When the pool reached the air-hungry corner, he watched the columns. 0.68. 0.69. 0.70. Capture flirted; capture worked. The adaptive micro-pause took a breath that looked like it belonged there.
"Good," he said. The word had weight because the room had air.
The tray chimed with another bracket. He carried it to the table and added chalk at the fillet marks; he forced his hands to slow so he didn't invent a mistake.
A shape across the road caught his eye as he moved back to the bench—something that didn't belong to any plant or sign. He narrowed his gaze. On the old phone pole at the far corner, a small black rectangle sat where rectangles shouldn't. It had the geometry of a cheap trail cam, lens the size of a fingernail, straps tight in fresh dust.
He blinked once and let the anger he felt be as thin as its justification.
[External device detected: low-power cam (non-RF; SD storage likely).][Location: pole across road, 3.1 m up, facing gate.]
Someone had decided the lane needed eyes. Not the utility. Not county. He pictured Skinny up a ladder at blue dusk, pretending to be a bird.
He looked at the manometer and at the pool taking its last polite bite from the sheet. He looked at the pole and the strap and the cheap black box hungry for boring.
The cycle had two minutes left. The camera would have the angle of the gate, not the inside. It would have trucks and faces and time. It would not have the enclosure doing honest work. It would have enough for someone to feel braver than they deserved.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and let the choice stand up. He could pause the run again, lock the door, fetch a ladder, and pluck the camera, breaking the strap with the hand steadying the base from inside. Or he could let the two minutes finish, stack the sheet that made his day into a number, and go out after—not giving the world the show of a man who panics when he's filmed.
The pool reached the start of the long seam that tied the nest together. The columns on the manometer held at 0.72. The towel flattened like someone agreeing for once in their life.
He stood with his hand near the kill bar and his eyes on the pole.
Two minutes was either forever or a discipline. He had to choose which kind of man he was in front of a lens he didn't invite.