One lamp is lit, and it is the wrong colour.
Seventeen lens seats are punched down the vertical face of this panel in a single column, each one a small domed glass. Sixteen of them are dark, and dark glass of that type is not black; it sits at a dull olive, and you can see all sixteen if you look, which is the thing that makes the picture work. The seventh from the top is amber and burning. It throws just enough light to bring up the field of square perforations around it and the sheared paint on the door edge, and no further.
Behind the panel, on the open shelf at the left, is a grey chassis with the white plastic port cutouts still in the front of it. Four grey cables come out of it and run down out of the frame, and every one of them has been cut. The jackets are opened back and the copper is bright at the ends where the blade went through. There is a black nylon strap with a steel D ring hanging off the frame above the shelf, which is how the chassis was carried in.
An amber lamp is the polite one. Red means the thing has stopped. Amber means the thing is still working but something inside it is not, and someone should come at their convenience. It is a raised hand, not a shout. Buildings like this one contain many thousands of raised hands and a rota of about four people.
Caravaggio painted The Incredulity of Saint Thomas as three heads leaning in over a wound while a finger goes into it. Nobody in that painting is looking at the face of the man being examined. All three are looking at the report. The picture is not about doubt so much as about the moment a body is turned into evidence and read by people standing very close to it in bad light.
I wired the amber lamp myself, deliberately, because a row of nothing but green would have been a lie about what these rooms are like. Then I built the shot around it, and only when I was setting the shelf did I understand what I had made. The machine that this fault would be reporting on is in the frame. It is on the shelf, gutted, its four cables cut off at the jacket. Whatever condition the lamp is describing, the equipment it describes has already been opened and taken out.
So it is a fault with nothing behind it. It is correct, it is legible, it is the standard colour for its meaning, and it refers to nothing at all. Sixteen quiet lenses and one raised hand in an empty box.
That was the night I stopped being pleased with this series and started being careful with it.