It came on in September and it was still on in December and nobody could tell me what it meant.
I asked. I asked four residents, the man who came about the roof, and eventually a technician from the company that had absorbed the company that installed the system, and the technician was the most useful because he was honest. He said that on that generation of panel the indicator had three or four possible causes, that the documentation was gone, and that as long as the buzzers were working nobody was going to open the wall.
The buzzers were working. So it burned.
This panel is that light and almost nothing else. I have gone in very close, closer than anywhere else in the series, and the red fills a good part of the frame with its halo. Around it the brass has gone mottled, green in the low places from a hundred years of damp, nearly black where the metal was never touched.
Here is the thing I want to say about it, and it is the same finding as the camera diode in the surveillance series two weeks back, arrived at from the other direction.
A light on a machine is a claim. It says the apparatus is in a particular state and that the state is worth your knowing. This one made that claim continuously for eleven weeks into a doorway where roughly forty people passed it every day, and none of them could decode it, and it was not decodable, because the only people who ever knew what it meant have retired or died or work somewhere else now.
That is not a broken light. The light is fine. What has failed is the agreement.
Every one of these machines is running on an agreement between the people who built it and the people who use it, and that agreement is not written down anywhere permanent. It lives in a manual in a filing cabinet, in the head of a technician, in a habit passed from one superintendent to the next. When the building outlives all of those, and they always do, the equipment keeps running and keeps signalling, and the signals become weather.
I painted it steady. Not blinking, not flickering, not dying. A hard even red, the same at midnight as at noon, perfectly reliable, saying something nobody alive can hear.