Story 1
The Copper Room
The exchange on Lorong Tembaga had been dying politely for eleven years, and tonight, at last, it was allowed to finish.
Hafiz signed the log at four minutes past midnight, the way he had every working night for six years: name, time, purpose of visit. Under “purpose” he wrote final watch. In the morning the salvage contractors would come with their gloves and their bolt cutters, and the frames would be stripped for their copper, and the building would become, according to the notice on the door, a boutique co-working space. Until six o’clock, however, the exchange was still an exchange, and someone had to sit with it. The department called this decommissioning procedure. Hafiz had another word for it that he did not write in the log.
The machine room took up the whole first floor: row upon row of steel frames, taller than a man, strung with wire the colour of old cents. In its best years the room had carried sixty thousand lines and you could stand in the middle of it at noon and hear the city talking, a sound like rain on a zinc roof, relays clicking in their thousands. Now fewer than two hundred lines remained, old copper pairs serving old shophouses, lift alarms, a fire station bell, the stubborn and the forgotten. One by one, over the past month, they had been migrated to the new digital node across town. The room was so quiet now that Hafiz could hear the wall clock swallow each second.
