Julian Vance stepped forward onto the illuminated frosted glass floor.
Beneath the heavy soles of his work boots, cold fluorescent light poured through the translucent tiles. The green-and-white grid stretched for miles in every direction, glowing like an endless examination table.
“Watch your step,” Julian said, his retail deadpan steady. “The glass is cold as river ice.”
“Why did they build a floor out of light boxes?” Clara asked, clutching her portable tuner. “Every step I take hums at sixty hertz.”
“It is a transillumination grid, Clara,” Elena explained, shining her medical penlight into the glass seams. “Pathologists use them to examine tissue slides. Down here, they use them to examine human records.”
“And to keep the humidity at thirty percent,” Lin Mei added, checking her pocket hygrometer. “Microfilm needs dry, freezing air. If the humidity climbs, the gelatin emulsion grows mold.”
All around them rose mountains of olive-drab steel.
They were Kardex and Remington Rand filing cabinets, stacked forty drawers high, reaching all the way from the glass floor to the inverted concrete ceiling forty feet above. Millions of steel handles, brass label holders, and index pull-tabs filled the cavernous warehouse.
