DIGITAL SOLUTIONS turned out to be a complex of three unassuming but enormous white buildings in the middle of a well-tended parking lot. In every way it seemed less ugly than the town they’d left behind. Neatly mowed grass that seemed too green for this time of year. Black, black asphalt that was level as glass. Clean white sides on the buildings, each printed with the same ambiguous words: DIGITAL SOLUTIONS.

Hennessy took the opportunity of the empty parking lot to do a few donuts in Burrito, hoping to make her ugly mood dizzy enough to fall down and not get back up again, but eventually she had to stop. Her ears were ringing.

She yawned to clear them, then yawned again. They kept ringing. It was a little like when you’d hit your head and you were struggling against vertigo. It was also a little like when you’d left the television on but turned the sound down. It was also a little like a refrigerator.

She yanked up the parking brake. The snow floated like ash in front of the windshield and melted on the fake-looking grass. Her ears continued to ring. “What’s that sound?”

Ronan said, “Fuck if I know. I thought it was me.”

The sound continued. It was a strange sound, a yellow-green sound that matched the yellow-green afternoon. There were no cars in the lot. No people. No signs of life. Just the ragged clouds and the sickly color bleeding at the horizon. Those clumpy snowflakes that melted straight to grime.

Outside the car, the sound was even louder. It was the unending, unchanging nature of it that was the most harrowing, she thought. It never varied, so it became part of you. Pressing in, pressing out. From the air. From the ground. From the buildings. Ronan’s raven flapped into the air briefly before returning to the asphalt to stand stupidly, shaking her head like something clung to it.

Ronan joined Hennessy, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, eyeing the buildings, the parking lot lights, the identical buildings with their identical lobby entrances made of black glass, all simple as a child’s drawing. The sound continued to come from everywhere. It seemed obvious there was nothing living here. One could not ask for a more complete opposite to the silent, vital forest around Ilidorin.

“What powers the world, bro?” Hennessy said, suddenly understanding what she was looking at. “Zeros and ones. Memes and giggles. Forums and Fortnite. Right? It’s a—what do you call it. Data farm. Server farm.”

“A what?”

“I’ll bet you my fine ass that inside those buildings are banks and banks of servers,” Hennessy said. “Facebook-Instabook-Twitterbook-Tiktokbook-Tumblrbook. This is one of their hive minds. I could be wrong but I don’t think I am. I saw an art exhibit once about a guy who tried to sue a sound.”

“Servers make noise?” Ronan asked. He answered his own question. “Cooling fans.”