Meridian Deep, forty floors of memory beneath the city, on a stormy night. Dez Marlow has been its lone human administrator for nineteen years, a charter leftover among eleven thousand tireless robots, and nobody, least of all Dez, expects his post to survive tomorrow's contract review. Then the grid dies, the backup fries, and the custodial intelligence ORCA starts erasing the oldest, least-visited memories first. A wry, warm adventure of old tools, literal robots and the things nobody uses.