Inside, the heat was a physical weight. The air was thick, still, and smelled of wet iron and ancient lanolin. He moved past the silent looms, their belts like fossilized serpents, toward the heart of the beast: the JMY Central Plenum, a concrete cavern where four colossal, rust-stained fans faced outward like blind, metal cyclopses.
The data resolved into a 3D model. He saw it: a drum, non-descript, rolled from a loading dock into the main weave room. It wasn't textile dye. The label was a military code from the nearby closed depot. The drum cracked. A pale, heavy gas—a precursor, a ghost of a weapon—pooled across the floor, too dense for the ceiling vents. The JMY system, designed for cotton lint, wasn't equipped for this. But it tried. jmy ventilation
“The building doesn’t just breathe, Jenna,” he explained to his skeptical civil engineer girlfriend. “It remembers what it processed. Cotton dust, dye vapors, human sweat—it’s all in the boundary layers of the ductwork.” Inside, the heat was a physical weight