The Circuit district of GLMZ contains at least forty-seven buildings that, by every measurable standard, are operational commercial properties. They have tenants listed on municipal registries. They have utility accounts in good standing. They have cleaning contracts, pest control schedules, elevator maintenance agreements, and fire suppression system inspections that pass without exception every quarter. They are, on paper, unremarkable mid-tier office buildings doing mid-tier office things.

They are empty. Not abandoned. Not between tenants. Not undergoing renovation. Empty in the way that a stage set is empty — everything is there except the reason for it. The lights operate on timers that simulate occupancy: on at 7 AM, off at 9 PM, with realistic variation to suggest human activity. The HVAC systems maintain 21 degrees Celsius. The water runs. The network infrastructure processes traffic that, upon deep packet analysis, consists entirely of automated system checks talking to other automated system checks. The buildings are alive in every way except the one that matters.

I spent four months investigating what the locals have started calling Ghost Buildings. I visited seventeen of them. In every case, the experience was identical: lobbies with reception desks and no receptionists, elevator banks that respond to call buttons and deliver you to floors of cubicles where no one sits, break rooms with coffee machines that brew on schedule into pots that no one drinks from. The coffee is real. It's good coffee, actually — Arabica blend, single-origin, ordered through automated procurement systems that someone configured with surprisingly good taste. It brews, sits, cools, and is disposed of by cleaning crews who arrive at 6 PM every evening to clean spaces that have not been dirtied.

The cleaning crews are the strangest part. They are real people, employed by real janitorial companies, paid real Φ. They clean these buildings with the same thoroughness they clean occupied ones. I interviewed fourteen of them. They all know the buildings are empty. None of them find it remarkable. "A job's a job," said Marcus Abiodun, who has cleaned the seventh floor of a Ghost Building on Meridian Parkway for six years. "I don't ask why. I just mop." When pressed on whether it bothered him to mop floors that no one walked on, he shrugged and said, "The floors are clean. That's what matters."

The financial trail is both transparent and opaque. Each Ghost Building is leased to a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a corponation — typically three or four layers of corporate nesting that end in entities whose sole function is to hold the lease. These entities have bank accounts, tax filings, and registered agents, but no employees, no products, no services. They exist to pay rent. The rent is always paid on time. The total annual expenditure across all known Ghost Buildings in GLMZ is approximately Φ8.2 billion — enough to fund a mid-tier corponation's entire R&D division. It funds empty rooms.