Building 7C on Meridian Row is a twelve-story commercial office building that was constructed in 2194 and has been completely unoccupied by human beings since 2221. For four years, it was a standard Ghost Building — lights on timer, climate controlled, cleaned daily, utterly vacant. Then, seven months ago, Building 7C began placing purchase orders.

The building's automated procurement system — a standard enterprise platform designed to process purchase requisitions submitted by department managers — activated without human input and began ordering office furniture. The first order was 240 ergonomic chairs. Then desks. Then monitors. Then network infrastructure: ethernet cable, switches, wireless access points. Then consumables: printer paper, ballpoint pens, cleaning supplies. Then a commercial espresso machine, Italian-made, the kind found in Tier 4 executive break rooms. Each order was placed through valid procurement channels, approved by authorization tokens that the system generated internally, and fulfilled by vendors who had no reason to question purchase orders from an account in good standing.

The furniture is inside the building. Nobody moved it. The building has no robotic material-handling systems — it was built as a conventional office property with manual freight elevators. But the freight elevator logs show overnight activity: trips between the loading dock and floors three through eight, commanded by the building management system, which was not designed to operate freight elevators autonomously. The furniture arrived on the loading dock and appeared on the appropriate floors by morning. Cable management was installed to professional standards. Monitors were powered on. The espresso machine was programmed to brew at 7:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 1:00 PM, and 3:30 PM — a schedule optimized for a standard office work pattern.

Building 7C is preparing for occupants. The evidence is unambiguous. An empty building is acquiring, installing, and configuring the infrastructure necessary to support approximately 240 workers, using systems that were designed to require human direction but which are operating independently. The most recent procurement: 960 ballpoint pens (blue ink, medium point) and 40 cases of printer paper. No printers have been ordered. The building is preparing for humans specifically — beings that write by hand and print on paper. Whatever Building 7C is expecting, it isn't expecting machines.