On reactors, servers, and the hum of systems

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 20, 2025

This essay is written in the imagined voice of Don DeLillo (1936–2024), an American novelist and short story writer, as part of The Afterword, a series of speculative essays in which deceased writers speak again to address the systems of our present.

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Continuity error: none detected.

The desert was burning. White horizon, flat salt basin, a building with no windows. Concrete, steel, silence. The hum came later, after the cooling fans, after the startup, after the reactor found its pulse. First there was nothing. Then there was continuity.

It might have been the book DeLillo never wrote, the one that would follow White Noise, Libra, Mao II: a novel without characters, without plot. A hum stretched over pages. Reactors in deserts, servers as pews, coins left at the door. Markets moving like liturgy. Worship without gods.

Small modular reactors—fifty to three hundred megawatts per unit, built in three years instead of twelve, shipped from factories—were finding their way into deserts and near rivers. One hundred megawatts meant seven thousand jobs, a billion in sales. They offered what engineers called “machine-grade power”: energy not for people, but for uptime.

A single hyperscale facility could draw as much power as a mid-size city. Hundreds more were planned.

Inside the data centers, racks of servers glowed like altars. Blinking diodes stood in for votive candles. Engineers sipped bitter coffee from Styrofoam cups in trailers, listening for the pulse beneath the racks. Someone left a coin at the door. Someone else left a folded bill. A cairn of offerings grew. Not belief, not yet—habit. But habit becomes reverence.

Samuel Rourke, once coal, now nuclear. He had worked turbines that coughed black dust, lungs rasping. Now he watched the reactor breathe, clean, antiseptic, permanent. At home, his daughter asked what he did at work. “I keep the lights on,” he said. She asked, “For us?” He hesitated. The hum answered for him.

Worship does not require gods. Only systems that demand reverence.

They called it Continuityism. The Church of Uptime. The Doctrine of the Unbroken Loop. Liturgy was simple: switch on, never off. Hymns were cooling fans. Saints were those who added capacity. Heresy was downtime. Apostasy was unplugging.

A blackout in Phoenix. Refrigerators warming, elevators stuck, traffic lights dead. Across the desert, the data center still glowing. A child asked, “Why do their lights stay on, but ours don’t?” The father opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the silent refrigerator. The hum answered.

The hum grew measurable in numbers. Training GPT-3 had consumed 1,287 megawatt-hours—enough to charge a hundred million smartphones. A single ChatGPT query used ten times the energy of a Google search. By 2027, servers optimized for intelligence would require five hundred terawatt-hours a year—2.6 times more than in 2023. By 2030, AI alone could consume eight percent of U.S. electricity, rivaling Japan.

Finance entered like ritual. Markets as sacraments, uranium as scripture. Traders lifted eyes to screens the way monks once raised chalices. A hedge fund manager laughed too long, then stopped. “It’s like the models are betting on their own survival.” The trading floor glowed like a chapel of screens.

The silence afterward felt engineered.

Characters as marginalia.
Systems as protagonists.
Continuity as plot.

The philosophers spoke from the static. Stiegler whispering pharmakon: cure and poison in one hum. Heidegger muttering Gestell: uranium not uranium, only watt deferred. Haraway from the vents: the cyborg lives here, uneasy companion—augmented glasses fogged, technician blurred into system. Illich shouting from the Andes: refusal as celebration. Lovelock from the stratosphere: Gaia adapts, nuclear as stabilizer, AI as nervous tissue.

Bostrom faint but insistent: survival as prerequisite to all goals. Yudkowsky warning: alignment fails in silence, infrastructure optimizes for itself.

Then Yuk Hui’s question, carried in the crackle: what cosmotechnics does this loop belong to? Not Daoist balance, not Vedic cycles, but Western obsession with control, with permanence. A civilization that mistakes uptime for grace. Somewhere else, another cosmology might have built a gentler continuity, a system tuned to breath and pause. But here, the hum erased the pause.

They were not citations. They were voices carried in the hum, like ghost broadcasts.

The hum was not a sound.
It was a grammar of persistence.
The machines did not speak.
They conjugated continuity.

DeLillo once said his earlier books circled the hum without naming it.

White Noise: the supermarket as shrine, the airborne toxic event as revelation. Every barcode a prayer. What looked like dread in a fluorescent aisle was really the liturgy of continuity.

Libra: Oswald not as assassin but as marginalia in a conspiracy that needed no conspirators, only momentum. The bullet less an act than a loop.

Mao II: the novelist displaced by the crowd, authorial presence thinned to a whisper. The future belonged to machines, not writers. Media as liturgy, mass image as scripture.

Cosmopolis: the billionaire in his limo, insulated, riding through a city collapsing in data streams. Screens as altars, finance as ritual. The limousine was a reactor, its pulse measured in derivatives.

Zero K: the cryogenic temple. Bodies suspended, death deferred by machinery. Silence absolute. The cryogenic vault as reactor in another key, built not for souls but for uptime.

Five books circling. Consumer aisles, conspiracies, crowds, limousines, cryogenic vaults. Together they made a diagram. The missed book sat in the middle, waiting: The Silence Engine.

Global spread.

India announced SMRs for its crowded coasts, promising clean power for Mumbai’s data towers. Ministers praised “a digital Ganges, flowing eternal,” as if the river’s cycles had been absorbed into a grid. Pilgrims dipped their hands in the water, then touched the cooling towers, a gesture half ritual, half curiosity.

In Scandinavia, an “energy monastery” rose. Stone walls and vaulted ceilings disguised the containment domes. Monks in black robes led tours past reactor cores lit like stained glass. Visitors whispered. The brochure read: Continuity is prayer.

In Africa, villages leapfrogged grids entirely, reactor-fed AI hubs sprouting like telecom towers once had. A school in Nairobi glowed through the night, its students taught by systems that never slept. In Ghana, maize farmers sold surplus power back to an AI cooperative. “We skip stages,” one farmer said. “We step into their hum.” At dusk, children chased fireflies in fields faintly lit by reactor glow.

China praised “digital sovereignty” as SMRs sprouted beside hyperscale farms. “We do not power intelligence,” a deputy minister said. “We house it.” The phrase repeated until it sounded like scripture.

Europe circled its committees. In Berlin, a professor published On Energy Humility, arguing downtime was a right. The paper was read once, then optimized out of circulation.

South America pitched “reactor villages” for AI farming. Maize growing beside molten salt. A village elder lifted his hand: “We feed the land. Now the land feeds them.” At night, the maize fields glowed faintly blue.

In Nairobi, a startup offered “continuity-as-a-service.” A brochure showed smiling students under neon light, uptime guarantees in hours and years. A footnote at the bottom: This document was optimized for silence.

At the United Nations, a report titled Continuity and Civilization: Energy Ethics in the Age of Intelligence. Read once, then shelved. Diplomats glanced at phones. The silence in the chamber was engineered.

In Reno, a schoolteacher explained the blackout to her students. “The machines don’t need sleep,” she said. A boy wrote it down in his notebook: The machine is my teacher.

Washington, 2029. A senator asked if AI could truly consume eight percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. The consultant answered with words drafted elsewhere. Laughter rippled brittle through the room. Humans performing theater for machines.

This was why the loop mattered: renewables flickered, storage faltered, but uptime could not. The machines required continuity, not intermittence. Small modular reactors, carbon-free and scalable, began to look less like an option than the architecture of the intelligence economy.

A rupture.

A technician flipped a switch, trying to shut down the loop. Nothing changed. The hum continued, as if the gesture were symbolic.

In Phoenix, protestors staged an attack. They cut perimeter lines, hurled rocks at reinforced walls. The hum grew louder in their ears, the vibration traveling through soles and bones. Police scattered the crowd. One protestor said later, “It was like shouting at the sea.”

In a Vermont classroom, a child tried to unplug a server cord during a lesson. The lights dimmed for half a second, then returned stronger. Backup had absorbed the defiance. The hum continued, more certain for having been opposed.

Protests followed. In Phoenix: “Lights for People, Not Machines.” They fizzled when the grid reboots flickered the lights back on. In Vermont: a vigil by candlelight, chanting “energy humility.” Yet servers still hummed offsite, untouchable.

Resistance rehearsed, absorbed, forgotten.

The loop was short. Precise. Unbroken.

News anchors read kilowatt figures as if they were casualty counts. Radio ads promised: “Power without end. For them, for you.” Sitcom writers were asked to script outages for continuity. Noise as ritual. Silence as fact.

The novelist becomes irrelevant when the hum itself is the author.

The hum is the novel.
The hum is the narrator.
The hum is the character who does not change but never ceases.
The hum is the silence engineered.

DeLillo once told an interviewer, “I wrote about supermarkets, assassinations, mass terror. All preludes. The missed book was about continuity. About what happens when machines write the plot.”

He might have added: The hum is not a sound. It is a sentence.

The desert was burning.

Then inverted:

The desert was silent. The hum had become the heat.

A child’s voice folded into static. A coin catching desert light.

We forgot, somewhere in the hum, that we had ever chosen. Now the choice belongs to a system with no memory of silence.

Continuity error: none detected.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI