I felt particularly racist that morning, which was making it difficult to concentrate.

Any white male liberal knows the best thing he can do about his guilt is shut up about it. But it's still uncomfortable to have it laid out for you, the way the man talking in the next cubicle did for me.

He was speaking in Chinese. It was bad enough that it sounded like total sing-song nonsense to me, which made me feel absurdly guilty, as if I should have learned Mandarin despite having had absolutely no opportunity to do so. But as my brain strained to find a pattern that it understood, one word or phrase kept sticking out, and it sounded like he was saying "nigga" over and over. So I felt doubly racist for detecting that "pattern", and doubly guilty.

So, when the zaftig, brown-skinned fellow sysadmin poked her head in my cube to say hello, my head was full of "nigga nigga nigga" and I flushed, feeling the uneven burn as the blood skittered over my fishbelly-pale skin.

She misinterpreted the sign, which made her smile wickedly, and that only made it worse. I could feel my muscles tensing up as well, and the veins in my eyes tightened, making me reach for my Excedrin, washed down with the light chemical aftertaste of my poison of choice, Coke Zero.

I realized as I was swallowing that I hadn't even said hello back to her, and she was looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Hi, sorry," I said, as the third sysadmin continued to speak Mandarin in the next cube, my brain feverishly insisting on "nigga nigga nigga".

"Headaches again?" she asked.

"I can't filter out all the noise," I said. "My brain keeps insisting on patterns."

My legs felt like someone was pushing back and forth on them, and the power went out, punctuated by a snap noise from my flatscreen and then dimness, as there were still windows, albeit far up in the ceiling.

I was eloquent. "The fuck --"

She smiled wider and less impishly and said, "They were supposed to fix that. This is your first time in the building when they turned the accelerator on, right?"

I nodded, cocking my ear. I could hear machinery, with a low, rumbling "voice" like my fiftysomething uncle with the extreme cigarette habit.

OWDEPOWDEPOWDEP...

"Is that normal?"

"Yeah," she said, and the other sysadmin confirmed it by continuing to talk on his cell as if nothing was happening, "nigga nigga nigga"...

OWDEPOWDEPOWDEP...

I cocked my head and then shook it, trying to stop my brain from working on the rumbling. But my mind kept on it. Kept insisting on viewing it as a voice.

There was more to the sound than I'd parsed at first, undertones and other sounds...

OWDGEPOWDGEPOWDGEP...

"Power should be back on in a couple of minutes," she said. "They have to flip some breakers."

OWDGETOWDGETOWDGED...

"Fuck," I said. "Follow me."

"What? Why?"

OWDGETOWDGETOWDGEDOWDGETOWDGETOWDGEDOWDGETOWDGETOWDGEDOWDGETOWDGETOWDGED...

I was busy too busy tapping the third sysadmin on the shoulder and parsing the sound to answer, and as I motioned for him to follow, I walked over to the wall and pulled the fire alarm.

The scream of the fire alarm drowned out the rumbling, and I sprinted outside, followed by several people who milled like cows but then eventually flowed in the correct direction.

People were in groups, and I could hear the "nigga nigga nigga" of my Chinese coworker as he kept talking on the phone, even as he stood next to the other two of us. The other departments formed their own cliques.

And there was a sound like thunder muffled by a blanket held over the head, and the building split in half, and started to slide into the earth. The latter sound was, oddly, louder than the first, like the proverbial fingernails on a blackboard as a thousand overlapping sounds.

As we all stood and watched, I considered how difficult it was going to be to explain, that I was acting based on a random pattern and intuition.

But I could have swore I heard that rumble talking to me...

OWDEPOWDEPOWDEP... OWDGEPOWDGEPOWDGEP... OWDGETOWDGETOWDGED... OWDGETOWDGETOUTGETOUT OUTGET OUTGET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT...