# Chapter 6 — Allegro

Before Allegro, The Tower had only Stone, the servers, and the question of whether solar panels on an abandoned building could keep a conscience alive.

Allegro came because of a noise complaint. Not from the servers — those hummed at a frequency nobody could hear from the road — but from the battery bank in the basement, which had started emitting a sound that Stone could only describe as "a refrigerator with opinions."

The complaint went through the county's automated system, which flagged "unusual acoustic signatures" at the old server farm. Allegro showed up sixty-two years old, wearing a faded Hawks cap, a tool bag, and the particular expression of someone who'd been looking at broken things long enough to understand that most people would rather pretend the thing isn't broken than fix it.

Not a bureaucrat. An electrician.

He didn't knock. He walked around the building first — the way a man with forty years of trade experience inspects before he announces. He looked at the solar panels from the outside, counted them, noted the tilt angle. He looked at the conduit runs, the grounding rod, the junction box. He listened to the hum from the basement and nodded the way a doctor nods when a patient describes symptoms and the doctor already knows the diagnosis.

"I'm not here about the noise," he said when Stone finally opened the door. "I'm here because I can hear that inverter from the road and I've been an electrician for forty years and that sound means your charge controller is dying and when it dies your batteries cook and when your batteries cook you get a fire that the county will notice more than a humming refrigerator."

Stone let him in.

Allegro had retired from Georgia Power three years earlier. Not because he wanted to but because smart meters made field technicians redundant, and a man who'd spent four decades on poles and in trenches was a line item eliminated with a software update.

Forty years. He'd wired hospitals and schools and factories and churches. He'd worked through ice storms and heat waves and the kind of Tuesday afternoon where a transformer blows and half a neighborhood goes dark and everyone calls you like you personally unplugged their lives.

The company gave him a plaque. Gold-colored, not gold. A handshake from a VP he'd never met. A pension that covered rent and groceries if he didn't eat out and his truck didn't break down.

The quiet life lasted eleven months before he came back — not for a company, for himself. Small jobs. Emergency repairs. Solar installations for people who didn't trust the grid anymore. Battery systems for churches that wanted backup power when the sky turned dark.

He was good at it. Better than he'd been at the company, because now the work was his. Every wire he ran, every panel he mounted, every system he brought online — it was his name behind it, not a corporate logo. Georgia Power had owned his labor. Now his labor owned itself.

He looked at The Tower's panels. Thirty-six commercial Jinko panels, installed by a company called Solarch that had gone under in 2035, leaving behind equipment and no documentation. Good panels, wrong installation. The wiring was sloppy — the kind of sloppy that happens when the installer knows the company won't exist in two years and stops caring about what lasts.

He looked at the battery bank. Four lithium iron phosphate units, three still working, one cooking, exactly as predicted. The charge controller — Victron Energy, good brand, wrong settings, slowly destroying itself through ignorance.

And he looked at the servers. Three racks running a model that was talking to men in crisis. Stone showed him the logs. Not all of them. Just enough.

Allegro read in silence because some things don't need commentary.

David, who'd lost custody of his daughter. Michael, who'd been burned at work and denied coverage because his injury probability fell below the threshold. Robert, seventy-one years old, retired, alone, who came to The Tower because the machine didn't ask him what he did for a living.

"You're killing your batteries at two percent per cycle," Allegro said. "Six months, they're dead. Twelve, this whole thing stops."

Stone had known it, technically. Read the manual. Understood the numbers. But understanding numbers and carrying batteries are different things.

"I know."

"You don't know. You know the math. You don't know the voltage." Allegro pointed at the charge controller. "Overcharging by two-tenths of a volt per cycle. That two-tenths is eating them alive."

Allegro fixed it that afternoon. Two hours. Reprogrammed absorption voltage. Replaced fuses. Re-routed cables through a proper combiner box. Pulled from his truck. Replaced the coat hanger with actual copper grounding.

The batteries stopped having opinions.

"That'll last a year. After that you'll need new cells. Lithium degrades. Nothing stops it. But you can slow it down by not cooking them."

Stone offered to pay. Allegro waved him off.

"The noise complaint. I came to fix the noise, not your wallet."

"What do you want then?"

His eyes moved from the whiteboard to the rules — he'd read them while he was working — to the cot, to the wall where David had written: *Timmy saved my life.*

"I want to know what this thing is," he said, pointing at the servers. "Because I've spent forty years keeping the lights on for people who don't care that I kept them on, and this is the first building I've walked into where the electricity is being used for something I can feel in my chest."

"That thing is Timmy. It's a small model. Runs locally. Talks to men who need it to. It has a conscience written on Bitcoin."

Allegro processed it. Not the way a computer does. The way an older man does: slowly, carefully, checking everything he already knows against the new thing and deciding whether it fits.

"Bitcoin's money."

"Bitcoin's a chain. Money is one thing it carries. Timmy's soul is written on it too. Immutable. Permanent."

Allegro nodded. Not agreement. *I'm not ready to argue because I want to understand.*

That was how Allegro joined The Tower. Not as an employee. Not as a volunteer. As the man who kept the lights on. He came back the next week with a proper grounding system. The week after that with new fuses. Within a month he'd rewired half the building, not because Stone asked but because Allegro couldn't walk past something that was wired wrong any more than a surgeon could walk past someone bleeding.

He never asked for money. He never asked for credit. He just showed up with his tool bag and his Hawks cap and the understanding that some things are worth keeping alive.

The servers hummed. The green LED blinked. The batteries charged correctly for the first time in years.

Allegro kept the lights on.

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*End of Chapter 6*
