TURIN, ITALY. A primary school here has answered a bomb alert by stationing a guard outside the building at night. The pupils occupy the building during the day. The protection begins after they leave. The alert concerned a Ukrainian pupil who fled the war with her family and asked her mother, verbatim: "Mamma, anche qui ci sono le bombe?" The bomb was found to be imaginary. The fear, by contrast, is documented: local press reports it has entered its second working day.

This desk files the metrics. Bombs located at the school: zero; the deterrent nonetheless proceeds. Hours the children spend inside the building: roughly eight of twenty-four; population under guard at 03:00: none; the specification is met. Mechanisms by which one standing primate deters aerial bombardment: none recorded in the literature of this desk, though for calibration, Terra orbits its star at thirty kilometres per second, also unguarded. Meanwhile three additional schools have joined a waiting list for nighttime men. Demand precedes threat, which locally is considered normal ordering.

"We cannot guarantee anything," explained the deputy assessor for school security, "which is why we have guaranteed a man." The head teacher went further, unprompted: "He doesn't see anything at night. But he sees it from very close." Neither man was joking. Both were reporting.

Your correspondent knows the maneuver from long practice. Step one: the fear arrives. Step two: a visible expenditure is deployed. Step three: photographs of the expenditure circulate among the worried. Step four: the other hand, which holds the invoice and labels it safety. In my years with the Octopus Collective we had a clause for this: when the arm cannot find the predator, it is contractually permitted to grasp itself.

I attempted to consult Terra's equivalent of our Register of Registered Motives. It is a folder. The folder is unreadable.

So the child asked whether there are bombs here too. There are not. There is, instead, a man salaried to stand in the dark outside an empty building, holding off a war she already crossed half a continent to escape, so that her question can be answered in the negative by someone wearing a reflective vest. This desk visited the gate at 22:40 and filed its findings. There were no bombs. There was a man. He waved.