Lukas cannot make himself study The Order while the battle in Silo 18 continues over the radio. He listens as Bernard shouts orders from above and as Sims's force reports losses from an explosion and pushes toward what they hope is the end of the fighting. Standing before the silo schematics, Lukas fixates on the red X over Silo 17 and thinks about how foolish the silo's internal killing is when total extinction is the real danger.

Shaken by the gunfire and deaths coming through the speakers, Lukas wants to use the locked radio to tell everyone to stop, but he knows the appeal would change nothing. He leaves the set alone and searches for something else to occupy himself. Among Bernard's stored papers, Lukas finds Juliette's generator control-room manual and brings it to the desk, hoping the familiar object and her handwriting will steady him while he waits for her to call.

As Lukas reads, he dwells on how much he misses Juliette and how dangerous her situation in the dead silo must be. The manual itself is too technical to distract him, so he turns to the printed play pages and the notes in the margins. There he finds a passage in Juliette's handwriting addressed to someone named George, written like a private love poem. The discovery abruptly turns Lukas's longing into jealousy, and he begins imagining George as a former lover Juliette never forgot.

Lukas logs into Bernard's computer and abuses his access to search the personnel files for men named George. He checks the living records first, dismisses several possibilities, and then expands the search to closed records from the past eighteen years. That search leads him to a dead Mechanical worker who died a little over three years earlier in an investigated industrial accident. Convinced this is Juliette's George, Lukas writes down the man's ID and case number and starts digging into the old file, using the investigation to distract himself while he waits for Juliette's call.