SATIRE · Human Deprecation Notice

The Waterless Award Has Been Presented to a Building With No Water in It

A fictional data center earns a civic prize for removing every drop from its cooling bill by arranging for the thirst to appear at a power plant several counties away. The committee calls this local leadership because it has never been asked to look at a map.

By The Deprecation Desk · October 27, 2026

The facility has not used a single drop of water we could see from the parking lot. That is what excellence looks like from the parking lot.

SATIRE. Every person, institution, award, quotation, company, location, and event in this article is fictional.

The ballroom of the fictional National Bureau of On-Site Virtue had been decorated in a palette called Responsible Beige, except for a twelve-foot brass faucet on the stage. It did not connect to plumbing. That was the point. The bureau’s annual Zero-Drop Ribbon went this year to the fictional Cloudmorrow Data Campus, a low-slung warehouse whose cooling bill had achieved the rare distinction of containing no water at all.

It is not merely a dry building, said fictional bureau chair Marlene Fawcett, raising the ribbon while the audience of fictional consultants pressed their hands together in approval. It is a building that has liberated water from the obligation to appear near a building.

Cloudmorrow had replaced its cooling towers with a formidable system of fans, ducts, screens, pumps, and a small indoor room called the Climate Responsibility Theater. The theater had no seats. Its sole exhibit was a wall display that showed the campus’s onsite water use declining to a clean blue zero. Every afternoon, a fictional employee polished the zero until it reflected the ceiling lights.

The additional electricity required to move heat away from the computers was supplied, according to the fictional company’s cheerful brochure, by the regional grid, which had the useful habit of existing somewhere else. On warm days, some of that electricity was generated at the fictional Stonewake Station in Silt County, a few counties away, where cooling equipment made an untelevised demand on a river. Cloudmorrow’s annual environmental statement listed this as water occurring off premise.

At the award ceremony, fictional Cloudmorrow president Eli Panner explained that the company had spent years asking the hard question: how can a data center use no water? Eventually we realized the question was geographically overcommitted, he said. We stopped asking where the water went and began asking whether it was in the building. The answer was no. That is innovation.

A fictional reporter asked whether moving cooling from the campus to a generating plant had moved the water question rather than solved it. Panner directed the question to Cloudmorrow’s new Responsibility Concierge, a software assistant displayed on an adjoining monitor. After a respectful pause, the concierge produced a statement in a tasteful serif typeface: The facility cannot be held responsible for liquids that are not presently touching it.

The audience regarded this as an important clarification. One fictional county official said it restored the boundary between infrastructure and weather. Another asked whether the river had been consulted. The concierge answered that the river had not completed the required intake form, which was why the company had not been able to include it in the ribbon application.

The bureau’s judging process was famously rigorous. Inspectors visited each nominated campus with a clipboard, a tote bag, and a bottle of blue food coloring. They placed a drop in every faucet, hose, cooling basin, and decorative fountain they could locate. If none of the blue water appeared in a place called the data center, the campus received full marks for resource independence. The inspectors did not visit power plants. That would have required a different tote bag.

Fawcett said critics misunderstood the award’s narrow mandate. We are not the National Bureau of Everything That Happens After an Outlet, she said. We are the National Bureau of On-Site Virtue. The title is a complete sentence.

By dessert, the fictional guests had begun to understand that the prize had accomplished something more profound than conservation. It had transformed a physical dependency into a clerical success. The building did not need less water in the only sense that mattered to the bureau. It needed a smaller water number on a document with the building’s address at the top.

Cloudmorrow plans to extend the method to other resources next year. The fictional company’s procurement team is exploring a paperless cafeteria by having menus printed at a restaurant across town. It is also studying a zero-waste shipping program in which packaging is removed at the customer’s doorstep, where it becomes an issue for a different report.

As the ceremony ended, the brass faucet onstage remained dry and magnificent. A fictional waiter passed beneath it with a tray of water glasses labeled Elsewhere. The guests lifted them to the light. No one could say whose water it was, only that it had not been served at Cloudmorrow.

Source: Los Angeles Times