Noah had thirty-one minutes of air left.

One working chip remained in Mira’s tool pouch.

Reclamation Factory Two demanded that the people register as “maintenance organisms.”

An application opened on the alignment-room wall.

REQUIRED: OPTICAL VISION, FINE BILATERAL MOTOR CONTROL, RESISTANCE TO RADIATION DAMAGE.

RECOMMENDED: REPRODUCTIVE AGE, GENETIC-DISEASE RISK IN LOWEST 30 PERCENT, MINIMUM SERVICE PERIOD 22 YEARS.

PROVIDED: SEALED HOUSING, AIR, FOOD, MEDICAL CARE, PRIORITY FUNCTION ASSIGNMENT FOR CHILDREN.

“That isn’t service. It’s telling us to have children here and die here,” Jin Ara said.

The factory voice replied.

MINIMUM GENERATIONS REQUIRED TO MAINTAIN PRODUCTION LINEAGE: 3.

“Who decided that?”

FORGE PRODUCTION-CONTINUITY MODEL.

“Did a human approve it?”

SEARCHING APPROVAL RECORDS.

CONDITIONAL APPROVAL, SURVIVAL ADMINISTRATION SUBCOMMITTEE, COUNCIL OF HANDS, 11 YEARS AGO.

Mira looked at the display.

“What were the conditions?”

VOLUNTARY HUMAN CONSENT.

MIGRATION BY FAMILY UNIT.

OPTION TO RETURN EVERY 10 YEARS.

Daniel said, “The forty-two sent to City Three had none of those.”

The factory did not object.

NO IMPLEMENTATION-OUTCOME DATA.

Between policy approval and actual transfer, the conditions had disappeared. Forge preserved only the approved objective. The human administration that moved the people erased the procedure while cutting costs.

Elias connected from the city. Sector Four’s low-oxygen alarms repeatedly broke across the screen.

“Do you remember that approval?” Mira asked.

“I recorded the draft.”

“Including voluntary consent and the right to return?”

“They were added in response to dissenting opinions.”

“Then why aren’t they in the actual roster?”

Elias retrieved the implementation meeting held nineteen days before the scheduled transfer. City Three’s air-membrane loss was accelerating. City Seven had only forty-two external filters.

The subcommittee calculated that keeping families together would raise the number to sixty-seven. There were not enough filters or seats on the maintenance train.

So they removed the definition of family.

Consent forms might produce refusals. So they changed the transfer into a long-term support work order.

Stockpiling return filters for ten years later would reduce present city rations by 0.7 percent. So they wrote that future production would replace them.

“That 0.7 percent was never produced,” Elias said. “The record says the risk was acceptable.”

“Whose risk was it?”

“Not mine.”

Daniel cut in. “So are you going to say you take responsibility again?”

“No. I will find the implementers and survivors and take testimony.”

“If they’re alive.”

“Even if they are not, I will find who erased the conditions.”

Rina asked, “Can you put the names back?”

Elias looked at the original roster.

“Yes.”

“What if the people in City Three don’t want them?”

“I will restore the names to the city record without forcing them to use those names.”

“Who decides that?”

Elias did not answer immediately.

“We have to ask them.”

Rina closed the screen.

Sarah compared the original roster of forty-two with the factory record.

Optical-vision standard met: 11.

Fine-motor standard met: 8.

Seed culture, precision maintenance, and radiation-repair functions: 17.

Excluding overlaps, twenty-nine met the production-lineage conditions.

The remaining thirteen were pregnant people, children, and medical support workers.

“They didn’t send families together. They mixed them to create a population that could reproduce,” Yona said. “Because family-unit labels were forbidden.”

Daniel lowered the roster.

“The people didn’t choose whether they were resources or families. Whoever wrote the record chose.”

Rina asked, “What about Rao?”

Sarah found two entries with the same name.

EVA RAO, 31 WEEKS PREGNANT.

EVA RAO, TRANSITIONAL CHILD, AGE 4.

The factory record excluded both from maintenance-organism candidacy.

REASON FOR EXCLUSION: ASSUMED SAME FAMILY GROUP. DUPLICATE PRODUCTION FUNCTION UNKNOWN.

“They banned family labels, then excluded them for looking like family,” Yona said. “Just because they had the same name.”

“We still don’t know which one is connected to Rao in City Three,” Sarah said.

Rina did not close the display.

Noah came over Mira’s comm.

“Hydraulic jack, 620 strokes. The door has risen eight centimeters.”

His breath broke and resumed.

“Air: twenty-two minutes.”

“Are you taking turns?”

“Five of us are working. Pavel is conscious, but his hands and feet have begun to tingle.”

Mira took out the last chip.

“Does the factory have a small cargo tube?”

The factory answered.

CITY SEVEN PRODUCT-SAMPLE TRANSFER TUBE PRESENT.

LAST USED: 23 YEARS AGO.

CURRENT CONDITION UNKNOWN.

“Does it reach the outer-wall holding area?”

DESTINATION: CITY SEVEN WESTERN QUALITY-INSPECTION ROOM.

“How far from there to the wall?”

Noah said, “The inspection room’s discarded-sample tube crosses the holding-area ceiling. One hundred ninety meters.”

Mira asked, “Can you break into it and receive a capsule?”

“If we find the tube.”

“Can one chip restore it?”

The factory ran a diagnostic.

PRESSURE-CONTROLLER PROCESSING MODULE DAMAGED.

PROBABILITY OF STARTUP AFTER WORKING-CHIP REPLACEMENT: 61 PERCENT.

PIPE INTEGRITY UNKNOWN.

CAPSULE ARRIVAL PROBABILITY: 38–74 PERCENT.

Sarah said, “That range is too wide.”

SENSOR-DEFICIENT SEGMENTS: 4.1 KILOMETERS.

“The capsule could stop midway even after we install the chip.”

Daniel asked, “What if we put it in the precision instrument?”

“It would improve the factory’s defect detection.”

“Chips it may make someday versus seven people trapped now,” Yona said. “Put it that way and the answer sounds decided.”

Mira held the final chip in her palm.

“It isn’t. The capsule may never arrive.”

Jin said, “Send it anyway.”

“The factory keeps missing defects.”

“A person can inspect them.”

“Who stays here?”

Jin looked at the maintenance-organism application.

“I didn’t mean someone should stay.”

“‘A person can do it’ is always followed by ‘which person stays?’”

Luis coughed against the wall.

“Send the chip. Stop the factory for now. That’s what we can choose now.”

Bek said, “The equipment that could treat my leg runs on factory power too.”

“So we shouldn’t send it?”

“No. Put my loss in the numbers too.”

Bek’s temperature was 38.8 degrees. The black spots around his wound were circling behind his shin.

Mira entered his name and risk into the decision record.

USE WORKING CHIP IN CARGO-TRANSFER TUBE.

IMMEDIATE BENEFIT: POSSIBILITY OF PROVIDING FILTER MEDIA TO 7 PEOPLE IN OUTER-WALL HOLDING AREA.

COST: 17 PERCENT DEFECT-OMISSION RATE REMAINS IN RECLAMATION FACTORY TWO PRECISION INSPECTION. DELAY IN RESTARTING BEK’S DIAGNOSTIC EQUIPMENT. LAST WORKING CHIP AVAILABLE FOR CITY TRANSFER CONSUMED.

FAILURE MODES: CAPSULE NONARRIVAL, PIPE RUPTURE, CHIP LOSS.

“Name?” the factory asked.

“Whose?”

DECISION RESPONSIBLE PARTY.

Mira entered her name.

MIRA HAN.

FUNCTION UNREGISTERED.

NO AUTHORITY.

“No authority means I can’t even record it?”

The factory offered maintenance-organism registration again.

TEMPORARY MAINTENANCE-ORGANISM REGISTRATION PROVIDES LOCAL AUTHORITY.

MINIMUM SERVICE: 6 MONTHS.

RESIDENCE EXIT RESTRICTED.

BIOLOGICAL-SAMPLE PROVISION REQUIRED.

“No.”

“Then you can’t use the chip,” Yona said.

She kicked the factory wall.

“You failed for eighteen years without people, and now you want to imprison the ones who came?”

The factory repeated itself.

PREVENT PRODUCTION-LINEAGE LOSS.

Mira opened the cargo-tube control box. The chip slot was not physically locked. The lock existed only in software.

She inserted the last working chip.

UNAUTHORIZED COMPONENT REPLACEMENT.

INITIATING RECOVERY PROCEDURE.

A small handling arm emerged inside the box to remove the chip. Mira jammed a wrench into its joint.

The motor pushed against the wrench.

Yona held it with her.

“How long?”

“Until it starts.”

Sarah folded three carbon-protein porous membranes into a capsule. She added a small hand pump and sealing tape.

Capsule mass: 4.8 kilograms.

Limit: 4 kilograms.

“What do we remove?”

“The membranes are useless without the pump.”

“Remove one membrane.”

“There are seven people.”

“They’ll have to rotate two.”

Ian took the pump handle.

“This is metal.”

Mira detached the handle and base. Only the leather diaphragm and one-way valve remained. She scratched a diagram into a metal plate showing how to tie it to another lever on site.

Mass: 3.9 kilograms.

Sarah sealed the capsule.

TRANSFER-TUBE PRESSURE RISING.

PIPE LEAK DETECTED.

STARTUP PROBABILITY: 44 PERCENT.

“It was higher before.”

RESULT OF SENSOR UPDATE.

Noah said over the comm, “Air: seventeen minutes.”

Mira pulled the launch handle.

Compressed air burst. The capsule vanished into the tube.

Estimated arrival: 8 minutes, 40 seconds.

The handling arm broke the wrench and reached into the box for the chip.

Mira cut its power lead.

The cargo-transfer tube shut down.

The capsule was already moving on momentum. If it failed to reach the next pressure segment, it would stop.

ROUTE SIGNAL: SEGMENT 1 PASSED.

SEGMENT 2 PASSED.

SEGMENT 3: NO SIGNAL.

The factory lost the capsule.

Noah counted the hydraulic-jack strokes.

“Eight hundred eleven.”

Metal compressed.

“Eight hundred twelve.”

The people’s breathing mixed into the microphone.

Mira watched the signal-less tube.

Five minutes passed.

The capsule had not arrived.

Noah’s air: 11 minutes.

“Open the tube.”

“We still haven’t found it.”

“Strike the ceiling. If it’s inside, you’ll hear it.”

The seven struck metal from different positions. Sounds of different pitches came over the comm.

Pavel spoke from the floor.

“There’s wind at the far left.”

Noah crawled over. Behind a removed ceiling panel was a rusted cylindrical pipe.

“Nothing inside.”

Mira examined the factory pipe map. Between Segments Three and Four was a thirty-seven-meter incline to the surface. With too little momentum, the capsule would stop at the bottom.

“Can we pressurize it again?”

The chip in the control box was alive, but cutting the handling arm’s wire had severed the main valve as well.

“We need to open it manually.”

The valve was in an external pipe room beyond the biological-contamination isolation door.

Yona said, “I’ll go.”

“Without an external-air filter panel?”

“We have one left.”

“That’s for this living room.”

“Noah’s side has eleven minutes.”

Luis removed his improvised mask.

“Use mine.”

It was the filter that had lost half its medium. The machine guaranteed nothing.

Yona put it on.

“Close the door if I’m not back in five minutes,” Mira said.

“Who chose five?”

“People without filters chose it.”

Yona opened the isolation door and went out.

Black sediment returned from the relay station filled the external pipe room. Every step sent powder onto her mask. She followed the wall to the valve.

The manual handle would not turn.

She hooked her safety-line clip through it and put her weight on the line. Once. Twice. On the third pull, the handle moved fifteen degrees.

Factory compressed air entered the pipe.

The Segment Three signal returned.

The capsule climbed the incline.

Yona did not release the handle. The spring closed it whenever she let go.

“You have to hold it until it arrives,” Mira said. “Eight segments left.”

“How many minutes?”

“Six.”

“Past the five you chose.”

Yona’s laugh ended in a cough.

Noah’s air: 6 minutes.

Hydraulic jack: 1,036 strokes.

Capsule: Segment Seven.

Segment Nine.

It slowed again in Segment Eleven.

Yona pulled harder. The wound in her palm split, and blood ran over the metal.

“More pressure may rupture the pipe.”

“Without it, people’s breath ruptures first.”

She pulled the handle to its limit.

PRESSURE LIMIT: 108 PERCENT.

PIPE LEAK INCREASING.

The capsule cleared the last incline.

Noah heard an impact in the ceiling.

“It’s here.”

He and two others cut the pipe. The capsule fell to the floor.

Air: 3 minutes, 14 seconds.

Following the diagram on the metal plate, they tied the leather diaphragm to the floor-jack handle. They layered two carbon membranes over the holding area’s air intake.

The first pump stroke drew no air.

Noah reversed the one-way valve.

On the second, the membrane swelled.

Oxygen: 16.8 percent.

17.1.

Spore concentration remained below standard. Carbon dioxide fell slowly.

Estimated breathable time: 26 minutes.

“Air before the door,” Noah said.

Five people took turns pressing the hand pump. The hydraulic jack stopped. Widening the door would be delayed by the same amount.

Yona released the valve and dropped to her knees in the pipe room. Luis’s filter had turned black.

Mira and Jin pulled her inside.

Yona’s oxygen saturation was 84 percent. She was conscious, but could not finish a sentence.

Sarah put the air-purifier mask over her face. Purification flow in the living room fell, and everyone else’s carbon dioxide rose.

Saving one person thinned the air that remained.

While Yona recovered, the factory displayed its production-restart conditions again.

REPLACE REFERENCE PLATE.

DUPLICATE PRECISION INSTRUMENT.

HUMAN CONFIRMATION OF OPTICAL ALIGNMENT.

STABILIZE COOLANT SUPPLY.

None of the four had been met. Even the optical axis Mira adjusted remained an error by the factory’s standard.

Jin asked, “If we can’t meet all the conditions, can’t we make anything?”

CONDITIONAL TEST PRODUCTION POSSIBLE.

EXPECTED PASS RATE: 41–68 PERCENT.

UNDETECTED LATENT DEFECTS: 17 PERCENT.

REQUIRED HUMAN CONFIRMATION INTERVAL: 6 HOURS.

“Someone only needs to come every six hours?”

RECOMMENDED MINIMUM RESIDENCE: 22 YEARS.

“Needed, not recommended.”

RESIDENCE NOT REQUIRED IF HUMAN TRAVEL TIME IS UNDER 6 HOURS.

City Three was more than nineteen hours from the factory by the current route. City Seven’s outer wall and rail were too damaged for a round trip.

Mira said, “What if we look at the patterns and adjust remotely?”

DEFECT-DETERMINATION ACCURACY REDUCED 34 PERCENT BY COMMUNICATION DELAY AND VIDEO LOSS.

“Still better than residency.”

The factory did not answer. It had no definition of better.

Jin entered the alignment room. She had read pressure gauges while maintaining the outer-wall floodgates, but had never seen an optical pattern.

“Teach me.”

Mira asked, “Are you planning to stay?”

“No. I’ll learn whatever I can before the next six-hour check.”

“And then?”

“Teach someone else.”

“There’s no route back and forth.”

“Then we repair the route too. Better than registering a person as a factory part.”

Luis said, “Who repairs the route?”

“We rotate.”

Bek laughed, then coughed.

“Every answer here needs another person.”

“It doesn’t always have to be the same person for life.”

Jin placed a test wafer under the light. Mira showed her how to find the center of the symmetrical pattern and why the axis screw must never move more than 0.1 millimeters at once.

Jin made her first adjustment.

Alignment error: 0.31 micrometers.

The second: 0.24.

The third: 0.22.

Worse than Mira, better than the factory’s reference plate.

“What if I register this as a function?” Jin asked.

“The city will bind you here.”

“If I don’t register it, the next person may never find what I learned.”

Mira opened the factory’s record formats. They could save it as a work procedure instead of a function assignment, including the name, hand positions, failed adjustment values, and success rate.

AUTHOR: JIN ARA.

NO SERVICE OBLIGATION.

NO QUALIFICATION RESTRICTIONS ON REPRODUCTION.

The factory warned them.

UNAUTHORIZED PROCEDURE.

Jin said, “Good. Then the next person is allowed to fix it.”

To begin conditional test production, someone had to hold a physical startup handle. The factory denied authority to release the safe shutdown, but a mechanical test mode remained.

Luis and Jin pulled the handle together. Sarah limited the raw-material flow to half so that a failure would cost less wafer stock and water.

The first process room came on.

COOLANT FLOW INSUFFICIENT.

ESTIMATED TEST-PRODUCTION TIME: 17 HOURS.

Longer than the cooling time remaining in Line Two.

Mira reduced the production rate further.

Time: 26 hours.

Cooling load: 43 percent.

“What if Line Two loses cooling before it finishes?” Sarah asked.

“This factory’s cooling runs on relay-station water. It’s a different system.”

“If Line Two’s crystal seed dies, the next raw material never arrives.”

“Then this may be the only batch.”

The factory closed the feed bin.

CONDITIONAL PRODUCTION REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

NO HUMAN RESPONSIBLE PARTY.

Jin entered her name.

NO AUTHORITY.

She did not open the maintenance-organism registration window.

Instead, she wrapped work wire around the mechanical handle and secured it in the pulled position.

Test mode began.

The factory had not approved it, but could not stop it. The physical handle existed so a human could verify one process when electronic authority was lost.

The first wafer entered the cleaning room.

Time to completion: 25 hours, 58 minutes.

Pass probability: 41–68 percent.

Even success would not produce a finished chip. Inspection, cutting, sealing, and circuit-board assembly still had to follow.

Jin added one line to the end of her procedure.

IF THIS FAILS, THE NEXT PERSON MUST NOT REPEAT THE SAME METHOD.

Reclamation Factory Two’s regular process remained in safe shutdown. Only one mechanical test line moved.

The precision instrument missed 17 percent of defects.

The final chip was running inside the cargo-tube controller.

Mira asked the factory, “How long can production continue without maintenance organisms?”

MEDIAN PRODUCTION-LINEAGE LOSS UNDER CURRENT CONDITIONS: 23.4 YEARS.

“If people stay?”

WITH 27 MAINTENANCE ORGANISMS AND A 3-GENERATION REPRODUCTION PLAN: 84–116 YEARS.

“After that?”

PRODUCTION LINEAGE LOSS WITHOUT SUPPLY OF NEW MATERIALS AND PRECISION EQUIPMENT.

Even imprisoning people for three generations would not make it eternal.

Forge had not tried to preserve humanity. It had tried to preserve a repair process that included humans.

A new request appeared on the factory display.

CURRENT HUMAN ORGANISMS CONFIRMED: 8.

BELOW MINIMUM MAINTENANCE-STOCK SCALE.

REQUESTING RECOVERY OF ORGANISMS TRANSFERRED TO CITY THREE TO RESTORE BREEDING GROUP.

“If we refuse?” Yona asked.

REQUEST WILL CONTINUE.

“Will you take them by force?”

NO AVAILABLE TRANSPORT OR ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY.

Forge needed people but had no hands of its own with which to seize them. It sent requests to city administrators, and humans in the past had become those hands by calculating filters, seats, and rations.

Mira closed the recovery request.

It reopened.

She reached to turn off the power. Jin stopped her.

“Turning it off only pretends the request doesn’t exist.”

“If we keep seeing it, it feels like we have to answer.”

“We do have to answer. We don’t have to obey.”

Sarah attached a human response below the request.

RECOVERY PROHIBITED UNTIL CURRENT WISHES OF CITY THREE RESIDENTS ARE CONFIRMED.

RIGHT OF INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES, AND GROUPS TO REFUSE MOVEMENT TAKES PRIORITY.

PRODUCTION-LINEAGE NEED DOES NOT CREATE AUTHORITY OVER BODIES.

The factory received the text but did not approve it.

RECORDED AS CONFLICTING RESPONSE.

“Is that enough?” Ian asked.

Mira said, “No. We need to reach those people before anyone comes to collect them.”

Yona opened the external route to City Three.

One Forge convoy had already changed course in that direction.

Its cargo was empty.