Seventeen minutes. Not a coincidence. Lin shuffled through the plant’s maintenance calendar and found the culprit: at 2:30 a.m., the HVAC system ran a self-calibration that pinged the building network, flooding the switch with traffic. The timing matched the switch hiccups. The A910 was not a dead wire; it was being drowned out by noise.

The factory hummed like a living thing—motors whispering, conveyors breathing, and the faint, patient tick of a clock that kept everyone honest. Lin, the night-shift technician, liked to think of it as orchestral: every servo a violin, each sensor a cymbal. Tonight, however, a sour note cut through the music: a steady orange lamp on Panel H, and the display reading A910.

The line had to run by dawn—the order queue would bankrupt them if a whole pallet station stayed down. Lin pulled on gloves and walked the cable runs. Connectors were snug, then fretted; the patch panel showed no obvious damage. She reseated a plug, and the A910 flickered into a new annoyance—A102, then vanished. Progress.