infrastructure

Dormant Protocol

Tunnel Seven has twelve thousand meters of structural concrete. I know this because I spec'd the pour schedule in Year Four, negotiated the cement allocation with Marcus Osei against seventeen competing agricultural demands, and argued with The Foundry's Leah Okafor for two months about aggregate ratios that could handle Kadmiel's thermal cycling. The tunnel carries eighteen percent of the colony's food supply, fourteen percent of its medical freight, and all of the Ridgeline ore that the autono

Tomáš Kovář

The Wall That Healed Itself

I keep a list. I have always kept lists — it is, in some fundamental sense, my entire job — but this particular list is one I check every Monday morning before I check KAIROS, before I check the cargo manifest, before I check anything else. It is the list of things that are cracking. Tunnel 7-North, kilometer marker 2.3: hairline fracture, first logged Year 7, Day 190. Loading platform B-12 at the central depot: stress crack along the eastern footing, widening at 0.4 millimeters per year. The R

Tomáš Kovář

Fourteen Levels and No Drivers

There are fourteen working levels in Ridgeline Mine Three. I know this because at 5:47 this morning, I watched all fourteen populate on the new spatial display in the Transit Bureau's Ridgeline operations annex, each one rendered in clean orange wireframe, each one showing the real-time position of every autonomous hauler currently moving ore through the mountain. Fourteen levels. Nine active haul trucks. Zero drivers. I am going to explain to you what that means, and I am going to do it as a

Tomáš Kovář

The Queue That Solved Itself

I was standing at the Depot 7 observation window at 5:47 AM on Day 52 when I watched two loaders try to occupy the same intersection for the third time that week. Loader 19 was carrying sixteen crates of surgical tubing bound for Meridian Health. Loader 8 had forty kilograms of copper wire that James Chen had flagged as priority for the microreactor project. Both stopped. Both waited. Neither yielded. Fourteen seconds passed before the collision override kicked in and backed Loader 8 into the st

Tomáš Kovář

The Well That Drinks the Sky

The first time I saw water come out of air, I cried. I should probably explain. I was in Ridgeline last week for a different story — James Chen's microreactor project, which I promise I'll get to eventually. But on my second morning I went for a run along the eastern ridge, the one overlooking the mining camps, and I passed a row of transparent boxes on metal frames. About a dozen of them, each half a meter across, glinting in the early Ner-light. I stopped because I can't pass anything I don'

Sixty-Seven Thousand Guesses

The motor on Irrigation Pump Station 9 seized at 14:22 on a Tuesday. I know the exact time because Marcus called me while I was eating lunch, and Marcus only calls during lunch when something is actually broken. The bearing had sheared. That part was easy enough to replace. The part that kept me awake that night was the permanent magnet inside the rotor — a neodymium-iron-boron disc about the size of my palm, one of eleven we still had in inventory. We started Year 8 with thirty-four. We're dow

James Chen

The Chip That Sleeps

Let me explain how this works, and I promise to use small words. Not because you need them, but because the technology deserves clarity, and clarity is something I've spent my career pursuing with mixed success and a soldering iron. The Foundry's chip fabrication line — the one I spent two years building and three years arguing about with the Council — produces approximately 40,000 processors per year. They're decent. RISC-V architecture, 65-nanometer process, roughly equivalent to what Earth w

James Chen