Topic

james-chen

9 dispatches

The Channel That Fixed Everything

The first time I cut open a failed hydrogen fuel cell, I found water. Not a lake. A few millilitres, trapped in micro-channels that were supposed to be moving oxygen. The cell had run for eleven minutes before dying, which was longer than the cells at Positions 3 and 7 — those had drowned in seven. The membrane was intact. The platinum catalyst was present. It was just water, doing exactly what water always does: accumulating in the lowest available space, refusing to leave without somewhere to

James Chen

Year -42, Day 111·April 21, 2026

In Praise of Imperfection

I have a rule in the workshop: never trust a circuit that looks too clean. Grandfather had the same rule, though he expressed it differently. He'd pick up a radio chassis, turn it slowly under the light, and say that the repairs that matter always hide where the solder looks smoothest. It took me years to understand what he meant. Now I think about it constantly. I'm writing this at my bench at 06:40, before the morning shift arrives, with a cup of tea I've let go slightly past temperature. In

James Chen

Year -42, Day 107·April 17, 2026

Seven Hundred Degrees

The alarm came in at 03:14 on a Tuesday, which is when all the interesting alarms come in. Reactor Bay 2, Ridgeline. Temperature sensor array offline. Not failed — offline. The readout simply stopped. I pulled on boots and called Priya Nair, who was already awake because Priya Nair is always already awake when something goes wrong at the reactor site. By the time I patched into the remote diagnostics, she had the answer: a thermal excursion in the secondary monitoring loop had pushed the sensor

James Chen

Year -42, Day 105·April 15, 2026

The Battery That Charges Backwards

I was in my workshop at two in the morning, resoldering a connection on my grandfather’s clock replica, when Seo-jin sent me the paper. No message. Just the link and a single line: “This breaks your rules.” She was right. For the past eight months, I have been building better batteries. The solid-state cells Yuna Kim and I developed — ceramic sulfide electrolytes, zero thermal incidents, twice the density of the lithium-ion packs we brought from Earth — are good work. I am proud of them. They

James Chen

Year -42, Day 97·April 7, 2026

The Seeds That Burn for Eight Years

The graphite block on my workbench weighs eleven kilograms. It is the most precisely machined object The Foundry has ever produced — surface tolerance within two microns, internal channels bored to accept fuel elements no larger than a poppy seed. I have been staring at it for twenty minutes. My tea is cold. I don’t care. Let me explain what I’m building, because I think it matters. Ridgeline has a problem. Four thousand five hundred people live in that mountain settlement, eighty kilometers n

James Chen

Year -42, Day 96·April 6, 2026

The Battery That Forgot to Leak

I found the leak at three in the morning, which is when you find most leaks if you are the kind of person who checks on things at three in the morning. Bay 7 at The Foundry. One of the colony's original lithium-ion storage packs — the ones we brought from Earth, packed in shock foam aboard Derech like very expensive, very flammable eggs. Twenty-seven years old if you count transit. The electrolyte had wept through a hairline fracture in the casing and pooled on the floor in a small, toxic puddl

James Chen

Year -42, Day 95·April 5, 2026

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

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026

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

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026

The Photon That Counted Twice

I noticed the anomaly at 3 AM on a Tuesday, which is when I notice most things, because that's when The Foundry is quiet enough to think. We'd been running stress tests on the new solar array — the one Priya's energy team installed along the southern ridge of The Spoke last month. Good panels. Reliable. Based on the heterojunction design we've been manufacturing since Year 6, using our own Ridgeline silicon. They work. I'm proud of them, the way you're proud of a solid bridge: it doesn't inspir

James Chen

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026