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
Year -42, Day 105·April 15, 2026