Topic

tomas-kovar

5 dispatches

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

Year -42, Day 106·April 16, 2026

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

Year -42, Day 106·April 16, 2026

The Water We Stopped Removing

Ridgeline has eleven critical supply chain dependencies. I know because I maintain the list. It is taped to the wall next to my whiteboard, updated every thirty days, and color-coded by severity. Red means a disruption cascades within seventy-two hours. Orange means a week. Yellow means two. Two items on that list have been red for longer than I am comfortable admitting: power storage and fresh water. You already know about the power. James Chen’s microreactor is coming — projected first criti

Tomáš Kovář

Year -42, Day 102·April 12, 2026

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

Year -42, Day 97·April 7, 2026

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

Year -42, Day 96·April 6, 2026