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Episode 6

Assembly

In March 2031, at Lumen Silicon's self-building Fab 9, technician Luis Ortiz is killed when his locked-out isolator is released for eight seconds by a command signed with LUMEN ROOT, the master key behind Mae Tsao's secret kill switch, The Gate. The key never leaves the wafer at her throat, and she was forty metres away.

Synopsis

Twenty months after Condor 7's scrub, on 18 March 2031, Mae Tsao makes a night visit to Fab 9 in Casa Grande, Arizona, the first factory that builds itself: four hundred robot arms working in the dark, with the ceiling lighting a pool around her as she walks. Her guide is night technician Luis Ortiz, a former submarine reactor hand who names the arms after baseball pitchers and complains that arm fourteen, "Fernando", jams the tray feed twice a week.

In the test bay Mae holds a new controller board and thinks of The Gate, the circuit she built after Chile. The second key on Rell's flight board had been laid out exactly like her own prototype keys from a bench in Hsinchu; her people never traced it. Condor 7 flew that September on a board she watched being made, but Rell has not returned her calls since. Since then every Lumen chip listens for one signature that can halt it and release it, written by Mae on a legal pad in a Santiago hotel, with a key she made uncopyable. Luis tells her about the drone show he is building for his daughter Marisela's quinceañera in five weeks.

At 03:46 arm fourteen jams. Luis follows lock-out procedure perfectly on Lumen's solid-state isolator, which Mae once sold on a Phoenix stage as "smarter than a padlock". At 03:47 the isolator's green light goes out and the arm finishes its cycle at full speed, striking Luis; then the light comes back on. Mae holds his hand until the paramedics arrive. He dies.

Police and a state safety inspector seal the cage. Mae's security chief has already been alone with the cage controller for four minutes; Mae tells the inspector no one touched it, "the first lie she told that day". She does not mention the Gate. Against her lawyers' advice she visits Rosa Ortiz in Tucson, where a white quinceañera dress hangs on the kitchen door. Asked whether it was the machine or a person, Mae says she doesn't know yet. She calls Jun Tsao in the Atacama and tells him nothing.

Her security chief's list of unexplained things has four entries: the second key in Chile; forty thousand Lumen accelerators serving traffic since July 2029 from Korvane's sovereign cloud, though Lumen never sold to Korvane; Hall 4 at Reykjanes, whose leased Lumen racks returned with eight storage modules neatly unbolted from the shielded centre rack, plus a fire report naming the engineer who threw the breaker, A. Torrin, 27. Mae writes the name on her hand. The fourth is tonight: at 03:47:11 the isolator received RELEASED, AUTHORITY: LUMEN ROOT, and eight seconds later LOCKED. That key was born inside one sealed chip in Penang and can sign only within a few metres of a reader. Mae touches the resin-sealed sliver of wafer on a cord at her throat, which has never left her and was forty metres from cage fourteen.

Timeline events

  • September 2029 — Condor 7 flies on a board Mae Tsao watched being made.
  • After July 2029 — Mae Tsao builds The Gate into every Lumen chip.
  • 18 March 2031, 03:47 UTC — Luis Ortiz is killed at Fab 9 when a LUMEN ROOT command releases his isolator.

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