In February, Blackwood faced its first major reliability crisis since the Carrington incident.
Line six began producing a high-frequency vibration signature during load testing. The condition appeared only after extended runtime and disappeared whenever the system was shut down for inspection.
It was exactly the kind of fault that once would have sent everyone running for Ethan.
This time Noel called him and said, "We've got it contained. Katherine's here. Sam's pulling the trend history. Can you look when you're free?"
Ethan was in a supplier meeting.
He almost stood up anyway.
Then he stopped himself.
"Do you need me now?"
Noel considered.
"No."
"Then I finish this meeting. Call if the risk changes."
For two hours, line six's response team worked without him.
They identified a coupling issue caused by a vendor tolerance stack. Katherine verified the model. Sam found the earliest shift in the data. Noel isolated the component.
When Ethan arrived, the team was already implementing the correction.
He stood beside the machine and felt an emotion he did not expect.
Pride mixed with irrelevance.
It was exactly what he wanted.
Noel noticed his expression.
"You okay?"
"Apparently you don't need me."
"We need you to approve overtime."
"Get out of here."
Noel laughed.
Ethan signed the overtime anyway.
Later that week, he told Vanessa about the moment.
"I spent fifteen years being the guy who got called when nobody else could fix it. Turns out the best thing I can do now is make that less true."
Vanessa nodded.
"That's leadership."
Ethan gave her a look.
"Don't put it on a slide."
"No promises."
She did not put it on a slide.
The company also changed how it handled dissent.
Lydia Monroe introduced what employees jokingly called the ninety-second rule, named after Ethan's offer to show Vanessa the fault log.
The policy was not literally ninety seconds in every case. The principle was simple: before significant disciplinary action based on observable behavior, the responsible manager had to document the facts available, allow the employee to respond, and check relevant operational records when those records could reasonably change the interpretation.
Managers complained that the rule slowed discipline.
Lydia answered, "Correcting a bad termination is slower."
The policy prevented several mistakes within months.
One assembler was initially accused of leaving a station without approval. Badge and maintenance records showed she had responded to an emergency stop on an adjacent line.
A technician accused of failing to complete required checks produced a system log showing the checklist application had not saved his completed entries during a server outage.
A supervisor accused of favoritism was cleared when shift-assignment data contradicted the complaint.
The rule protected employees and managers because verification worked in both directions.
Ethan liked that.
He did not want Blackwood to replace a culture that automatically believed supervisors with one that automatically believed accusations against them.
Facts were the point.
In March, the board requested a workforce-culture survey.
Vanessa hated surveys because she believed they reduced human experience to percentages. Thomas Bell reminded her that dashboards had once been her favorite language.