At home, he unfolded the new schedule beside Emma's school calendar. Her class had a Saturday visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, and he had already agreed to go as one of the parent volunteers. The museum was not a grand obligation by the standards of the people who ran Meridian, but it was exactly the kind of ordinary promise that had shaped his decision to leave Hartley. He sat at the kitchen table longer than necessary, staring at the conflicting dates even after Peter had promised to solve the problem.
Emma came in carrying her toothbrush. "Are you mad?" she asked. Marcus looked up quickly. "No, honey. Just figuring something out with work."
She glanced at the schedule. "You still get to come to the museum?" Marcus wanted to answer before thinking, to reassure her with confidence he did not yet possess. Instead, he told her that he had been assigned hours he had not agreed to and was working with his supervisor to correct the mistake.
"So you don't know?" Emma asked. "I know I promised you," Marcus said. "And I haven't agreed to change that promise."
We'll solve the work part tomorrow. Emma nodded, though the worry in her face remained. Marcus watched her leave the room and wondered how much of his daughter's childhood had already been spent calculating whether adults meant what they said.
He was at Peter's office early the next morning. Peter had obtained an amended schedule before Marcus arrived, but the experience left them talking about staffing rather than a single clerical mistake. The maintenance team was running lean, and management had treated irregular overtime as a natural substitute for hiring enough people. Peter admitted that he had been covering additional shifts himself and that the arrangement was making him less careful, not more dedicated.
"We spend our days talking about systems having redundancy," Marcus said. "But the people running them don't get any. One person has a sick child or someone misses a train and the whole plan starts falling apart." Peter laughed without humor.
"There's a budget meeting next week. You should hear the way people talk about head count. They make the missing technician sound like a line of waste we're being clever enough to avoid."
Marcus did not expect to attend that budget meeting, and he did not ask to. He gathered his notes on the sensor incidents and returned to the workbench, where Leila had left a controller training unit for him to practice on. He spent most of the day repeating a simple configuration task until his hands and eyes found the sequence naturally. In the afternoon he made a mistake, entered the wrong parameter, and watched the training unit behave in an unexpected way.