Jonah nodded slowly.
"Still terrifying."
"Good. You were terrified and brought the plot anyway."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Don't get used to it."
Eleanor heard about the exchange before lunch.
She found Isaac near the secure work area reviewing another model.
"I heard you were publicly wrong."
"Historic day."
"How are you coping?"
"Barely."
She leaned against the doorframe.
"Jonah said you told him evidence doesn't owe you loyalty."
Isaac looked up.
"People repeat too much around here."
"That's a good line."
"It's not a line."
"That's why it's good."
She grew more serious.
"You know, this is what I worried about when I brought you back."
"That I'd be wrong?"
"That being right about OBSIDIAN-7 would become armor. That everyone would be so afraid of repeating Nexora's mistake that they'd stop challenging you."
Isaac closed the model window.
"I worried about that too."
"When?"
"When Adrian called about that benign oscillation and I wanted it to be the same failure again."
Eleanor nodded.
"So what fixes it?"
"Nothing fixes it permanently. You keep building opportunities for someone else to prove you wrong."
She smiled faintly.
"That sounds suspiciously like management."
"Don't insult me."
"Too late."
The incident made its way into the team's internal training material without Isaac's name. The example was deliberately ordinary: a senior reviewer used an over-conservative assumption, a junior analyst challenged it, the model changed, the decision changed, and no one's career had to be sacrificed for the room to become more accurate.
Isaac liked that version.
No hero.
No villain.
Just a system doing what it was supposed to do before the stakes became large enough to make people afraid.
On a Thursday afternoon near the end of summer, Isaac drove back from Houston with the windows down and the jazz station barely audible over road noise.
The light changed as he moved south, glass buildings and highway interchanges giving way to pasture, scrub, mesquite, and long stretches where the horizon widened enough to make cities feel temporary.
When he reached Harlow, the garage looked exactly as he had left it.
Paint curled from the bottom of the sign.
The south-facing window caught late-afternoon sun.
A customer had left an old Chevrolet near the fence with a note under the windshield wiper.
Raymond's F-150 sat near the open bay.
The truck had developed a new vibration at highway speed, and Raymond had dropped it off that morning with a message reading: YOU FIXED THE ENGINE. NOW FIX WHATEVER OLD AGE DID NEXT.
Isaac smiled.
He put his Houston bag inside the office, changed shirts, and slid under the truck.
The frame rails were dusty. One exhaust hanger had begun to crack. The driveshaft showed a worn carrier bearing.
Simple compared with orbital propulsion.
Not lesser.
He removed the bearing assembly and set it on the floor.
Across the road, Dale Hutchins walked to the fence.