Chapter 181: The Stupidest System Is the One Only One Person Can Fix

The fourth assignment glowed amber above the maintenance bay.

[TECHNICAL MAINTAINER]

Designated candidate: EVELYN WRIGHT.

Obligation: Maintain all World Tower code and magitech circuits indefi-nitely.

Evelyn tightened a screw without looking up. A strawberry lollipop occupied one side of her mouth.

“No.”

Lucian sighed from his seat on a metal ammunition crate. “Our rejection process is becoming very efficient.”

He opened his notebook. “I’ve budgeted a hundred thousand gold per month, a hundred dwarven assistants, and exclusive use of the first-floor foundry. You’d only take the temporary—”

“It’s not the money.” She took out the lollipop and pointed it at him. “The bus factor is one.”

“The what?”

“If I get hit by a bus in Seoul tomorrow, who fixes this thing? Or a monster bites my head off here. Same question.”

“We don’t have buses here.” “THAT ISN’T THE POINT.”

She turned to Vane, who was taking notes. “Who wrote this operating system?”

“A council of twenty-four chief engineers. They died approxi-mately nine thousand years ago.”

“I want a code review. I want every one of them in a room explaining why this garbage has no usable documentation.”

“They’re dead.” “Cowards.”

Unified System v3.0 offered its analysis.

[MAINTENANCE ARCHITECTURE]

Single expert: Fast repairs while expert remains available. Severe continuity risk if lost.

Rotating teams: Slower initial repairs. Knowledge retained beyond any one operator.

[EVELYN WRIGHT: STRATEGIC WEAPON]

Documentation. Physical damage: Low.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Long-term operational argument: ANNOYINGLY CORRECT.

“All roads lead to spending more money,” Lucian muttered.

Eleanor passed the doorway in her knight’s uniform. Seeing him with his head in his hands, she paused.

“Doing all right, Chairman?”

“My entire staff is optimizing me out of a job.”

Evelyn ignored them and spread her drawings across the forge’s stone anvil.

Replace the ancient circuits with standardized modules. Write a thousand-page operating and troubleshooting manual in lan-guage people actually spoke. Train dwarven smiths and appren-tice mages. Run an emergency drill at every station once a month.

Lucian pointed to the center of her diagram.

“One automated controller linked to the satellite would respond ten times faster. We could save most of the staffing bill.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever holds that controller gets to decide whether the whole continent keeps running.”

“I’d hold it.”

Evelyn looked at him.

Lucian waited for her objection. She kept looking.

He lowered his eyes to the diagram. “Right.”

Evelyn pulled out a small thermal printer. It spat out five plastic badges. She tossed one at his chest.

[WORLD TOWER INFRASTRUCTURE]

Lucian Vance.

TEMPORARY CONSULTANT.

Authority expires in thirty days.

Astra hurried over from her biscuit supply. “Can I have one?” Evelyn stuck a spare badge onto her pink jacket.

A crash rang out from the main conduit.

Thorbjorn and thirty dwarven smiths stood around an ancient pressure-release valve, shaking their heads.

“No mechanical isolation,” the master smith said. “Every control is magical. A short in the command circuit leaves this valve stuck while the basement fills with pressure.”

He hefted his hammer.

“We put in a black-steel manual breaker. Five tons. Ugly as sin. Takes three people on the wheel. But you can shut the line when every magical command has failed.”

Evelyn glanced at Lucian.

“A physical fallback. Slow. Hard work. Still works when the software doesn’t.”

She sat on the crate beside him and watched the forge for a moment.

“The worst code I saw back on Earth wasn’t code that crashed.” “What was it?”

“The stuff nobody in the company dared touch because exactly one person understood how it worked.”

Lucian looked up at the inverted pyramid on the main screen. The Supreme Guarantor slot was still suggesting his name.

An immortal genius keeping everything alive. An entire world afraid to touch the controls.

He was beginning to dislike the job description. Evelyn launched the first full comparative stress test. The results appeared side by side.

[MATCHED CONTINENTAL FAILURE SIMULATIONS]

Legacy Keystone model: 0.04% catastrophic failure. Distributed prototype: 8.71% catastrophic failure.

Results apply to the modeled stress scenarios, not an annual forecast.

Nobody spoke.

Eight point seven one. More than two hundred times the old model’s failure rate.

Lucian gripped the plastic badge pinned to his chest. “There,” he said.

He looked at Evelyn, Eleanor, and Astra. “That’s the problem.”

Freedom was expensive. At the moment, their version was also considerably more dangerous.