That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It lifted its head.
He wrote the time in the notebook, because he wrote everything in the notebook, and his handwriting was terrible.
[Status: Cannot stand. Cannot move independently. Cannot engage.]
Then he looked at the clock, and at the incubator, and at his own hands.
It was 0747. He had been awake for twenty-six hours. He had a mandatory class at 1100.
And the moment he stopped moving the card, the shell would settle to a flat 36.4 and hold there, perfectly, forever, and the line would go back to the direction it had been going for sixty-three days.
I can’t do this every eighteen minutes for the rest of my life.
____
The campus supply service opened at 0800 and delivered to dormitory blocks twice a day, which was the only reason any of this was possible.
Jin placed the order with one hand while running a heat phase with the other.
[CAMPUS SUPPLY — ORDER CONFIRMED]
[Adjustable micro-fan, 40mm, variable speed — 85 Cr]
[Thermal control module, single element — 60 Cr]
[Interval timer, programmable — 35 Cr]
[Basic controller board — 40 Cr]
[Wiring set, connectors, mounting hardware — 20 Cr]
[TOTAL: 240 Cr]
[Delivery: 0930]
[Personal Savings: 140 Credits]
He looked at that number for slightly longer than he needed to.
Eighteen hundred yesterday. Twelve hundred owed. Two hundred and forty this morning.
It was, by any reasonable measure, the worst sequence of financial decisions he had ever made. He had gone from two thousand one hundred and eighty Credits to one hundred and forty in two days, and every one of those Credits had gone toward an egg that four professionals had assessed as finished, on a diagnosis nobody had checked.
And it lifted its head.
He went back to waving cardboard.
The parts arrived at 0934 in a plastic tray and Jin discovered, over the following four hours, that he was not an engineer.
He could read instructions. He could follow a wiring diagram. He could reason from what the embryo was doing.
What he could not do was anticipate anything.
Attempt one took ninety minutes and produced a system that worked exactly as designed and was wrong.
He had mounted the fan on the opposite side of the case from the heating element, which was tidy and symmetrical and meant that air crossed the egg in a straight line from one side to the other.
The scan showed him the result in about forty seconds.
[Shell temperature: uneven]
[Differential across surface: 1.4°]
One side of the egg was measurably hotter than the other. The fan was pushing warm air off the element straight across and out, and the far face was getting cooked while the near face cooled.
It’s not a wind tunnel. It doesn’t need a direction, it needs circulation.
He tore it down and used the packing card again, this time cut into a curved baffle that sat between the fan and the egg, so the air came off it and went around the case interior instead of at the shell.
Attempt two was better and too strong.
Even on its second-lowest setting, the fan dropped the shell 1.1 degrees in the first thirty seconds of the air phase, which was well past the 0.6-per-minute line Jin had established at two in the morning.
He turned it to the lowest setting. Still too fast.
He ended up running the fan in short bursts, four seconds on and six off, throttled by the interval timer, which was an inelegant solution he arrived at only after trying three elegant ones.
Attempt three worked, and then stopped working.
The timer held the eleven-three-four rhythm perfectly through the first cycle. On the second it ran the heat phase for eleven minutes and eight seconds. On the fourth, it reached eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds. By the seventh, the heat phase lasted eleven minutes and forty-eight seconds, and because the total program stayed at eighteen minutes, every extra second of heat came directly out of the air phase.
Jin caught it because he was scanning the embryo every cycle, which was the only reason he caught anything.
The readings never told him about the timer. Appraisal read a bird. It said the chest pocket was hotter than it should be at that point in the cycle, and Jin had to work backward from the imbalance to an eight-second-per-cycle drift in a thirty-five-Credit component.
The scanner tells me it’s sick. It doesn’t tell me the machine’s lying.
He went back to manual for an hour while he reworked the timing, and by then it was past 1400 and he had been awake for thirty-two hours and had missed the class entirely.
He checked. The class was at 1100 tomorrow, not today.
He had been running on a schedule assembled at four in the morning by a person who had also spent that morning waving cardboard.
Glitch spent the whole afternoon involved.
Not helpfully. He inspected every single component as it came out of the tray, nose first, and had to be moved twice, and at one point stood with a forefoot on the wiring set for four minutes while Jin looked for the wiring set.
But the suspicion was completely gone. There was no circling now, no low sound, none of the territorial stiffness from the first night. When Jin lifted the egg out of the case to fit the baffle, Glitch came and stood at the edge of the desk and watched the whole operation with an intensity that Jin found slightly unnerving, and did not try to touch it.
He had decided something about the egg. Jin could not tell what, exactly, and the bond gave him only a steady, low, attentive weight whenever Glitch’s attention went that way.
He’s counting it. Whatever’s in there is one of ours now and he’s counting it.
The final system was ugly.
The fan sat in a bracket cut from the ration tin lid, angled at a card baffle held on with two loops of wire. The controller board was zip-tied to the outside of the case because it did not fit inside. The thermal module ran the element to 38.1 and cut, mostly, and the timer ran the sequence and drifted.
It worked.
Jin ran it under observation for seven cycles and got the shape he wanted each time, though the timer added roughly eight seconds to every successive heat phase and stole those seconds from the airflow. After ten cycles the rhythm would be meaningfully wrong; after twelve, it would be doing harm.
Three hours. Three and a half if I want to be optimistic, which I don’t.
He wrote the recalibration procedure in the notebook in block capitals, mostly for himself at four in the morning.
[Vitality: 13% — stable]
[Terminal maturation: NOT INITIATED]
Holding since dawn, and still holding.
Class was at 1100 the following day and he could not skip it.
Fourth Class had a mandatory attendance floor and he had spent four months building a record whose entire value was that it was boring and consistent, and losing a compulsory theory session eleven days after his placement change was exactly the kind of thing a committee would notice.
He began a full manual cycle at 1010 to start the machine from a clean baseline. Then he calibrated it, scanned twice, watched one automatic cycle execute correctly, and scanned again before leaving.
Ninety minutes of class. Ten minutes each way.
One hour fifty. Inside the limit. Barely.
He crouched down in front of Glitch, who had already positioned himself between the desk and the door without being asked.
"You can’t fix it."
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