A catch is a matter of timing. Each decelerator ring reaches for a pod at a computed instant; if the clocks across the chain agree, the mountain is handed down gentle as grain. If they disagree by even a little, the pod arrives fractionally outside its window — and a worker on the deck feels the malformed field as a wave of nausea, and a capsule that should have been there is, by a margin, not.
The Readings
| Symptom | Reading | Logged as |
|---|---|---|
| Inter-ring clock agreement | drifting — small, accumulating | ”Within tolerance — monitor” |
| Duplicated catch timestamps | present on the legacy local net | Noise |
| Pod arrival vs. predicted window | fractional misses, increasing | Equipment wear |
| Crew effect during mistimed cycles | vestibular disturbance, nausea | Unrelated |
None of it, on any single day, rises to a finding. That is the trap of it: every reading is within tolerance, and the sum of the readings is a chain that no longer quite knows what time it is. Delgado refuses to round it away.
After the Repair
The cover-up is exposed. The illegally transferred people are accounted for. The legacy control modules are flagged, the spoofed packets traced, the clocks corrected and re-synchronised across the chain. The corridor is made honest.
The baseline is re-run.
Human faults: fixed. Clocks: in agreement. And on one quiet instrument, the number is still wrong.
Not enough to have caused the accident. Enough to prove the accident exposed something rather than created it.
The cover-up happened around a real physical anomaly nobody yet understands. The corridor reopens at reduced throughput, under a transparent system, with everything explained — except the one line that won’t file. It is left, deliberately, on the record. ████████████