Arthur Pemberton removed his glasses and polished them with his tie, slowly—the gesture of a man containing something very large inside a very small space.
Ivory set the cloths down and walked to the base of the SD9 unit. She knelt and ran her hand along the mounting plate, the steel plate that bolted the entire robotic assembly to the factory floor.
"I need the unit powered on in diagnostic mode," she said, "and I need a laser alignment tool."
Nathan moved to the control panel. One of the engineers retrieved the alignment laser from the QA cabinet. Ivory set it up herself: positioning the emitter on the base plate, checking the reference plane, adjusting the beam until it projected a thin red line across the mounting surface. She read the measurement, then she read it again.
"The base plate is 0.4 millimeters off-axis, just outside the manufacturer's tolerance of 0.3." She stood up and faced the room. "This misalignment means the robotic arm has to compensate on every single pass. Micro-corrections, thousands of times per cycle. Each correction puts asymmetric stress on the harmonic drive—stress that falls on the teeth that are already weakened by resonant fatigue, already overheating from the wrong lubricant."
She closed her notebook.
"You don't have one problem. You have three. The resonance weakens the teeth. The grease accelerates the heat. The misalignment forces the arm to fight itself on every cycle. Any one of these alone might take a year to cause failure. Together, they created a cascade. Your machines didn't break; they were set up to break."
The room was perfectly still. Garrett Hollowell sat with his arms no longer crossed; his hands were flat on the table.
Ivory reached into her backpack one last time and pulled out her phone. She opened a photograph and handed the phone to Nathan, who connected it to the factory's overhead display screen. The image showed a calibration sticker on a laser alignment tool—the tool used by the outside contractor who had last certified the SD9 base plates.
The sticker showed the calibration expiration date: 14 months ago.