She didn't wait for permission. She didn't ask for a team. She sat cross-legged on the concrete floor beside the SD9 unit and went to work.
First, the firmware. She connected the laptop to the SD9's control board through a diagnostic port on the side panel. Nathan stood beside her, pulling up the firmware interface. She navigated to the drive frequency parameter, scrolled past 8 months of update logs, and found the line she was looking for: Drive oscillation frequency: 68 hertz. She changed it back to 62 hertz, saved, and rebooted the controller. The machine hummed—a lower pitch now, steadier, the way it was designed to sound. Brent Calloway watched from 6 feet away; he said nothing.
Second, the grease. Ivory unbolted the lubrication access panel and drained the old grease into a waste tray. It came out thick and sluggish: pale, heavy, wrong. She wiped the internal channels with a lint-free cloth, working her fingers into the tight spaces around the flex spline housing where residue liked to hide. Then she opened the tube of NLGI grade one she'd brought from home and repacked the harmonic drive by hand: slow, precise, the right amount in the right places. Not too much, because over-greasing a harmonic drive creates its own set of problems.
The smell changed. The old grease had a burnt, stale odor—the smell of friction and heat doing damage over months. The fresh grease smelled clean, sharp, like the machine was breathing again.
Third, the alignment. This was the part that required patience. Ivory loosened the four base plate anchor bolts—not all the way, just enough to allow micro-adjustment. She retrieved the factory's own laser alignment tool from the QA cabinet, not the contractor's expired unit: the in-house tool with a current NIST-traceable calibration sticker dated 3 months prior.
She positioned the laser, checked the reference plane, and then began tapping the base plate with a dead blow mallet: small, controlled strikes, each one moving the plate fractions of a millimeter. Between each strike, she checked the dial indicator mounted on the arm's spindle housing.
Tap, check. Tap, check.
The room was silent except for the soft thud of rubber on steel and the faint click of the dial indicator needle settling into position: 0.4 millimeters off... 0.3... 0.2... 0.1... She stopped at 0.05, well within tolerance.
She torqued the anchor bolts back down in a star pattern—the correct sequence to maintain even clamping pressure—and removed the alignment tools. She stood up, wiped her hands on a shop rag, and looked at the clock on the factory wall: 84 minutes. She'd given herself 90; she finished with six to spare.
Ivory set the rag on the workbench next to her open notebook and her empty backpack. She looked at Pemberton. "Run it."