day 7 of 30

That she was working in a reincarnation of her old manufacturing plant, and aware that it could be destroyed as quickly and “accidentally” as was the former one, simply due to business-political mischief; and that she herself lived on the edge of death from the implants because of the same bunch of power-crazed mischief makers, had become a tough but tolerable environmental set of factors for Idealiana, as she continued to merge back into the role of manager. They finally had produced a set of new prototypes that had passed the test at the Ecuador Andes facility, and had made a test run around the Carousel to GEO and back without trouble. It was a Go for a manufacturing run.

Her application of the Holovision Presence monitoring system was multiplying her effectiveness on the job almost by the minute, and the temptation was great to allow it to be used at other 3Musketeers Political Corporation facilities; yet her agreement with Rationallo was that she could innovate without limit here, but it must not result in patents nor spread beyond the facility. She signed with sadness and frustration about that; yet she knew that innovation was really illegal under the regime of the Tanfl political corporation, which had taken over the country as with a military battle assault using civilian techniques instead of guns and tanks; yet it was an accomplished fate, and she and the others were stuck with the situation. It wa only through some minor miracles that even she could use innovation now, and that only because of some unmentioned switch in Tanfl policy toward 3Musketeers Space Escalator Carousel project.

She went into the tiny cubicle where the HolovisionPresence device was installed, and turned it on. Her self-awareness expanded out to the edges of the cubicle, then the office beyond, then out into the manufacturing plant facilities, like the clearing of fog that had enveloped a city. She focused attention into the final test station of the “3 mm sliding armature segments” that were the primary product here. A group of 15 armatures moved in a fitted bunch through an opening of the shape of the perfect group; if any one of the segments was too big it would shove outward through the group of segments to collide with the opening somewhere, and the whole group would be sent to the re-inspection station, to find the defective one. She focused on one such reject: entering its presence, she found that spall fragments had pressure welded into its side; flowing back in time of that armature segment, she saw the collision that had spalled the armature, and where the other fragments went to. Chasing them all down, she activated dropouts for all those armature segments, and put in a request for burnishing of the fixture at one of the armature assembly stations, to prevent further spallings and subsequent failures. The space escalator Carousel had its own high velocity inspector for each of the armature segments as they passed through the accelerator at the ground terminal, but she would rather catch the defective units here.