And right now, XSTABL was dying.

XSTABL wasn’t just another program. It was the last ghost of her father’s life’s work—a proprietary stability engine he’d designed to keep failing infrastructure alive. Old bridges. Leaning towers. Aging nuclear coolant systems. XSTABL didn’t just predict failure; it negotiated with it, rerouting stresses, redistributing loads in real time through thousands of micro-sensors embedded in concrete and steel.

Then the connection died. The Verona Bridge sensors went silent. And somewhere in the dark, a few hundred tons of steel and concrete settled into a new, precarious peace.

Mira typed and watched the diagnostic crawl across the screen. Hex codes. Register dumps. Then a line that made her stop breathing: