Chapter 5: Cascade Failure

Chapter 5: Cascade Failure

The chaos didn’t erupt; it seeped. It began as a low-grade hum of anxiety in Bay 7 and, over the course of three weeks, metastasized into a full-blown panic that infected the entire facility.

The golden goose was sick. Without Alex, the CMM had become a temperamental beast. The operator who replaced him, a nervous man named Dave with twenty years of experience on lesser machines, couldn’t tame it. The machine, which had danced for Alex, now stuttered and stalled. Probes misaligned, calibration routines failed, and error codes, once a rarity, now filled the screen in a constant, mocking stream of red text.

Freddy Vance stood beside the silent machine, his expensive suit looking wilted under the harsh factory lights. His face, usually a mask of smug superiority, was slick with a desperate sweat. “What do you mean, ‘incompatible thermal coefficient’?” he snarled at Dave, who flinched.

“I-I don’t know, sir,” Dave stammered, wringing his oily hands. “It’s what the manual says. Thorne… Alex used to have these custom macros he wrote. I think he built a compensation algorithm. But they’re gone. Everything is gone.”

“Then fix it!” Freddy roared, his voice echoing in the cavernous bay.

“I can’t! I don’t know how!”

The silence that followed was heavier than the multi-ton rotor sitting uselessly on the CMM’s cradle. Production hadn’t just slowed; it had ground to a complete halt. Three rotors, each worth millions, were parked in the bay like beached whales, waiting for the final measurements that would clear them for shipping. Two more were stuck in earlier stages, creating a catastrophic bottleneck. The rhythmic heartbeat of the factory had flatlined.

Freddy’s phone buzzed for the tenth time that hour. It was a client from a major energy consortium in South America. He silenced it again, his thumb jabbing the screen. The contractual penalties for late delivery had already crossed the seven-figure mark and were climbing by a hundred thousand dollars a day.

His office door burst open. It wasn’t a technician, but a sharp-faced woman in a severe grey pantsuit. Clara, from accounting. She was one of the few people in the building who didn’t seem afraid of him. She slapped a tablet down on his desk, her expression grim.

“This is the third wire transfer to cover penalty clauses this month, Freddy,” she said, her voice clipped and cold. “Another one this size and Corporate is going to send auditors. What is going on in Bay 7?”

“It’s a technical issue,” Freddy snapped, straightening his tie. “We’re handling it.”

“Are you?” Clara’s eyes were like ice chips. “Because the logs show that our equipment failure rate went up by nine hundred percent the day after Alex Thorne was terminated. And our output went to zero. The numbers don’t look ‘technical,’ Freddy. They look personal.” She turned and left without another word, leaving the tablet glowing with damning figures.

---

Miles away, in the quiet, sunlit workshop of a small aerospace firm, Alex Thorne gently lowered a loupe from his eye. On the felt mat before him lay the intricate guts of a vintage 1960s mechanical watch. Tiny gears and springs were arranged in a pattern of perfect, logical order. The work was complex, demanding absolute precision. It was calming. It was everything his old job was supposed to be.

He had started here a week after his ‘resignation,’ at a thirty percent pay increase. They valued his skills, his meticulous nature. They saw his System-enhanced perfectionism not as a threat, but as an asset.

His phone buzzed softly on the workbench. It was a message from an encrypted number.

[C]: It’s a bloodbath. They tried to bring in an external contractor to fix the CMM. He lasted six hours and billed them twenty grand for a report that said, ‘Hire back the guy you fired.’ Vance is living on antacids. The penalty clauses are over two million now.

Alex felt a cold, clean satisfaction. It wasn’t just vengeance; it was the inevitable, logical outcome. The restoration of order. He typed back a simple reply.

[A]: Thank you for the update. Stay safe.

[C]: They deserve what’s coming. We all knew what you were doing, and what Iggy was. You were the only one who had the guts to do something.

He put the phone down, his focus returning to the delicate escapement wheel of the watch. Antonio’s words echoed in his memory: “You need to learn to fight a different kind of war.” He had. He had used their own rules, their own system, and let them tear themselves apart.

---

The ‘Kill Squad’ did not arrive with sirens. They came in a black sedan that was as sleek and merciless as a shark. A man and a woman, both in perfectly tailored dark suits, stepped out and walked into the facility’s main office with an air of authority that made Freddy Vance look like a regional sales rep.

They weren’t auditors. The woman, who introduced herself as Ms. Devereaux, had the dead-eyed stare of a prosecutor. The man, Mr. Chen, was silent, his gaze sweeping every corner of the room, missing nothing. They didn’t ask for Freddy’s story. They came with their own.

“Mr. Vance,” Devereaux began, her voice calm and lethally sharp, sitting opposite him in his own office. “Our internal analytics flagged this facility for a catastrophic drop in productivity three weeks ago. It also flagged your department for abnormal parts-replacement expenditures going back six months, specifically in components signed for by an Igor Volkov.”

Freddy’s blood ran cold. This was no longer about a broken machine.

“We are here,” she continued, folding her hands on the table, “to investigate the complete operational failure of this facility and its correlation with the dismissal of Quality Control Technician Alex Thorne.”

Freddy began to bluster, a torrent of practiced corporate excuses about insubordination, difficult employees, and personnel issues. Devereaux let him talk, her expression unchanging. When he finally wound down, she slid a single sheet of paper across the table.

It was a copy of Alex’s termination letter. The one he had forced Alex to sign.

“Mr. Thorne followed shutdown protocol to the letter, as per corporate policy 7.4.2,” she stated. “Data wipe, transfer of active files to a secured archive. All standard. Except the archive his files were transferred to requires Level 4 security clearance to access. Clearance you, Mr. Vance, do not have. It seems Mr. Thorne was significantly more familiar with company policy than his department head.”

The unspoken accusation hung in the air: You were so arrogant, you didn’t even know the rules of your own game.

The disaster had officially climbed the corporate ladder and landed squarely in this room. The hunters had arrived.

That evening, as Alex was cleaning his tools, his personal phone rang. It was a number he didn’t recognize, with a corporate headquarters prefix. He let it ring twice, then answered, his voice perfectly level.

“This is Alex Thorne.”

The voice on the other end was female, professional, and devoid of warmth. It was the voice of command.

“Mr. Thorne, my name is Evelyn Devereaux. I’m with the Corporate Oversight and Investigations Division. I’m currently at the Westland facility, and I believe you have information that is critical to our inquiry.” There was a brief pause. “We would like to hear your side of the story.”

Alex looked out the window of his quiet workshop at the setting sun. The final piece was moving into place. The System, which had been dormant, flashed a single, bright green notification in his vision.

[Quest Updated: The Corporate Takedown] [New Objective: Present the Evidence.]

A thin, cold smile touched Alex’s lips.

“I’d be happy to cooperate,” he said. “When and where?”