In front of the classified cleanroom doors, my manager was throwing an absolute fit, pointing a trembling finger right at my nose and screaming at me. I had missed his voice memo because I didn't have my phone on me. "Do you have a single brain cell in your head?! I sent you a message, and you dare to ignore me?!" I pointed at the red-lettered warning sign bolted to the wall: ABSOLUTELY NO COMMUNICATION DEVICES PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT. Then, I pointed to the young woman standing right next to him. It was the Plant Director's niece, Chloe, who was currently holding her iPhone up on a ring light, aggressively live-streaming the assembly line. "Manager, company policy strictly forbids phones in the cleanroom." The manager violently slapped my hand down. "Chloe is executing a corporate culture marketing campaign! Who the hell do you think you are to compare yourself to her? One of her videos gets tens of thousands of likes! What is a day of your manual labor worth?!" Chloe shoved her camera right into my face, her voice sickeningly sweet and dramatic. "Look at this, chat! This is exactly the kind of stubborn, rigid boomer that ruins companies. No wonder she'll be tightening screws for the rest of her miserable life." Desperate to kiss up to Chloe, the manager made a split-second decision. "Fine! Since you love the rules so much, you can go home and follow them all you want. Effective immediately, this facility no longer requires your services. You're fired." I unclipped my company ID badge and grabbed the notebook that was propping up the wobbly leg of the supervisor's desk. It was the only handwritten, master calibration log for the entire factory. As I sat down on the city bus heading home, a piercing, deafening alarm suddenly erupted from the massive, antique German CNC machine back at the plant—the machine that I was the only person in the state qualified to calibrate. "Get the hell out! If I ever see your face in this industrial park again, I'll call the cops!" A senior technician with ten years of seniority, fired on the spot for missing a text message. I didn't look back. The cleanroom was blindingly bright. Two massive, high-wattage ring lights were pointed directly at people's eyes. "Did you guys see that, chat?" Chloe squeaked into the microphone, pitching her voice up an octave. "She actually picked up that trash pile of scrap paper like it was some kind of treasure. Some people are just born to be garbage collectors, I swear." I stepped over the yellow hazard line. My steel-toed boots clicked heavily against the epoxy floor. As I walked past the German 5-axis CNC machining center, I stopped. The machine was humming, but the frequency was wrong. That machine had insanely strict voltage requirements. Right now, Chloe's live-streaming setup, her two massive ring lights, and two phone chargers were all plugged directly into the machine's dedicated, isolated power supply. That specific circuit was meant exclusively for micro-millimeter precision calibration. My right thumb twitched. I instinctively reached out to check the hydraulic pressure dial. "What the hell are you looking at?!" Manager Davis lunged forward, physically blocking the machine. "Trying to sabotage company property?! Evelyn, you are terminated! If you touch this machine one more time, I am calling the police and having you thrown in a cell!" "Good luck, Manager Davis." "GET OUT!" He shoved me hard in the shoulder. I used the momentum to turn around and walk straight toward the loading dock doors. Behind me, the low hum of the machine began to mix with the distinct, grinding sound of metal-on-metal gears. The lubrication supply was failing. To my trained ears, that sound was deafening. I walked out of the facility and down to the bus stop at the edge of the industrial park. A city bus, belching black exhaust, pulled up to the curb. I stepped on and tapped my transit card. The exact second the card reader beeped, a shrill, catastrophic siren erupted from the factory behind me. It was a Level 3 Critical Failure alarm. I sat down by the window. Through the glass, I saw the security guards sprint out of their booth. The workers inside the plant were running around in pure panic. The German CNC machine had completely shut down. Red warning strobes were flashing violently across the exterior walls of the factory. An abnormal shutdown meant the core spindle had automatically locked down. Besides the 16-digit hex code written in my notebook, absolutely no one on earth knew how to bypass that lock. The bus had barely driven a hundred yards. In the side mirror, a security golf cart came flying out of the gates. Manager Davis had the throttle pinned to the max, waving frantically at the bus driver, his mouth open in a desperate scream. The bus slammed on its brakes. I jerked forward in my seat. "STOP! STOP THE BUS!" Manager Davis violently pounded on the folding doors. The driver opened the doors. Davis charged up the steps and grabbed my arm. "Get off!" His face was completely twisted in rage. "You sabotaged the machine before you left, didn't you?! The machine is dead! You aren't going anywhere today!" Davis clamped his hand around my wrist and violently dragged me off the bus. His grip was brutal. He wasn't treating me like a human being. The bus driver took one look at Davis's gold "Manager" badge, quickly shut the doors, and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. It was shift change. A massive crowd of workers was bottlenecked at the factory gates. Even people from the neighboring factories were poking their heads out to watch the drama. "Search her bag!" Davis pointed at me, screaming at the security booth. The guards didn't move. Old Frank, the head of security, glanced at the crowd. "Manager Davis, searching an employee's personal belongings without a warrant is illegal." "I AM THE LAW AROUND HERE!" Davis kicked Old Frank hard in the shin. "That machine costs millions of dollars! If it's broken, are you going to pay for it?! She definitely stole a microchip or slashed a wire! If you don't search her, you're all fired!" Old Frank took a step back and fell silent. A few younger guards hesitantly stepped forward. "I'm sorry, Evelyn." I tightened my grip on the strap of my canvas tote bag. Before the guards could even reach me, Davis violently snatched the bag from my shoulder, ripped the zipper open, turned it upside down, and shook it violently over the pavement. Everything crashed onto the asphalt. My glass water bottle shattered. A half-empty pack of tissues scattered in the wind. Two pink, wrapped tampons landed right on top of the pile. A few wolf-whistles echoed from the crowd of male workers. The sound of hushed, mocking whispers drilled into my ears. I stared at my belongings on the ground, keeping my spine perfectly straight. "Well, well, what do we have here?" Chloe squeezed through the crowd, shoving her selfie stick right into my face. "Look at this, chat! This is what happens when you try to sabotage a company. Her bag is literally just full of garbage." She aimed the camera lens directly at the tampons on the ground. "Bringing this kind of gross, private stuff into a sterile cleanroom? So disgusting." The comments on her live stream were scrolling at lightning speed. Davis didn't find any stolen microchips or wire cutters. The only thing he saw was the notebook. It had landed splayed open on the wet asphalt. "Is this what you stole?!" Davis snatched the notebook off the ground and flipped through a few pages. "Looks like alien chicken-scratch." He couldn't understand a single word of it. But he noticed that I had been fiercely protecting it earlier. "Give it back," I said, holding out my hand. The sky had darkened ominously. Thunder rolled overhead, and the rain suddenly began pouring down in sheets. Davis raised his arm high. He violently chucked the notebook into a muddy puddle by the curb. He stepped directly onto it, grinding the sole of his leather dress shoe into the pages. Black mud soaked instantly into the paper. The fountain pen ink was completely destroyed by the rainwater. The meticulously recorded calibration data turned into a massive, illegible blur of black ink. "Garbage belongs in the garbage dump." Davis spat on the ground. The rain was coming down hard now. The crowd of onlookers retreated under the security awning. No one said a word. I crouched down. Rainwater blurred my eyelashes. My fingers dug into the wet, mushy pages. I picked it up and tried to wipe it with my sleeve. It only smeared the black ink further. "Stop wiping it." Davis opened an umbrella, holding it over Chloe, while his own shoulder got soaked in the rain. "Evelyn. The machine is flashing completely red. You are coming back inside to fix it right now. If you can't fix it, that's millions of dollars in damages. You couldn't afford to pay that off if you sold both your kidneys." I stopped wiping the book. I stood up straight. Rainwater dripped steadily from my chin. "I have already been terminated, Manager Davis." I stared him dead in the eye. "Since it's garbage, you can fix it yourself." I turned around. Behind me, the piercing shriek of the machine's alarm cut right through the torrential rain. His phone was violently vibrating in his pocket. It was the client, screaming for their order. "You ungrateful bitch!" Davis threw the umbrella aside and frantically waved at the guards. "Arrest her! Lock her in the security booth! Until that machine is fixed, nobody is leaving this property!" Two guards grabbed me by the arms. I didn't fight back. Even if he locked me in a cage, there wasn't a single person on this earth besides me who could fix that machine. The security booth had nothing but a cheap wooden desk and a folding chair. The roar of the rain pounding against the window was deafening. My uniform was completely soaked, clinging heavily to my back. I curled up in the folding chair, pressing my elbows into my knees, tightly clutching the dripping, mud-soaked notebook to my chest. When the 5-axis CNC center goes into a voltage-anomaly lockdown, if the system isn't bypassed and reset within twenty minutes, the hydraulic pressure system suffers a catastrophic overload. The machine being destroyed was the least of their problems. Clamped inside that machine was a three-million-dollar piece of aerospace-grade aluminum. The minute hand on the wall clock ticked forward. The door violently slammed open, hitting the wall with a loud crack. Davis burst into the room. His tie was ripped loose, and the collar of his dress shirt was soaked in nervous sweat. Behind him trailed a group of junior technicians who usually walked around with their noses in the air. Right now, they were all shrinking into themselves, staring intensely at their own shoes. "THE PASSWORD!" Davis slammed both hands brutally onto the wooden desk, making the metal thermos jump. "WHAT IS THE RESET PASSWORD FOR THAT STUPID PIECE OF JUNK?!" I hugged the notebook even tighter. "There is no password." It was a hardcoded, base-level logic bypass code. There was no simple "6-digit pin." "BULLSHIT!" Davis pointed a shaking finger at the technicians cowering behind him. "They tried everything! The system is hard-locked! It requires a master-level override command! You are the only person who has it!" The technicians shrank back even further. They were perfectly happy swapping out drill bits and refilling coolant, but the second it came to complex system calibration—the actual dirty, exhausting work—they ran faster than anyone else. "Chloe is still live-streaming!" Davis paced the tiny room in frantic circles, his wet shoes squeaking aggressively against the linoleum. "The machine won't stop screaming! It's so loud she can't even sing for her viewers! The client called asking why the background noise is a literal emergency siren! How the hell am I supposed to explain that?!" "That is the equipment overload warning." "In exactly ten minutes, the pressure valves are going to rupture." I looked up at him. "When that happens, it won't just be loud. People are going to die." The fat on Davis's face violently trembled. He yanked his phone out of his pocket, pulled up a video, and shoved the screen inches from my face. On the screen, a blonde, blue-eyed German executive was slamming his fist on a boardroom table, screaming in broken English about triggering the 3x penalty clause for breach of contract. Five million dollars. "Did you hear that?!" "Evelyn! If the company has to pay this fine, I am going to the cops and pressing charges against you for premeditated sabotage and destroying industrial infrastructure!" From the hallway outside, Chloe's voice echoed loudly. She was holding her phone high in the air. "Listen to this, chat! Do you hear how evil this woman is? She got fired, so she's trying to drag the entire factory down to hell with her! She's just jealous because I'm young and pretty, and because my uncle is the Plant Director!" She squeezed into the tiny security booth and latched onto Davis's arm. "Dave, stop wasting time talking to her. Just call the cops." Davis didn't say a word. If he called the cops, the first thing they would do is investigate the electrical load failure, and the entire blame would fall squarely, 100% on his shoulders. His eyes darted around the room before he suddenly bent over, bringing his face uncomfortably close to mine. "Evelyn. I'm going to give you one chance." "Director Vance is on his way right now." "You are going to walk out there, fix the machine, drop to your knees on Chloe's live stream, and publicly confess that you deliberately sabotaged the equipment." "If you do that, I won't press charges." He lowered his voice to a venomous whisper. "Otherwise, I will make sure you rot in federal prison for the rest of your life." A wave of stale cigarette breath hit my face. I glanced at Chloe, who was currently pouting her lips at her front-facing camera, and calmly wiped the muddy water from my notebook onto my sleeve. "Sure." I looked directly at Davis. "Then we'll wait for Director Vance to get here." Before the words even finished leaving my mouth. BOOM! A deafening, explosive boom detonated from the direction of the cleanroom. The glass windows of the security booth rattled violently. Davis's legs instantly gave out. He collapsed hard onto the floor. The technicians behind him turned the color of wet cement. The pressure valve had ruptured. Davis scrambled up from the floor like he had been electrocuted. "Did... did it explode?!" He stumbled backward, trembling uncontrollably. I glanced out the window at the thick plume of white steam billowing out of the factory roof. "Not yet. That was the primary release valve. There's still a secondary backup." Davis lunged forward, grabbing me by the collar of my uniform, his knuckles digging painfully into my throat. "FIX IT! IF YOU WANT TO DIE, DON'T DRAG ME DOWN WITH YOU!" He violently hauled me out of the booth. I stumbled after him, struggling to keep my balance. The cleanroom was completely engulfed in blinding white steam. The air was thick and suffocating with the acrid stench of atomized hydraulic fluid. Chloe had retreated to the far wall by the main breaker box, her phone still held high in the air. Seeing me get dragged in, she instantly shoved the camera lens toward me. "Chat! We caught the terrorist!" She pointed dramatically at the hissing, screaming machine. "Look! This is all her fault!" Davis violently shoved me toward the main control console. "Do it! Now! Director Vance is going to be here any second! If he walks in and this machine isn't fixed, I will literally kill you!" The massive steel loading dock doors began to roll upward. A black Audi A6 came tearing into the warehouse, slamming on the brakes, the tires shrieking as they left thick black skid marks on the polished epoxy floor. The driver's side door flew open, and Robert Vance, the Plant Director, vaulted out of the car. He slipped on the wet floor and nearly face-planted onto the concrete. His white dress shirt was completely soaked by the rain, clinging tightly to his stomach. Several Chief Engineers sprinted in right behind him. "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!" Vance's roar completely overpowered the shrieking alarms. He stared in absolute horror at the machine, which was now flashing blood-red emergency strobes, his eyes bulging out of his skull. "Uncle Robert!" Chloe threw herself at him, tears streaming down her face with perfect, dramatic timing. "I was so scared! It's all Evelyn's fault!" She pointed a vicious finger at me. "She was mad that she got fired, so she sabotaged the machine! She almost blew me up! Look at my dress, it's ruined!" Davis wiped the rain and sweat off his face and scurried over to Vance. "Director! I tried everything! Evelyn holds a grudge against the company, refused to run the maintenance protocols, and actively tried to destroy the facility!" Vance was panting heavily. His furious gaze swept over the screaming machine, over Chloe, over Davis. And finally, it locked onto the dedicated, isolated power supply outlet on the wall. Plugged directly into that highly sensitive circuit were the two massive, thousand-watt ring lights, with thick, heavy extension cords trailing all across the wet floor. The veins on Vance's neck looked ready to burst. Chloe tugged on Vance's wet sleeve. "Uncle Robert, tell the security guards to arrest her! I'm going to sue her for..." SMACK! Vance swung his arm with everything he had and delivered a brutal, open-handed slap directly across Chloe's face. Chloe spun 180 degrees from the impact and collapsed hard onto the floor. Her phone flew out of her hand and smashed onto the concrete, the screen instantly shattering into a spiderweb of cracks. Davis stood there with his mouth hanging open, entirely speechless. Chloe clutched her burning cheek. "Uncle... you hit me?" Vance pointed a trembling finger at the power outlet. "Live-streaming inside a classified, restricted-access cleanroom?! Plugging commercial ring lights into a micro-voltage industrial outlet?!" "ARE YOU TRYING TO BLOW THIS ENTIRE BUILDING OFF THE MAP?!" Vance turned around and slowly looked at me. He bent at the waist, bowing a full, perfect ninety degrees. "Evelyn. I am begging you. Save us."
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