It accepted her immediately.
She came back.
“So it’s fixed.”
“It’s functioning.”
“That sounds like an engineer avoiding the word fixed.”
“It is.”
For the first time that night, the edge of a smile touched Olivia’s face.
Then Andrew found the last entry.
It was not another failure command.
It was a service counter.
The original installation software had been checking elapsed operation against an internal maintenance state.
The hidden routine became active only after that state expired without receiving a particular installer-level reset.
Andrew leaned closer.
There it was.
Not a random corruption.
Not a storm problem.
Not a mysterious hardware defect.
A deliberately created dependency buried where the homeowner could not see it and ordinary technicians were unlikely to look.
Olivia understood before he finished explaining.
“The installation company made the system depend on them.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“But they went out of business.”
“And the system kept counting.”
She stared at the cabinet as if it had personally betrayed her.
Andrew shook his head.
“The machine did exactly what somebody told it to do.
That’s the problem with systems.
They can be perfectly obedient to bad decisions.”
The sentence hung between them.
Olivia looked at him differently after that.
“How did the other companies miss this?”
“They were looking for what broke tonight.”
“And you weren’t?”
“I was looking for what had to be true before tonight could happen.”
That answer seemed to land harder than he expected.
Olivia pulled the chair opposite him and sat down.
“What happened at Halcyon?”
Andrew’s hands stopped.
He had not told her the company name that evening.
Then he remembered who she was.
Olivia Harmon ran an investment firm.
Information was part of her profession.
She had walked across the street asking a neighborhood repairman to solve a sophisticated integration problem.
Of course she had checked who he was first.
“You looked me up.”
“I looked up the man I was about to give access to my security system.”
“Fair.”
“I found a short employment history.
Mechanical systems engineer.
Halcyon Industrial Solutions.
Terminated after the Meridian incident.”
Andrew closed the cabinet halfway.
“If you already found the official version, you know what happened.”
“I know what somebody wrote happened.”
He looked at her.
The distinction was so precise that for a moment he did not know what to say.
