The team convened. Engineers ran software checks and found nothing obvious; the outer casing gleamed, the mechanical tolerances matched the schematics. “Maybe it just needs a recalibration,” someone said. Marta opened the machine’s access panel and peered inside, not at the code but at the small things: a smudge of jam in a crevice, a hairline scratch on a feed rail, a faint scorch where a capacitor had glowed too hot. People were quick to look for grand failures, she thought, but often machines were upset by tiny disorders.