You find a different basement lab - the forge - which is usually sweltering but right now is simply warm. Next you rush down the halls, crowded now with people. Nothing breaks, and the work progresses but isn’t finished entirely. You stop the probe one inch above your stock piece, tell the machine to measure the distance between the two. The shopmasters would not even be angry, just annoyed, and you’d have to spend time inserting a new probe. You could crush that scarlet globe and the world would not crack. The void then does not call, it screams: smash it. You set a probe in the machine, a thin stick with a delicate and costly red glass ball at the end, and send it slowly shooting down. This time you know the remedies: you trace the cuts, the way the machine will go. Your hands tremble with caffeine, this old well-trodden routine. You set to fixing it, blinking through a tired haze. Someone else, perhaps as sleepless as yourself, forgot half the holes and channels. One piece you cut is fine and smooth, but the next has flaws in the designs. They make the metal that you cut look clean. You’re breathing foul chemicals you do not know the name of. There are jobs that need doing in the basement by the street, where a massive CNC machine chatters and hums. You rose closer with the sun today, shivered on the way to lab, the morning pale and grey.
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