"An unauthorized employee accessed a restricted area and performed unsupervised intervention on our most critical asset without clearance of any kind." Evelyn watched the footage. The timestamp read 2:16 in the morning.
The figure on the screen moved through the bay without hesitation, without confusion, without the tentative quality of someone doing something they had never done before. "Is the car functional?" she asked.
"That isn't the point," Cameron said. "I'm asking anyway." Cameron straightened his folder.
"The point is precedent. We are still under regulatory review from the Harmon incident."
"Any undocumented technical intervention, regardless of outcome, creates liability exposure that we cannot afford." Evelyn was quiet for a moment. 18 months ago, she would have deferred immediately.
She was still learning when not to, but Cameron was not wrong about the liability, and she did not yet have enough information to know what she was missing. She signed the termination notice.
Mason arrived at her office wearing his work clothes, a gray long-sleeve shirt with the company logo on the left chest, clean but carrying the faint smell of machine oil that never entirely left him. He stood in front of the desk without sitting.
His eyes moved briefly across the room when he entered, a habit so fast it was nearly invisible, then stopped for a fraction of a second on the large photograph mounted on the wall to the left, the first GT series car, the vehicle that had won the championship in 2015, photographed in victory lane with confetti falling and the crew surrounding it. In the lower left corner of the original photograph, almost too small to see from where Mason stood, was a small technical mark, two initials and a date rendered in the same precise hand that had filled the back page of Luna's picture book the night before.
Evelyn placed the tablet on the desk with the footage visible. "Can you explain this?"
"I fixed the engine," Mason said. "You didn't have authorization to do that."
"The car works now." "That isn't what I asked you." Cameron was standing to Evelyn's left.
His voice was smooth and measured when he spoke. "Do you understand what that vehicle is worth?"
"Do you hold any engineering certification relevant to that system? What exactly qualified you to touch it?" Mason did not look at Cameron.
He kept his eyes on Evelyn. "Do you want the car to run?" he said, "or do you want the paperwork to be correct?"