That's a direct access interface, Patterson said quietly. We don't use that port anymore. Or it was deprecated in the last system update. I know, Daniel said without looking up. I'm the one who deprecated it.
Left it active in the hardware because I knew there might be a day when the front end access wasn't enough. He scrolled through a cascade of system data. Good thing I did. Patterson stared at the screen. Then he stared at Daniel.
Then he looked over his shoulder at Richard and something shifted in his expression that wasn't quite readable. The look of a young man doing a very fast mental recalculation. Daniel pulled up the balance systems core log files. The data went back 14 months. Every operational cycle, every calibration record, every modification timestamp, he moved through it the way a man moves through a house he grew up in.
No hesitation, no searching. He knew exactly where everything was. He found what he was looking for in 40 seconds. He leaned back slightly. He rubbed the edge of his jaw with two fingers.
He looked at the timestamp on the screen. The way a man looks at a wound he's been carrying for a long time with the quiet, tired recognition of something confirmed. There, he said. Patterson leaned in. What am I looking at?
That entry 7 months ago. Daniel pointed at a modification record in the log. Somebody accessed the ABC failsafe layer and stripped out 43 lines of override code. 43 Specific lines. Not an accident, not a system error.
He turned to look at Patterson directly. You have to know exactly what you're removing to remove those 43 lines and nothing else. Patterson read the timestamp. He read the modification tag. He read the user credential attached to the change.
He straightened up very slowly. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to because from across the room, Richard Cole had been watching. And something in the way Patterson straightened something in the particular quality of the silence that followed made Richard walk forward again. His arms were still crossed.
His face was controlled, but his eyes were doing something different. A rapid, almost invisible calculation running behind them like code on a screen. What did you find? Richard's voice was calm. Professionally calm.