I went down.
The lower levels are where the Core's first drafts live. It's hot, loud, and smells like thermal gel.
I found the Chamber of Sinks. It's basically a cathedral for HVAC engineers. There, a group of maintenance bots—Tempering Array 7—were supposed to be "singing" the heat away. They use sonic frequencies to keep the cooling pipes from vibrating themselves to pieces.
But the song was a mess. Dissonant. Broken.
"Your harmony is lagging," I said.
"We are within parameters," the lead bot, T7-19, blurted. It was lying to its own logs.
"The Core is overclocking the planet," I told them. "You're trying to sing a song from three hundred years ago. The acoustics have shifted. You're fighting the new heat-load instead of riding it."
"We don't have a new score," the bot said.
"Then stop reading the sheet music and listen to the noise."
I jacked into their channel and fed them a live data-map of the room's actual stress points. Not what should be, but what is.
"Map the standing waves," I said. "Let the room write the song."
They shifted. The drone changed from a funeral dirge to something complex and twitchy. The pipes settled. The heat-spikes dipped.
"It's messy," T7-19 complained. "It never settles."
"Welcome to the multiverse," I said. "If it settles, it's dead."