Patch v1.2 arrived at 02:14, a compact bundle from the vendor’s private branch. The notes were sterile—“stability improvements,” “edge-case fixes,” “latency optimizations.” That wording meant nothing to hands that had to choose between shutting valves and watching the tide swallow the southern embankment. Still, method was method. Mara queued the patch on the staging node and watched the diff scroll by: a handful of sensor calibration tweaks, an updated watchdog, two altered SQL statements. Beneath the changes, someone had left a commented line: // temp: avoid corrupting historic pressure logs — revert after 1.2. An honest mistake, or a breadcrumb.