The CNC machine in his workshop—a 2009 Haas that he’d rebuilt with his own hands—was dead. Not dead-dead, not yet. The servos groaned, but the controller PC running its guts had suffered the digital equivalent of a stroke: a corrupted boot sector.
He closed the fire safe. Spun the lock.
“Latency,” Leo said, not looking away from the screen. “The microsecond timing. You can’t fake that over a virtual COM port. It needs the iron.”
Leo let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.