The Only Fixer

An urgent, piercing alarm abruptly shattered the workshop's tranquility.

A barrage of red Gorman error codes instantly appeared on the LCD screen; a bold warning message at the top pierced everyone's hopes like a sharp sword.

[SYSTEM OVERLOAD! SHUT DOWN IMMEDIATELY!]

The alarm was so shrill that it was going to puncture eardrums.

The indicator lights that had just illuminated went out, and the code on the screen scrolled wildly before finally settling on blood red.

The lively atmosphere that had just begun to rise in the workshop was instantly doused with ice water, freezing solid.

Bill's smile froze, becoming more like a grimace.

How could this be? It was clearly fixed, so why did it suddenly set off the alarm?

Just then, hurried footsteps came from the workshop door. "Mr. Lamar! Mr. Lamar! I've brought Mr. Henry Lewis for you!"

Bill's assistant, John, strode in with a middle-aged man in a sharp suit.

It was none other than Henry, the expert Bill had regarded as an honored guest and had overseen the repairs.

The moment Henry entered, he saw me, the warehouse manager, standing beside the machine, and his expression immediately darkened.

"You're fooling around!" he roared, his voice filled with scholarly arrogance and an unyielding anger that did not allow anyone to violate his authority.

"Mr. Lamar, didn't I tell you? This equipment is incredibly delicate. Leaving it to an untrained person could cause devastating consequences! How could you let a handyman touch my 'patient'?"

He strode to the control panel, glanced at the blood-red error code on the screen, and his face immediately showed an agonized expression.

He slapped his thigh and pointed at the screen before saying to Bill, "We're doomed! We're completely doomed! Mr. Lamar, the motherboard is completely burned out! It was originally just a problem with the driver chip; we still had a sliver of hope for repair. After he messed around with it, the high-voltage current directly damaged the main control CPU! This machine is now just a pile of scrap metal! It has absolutely no value for repair!"

Every word Henry spoke struck Bill's heart like a hammer blow.

Bill's face instantly went from ghastly pale to ashen, then as black as the bottom of a pot. He whirled around, his eyes fixed on me. His gaze was icy cold, as if he wanted to devour me alive.

"Shaun... Zigger..." His voice seemed to come from hell, filled with the fury of being deceived and betrayed.

The life-or-death contract I had signed and the massive four million dollars in compensation crashed down on me like an invisible mountain.

In the workshop, gloating, sympathetic, and contemptuous glances once again wove together into an impenetrable net, trapping me firmly in the center.

I met Bill's murderous gaze and Henry's contemptuous and smug gaze.

I spoke, word by word. "He's wrong. This isn't an overload. It's a protection protocol. Someone deliberately modified the safety parameter thresholds in the system."

As soon as I finished speaking, Henry burst into laughter, furious. He pointed at me and said to everyone, "Absurd! Absolutely absurd! Listen, a warehouse manager who can't even read a circuit diagram is discussing safety parameters with me? It's utterly absurd!"