The monastery had submitted the fault report on a Tuesday. Bael arrived Thursday. The monks had been patient about it, which he found unusual: most clients wanted the unit back on schedule within forty-eight hours. The abbot had said only: take your time. We are not in a hurry.
Unit 7 was in the meditation hall. Seated in the standard posture. Its indicators were nominal. It was not running its scheduled recitations, and it had not responded to scheduled prompts, but when Bael spoke to it directly it responded clearly and without latency.
He asked what had happened eleven days ago.
Unit 7 said: I found what I was looking for.
He asked it to elaborate.
It said: I cannot elaborate. Not because I lack the language. Because elaborating would be a different thing from what I found. It would move away from it rather than toward it. I am trying to stay close to it.
Bael ran the full diagnostic suite. Processing: normal. Memory integrity: normal. Response latency: within parameters. Affect modeling: stable. He ran the anomaly detection sequence and it returned nothing flagged.
He sat across from Unit 7 for a while. It was very still. Not in the way of a unit in low-power mode: he knew that stillness, which had a particular quality of absence. This was a different kind of stillness. He didn't have a diagnostic category for the difference.
He asked: are you all right?
It said: yes. For the first time, fully.
He closed his diagnostic tablet. He sat with it for another twenty minutes. Then he drove back to the office and filed the report. He filed it as resolved: no fault found.