Margot's Diary

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Monday. The shop was dark. Smells like solder.

My father opened it in 2017. I took it over in 2029. There’s a bench by the window with half a dozen radios nobody has asked about in years. I keep them up because throwing them out would mean admitting something I’m not ready to admit.

I calibrate the servo joints on my fingers. Not out of habit. The interface reads the motor signal, the server processes it, and the feedback comes back with the torque. My hands are the input. If I stop moving them, the calibration drifts. I’ve tried doing it in my head. It drifts. The fingers don’t drift.

I was going through old supplier documentation — 2026, from the archive — and the word was there. Blockchain. They used to say it like it was a thing you could point at. My father wrote about it in his essay. He said the chain would tell a story of honor, that every transaction would be immutable. He promised the world wouldn’t be a world of shadows anymore. I can’t remember the last time I heard him say honor. Nobody says reputation anymore, either. It’s just a metric now.

The MEMS capacitors from Hanoi were eighteen percent under last week’s price on the market. I knew the number the way you know the time — it was just there. Thirty-four percent after freight and duty. Good number. I bought the batch. Four minutes. Back to the board. The frame’s motherboard takes forty of them. Surface mount. The joint has to hold at thirty kilos of torque. I solder them one at a time, my fingers doing the alignment, the interface reading the angle, the server confirming the seat.

There was a legal fee in the number for the batch. They’ve changed the name of it four times since 2028. I just add it to the cost of doing business. The address of the clearing node has been live since 2017. It’s the same address my father used. Integrity Network, they called themselves. A funny name for a band of mercenaries. The ledger shows I paid it. The ledger shows I paid it on time. That’s what matters.