Juno asked Eli not to move his wrist while she checked the reader’s mode record.
The sensor occupied the only surviving diagnostic port. At its present angle, it could follow the damaged voice sequence through a narrow alignment that the broken guide no longer held by itself. The gauge at the mechanism’s base had moved close to a worn boundary. Its visible indication could be photographed. The changing internal channel sequence could not be recovered from that image.
“One sensor,” Juno said. “We can keep this alignment for the voice segment, or switch it to the channel-state acquisition. Switching loses the unrecovered voice sequence.”
“Could we copy the voice from Lale’s recording?” Tessa asked.
“The room audio has overlap and gaps. This is the damaged part the diagnostic output is separating. We preserve what we’ve already heard either way. We lose this cleaner segment.”
“And the mechanism state?”
“We have the outside gauge and a partial sketch. Not the internal closing order.”
The distinction mattered to Eli. At first the choice had sounded like a question of which person could work faster. He had imagined Lale recording the sound while Juno measured the machinery. Now he saw that both tasks required the same calibrated sensor at the same port, in positions the damaged mechanism would not permit them to combine.
