196: Chapter 196 A Hand from 2022

When the second batch of transferred data was written to 137.8 GiB, the write indicator lights of the eight hard drives went out simultaneously.

Jiang Lin initially thought it was time for another block verification interval, but after waiting for half a minute, the speed in the status bar was still zero.

OUTER CACHE-07 did not disconnect the optical path.

The dark red status band shortened by about a quarter, and a local piping diagram appeared on the maintenance terminal.

Of the two parallel branch lines, one had already been deactivated, and the pressure difference of the other was slowly rising.

[Frozen Loop F-2: Filtration Pressure Difference Exceeds Long-Term Preservation Range]

[Switching Valve MV-6: Command Position 100% / Mechanical Position 73.4%]

[Current Action: Pause Data Transfer, Maintain Frozen Preservation]

The 612.4 GiB just acquired was still safe, but the subsequent data was locked back out.

This cache was very disciplined. It first protected what had already been handed over, and then lay back down to continue freezing.

As for the local custodian who had tossed and turned for half a year over that data channel, it was not responsible for understanding.

Jiang Lin brought up the maintenance records of F-2.

The failure process was not complicated.

The two filtration units originally worked in rotation, but F-1 lost its backwashing capability in the seventy-third year after the catastrophe, and since then F-2 had shouldered the low-flow circulation all along.

Now F-2 had also reached the upper limit of the pressure difference, and the system attempted to open the backup bypass, but MV-6 only moved to 73.4%.

Attached to the end of the record was a complete maintenance package.

After Jiang Lin clicked it open, a three-dimensional diagram first unfolded on the screen.

A maintenance unit with an outer diameter of 31 millimeters entered from the pipe trench access hole, passed through two pipe bends, fixed itself on the side of the valve body, calibrated the valve position, removed the old filter element, and then replaced it with an in-situ packaged new filter element.

The complete set of actions was estimated to take 11 minutes and 40 seconds.

The blueprints were very complete, with tolerances, materials, control programs, and failure evidence not missing a single item.

The first material mapping got stuck immediately.

[Gradient Compliant Shell: No Local Equivalent Material]

The second item was a micro-joint integrating drive, deceleration, braking, and six-axis force measurement, and the result given by the local capability mapping was still blank.

The subsequent self-sealing fluid circuit interfaces, in-situ curing sealing rings, and distributed tactile layers also had no manufacturable alternatives from the year 2022.

Jiang Lin widened the scope of local capabilities from the Outpost inventory to the complete industrial system of 2022, and the result only yielded three more yellow candidates.

All three stopped at the laboratory sample stage, with at least one item failing in size, lifespan, or media compatibility.

The maintenance package finally gave a conclusion.

[Local Reproduction of Original Scheme: Unexecutable]

A complete blueprint from the future thus accurately pointed to a string of non-existent factories.

Jiang Lin put away the three-dimensional assembly, retaining only the valve body, filtration unit, and maintenance space.

The maintenance unit could not be manufactured, but the valve was still there, and the allowable applied force, the required actions to be completed, and the consequences of failure did not disappear along with it.

G-Explorer-C had already walked to the west side of the equipment compartment.

Behind the wall panel was a 42-centimeter-wide pipe trench with a depth of 1.6 meters, and both F-2 and MV-6 were hidden at the bottom.

The robot crawled over to the side of the access port and sent the probe rod inside.

The mechanical marker of the valve position stopped near 70%, which was basically consistent with the system feedback.

The shell of the filtration unit was covered with a circle of white sediment, there were no active leaks around the interface, but at the bottom of the pipe trench there was a layer of old accumulated liquid of unknown origin.

At its narrowest point, only 35 centimeters remained, and after a person crawled in, they wouldn't even be able to turn their shoulders.

Jiang Lin measured the entrance and looked at the residual pressure of the pipeline once again.

0.68 MPa.

This pressure was not enough to blow open the pipe trench, but it was enough for a wrongly disassembled joint to trap a person inside.

Even if he could use long-handled tools to force the valve into place, it would only solve this single time.

The filtration unit would continue to clog, the next group of valves would also age, and there were a total of 27 similar interfaces on the periphery of OUTER CACHE-07.

He deleted [Restore Original Maintenance Unit] in the maintenance request and changed it to [Restore Maintenance Actions].

The robot had to first approach the pipe trench, find support, identify the interface, and control axial preload and torque.

After the old part was removed, it also had to connect a replacement filter, complete low-pressure leak detection, and then evacuate via the original route.

The future maintenance package provided what was allowed to be touched at each step, how much force could not be exceeded, and what signs appeared that required stopping.

As for what to use to do it, the middle of the screen remained a blank sheet.

Three days later, Jiang Lin returned to the Outpost with the valve body scan, the dimensions of the old filtration unit, and all failure records.

On the test bench in the No. 1 assembly room, a valve interface machined to the original size soon appeared.

Behind the interface was a section of ordinary steel pipe and a pressure tank filled with water.

If it really got twisted and broken, at most it would mean mopping the floor once.

The first operating module used a ready-made planetary reducer, a joint motor, and a telescopic slide rail.

The front end was equipped with a three-petal sleeve machined according to the scanned dimensions, and the rear end directly connected to the standard mission module interface of G-Explorer-C.

The actions Jiang Lin wrote for it were also very simple.

Aligning, pressing, and rotating.

During the first test, as soon as the sleeve touched the valve stem, the driving current exceeded the preset value.

The controller judged that the valve was jammed.

Jiang Lin squatted down to the side of the test stand and shined a flashlight into the gap.

The three-petal sleeve was misaligned by less than two millimeters, and one of the petals was pressing against the chamfer of the valve stem.

All the force consumed by the motor was used to contend with its own reducer, slide rail, and that chamfer block, while the valve remained motionless.

He raised the current threshold upward by ten percent and restarted.

The sleeve slid out along the chamfer, shaving off a curled strip of aluminum chips.

G-Explorer-C immediately executed a retreat, the operating module retracted, and the aluminum chips hung on the edge of the sleeve, looking as though a rather unseemly fingernail had been temporarily added to the first hand.

That micro-joint from the future could directly distinguish forces from six directions.

The motor in Jiang Lin's hands could only tell him how tired it was; as for whether it was tired at the valve, the gears, or the sleeve, it didn't care at all.

The second operating module had an extra cross-shaped elastic body at the wrist.

Four groups of strain gauges were attached to both sides of the slotted steel sheet, with a sealed shell nested outside.

Jiang Lin retrieved the torque tool calibration path from the civilization restoration core, re-establishing weights, lever arms, fulcrum friction, and temperature drift item by item.

The Outpost lacked a future metrology chain, so he started from the length and mass he could still confirm, pressing this elastic body thousands of times in each direction.

It was far less compact than the membrane sensing layer in the maintenance package; the lead wires and waterproof connectors alone took up half a palm.

The advantage was that every curve could be traced back to the lever arm in the assembly room that had once hung weights.

During the second test, the operating module stopped when the sleeve was skewed.

Jiang Lin corrected the position and pressed down again.

The starting torque of the valve stem climbed from zero to 47 N·m, the sleeve did not slip, and the wrist lateral force also stayed within the allowable range.

At 52 N·m, G-Explorer-C moved three centimeters to the left.

The valve stem still didn't move.

This time the sensors understood what happened on the hand, but the six mechanical feet still worked according to the rules of a walking platform.

The fuselage suffered continuous counter-torque, so the gait controller adjusted the footing points to unload the dangerous load.

For walking, this reaction was completely correct; for twisting a valve, it was equivalent to actively letting go every time it just started exerting force.

Jiang Lin rewound the operation records.

The wrist torque, fuselage posture, and six-foot pressure curves diverged at the exact same moment; the operating module was still executing a fixed trajectory, while the chassis had already begun to save itself.

He turned off the robotic arm test, removed the valve interface from the steel frame, and changed it to an inclined gravel terrain board.

A machine capable of unscrewing standard valves on flat ground was of little use for underground maintenance.

The interfaces in the pipe trenches rarely straightened themselves out, nor would the ground actively level itself just to pass a test.

The third version stayed on the original three groups of joints, giving the added weight to two short support arms.

They could deploy from both sides of the operating cabin, with their ends bracing against the edge of the pipe trench or the equipment base.

After the wrist made contact, G-Explorer-C first redistributed the six-foot load according to the direction of force, and then allowed the support arms to establish a reaction force channel.

The robotic arm, fuselage, and six legs were written into the same force-controlled loop; if any place began to slip, the torque on the valve stem would drop first.

On the one hundred and seventh test, the valve opened.

After the socket turned the initial six degrees, the rusted contact surface emitted a muffled thud.

The right front foot of the G-Explorer-C slipped nine millimeters on the gravel slab, the wrist torque immediately dropped back, and the support arm pressed down again.

During the second exertion of force, the valve stem crossed the starting torque, and the mechanical marker slowly turned toward the fully open position.

Jiang Lin changed to a valve stem with an eccentricity.

For the two hundred and thirty-fourth time, the socket completed opening and closing at an eccentricity of 1.8 millimeters.

Exceeding 2.3 millimeters, the module refused to continue applying force.

He retained this boundary.

Raising the threshold further would increase the test success rate, but the corners of the valve stem would also wear out faster.

OUTER CACHE-07 only had one working freezing circuit left, and it could not be used to test how bold the machine was willing to be.

From shaving off that piece of aluminum chip from the first prototype to the force-controlled operation cabin completing the immersion, low-temperature, and pressure-bearing simulation tests, it took a total of eleven months.

That originally bare telescopic rod had turned into a sealed cabin packed with standard mission interfaces.

It weighed sixty-three kilograms, and when retracted, it was still twenty centimeters longer than the body of the G-Explorer-C.

The cabin contained three sets of ordinary motors and reducers, a homemade six-axis force-measuring wrist, two support arms, and six replaceable tool heads.

Future technology squeezed these functions into a thirty-one-millimeter-wide maintenance unit.

Jiang Lin's version required a hexapod robot to carry it around, and it had to find a place to stand firm before turning a valve.

At least every material, every bearing, and every wire that composed it could trace its origin back to the year 2022.

The remaining problem was the filtration unit.

Future original parts used in-situ curing sealing rings; after pulling out the old filter element, the insertion of the new part could automatically compensate for the casing deformation.

That material still remained in the gray dependency chain. Jiang Lin moved the entire replacement filter outside the pipe trench, switching to three off-the-shelf sintered metal filter elements connected in parallel, increasing the volume to 4.7 times that of the original.

Two existing seals from 2022 were retained at the interface, with a leak-monitoring chamber added in the middle.

If any seal failed, the accumulated liquid would enter the leak-monitoring chamber first instead of flowing directly into the equipment compartment.

This setup was not pretty, and its maximum flow rate was only sixty-two percent of the original.

OUTER CACHE-07 currently only maintained low-power freezing preservation, and sixty-two percent was already enough.

In the seventeenth month of this round, Jiang Lin walked into the OUTER CACHE-07 equipment compartment for the sixth time.

The 4.42 kilometers leading here already bore the tracks of six-wheeled transport vehicles.

The earliest thin-shell ground area was still circled by permanent no-entry markings, and two temporary guardrails had been added to the entrance of the western cable maintenance corridor.

The G-Explorer-C had its right-rear foot pressure array replaced, and the two gray sampling points lit up again. The force-controlled operation cabin hung in front of the belly, and the towing box contained the replacement filter and interface components.

The F-2 differential pressure had risen to 58.7 kilopascals.

The cache only opened two short reading windows a day, and the data moved out was just enough to improve the maintenance catalog; the rest of the time, it lowered the flow rate to protect itself.

Jiang Lin parked the G-Explorer-C in front of the pipe trench, and the safety rope was connected to the load-bearing ring of the equipment compartment.

He retreated behind two isolation doors and switched the on-site control to wired mode.

The robot propped its two support arms on both sides of the access port, and the telescopic arm reached into the pipe trench.

The tool head bypassed the upper pipe bundle and caught the mechanical interface of the MV-6.

The wrist axial preload reached 180 Newtons, and the lateral force was 12 Newtons.

The first round of torque rose to 49 Newton-meters, and the mechanical marker only shuddered once.

The operation cabin unloaded force and remeasured the interface eccentricity. Over the long years, the valve body bracket had sagged downward by 2.1 millimeters, which was close to the rejection boundary left by the tests.

The G-Explorer-C retracted its right front foot, and its body moved laterally by six millimeters along the edge of the pipe trench.

The socket pressed down a second time, and the lateral force dropped to 7 Newtons.

The torque rose again.

Fifty-five.

Sixty-one.

At 66.4 Newton-meters, a dry metallic friction came from deep within the valve body.

The mechanical marker crossed 80% from 73.4%, and then continued to move toward the fully open position.

The flow curve of the freezing circuit lifted by a section.

OUTER CACHE-07 still had not resumed data handover, but the F-2 differential pressure stopped rising.

The G-Explorer-C switched to the pressure-relief tool head, connecting the old filtration unit to the low-pressure recovery tank.

After the residual pressure dropped to 0.03 megapascals, the disassembly procedure was allowed to continue.

The locking ring of the old filter element had shrunk inward by three millimeters compared to the scanned position.

During the first rotation, the wrist axial tension exceeded the upper limit, and the operation cabin stopped.

The optical probe found a layer of hardened sediment from the back of the locking ring; the tool head withdrew, switched to a thin shovel, and cleared the slot little by little.

During the second rotation, the locking ring retreated to the release position.

The moment the filter element was pulled out, a stream of turbid liquid surged into the recovery bag.

The bag wall bulged, and the droplet sensor under the belly lit up twice in succession.

The G-Explorer-C maintained its original posture, waiting for the recovery pump to pump out the residual liquid before placing the blackened old filter element into the isolation compartment of the towing box.

The replacement filter was installed on the outside of the pipe trench.

Three metal filter cylinders occupied most of the wall, the braided hoses were fixed along the load-bearing ribs, and the very end was connected back to the original pipeline through an adapter assembly.

After the force-controlled operation cabin pressed down the two interfaces, Jiang Lin only opened 5% of the test flow rate.

The first group of leak sensors in the leak-monitoring chamber spiked.

He closed the test valve.

The right interface did not reach the predetermined compression amount.

The operation cabin retreated the locking ring, cleaned the sealing surface, and corrected the adapter assembly clockwise by 1.2 degrees.

The second low-pressure test lasted for twenty minutes, and the leak-monitoring chamber remained dry.

The flow rate rose from 5% to 20%, and then to 62%.

The F-2 differential pressure fell back from 58.7 kilopascals.

Forty-one, twenty-seven, and finally stopped at 16.9.

The dark red status strip on the wall of the equipment compartment lit back up section by section to its original length.

[Freezing Circuit: Restore Long-Term Preservation Zone]

[External Replacement Filtration Unit: Conditions Accepted]

[Data Handover: Available]

On the other side of the isolation door, the eight write lights of the receiving array lit up again.

Jiang Lin let the circuit run continuously for forty-eight hours at 62% flow rate.

Only after the differential pressure, temperature, and leak-monitoring chamber readings all remained within the limited range did the G-Explorer-C remove the temporary control line and bring the old filtration unit back to the entrance of the equipment compartment.

He created three new partitions in the local index.

The in-situ curing sealing ring entered Grade B.

Its principles and failure records were complete enough; what 2022 lacked was the material system and mass production process, which could be left for preliminary research.

The thirty-one-millimeter maintenance unit entered Grade C.

Critical joints, compliant shells, and manufacturing equipment could not be independently verified, so the original drawings were sealed and would not enter real-world research and development.

The force-controlled operation cabin, the external filter, and all on-site evidence of this repair were put into Grade A.

Every material had completed its 2022 mapping, all parts could be manufactured by existing processes, and the valve opening and closing, disassembly, assembly, connection, and leak detection had already been run through once in OUTER CACHE-07.

[A06 / Force-Controlled Operation Cabin and Industrial Action Library]

[Local Material Mapping / On-Site Verification: Closed]

[Applicable Boundaries: Low Speed, Known Industrial Interfaces, External Support Can Be Established]

The last line of boundary was retained by Jiang Lin.

It could turn valves and change filter elements, but it was still far from being a hand that could do anything.

When encountering tasks without support points, unknown interfaces, or tasks requiring continuous handling, it still could only stay in place.

The G-Explorer-C stood up from the edge of the pipe trench.

The force-controlled operation cabin retracted into the belly, and the three-petal socket at the very front was still stained with old coolant.

It turned and walked towards the towing box, extended its operation arm, clamped the blackened old filter element, and placed it into the isolation box.

In the past, the only things it brought back from danger were maps, samples, and data.

This time, it brought the broken things out as well.