The retired dispatcher had seen a similar pattern years earlier, during a period when the city was testing the first generation of its digital emergency communications network.
And she remembered something else.
A warning that had never been fully investigated.
The engineer was sitting at his dining room table reviewing maintenance reports when the call came through. He had just finished preparing materials for another youth electronics workshop, and a cup of coffee rested beside his keyboard. His restored silver watch sat securely around his left wrist, its dark blue face reflecting the morning sunlight.
He almost ignored the unfamiliar number.
Then he answered.
"Good morning."
A woman's voice came through the speaker.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you. I used to work in emergency dispatch. I believe you helped design the system we used."
"That's right."
"I saw the video of what happened to you."
He paused.
"I see."
"I'm sorry about what that officer did."
"Thank you."
"But that's not why I'm calling."
Something in her voice made him sit straighter.
She explained that years earlier, dispatchers had occasionally experienced brief communication failures involving certain patrol vehicles. The outages seemed random. Sometimes a terminal disconnected for several seconds. Sometimes a vehicle's data connection failed while its independent radio remained operational. In a few cases, the affected equipment automatically switched to a protected maintenance state.
Most incidents had been attributed to aging hardware or intermittent network faults.
But the retired dispatcher remembered one particular technician who had raised concerns about irregular authentication behavior.
"He kept saying the failures weren't completely random," she explained.
The engineer reached for a pen.
"Do you remember his name?"
"I remember his reports. He was always asking people to write down exactly what happened before a terminal disconnected."
The engineer glanced toward his own notebook.
"That was good advice."
"Nobody listened to him for very long."
"Why not?"
"Because the failures were brief, and the system usually recovered. People were busy. There were emergencies to answer. Nobody wanted to spend hours chasing a fault that seemed to disappear by itself."
The engineer remained silent.
He understood the situation immediately.