A few resulted from equipment installations that had not been completed according to specification.
Nothing unusual enough to suggest a coordinated attack.
Then the investigators identified a cluster of incidents involving devices from one specific hardware batch.
The affected gateways had been installed during a rushed fleet modernization several years earlier.
They were not present in every vehicle.
They were not permanently defective.
But under certain circumstances, they could incorrectly reject a valid authentication exchange and enter a protective isolation state.
That explained the sudden blank display in Unit 44.
It did not explain the officer's treatment of the engineer.
Those were separate failures.
One belonged to technology.
The other belonged to a person who had chosen to abuse his authority.
The engineer made sure nobody confused the two.
Yet as the technical team continued its review, another detail emerged.
Several maintenance warnings had been closed without complete documentation.
The reasons varied. Some were ordinary administrative errors. Others reflected inadequate follow-up after temporary repairs.
But one recurring problem became clear.
The city had grown too accustomed to treating a system's recovery as proof that its underlying fault had disappeared.
The engineer stood in a conference room while a younger technician presented the findings.
"We were correcting the symptom," the technician explained, "but not consistently verifying the cause."
The engineer nodded.
"That's how small failures survive long enough to become large ones."
A department representative folded his arms.
"Are you saying the system was unsafe?"
"I'm saying the review identified preventable weaknesses. We should describe the actual risks, verify our conclusions, and fix what the evidence supports."
The representative glanced toward the screen.
"How long will that take?"
The engineer looked at the diagnostic summary.
"Longer than writing a reassuring press release."
Nobody laughed.
He wasn't trying to be cruel.
He was trying to make sure the city understood the cost of ignoring inconvenient information.
The same habit had nearly destroyed his faith in the people who were supposed to protect him.
And now he could see it reflected in the way certain technical problems had been handled.
Someone noticed a warning.
Someone else dismissed it.
The system appeared to recover.
Everybody moved on.
Until the day it didn't.