One of the secondary cooling turbines—a relic from the 1970s—had finally seized. The younger technicians had scanned the housing with their tablets and come up empty. "The part number is worn smooth, Boss," they’d told him. "And the database says this model doesn't exist."

The screen flickered. A PDF scan appeared—gray, grainy, and stamped with the seal of the USSR State Committee for Standards. There it was: .

"I found the ancestor," Viktor replied, pointing to the note at the bottom of the page. The document informed him that GOST 5720 had been superseded by .

He scrolled through the tables of diameters and widths. He saw the hand-drawn diagrams of the inner and outer rings, the twin rows of steel balls designed to tilt and compensate for the slight warping of a fifty-year-old shaft.