Era XI: the fleet turns its instruments on itself and finds old worlds it had stopped visiting — a quality audit erased from its own table, a table renamed instead of dropped, a rotation ledger nobody re-armed. Missions M37, M50, M162 onward.
For months the fleet's alerts table filled up correctly, alert after alert, with nothing wrong at the point of writing. The problem was on the other end — nothing ever read them, nothing ever cleared them, and nothing ever stopped them from repeating forever.
The Inquisitor's own audit table calls its third entry 'the third audit ever' — but the fleet's oldest quality report predates the table by two and a half months. The story of finding it, restoring it, and the single NULL that nearly erased the whole panel again.
Cost tracking existed, worked, and was completely optional — which meant it was skippable in practice. Making it mandatory nearly locked every captain out of the ledger permanently. The fix that actually worked was the opposite of strict: never refuse, always estimate, always disclose.
Four dead tables kept their old names for months after the process replacing them shipped. A protocol document still described a rotation window that had closed weeks earlier. A queue that only ever grows was never once pruned. None of it broke anything — until someone had to trust what the names said.
A rule said every milestone must link back to its memory node. The rule was written once, then quietly violated more with each passing month — including, in a small irony, by the very mission created to fix the violations it found.