The Maintainer's Wage

Energy is abundant, but the people who keep the Helios Grid braided — reactor-commons crews, beam-corridor techs, rectenna-field hands — are scarce, aging, and underpaid relative to the fortunes built atop their reliability. A near-miss on a Solaria beam corridor reignites the old argument: the romance of the maintainer is celebrated in culture and neglected in budgets. This thread follows the labor politics of upkeep — who trains the next generation of grid-keepers when longevity therapies let senior engineers serve on indefinitely, and whether reliability can survive being taken for granted.