The Wire Room has no upgrade path — it is built once, at this level.

The Mint cracked the ciphers. The Wire Room finishes the job. Federation technicians use copper-wire contact arrays to embed cipher chips — a precision process that creates a tamper-evident physical bond: cut the wire, and the key self-destructs. Mera's chemists replicated the same bond using gutter flux: the solvent dissolves the chip's outer lattice, which re-hardens around the contact surfaces into something the Federation's own verification equipment classifies as authentic. Mera read the Federation's published rationale for why authenticators are unforgeable — the precise document explaining why counterfeiting is physically impossible — and gave it to her chemists as a specification sheet. They delivered in eleven days. She found this less funny than the cipher work. More satisfying.