Seven cycles, one stone

Inside the reactor room, where carbon is persuaded to arrange itself the way it does beneath a continent.

Growth is not manufacture. A diamond seed is placed in a plasma of hydrogen and methane and left to accept carbon atom by atom, at a rate of roughly 0.2 millimetres a day. Rushing it introduces strain the eye will later read as haze.

Our reactors run in cycles of fourteen weeks. Each cycle is logged: temperature drift, plasma density, the exact hour of every interruption. That log travels with the stone for the rest of its life and is reprinted in the client's dossier.

Stones from one cycle share a fingerprint — the same fluorescence, the same faint tone. It is why a Meridian rivière can be matched to within two hundredths of a millimetre and still read as a single object.