The Machine was never going to work the way Hadden built it.

That's the whole point — watch the construction sequence and see not the mystical arrival of the blueprints, but everything after: the redundancies, the dual control systems, the camera cutting between Russian engineers, American engineers, Indian engineers, all watching each other, all checking the others' work.

This isn't how you build a functioning device. This is how you build a device that can't be used without permission — this is how you build a weapon you've agreed not to fire.

But the actual screenplay and actual design choices reveal something darker: the Machine works because no single nation can operate it alone. That's not cooperation; that's mutually assured helplessness — that's Cold War deterrence architecture dressed up as scientific progress. The moment that exposes this isn't dialogue but the scene where the American delegation inspects the Russian components — they're not there to help but to ensure the Russians can't weaponize first, and everyone knows this, and they build anyway because the alternative is worse.

Two decades later, we're living in that world of AI development labs with government liaisons and semiconductor supply chains treated like nuclear arsenals. Contact understood that transformative technology doesn't unite humanity — it just redistributes paranoia.