Attempts remaining 0

On my mini, I did the first boot fine. Entered the encryption password for the drive, Admin password, user account name and password… rebooted fine using pin. Entered password, looks good. Installed Tor, updated system sofware with sudo, everything looks ok, rebooted a couple of times more, made some errors on pin and now the counter is 7 remaining 0, even though I was allowed three more times to try on each reboot.

Am I out of chances to get back in?

I leave the Librim USB key in the machine during my session and when I power down.

I never changed the pin to my knowledge. I try 123456, then 12345678, then 123456789 and then naught, nada, “Found Verified kexec params”, GPG Verify signature failed unkown sys", Invalid signatures on kexec error boot params", Failed default boot" Starting recovery shell"

Hey look, the Librem Key does not blink red, so there is no indication of tampering. I don’t think I have reached the point for a factory reset…

SO, what are my options? I am looking for the easiest, most elegant way to fix this problem.