“Just peachy.” She gestures at the screen.
They’re both running on fumes after attending the Semiconductor Design Automation Conference in San Diego the day before and rushing back to the office in the dead of night to make up for lost time. Clive’s late feature request has thrown everything off balance. Fiona sketched an encoding algorithm on the plane, but the system crashed during synthesis.
“Checked my sim,” Evan says with a yawn. “A couple of errors—none in your blocks, of course. But hey, there’s always a first time.”
“You ever known me not to pull off something brilliant?” Fiona retorts.
Long ago she learned to cultivate confidence to survive as the only woman in the room. Things improved after her promotion to technical lead—a role she earned by catching a critical error in the last chip’s design. She stepped in, fixed it, and saved the company from a six-month delay. The victory came at a price: weeks of fourteen-hour days.
Evan shuts her cubicle door. “I’m outta here,” he says through the partition. Fiona exhales. The flimsy partition offers little privacy but enough to breathe. The image of the cup of blood flickers back; she shoves it aside and studies the chip’s block diagram—six modules with a razor-thin five-nanosecond window. Her ASIC, designed for InfiniMed’s next-generation medical device Apollo, will process real-time 3D images from light waves. One timing violation could turn a surgeon’s guidance system blind.
At the kickoff meeting, her team had named the chip Chronos—a nod to the Greek god of time. Fiona suggested Hedy, after Hedy Lamarr, whose pioneering work helped invent spread-spectrum communication.
“Chronos is way better than some chick’s name,” Sid Mulholland declared.
“Why pick some actress over a god?” Spencer McGillicuddy smirked.
Evan Taylor chimed in, “Hedy? Seriously?”
The vote was decisive: Chronos, 6–2. Only Clive Stuart, the department head, backed Fiona. She’d let it go. Mostly.
InfiniMed’s CEO, Paul Wolfe, staked everything on Apollo, touting it as a revolutionary breakthrough in the company’s latest earnings call. Fiona remembers watching the clip online—the measured cadence, the gleam of certainty—as if conviction alone could bend physics to his will. With his Ferrari Testarossa, three high-profile divorces, and a Greek girlfriend who wears couture to farmers’ markets, he curates an image of wealth and control so precise it feels engineered.
Handsome and self-assured, he inherited his beauty-queen mother’s looks, though her sudden disappearance from Seattle’s social circuit hadn’t gone unnoticed. Now in his early fifties, he moves through the world with the confidence of someone who has never been told no. Fiona once overheard him explaining quantum entanglement to a visiting physician, his tone as smooth as if he were discussing wine—a performance equal parts intellect and dominance.
Ruthlessness, she’s learned, defines him as much as brilliance. He fired the VP of finance after a single month, and rumor has it another shake-up is coming.
Paul’s promise still echoes in Fiona’s mind.
“We can do it,” she mutters, glaring at the error message. Her head throbs. She needs caffeine.
Down the hallway, the office feels alien in its midnight stillness. Oscilloscopes cast ghostly light through the lab. Footsteps echo. She quickens her pace and slips into the kitchenette, telling herself it’s another night owl.
A paper sign hangs crookedly from the coffee maker: OUT OF ORDER, written in thick black marker. She curses softly and crosses the rain-soaked campus to marketing’s building; their machine usually works. Birch trees shimmer like sepia silhouettes in the lamplight.
Inside, the copier hums. By the machine stands Paul Wolfe.
“Late night, Fiona?” he asks, smiling.
“Yeah, fighting with some code.”
“How’s the battle going?”
“Uphill. Adding a new feature at the eleventh hour doesn’t help.”
“I hear you, but this one’s a game-changer for Apollo. You delivered spectacularly last time. We’re counting on you again.”
“I’ll do my best,” Fiona replies.
“I’m sure you will. The critical path still runs through the decompression logic?”
Seeing Fiona’s surprise, he laughs. “Steel-trap memory,” Paul says, tapping his temple. His tone is light, but his eyes remain clouded with something that looks like pain. He presses on.
“Do you think we could shave a month off the schedule if I send reinforcements? Maybe a couple of top guns?”
“I’ll have to reassess,” she says carefully.
“Maybe I can entice you.” He turns on the espresso machine. “Jamaican Blue Mountain. The best for my best engineer.” He hands her a steaming cup. His smile crinkles the corners of his eyes, but a flicker of wariness lurks beneath. She murmurs her thanks, unsettled by the contradiction.
“That’s just a taste of success if we launch Apollo early,” he adds.
“We need good people, the right skills, and a lot of luck,” she says.
Paul grins. “Branch Rickey said it best: ‘Luck is the residue of design.‘ And we’ve designed quite well, haven’t we?”
She allows a small smile. “Though our chip is more brain than luck. Luck doesn’t write the RTL.”
They sip their coffee in companionable silence. The taste is decadent, smooth and creamy with a chocolate finish. Rain patters against the windows. For a minute, Fiona forgets the new feature.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she says finally. “I’d better check on the simulation.”
He nods, gathering papers from the tray. As he turns, bold text flashes across the page: Lucie4 Phase II-B. The words snag in her mind like a loose thread.
“Let me know when you have an updated schedule,” Paul says. His tone shifts, charm cooling to calculation. Fiona wonders what he’ll do if she fails to deliver—but why contemplate the unthinkable?
The vise around her skull tightens. She takes the long way back through the rain, the word Lucie4 echoing in her head like an error she can’t debug.
She wipes the rain from her cheeks and wakes the workstation. The internal error message stares at her indifferently. She exhales sharply and tries the usual fixes—clearing the cache and restarting the compiler. Nothing. With a sigh, she reboots the system, watching the screen flicker back to life. The error is gone. For now.
“The best defense is a good offense,” she mutters, making a few aggressive adjustments to the code before starting the simulation again.
While waiting for the run to complete, she scrolls through a science website and pauses at an article: Theoretical Physicists Propose New Model for Quantum Tunneling Between Parallel Universes. The article describes the hypothetical Schwarzschild Bridge—a concept more at home in science fiction than reality. She lingers over Everett’s Many-Worlds concept, drawn to its elegance, imagining a version of herself with time for both circuits and poetry.
The steady hum of the HVAC takes on an eerie note in the stillness of the empty building. The late hour warps reality at the edges of her consciousness. Her reflection in the darkened monitor seems oddly off-kilter, as if someone else is looking back. For a fleeting moment, she could swear the reflection’s lips moved independently of her own, forming words she couldn’t quite catch. A strange tingling creeps over her skin, vanishing before she can grasp its meaning. Pushing aside the unsettling moment, she bookmarks the page for later, unaware of how soon its concept will intersect with her life.
The simulation finally finishes. The changes hold up. She copies the latest updates to her local drive before starting the synthesis run again. It will take hours. Time to go home.
Xuan Ba Nguyen 