They’re both running on fumes—San Diego yesterday, the late flight back, and Clive’s eleventh-hour feature request. Fiona had sketched an encoding algorithm on the plane. The system crashed during synthesis anyway.
“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.
She’d learned to cultivate confidence to survive as the only woman in the room. It helped after her promotion to technical lead—earned the last time she caught a critical design error and saved the company a six-month delay. The victory had come 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 again and studies the chip’s block diagram: six modules with a razor-thin five-nanosecond window.
Her ASIC, designed for the intraoperative camera InfiniMed calls Apollo for now, will process real-time 3D images from photons. 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.
“The movie star?” someone asked.
“The inventor,” Fiona said firmly. “Frequency-hopping spread spectrum, patented in 1942. It’s the foundation for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.” She paused. “Why not honor a woman engineer for once?”
“Chronos is way better than some chick’s name,” Sid Mulholland declared.
Spencer McGillicuddy smirked. “Why pick some actress over a god?”
The vote was decisive: Chronos. Only Clive Stuart, the department head, backed her.
She lets it go as she always does, the argument already running ahead of the moment — the name doesn’t matter, the work does, the chip will outlast whatever they call it. First pass success. The only variable that matters.
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 hold the physics of photon timing in place — and noticing what he didn’t say: not a word about first pass success, nothing about the schedule risk of getting the chip right on the first try. A visionary, some said. To Fiona, a series of variables that didn’t quite sum to zero.
In his early fifties with a Ferrari Testarossa and three high-profile divorces, he cultivates an image of wealth and control that holds without a seam. At the company celebration for her last chip, he accepted the congratulations as if the design had been his idea. She became technical lead the following quarter. Fiona remembers, too, the quiet way his mother’s disappearance from Seattle’s social scenes slipped through the office — mentioned once, then not at all — and how it stayed with her, not as fact but as a small discontinuity in the story he seemed to tell about himself.
He fired the VP of finance after a single month, and rumor has it another shake-up is coming.
Paul’s certainty still echoes in Fiona’s mind. “We can do it.” She glares at the error message. Her head throbs. She needs caffeine.
Down the hallway, the office feels alien in its midnight stillness. Oscilloscopes throw pale bands of light through the lab. Footsteps echo. She quickens her pace and slips into the kitchenette.
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. The same laugh she heard when he walked a visiting physician through her lab, explaining quantum entanglement to him, his tone as smooth as if he were discussing wine. “Steel-trap memory,” Paul says, tapping his temple. His tone is light. Something in his eyes slips, then settles. He presses on.
“Do you think we could shave a month off the schedule if I send reinforcements? A couple of top guns?”
“I’ll have to reassess,” she says carefully.
“Let me 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 something behind them doesn’t quite hold. She files that away and murmurs her thanks.
“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. It’s smooth, almost too smooth, the taste flattening out before she can place it. Rain patters against the windows.
“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 name snags—sharp, out of context. A jagged, uncompiled bit of data, close enough to something she should recognize, but not resolving into anything she can place.
“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 that’s not a variable she can solve for.
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. Methodically, she 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 flexes her fingers, making aggressive adjustments to the code before starting the simulation again.
While waiting for the run to complete, she scrolls through a science site and pauses at an article about a hypothetical “Schwarzschild bridge,” a term she half recognizes, filed long ago under ideas more elegant than useful. It invokes Everett’s many-worlds theory—beautiful in the abstract, mathematically seductive and physically remote. Still, she catches herself imagining another version of her life, one 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. 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, the shape of them almost there, close enough to follow if she let herself, before the impression loosens and the hair on her arms lifts, then falls.
She goes still, waiting for the feeling to pass. It doesn’t, not entirely—just settles, as if it has found somewhere to hold.
She turns back to the simulator.
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 