“Is this—” He cleared his throat. “Irina's project meeting?”

  The words barely carried across the small space. His posture formed a stark contrast to the confident programmer whose visual effects had left crowds gasping just weeks earlier.

  Glancing up from the circuit diagram, Irina grinned. “Vitya! Perfect timing. We've just reached the display synchronization challenges.”

  She crossed the garage in three quick strides, placing a hand briefly on his elbow to guide him toward the workbench. “Everyone, this is Viktor Chernov—the man who made a Pentagon display sixteen thousand colours simultaneously.”

  Vitya gave a small nod, his gaze fixed on the circuit diagrams rather than the people surrounding them.

  "I brought some timing samples," he mumbled, fingers dancing methodically over the backpack zipper like executing a well-rehearsed algorithm. "Modified the vertical sync interrupt to match Western refresh rates."

  Vitya eased the door to his workspace shut, careful not to let the hinges squeak. The flat's corridor clock read 23:47—twenty minutes since he'd last checked on his mother. Her breathing had settled after a difficult evening. The doctor's adjustment to her medication left her disoriented, but she'd drifted off, clutching that faded photograph of his father.

  Sinking into his chair, the worn cushion moulded to contours his body had imprinted over countless nights. Equipment crowded the cramped room—shelves bowed under the weight of technical manuals, circuit boards hung from nails on the wall, and a tangle of cables snaked across the floor. A tap on the power button, and his 486 responded with its sequence of clicks and whirs.

  Light from the CRT monitor washed over his face as the system booted. Above, a collection of Soviet-era computers lined the shelf—the БК-0010 with its yellowed keys, the Specialist with its custom modifications, and three variations of Pentagon clones.

  A muffled cough from his mother's room made him freeze, hand hovering over the keyboard. Ten seconds passed. No follow-up sounds. He exhaled and continued typing.

  Chaos Constructions message board loaded at its typical glacial pace. After entering his login, Vitya_BK, the forum populated with the usual mix of technical questions, project updates, and scene politics. New thread: “Pentagon Chimera - Pipe Dream or Revolution?” Already thirty-seven replies.

  Upon clicking through to a thread about optimizing polygon rendering on Z80 architectures, he spotted assembly code with an obvious inefficiency in the rotation matrix calculations. His fingers moved to type a correction, but paused as he cocked his head slightly. Was that a rustle of bedsheets? Poised between worlds, he waited until the flat fell silent again.

  The small desk clock read 00:12. Time for another check. Rising to his feet, he stretched his back, already plotting the optimizations he would suggest upon return. His mother's needs and the demands of his code—twin responsibilities that defined the narrow boundaries of his existence.

  From beneath a pile of circuit diagrams, Vitya extracted his worn notebook. The spine cracked as he opened it to a fresh page, previous ones filled with meticulous Z80 assembly routines and hardware timing calculations. Irina's white paper filled the screen as the monitor's glow cast stark shadows across his desk.

  “Beyond Boundaries,” he murmured, eyes tracking the title at the top of the document.

  Uncapping his technical pen—a Rotring 0.25mm—he assembled regimented lines of tiny Cyrillic characters on the notebook page, each precisely shaped.

  DMA transfer rates unsustainable? 170 KB/sec claimed—verify against Pentagon bus limitations.

  On his shelf, the clock displayed 00:37. Twenty-five minutes until his next check on mother.

  Leaning closer to the screen, his eyes narrowed at the section on the VideoMixer circuit. The concept was sound—analogue signal mixing wasn't revolutionary—but Irina's implementation showed genuine insight. The transparency mask technique could actually work.

  K561KT3 switching too slow? Calculate signal propagation delay.

  A rough timing diagram took shape in his notebook as he calculated nanosecond intervals with swift efficiency. The numbers aligned. Irina hadn't overlooked the timing constraints.

  Pipes contracted as the flat's heating system clicked, the municipal supply reducing overnight. Without looking away from the monitor, he pulled his cardigan tighter.

  Interrupt vector table could be remapped to accommodate bridge controller signaling...

  His watch alarm beeped softly. 01:00. After capping his pen, he stood and stretched. The medical log lay open on the shelf beside the doorway, a blue ballpoint pen clipped to its cover. He took it automatically.

  A small lamp cast dim light in his mother's room. She lay on her side, blanket drawn to her chin. Vitya approached on silent feet, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Taped to the bedside table, the medication schedule caught the weak light—his roadmap through her illness.

  “Mama,” he whispered, expecting only silence.

  Fingers found her wrist, counting pulse beats against his watch. Her breathing seemed steadier tonight. The oxygen saturation meter glowed with numbers that made him frown slightly. He adjusted the concentrator with a precise quarter-turn—the same deliberate movement he used when calibrating voltage on circuit boards—then waited, watching the numbers climb to safer territory.

  Reaching for the medical log, he made a brief entry. The pen moved in compact arcs, recording another checkpoint in her decline.

  This routine comforted him even as it pained him—a systematic approach to a problem that could never be fully debugged. What worked for memory errors in Pentagon demos offered only temporary patches for his mother's failing systems.

  Back at his desk, the next section of the white paper awaited. The genlock synchronization presented the most challenging problem. Forcing a Voodoo card to match the Pentagon's timing would require hardware modifications.

  Possible solution: Crystal oscillator replacement? Need exact timing values.

  Frequency ratios and equations filled a fresh page. With each solved variable, the feasibility increased. Initial scepticism eroded as technical problems yielded to technical solutions.

  Another check.

  02:05 – Restless. Murmuring. Recognized me briefly as 'Kolya' (father). Reoriented to person/place. Vital signs stable. Administered 50ml water.

  Outside, Moscow slept under a thin layer of fresh snow. Occasional vehicles passing on the street below cast momentary patterns across his ceiling, competing with the electronic illumination from his monitor.

  By 03:00, his notes had evolved from questions to tentative solutions:

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Bridge controller could leverage existing memory paging scheme if modified to trap specific port accesses...

  The 03:00 check confirmed his mother sleeping peacefully again, which he documented with characteristic attention.

  Vitya reached the final section of Irina's white paper. His notebook now contained a modified approach to the architecture bridge yielding reduced latency. Careful diagrams showed timing charts, memory maps, and circuit modifications that expanded on Irina's original design.

  One final check on his mother before bed:

  04:45 – Sleeping comfortably. Medication prepared for morning dose. Oxygen stable at 96%.

  With both technical and caregiving responsibilities complete, Vitya allowed himself three hours of sleep before his mother's next scheduled medication.

  “So,” Azamat said, breaking the silence that Vitya found oddly reassuring. The Kyrgyz man reached into his bag and pulled out a green circuit board wrapped in anti-static film—proper handling technique, Vitya observed with approval. “I've been thinking about our design approach, and there's something critical we're overlooking—mass storage integration.”

  Dima glanced up from his schematic, his features hardening. Vitya recognised this look; recalled it forming on faces as a debate over fill algorithms escalated a month ago. He winced at the memory.

  “We discussed this. Pentagon uses tape or floppy. Works fine.” Dima's tone carried the pragmatism Vitya had come to respect.

  “For 1982, perhaps.” Azamat unwrapped the board with a flourish reminiscent of an electronics market seller. “But Project Chimera deserves proper storage architecture. SCSI gives us direct access to CD-ROM drives, hard disks with actual capacity—”

  “Impossible,” Dima cut in sharply. His pencil froze mid-stroke. “The Pentagon bus architecture can't handle SCSI timing requirements.”

  Mentally calculating the timing issues, Vitya concluded Dima was right about the technical limitation, but Azamat had a point too. The potential existed, if they could solve the interface problem.

  “Not with standard drivers, no.” Azamat's eyes brightened with an enthusiasm that Vitya associated with solving optimisation problems. “But if we implement DMA transfer modes and buffer the—”

  “We lack the bandwidth.” Dima's voice flattened.

  Vitya recoiled internally at the mounting disagreement. Technical disputes stirred uncomfortable memories of his family's past conflicts. Of his brother's tirades about Chechnya. He redirected his focus to the circuit board lying in front of him, his mind automatically tracing possible integration pathways.

  Azamat placed both palms on the workbench, leaning forward like a chess player making a decisive move. “Which is why we create a bypass circuit! Think beyond polygons, my friend. Mass storage means procedural generation. Entire worlds built on-the-fly. Texture streaming.”

  These possibilities stirred Vitya's interest despite himself. He'd imagined such capabilities for his demos, dreaming of what streaming textures could achieve compared to the tight memory constraints he'd mastered.

  In her corner, Katya tapped a subtle rhythm against her notebook—01010000, ASCII ‘P.’

  “The physics calculations alone would overwhelm the CPU,” Dima countered, crossing his arms defensively.

  01010010, ‘R.’ The pattern registered almost before conscious thought; Katya was spelling out “problem” in binary.

  “Not with parallel processing,” Azamat tapped his temple in a gesture Vitya found needlessly theatrical. “Storage is what separates toys from real computers. Look at what Western machines accomplish with proper data buses.”

  Dima's jaw muscles tightened—a warning sign Vitya had learned to interpret from helping others debug code.

  ‘O,’ ‘B,’ ‘L,’ …

  Azamat peeled back the anti-static film with theatrical precision, revealing a PCI card beneath—a small controller with a distinctive chipset. Vitya's eyes locked onto the familiar architecture, his mind automatically cataloguing it as an American SCSI controller. The gold-plated connectors caught the workshop's fluorescent light as Azamat held it up.

  "What about this?"

  “Adaptec,” Dima identified flatly. “Expensive. Complicated. Unnecessary.”

  “The same was once said about satellites,” Azamat replied with a flourish. “While Americans were launching fireworks, we put Sputnik in orbit because someone dared to think beyond limitations.”

  This historical reference struck Vitya as misplaced. Sputnik succeeded through simplicity, not added complexity—a lesson from his studies of Soviet-era engineering journals.

  “Seven megabytes per second transfer rate,” Azamat continued, his voice rising as Vitya shrank in his chair. “Do you comprehend what that means for a machine currently stuck with kilobytes per second? Revolution!”

  ‘E,’ ‘M.’ Vitya nodded at Katya, attempting reassurance he couldn't justify to himself.

  Dima pushed back from the workbench and stood. His posture shifted from defensive to confrontational. “And how many roubles worth of additional components? How many more points of failure? How many more debugging hours?”

  “Since when does innovation need to justify its cost?” Azamat's cheeks flushed. “This is about vision!”

  “No,” Dima said firmly. “This is about you trying to off-load those AHA2930s you overpaid for at Gorbushka last week.”

  The accusation crystallised in the air. Vitya recalled seeing Azamat at the market that day—selling RAM chips acquired at the demo party—but hadn't noticed the transaction Dima described.

  Azamat's mouth opened, then closed like a system crash. “That's—that's not fair.”

  “Wednesday. You bought ten controllers from Viktor Ivanov. I saw the transaction while buying capacitors. He charged you double market value because you didn't check going rates first.” Dima crossed his arms. “Now suddenly SCSI is critical to our project? Convenient.”

  At the mention of Viktor Ivanov, Vitya flinched. The black market trader unsettled him with his calculating stare and leather-gloved hands.

  Shifting uncomfortably, he noticed Irina exchange glances with Katya. While concern showed in Irina's features, Katya maintained her analytical reserve. Outwardly, she may as well have been debugging an interrupt handler.

  Azamat's fingers curled into fists, mirroring how his brother's had before smashing their father's prized radio during their final argument.

  “So I made one bad deal. That doesn't invalidate the technical merit—”

  “It clouds your judgement,” Dima interrupted. “We need objectivity, not sales pitches.”

  “And we need ambition!” Azamat slammed his palm on the table, causing a jar of capacitors to rattle. Twelve newtons more would send tiny components scattering across the floor, Vitya calculated.

  With each exchange, the atmosphere grew heavier, filling the garage with an uncomfortable electricity like static accumulating before a system crash. Checking his watch, Vitya noted his mother would need her medication in two hours. This routine offered a sense of order amid the discord.

  A solution formed in his mind, straightforward yet effective—akin to the way he overcame the Pentagon's lack of sprites earning first place at Chaos Constructions five years ago.

  “Perhaps,” he ventured, voice barely audible. Both men paused their argument to listen, making his skin prickle with unease. Clearing his throat, he fought the impulse to retreat into silence, knowing the solution justified this momentary disquiet.

  “The SCSI controller,” he elaborated, drawing strength from technical details. “We don't need to integrate it directly into the main board. We could build a separate expansion module—a daughterboard that connects only when needed.”

  Taking a spare sheet of acetate, he laid it over Dima's design. With gentle yet confident movements, he sketched a simple block diagram, the solution flowing through his pencil.

  “This approach isolates the complexity,” he explained, briefly forgetting his shyness in the clarity of the solution. “The main system remains stable and focused on core functionality. The SCSI subsystem becomes optional—a plug-in module with its own power regulation and bus interfaces.”

  His pencil traced circuit paths with efficiency honed through years of optimising Z80 assembly code. Each line offered a solution to both the technical problem and human conflict—bridging opposing viewpoints.

  “By separating the systems, we reduce electrical noise that would compromise video timing. Additionally—” he acknowledged Azamat with a glance, “—we create a market for expansion modules beyond storage. This interface could eventually support network cards or audio processors.”

  The garage fell quiet. Even Katya leaned forward, her binary tapping halted as she examined his diagram with the attentiveness she reserved for well-crafted algorithms.

  “That's... actually brilliant,” Dima admitted, studying the sketch with a respect Vitya valued above praise.

  “Expandability means recurring revenue,” Azamat added, clearly intrigued by the commercial potential.

  Irina peeled herself from her observational post against the wall. Her dyed hair caught the workbench lamp as she bent to study the design, casting prismatic shadows across Vitya's sketch.

  “Clean approach. Perfect separation of concerns.” Her accent slipped as technical appreciation took over. “We could push it further—implement hot-swapping with buffered I/O. Chuck a small EEPROM in there for device signatures, yeah?”

  She straightened up, a sardonic smile playing at her lips. “And here I thought I'd spend another evening watching lads square up over components. Vitya just saved us from that particular horror show.”

  After adding a few quick annotations, Vitya set down his pencil. His momentary confidence ebbed away. Folding his hands in his lap, he leaned back, seeking invisibility once more. The attention made his skin itch.

  “Just a thought,” he murmured, focusing on a scuff mark on the concrete floor.

  Above him, the others exchanged glances. He sensed their recognition—similar to what audiences experienced when his demos achieved seemingly impossible effects on ageing hardware. Yet technical brilliance came more naturally than human interaction. His thoughts drifted to his mother's medication schedule, finding solace in its predictability as attention shifted away from him.