"Vitya? Vitya, where are the tapes? Director Morozov needs the БЭСМ calculations by morning!"

  The voice sliced through his concentration like a system interrupt. His fingers froze above the keyboard, the half-completed assembly routine momentarily forgotten. A glance at the digital clock showed 2:23.

  "Coming, Mama," he called, swiftly saving his work with three keystrokes.

  Switching off the monitor plunged the room into darkness except for the amber power indicators on his equipment rack. Phosphor ghosts danced across his vision from the screen's afterglow as he made his way down the narrow corridor to his mother's room.

  She sat upright in bed, her thin nightgown hanging off one shoulder, eyes searching the shadows with urgent purpose. The clear plastic oxygen cannula looped around her ears and across her cheeks, where permanent impressions marked her pale skin. Her fingers traced invisible geometric patterns across the blanket as the oxygen concentrator in the corner maintained its rhythmic hum.

  "The magnetic tapes," she insisted, fingers plucking at the cotton fabric. She paused, drawing a shallow breath. "They were right here. The ТРАЕКТОРИЯ-М CNC routing algorithms—" Another breath, slightly laboured. "—for the thrust vector actuator. Director Morozov needs them by morning!"

  "Mama," Vitya said softly, approaching with measured steps. The floorboard beneath his left foot creaked, a sound he'd memorised and typically avoided. He settled on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb her invisible calculations.

  "It's 2002, not 1986. You're home in our flat on Prospekt Vernadskogo."

  Her eyes, so like his own, darted around the room, seeking reference points in a mental geography decades out of date.

  "But the precision tolerances... the БЭСМ-6 batch processing..." she murmured.

  "The Arsenal plant's computing centre closed years ago," he explained, with the same methodical patience he applied when debugging assembly routines. His voice maintained the exact cadence that seemed to penetrate her confusion. "Remember? You revolutionised the CNC manufacturing algorithms there. They still use your optimisation techniques."

  She blinked, momentarily anchored by the technical reference, a flicker of recognition crossing her face like a valid data packet amidst noise.

  Vitya reached for the pill organiser on her nightstand, checking the evening compartment. Empty. Good. After adjusting her blankets, he tucked them around her thin frame.

  "What year did you say?" she asked, her brow furrowing.

  "2002. November."

  "November," she repeated, testing the word. "And Kolya?"

  The question he knew would come. "Papa died in 1994, Mama. Remember?"

  She nodded vaguely, the information registering without fully connecting. Then her eyes sharpened suddenly, focusing on Vitya with unexpected clarity.

  "Did you ever solve that memory allocation problem?" A pause as she caught her breath. "The one with the recursive array addressing?"

  Vitya blinked, momentarily disoriented by this fragment of lucidity. Two years since she'd discussed technical matters with him.

  "I did," he said, his throat constricting. "I'm working on something similar now, actually. A project with some... colleagues."

  "The Pentagon," she said, nodding as if they'd been discussing it all evening.

  "Yes." He swallowed. "We're trying to bridge the Z80 architecture with PCI bus operations."

  "Mmm." She nodded. "Direct memory access?"

  "Exactly. Using a two-stage approach with shared memory buffers."

  Her eyes lit with understanding—brief, but unmistakable. "Smart boy. Always were."

  Adjusting her pillow to relieve pressure on her lungs, he noticed the photograph of his father tucked beneath it. She sank back, the moment of connection dissolving. Her eyes opened again, confused. "Vitya? Is it time for work?"

  "No, Mama. It's night. Time to sleep."

  After straightening her blankets once more, he checked her water glass and adjusted the small lamp to cast just enough light to orient her if she woke again. Her breathing slowed as he sat beside her, counting the seconds between each breath as if counting machine cycles.

  When she finally descended into sleep, he adjusted the cannula where it had slipped during her agitation. Remaining, he watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. In the dim light, he could almost see the brilliant mathematician who had once explained recursive functions to him on graph paper at their kitchen table. The woman who had taught him that complex problems yielded to patience and systematic thought.

  The small display of the pulse oximeter clipped to her index finger glowed a pale green in the dim room: 89%. Not ideal, but stable. Vitya had learned that her moments of technical clarity sometimes came with a physiological cost—the excitement slightly elevating her heart rate and taxing her compromised lungs.

  Rising carefully from the bed, Vitya tested each floorboard before shifting his weight. At the doorway, he paused, listening to her breathing.

  "Good night, Mama," he whispered, and returned to his code and calculations.

  The wall clock's dim glow marked 3:07 when Vitya returned to his chair. Oximeter reading recorded against the time. Four hours until mother's next dose of medication—a precious window of uninterrupted time.

  He flicked the Pentagon's power switch, leaning forward to listen to its startup sequence. His ear caught each distinct sound—the initial click, the rising whine of the power supply, the soft chatter of the disk drive. The mechanisms, in their way, spoke to him through their rhythms and irregularities.

  Time to test his compression theory.

  As the monitor warmed to life, its glow illuminated the cramped workspace. His shoulders relaxed when the command prompt appeared. In this digital realm, problems had solutions. Variables could be controlled. Memory could be optimized.

  Since the previous night's dive into Irina's white paper, the compression scheme had occupied his thoughts. The design required a steady stream of texture data—deemed impossible on standard Pentagon hardware. Yet to Vitya, impossibility merely signified that nobody had discovered the right approach.

  His fingers descended on the keyboard, assembly code flowing from his mind through his fingers. Each instruction represented hours of mental calculation, optimized for the Z80's limited register set.

  Code emerged in bursts, each function built upon decades of intuition. Where others perceived only the Pentagon's limitations, Vitya recognized opportunities—unused clock ticks, overlooked hardware quirks, forgotten timing tricks.

  "Bus transfer rates too slow? We'll see about that," he whispered, assembling the test routine.

  Program loaded. Holding his breath, he pressed the execute key. The screen flickered, displaying a grid of compressed textures unpacking in real-time.

  Numbers appeared in the corner: 176 KB/sec transfer rate.

  He blinked, ran the test again. Same result.

  A sound between laugh and gasp escaped as he leaned back. His compression algorithm exceeded the Voodoo card's requirements by 6 kilobytes per second—on hardware never intended for such tasks.

  "Это невозможно," he whispered, echoing what others murmured about his demos at festivals. A rare smile crossed his face as he savoured this moment of technical victory.

  The Pentagon continued its contented hum, unaware it had just accomplished what its designers would have considered impossible.

  Pink light filtered through the thin curtains as Vitya blinked at his monitor. His neck cracked as he straightened, the night's work spread before him—six pages of graph paper covered in his microscopic handwriting, circuit diagrams sketched with mathematical precision.

  He'd first opened Irina's white paper with a dismissive snort. "Pentagon-3Dfx integration? Чушь собачья." With each step towards the goal, his scepticism faltered. He'd traced each signal path through her proposed VideoMixer architecture, recalculating timing diagrams, verifying her assertions against his own knowledge of the hardware.

  The transparency mask technique transformed the Pentagon's notorious attribute clash into a deliberate feature. Where others saw limitations, she'd engineered advantages. He'd spent the last two hours sketching potential optimizations to her design, lost in the puzzle.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Vitya rotated his wrist, checking the time. 6:43. Another night sacrificed to technical obsession. His mother would need her medication in seventeen minutes.

  The apartment hummed with pre-dawn quiet. In this stillness, Vitya recognised something in Irina's work that mirrored his own approach—pushing hardware beyond its documented capabilities, redefining limitations rather than accepting them.

  How many times had other coders dismissed his demos with the same doubt he'd first applied to her paper?

  "No way a Pentagon can render that many polygons."

  "Z80 can't handle those calculations in real-time."

  Yet he'd proven them wrong, time after time.

  Vitya stood frozen outside Café "Bytes," smoothing the worn edges of Irina Petrova's technical white paper.

  "Genlock synchronization requires precise timing compensation," he murmured, rehearsing arguments. "The К561КТ3 switching circuit might degrade signals at higher resolutions..."

  University students pushed past him. Vitya flattened against the wall, shoulders contracting inward.

  He glanced at his Casio F-91W. Forty-one minutes. That's all he could spare before racing back across Moscow. His mother needed her evening medication thirty minutes after the nurse left at nine, and the metro journey carved away his margin for error.

  Through the window, he glimpsed figures around a table littered with circuit boards. A woman sketched signal waveforms in the air with animated hands.

  He folded the paper into a precise rectangle and tucked it into his breast pocket, fingers brushing the notebook where his mother's medication schedule shared pages with optimization algorithms.

  "VideoMixer circuit requires forty-seven components," he reiterated to himself one last time before grasping the door handle.

  Inside, Vitya located the perfect spot—a dim corner offering both concealment and sight lines. He positioned his tea at a distance from the table edge matching his arrangement at home. A small ritual of control in unfamiliar territory.

  Behind the counter, Irina Petrova moved with the efficiency of a superscalar processor. Pour coffee, tap keyboard, scan room, repeat. Three operations interleaved without idle time. Vitya found himself tracking her rhythms—the brief pauses between serving customers and returning to her terminal, the seamless context switching when someone approached the counter. Like efficient machine code, her actions contained no redundant steps, no unnecessary loops.

  "Net access for terminal four expires in eight minutes," she announced without looking up from her screen, continuing to type. "And you—" she pointed at a teenager with a Zip disc, "—that payload won't compile on our systems. Try again with standard libraries or go elsewhere."

  Her Dublin-tinged Russian cut through the café din with a signal-to-noise ratio that Vitya appreciated. No redundancy in her speech, no inefficiencies in her motions.

  Vitya sat without moving, maintaining his invisibility subroutine while his untouched tea cooled. A quick check of his Casio confirmed twenty-three minutes remained before his mother needed medication—enough for initial contact but not for deep technical discussion.

  Irina's gaze flicked toward him—a system scan detecting an anomaly. Vitya stiffened, compiler errors flashing through his mind.

  When the café emptied to just two screen-fixated customers, he rose and approached the counter with the careful steps of a programmer debugging volatile memory. He placed Irina's document between them.

  "The two-stage memory addressing scheme," he began, voice tight and mechanical. "Your buffering strategy employs non-standard page alignment. Won't this cause cache thrashing during texture transfers?"

  Irina glanced up from her terminal, eyes narrowing with comprehension.

  "Only if you're thinking in PC architecture terms," she replied. "Z80 doesn't suffer the same alignment penalties."

  Vitya's shoulders remained hunched, his gaze fixed on the schematic rather than her face. "But the interrupt overhead during DMA operations—"

  "Test it yourself," Irina challenged, tapping a finger against his calculation. "You're assuming worst-case latency. The Pentagon's ULA isn't as inefficient as you think."

  Something in her tone—the absence of condescension, the pure technical focus—caused a subtle shift in Vitya's posture. His spine straightened fractionally.

  "I modelled the interrupt handling on a modified Toshiba T3100," he explained, his sentences expanding beyond their initial terse structure. "But your approach suggests the vertical blanking interval could be exploited for background transfers."

  "Exactly." Irina smiled. "Now you're thinking like a proper hacker, not a textbook."

  The overhead lights flickered. Terminal six's screen strobed, green text fragmenting before stabilizing. Vitya's hands paused mid-gesture as he instinctively glanced toward the affected machine.

  "Flyback diode shorting from thermal stress," he murmured, the diagnosis surfacing without conscious thought.

  "Terminal six needs a new КД213А," Irina stated at the same moment, reaching beneath the counter for her toolkit.

  Vitya blinked, his train of thought interrupted. He turned back to find Irina staring at him, her expression shifting from professional detachment to something more curious.

  They'd arrived at identical diagnoses without exchanging a word.

  For a fraction of a second, Vitya forgot his carefully maintained social barriers. Their eyes locked in mutual recognition—two minds that processed electronic failure states through the same pathways, that heard the same whispered secrets from dying silicon.

  The corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile.

  "You're Vitya_BK, aren't you?"

  The handle she'd spoken crashed through Vitya's processes like a breakpoint interrupt, halting execution mid-instruction. Eyes snapped to the schematic as his mind recalibrated. Recognition from strangers unsettled his usual routines, but this deviation carried technical nous—an informed awareness.

  "Your vector rotation routine on the Pentagon." Irina leaned forward, her voice steady with admiration. "The one with quaternion transformations squeezed into 512 bytes. Nobody could figure out how you fit the lookup tables into such tight memory."

  Warmth spread across Vitya's ears. He stared at the circuit board between them, unable to meet her gaze. Three people in all of Moscow should recognize that optimization technique. Four, apparently.

  "The palette cycling during frame transitions," she continued, "using the interrupt vector to swap color registers mid-scan. Brilliant solution for the bandwidth problem."

  His eyes darted up. Not just recognition—understanding. She hadn't merely seen his demo; she'd reverse-engineered it, decoded his methods. Techniques he'd spent weeks perfecting, negotiated into impossibly tight memory constraints, tricks the demo scene had applauded but never properly dissected.

  "I've been working on a texture compression algorithm." The words emerged before he realized he was speaking. His right hand lifted, index finger tracing invisible assembly code. "Adaptive bit-depth allocation based on visual importance sampling."

  His hand sketched memory layouts and bit-packing schemes through the air. "The Pentagon's limited bandwidth means traditional mipmapping fails, so instead I'm using a variable bit-depth approach where peripheral textures receive fewer—"

  Vitya halted, suddenly conscious of his own animation. But Irina nodded, following his explanation without the glazed expression non-programmers adopted when he spoke of his work.

  "Go on," she said.

  And for the first time in months, someone besides his sleeping mother heard him describe his code exactly as he understood it—not simplified, not translated, but in its raw, elegant form.

  Vitya's gaze flicked to his watch. The familiar panic surged through him. Nine twenty-two. He evaluated the remaining buffer: Minutes until the nurse left, transit time home, his mother's medication schedule. Time—his most precious resource—slipped away.

  "I need to leave." His voice reverted to flat, mechanical. "My mother requires her Memantine at precisely ten o'clock. The nurse departs at nine-thirty."

  He expected the standard response—impatience, dismissal, the subtle narrowing of eyes that always followed his abrupt departures. Instead, Irina's expression shifted into something unexpected. Recognition.

  "Alzheimer's?" she asked, her voice dropping to match his volume.

  Vitya stilled, hand hovering above his half-finished tea. "Early-onset variant. Diagnosis three years, four months ago."

  Irina nodded once, her movements economical. "My uncle. Similar timeline."

  She reached beneath the counter, producing a folded square of graph paper, creases aligned to perfect right angles. She slid it across the counter.

  "Coordinates for a project that shouldn't exist, but will."

  Vitya unfolded it with careful fingers. A hand-drawn map, annotated with cyrillic shorthand.

  "Your texture compression algorithm," Irina continued, "could solve our bandwidth problem. And I suspect you'd find our approach to the vertical blanking interval... interesting."

  "I maintain strict schedules," he said, already computing potential adjustments to his mother's care routine. "My availability follows predictable patterns with minimal flexibility."

  "We work around constraints." Irina tapped the map. "That's the entire point."

  Vitya folded the map along its original creases and slipped it into his breast pocket. The paper's weight pressed against him, simultaneously insignificant and monumental. A new variable in his carefully balanced equation.

  His watch beeped. The nine-thirty warning. He stood, movements mechanical once again.

  "Garage location noted. I'll modify my schedule," he said, his mind already calculating the judicious alterations to his mother's care routine needed to make this possible.

  As he turned to leave, his fingers brushed against the folded map, its corners perfectly aligned with his shirt pocket. For the first time in months, his mind raced with something other than medication schedules and memory management routines.

  Vitya shifted in his chair, fingers moving against his backpack. His gaze darted between the expectant faces surrounding Dima's workbench.

  "I..." He cleared his throat. "I've been working on something that might help with the memory bottleneck."

  Unzipping the backpack, he extracted a carefully labeled floppy disk in a protective case. The disk bore his neat handwriting: "TexComp v0.8.4 - Pentagon 128."

  "Texture compression algorithms," he explained, voice barely audible above the heater's rumble. "Based on run-length encoding but with optimizations for the Z80's register limitations."

  Dima extended his hand, and Vitya paused before relinquishing the disk.

  "This works with standard Pentagon memory mapping?" Dima asked.

  "Yes," Vitya nodded. "Also added special handling for the HD64180's MMU if we secure one. Should improve texture transfer rates by forty percent, possibly more."

  Inserting the disk into the drive of the Pentagon 128 set up on the corner of his workbench, Dima waited as the ancient floppy mechanism whirred and clicked, struggling to read the magnetic surface.

  The Pentagon booted into Vitya's custom loader, its familiar beep replaced by a synthesized chime that made Irina raise her eyebrows in appreciation.

  "Nice touch," she murmured.

  "Memory-resident player," Vitya explained. "Only sixteen bytes in the interrupt vector."

  The screen flickered, then displayed a spinning 3D cube. Unlike the wireframe models typical of Z80 machines, this cube featured fully textured surfaces—stone, metal, and what appeared to be flowing water on different faces.

  "That's impossible," Katya whispered, stepping closer. "The memory requirements alone..."

  "Watch," Vitya said, his voice gaining confidence as he pressed a key.

  The cube unfolded, transforming into a corridor that stretched into apparent infinity. The textures remained crisp as the viewpoint began moving forward, giving the impression of flight through the textured tunnel.

  "Eight frames per second," Vitya noted. "With sixteen distinct textures cycling through the buffer."

  "How many kilobytes per texture?" Dima asked, his usual stoic expression softening into wonder.

  "Four," Vitya replied. "Compressed from sixteen."

  Azamat whistled low. "Чёрт возьми... that's actually working."

  The group fell silent, watching the smooth animation and texture transitions—a technical achievement that shouldn't have been possible on the aging hardware before them.

  For a moment, their differences faded. Dima's factory-hardened pragmatism, Irina's cyberpunk ambition, Katya's cautious brilliance, Azamat's entrepreneurial drive, and Vitya's retiring genius—all united in appreciation of what they witnessed.

  "This," Irina said, breaking the silence, "this is exactly what Project Chimera needs."