The spinning cube on the Pentagon's screen ensnared Katya, mesmerizing her like a hypnotist's pocket watch. Textured surfaces glinted with impossible detail, each polygon snapping into place—an equation resolving itself. Every frame of Vitya's demonstration basked in stolen cycles, an illicit dance of optimized memory transfers. Her hands moved through the air, mapping the sleight of hand behind such mastery. Only a select few grasped the artistry required to push Soviet-era hardware to these limits.

  This moment transcended the ordinary.

  A revelation struck her—how much further the Z80 might stretch, given room to flourish despite its constraints. Observing it now, alive with motion among her technical peers, shifted something fundamental in her understanding.

  The CRT's glow etched sharp angles across Vitya's face as he adjusted the code's parameters. His movements flowed with unhurried exactness—displaying the confidence of one who understood precisely where the machine's boundaries lay. Dima watched from behind, arms crossed over his Zenith scarf, while Azamat prowled near the workbench, rolling a capacitor between restless fingers.

  Vitya released control of the core subroutine. The pixels trembled—a microsecond's hesitation—before realigning. The illusion persisted.

  A quiet exhale through her nose marked Katya's sole acknowledgement.

  “Bloody brilliant,” Irina said, her Dublin accent thickening with excitement as she dug through her overflowing satchel. She pushed aside tangled cables and dog-eared technical journals, extracting a worn folder. The schematics unfurled across the workbench beneath her fingers, pages placed with the reverency of a priest arranging sacred texts.

  Katya gravitated closer. The diagrams sprawled like a city map, each line beckoning toward unexplored possibilities. She hovered her hands above the paper, following invisible execution paths while her mind reconfigured the architecture.

  “The interrupt table needn't sit at zero page,” she murmured, speaking to herself. “Move it up—reclaim that memory.”

  Irina's eyes locked onto hers, sparking with recognition. “Yes! That frees enough space for a proper dispatcher—”

  "—no more need for repeated dereferencing,” Katya completed, their shared insight taking form.

  Irina's grin widened, her Dublin accent thickening with excitement. “Exactly.”

  Katya retrieved her notebook, opening to timing tables etched into graph paper through untold sleepless nights. Each column stood accounted for—a meticulous dissection of CPU cycles, expressing truths clearer than speech.

  Irina's battered notebook mirrored hers, though with messier, urgent script—solutions discovered in motion rather than stillness. Scanning the code, Katya identified inefficiencies as naturally as corrupt sectors on a disk. Her finger targeted an offending line.

  “Here. Redundant registers.”

  Irina paused, then nodded sharply. “Good catch.”

  Everything around them blurred into background noise. Dima shifted his weight, and Azamat continued rolling his capacitor with the restless energy of someone waiting for a chance to interject. Only Vitya followed their exchange with comprehension.

  Katya paused, then spoke: “Командная очередь.”

  The words pierced the silence. A flash of comprehension crossed Vitya's eyes. Irina's expression brightened. The command queue—the cornerstone of her white paper, bridging architectures across a decade's evolution.

  “Yes!” Irina seized her pen, already writing. “That's it.”

  Their collaboration flowed with natural rhythm. Katya anticipated Irina's thoughts, completing ideas before they formed words. When Irina proposed self-modifying code—a technique Katya reserved for private experiments—she built upon it without hesitation. The solution's elegance outweighed convention.

  “I implemented similar logic for the interrupt-driven texture swap,” Vitya said.

  Katya acknowledged this with a slight nod. His compression routines demonstrated the power of exact timing. She incorporated the concept seamlessly, watching the architecture assemble itself like a recursive function finding its path home.

  “These calculations astound me,” Irina said, studying Katya's timing diagrams. “Every T-state accounted for.”

  Katya turned away as recognition's warmth settled in her chest—an unfamiliar sensation in its genuineness. Her father never acknowledged her technical prowess. Yet Irina understood without explanation.

  “We speak directly to hardware,” Katya whispered to herself, recalling the line from Irina's white paper.

  “In ways that would make Sinclair proud,” Irina replied, flashing a grin Katya couldn't help but mirror—if only briefly.

  The moment stretched, electric with unspoken understanding. The room stilled around them. Awareness of others' attention snapped Katya back to reality, conscious of how completely she'd forgotten their presence.

  Irina directed a sheepish grin toward Dima and Azamat. “Sorry, lads. Got carried away.”

  Azamat rocked forward. “Tell me what parts you need. I'll find them.”

  Katya sealed her notebook and slipped it inside her coat pocket alongside her mechanical pencil, pressing both against her chest beneath layers of concealing clothing—garments chosen to hide everything essential, including her true self. The shared focus remained with her like a monitor's afterglow.

  For this brief interval, she existed not as Yegor Volkov, dutiful son and political prop.

  In that moment, she'd lived as Katerina_Z80—a programmer among peers.

  Azamat performed his ritual with the deliberate theatrics of a stage magician, teasing the moment as if delay might multiply their fortune. Light from the dim garage caught the scuffed leather of his military surplus bag as it settled on Dima's workbench. He let his hand rest on the worn straps before unveiling the contents. Soldering fumes mingled with damp concrete and stale cigarette smoke, yet Katya detected something else beneath it all—possibility.

  “Before we discuss specifications,” Azamat said, his vowels stretching, consonants softening as excitement thickened his accent. He produced an anti-static case, setting it down with exaggerated care, as if it might detonate.

  Katya's breath caught. Another false promise? More counterfeit chips masquerading as genuine? But Azamat's bearing suggested otherwise—he projected the confidence of a man clutching truth.

  The lid lifted.

  The magician's reveal.

  Three microprocessors lay nestled in black conductive foam. Ceramic casings gleamed with gold-trimmed edges and laser-etched markings.

  “Hitachi HD64180.” Azamat's voice dipped low.

  Recognition jolted through Katya's chest, electric and raw. She held back from reaching out. She knew these chips—had spent months chasing leads that evaporated, calling in favours, mapping out architectures in the margins of official documents while pretending to take notes at ministry events. Now they existed, tangible, real before her.

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  “Integrated memory management unit. Direct memory access controller. Full Z80 compatibility,” Azamat recited, but her mind raced ahead, envisioning implementations.

  And naturally, the grand finale.

  “Sixteen-bit addressing?” He tapped his sunburned nose, grinning. “Нет. I got us thirty-two.”

  The garage air thickened. Irina froze beside her. Dima's expression shifted, his perpetual frown dissolving into wonder.

  A thirty-two-bit address space. Gigabytes of accessible pages. Proper virtual memory. Protection rings for multitasking. Katya's hands twitched with urgency—pen, paper, keyboard—anything to transmute the rush of thought into structure before it escaped.

  A metro train thundered beneath them, rattling dust from the rusted beams. Silence held.

  Until—

  “How?” Dima probed, his voice soft. More for the benefit of the others than himself.

  Azamat spread his hands. “Does it matter?”

  Of course it mattered. Every pipeline explored, source exhausted, connection leveraged. Yet in this moment, the missing pieces meant nothing to Katya. Only what lay before them meant anything.

  “May I?” The words escaped unbidden.

  Azamat nodded his permission. She stepped forward, studying the processors under flickering fluorescent light. Her eyes traced the laser-etched numbers, matching them against memorized datasheets.

  If genuine—if functional—these processors changed everything.

  Azamat leaned against the table, pride radiating from him. “You see the possibilities, да?”

  She saw them.

  But the earlier argument soured her stomach. Its memory persisted, woven between burnt solder and fading adrenaline.

  Azamat pushing forward, invading space, vodka and tobacco on his breath as he pressed his point. His voice rising, gestures cutting through air until collective pressure forced his retreat.

  Dima standing rigid, hands clenched, voice hardening to steel. Not shouting, not hostile, yet dangerous—a force demanding submission.

  Katya's palms pressed together. That tension struck chords she recognized too well. Not just in male dominance displays, but in her own visceral understanding of them.

  A spectral aggression-filled response. A figment that she feared still lurked beneath, waiting to betray her.

  Did it still coil inside her? Hidden beneath her ribs, seeking weakness?

  Dima reached for his hoarded factory acetate. Light caught the transparency as he aligned it over the schematics. His shoulders relaxed as focus replaced tension. His state resonated with her—the same clarity she found when solving complex problems.

  “We position the HD64180 here,” he marked a central rectangle. “Primary crystal oscillator adjacent, not perpendicular. Minimizes interference.”

  His voice transformed—grounded, certain. Social awkwardness vanished before circuit logic.

  “Would a crowbar circuit stabilize the power fluctuations?” Katya asked.

  Dima continued marking without looking up. “Already planned. Moscow grid drops below spec three times daily. Voltage supervisor with millisecond delay prevents false triggers.”

  She exhaled. This explained their cohesion. Why she stayed despite tensions and the unease gnawing at the tendons of her neck.

  Azamat smirked. “I knew you'd like them.”

  She ignored him, thoughts already racing with implementations.

  Dima's pencil struck the acetate. “Termination resistors here, here, and here. Pull-downs on unused inputs. Ground plane split between analogue and digital with ferrite bridge.”

  Something flickered across Irina's expression—quiet appreciation.

  Dima sketched without hesitation, each stroke born of practical knowledge gained through years of factory work and clandestine studies.

  “The data bus will split here,” he continued, “with the Z80 lines running parallel to the backplane and the PCI signals on a separate layer entirely.” Flipping the acetate sheet over, he began marking the opposite side. “Dual-layer board, minimum. Four would be optimal, but cost becomes prohibitive.”

  “Manufacturing tolerances?” Irina asked. “Layer misalignment could ruin everything.”

  Dima met her eyes. “Two tenths spacing on high-frequency traces. No blind or buried vias. Standard fibreglass and resin substrate with 35-micron copper. Any shop with Soviet-era etching machines will manage. Even with inconsistent chemical supplies.”

  Azamat whistled softly. “You've considered everything.”

  A wisp of a smile touched Dima's mouth. “Not everything. Just the practical issues academics miss.”

  The barb struck true. Katya absorbed it silently. She dwelt in theory. Dima lived in reality.

  Her attention returned to the processors. Three quiet revolutions waiting to spark.

  Hope stirred for the first time in months.

  The argument faded to background noise.

  She dismissed it.

  Katya observed Azamat's fingers turn the Hitachi chip, its ceramic surface gleaming under the desk lamp. In this dingy garage, surrounded by circuit boards and neatly labeled jars of components, equations cascaded through her thoughts. Here, she existed differently than in her father's house. Not completely herself. Never completely, but closer.

  “Ten megahertz base clock, but I've seen them pushed to twelve in military surplus gear,” Azamat said, rotating the processor between his thumb and forefinger.

  Technical specifications flashed through her mind: memory segmentation, extended addressing modes, integrated DMA channels. “We could address four times the RAM with minimal overhead.” Her voice emerged quieter than the insight deserved—a technical truth muffled by old habits.

  Irina leant forward, eyes narrowed at the circuit diagram. “The VideoMixer needs those extra cycles. Two-fifty-six colours instead of sixteen.”

  “Not if we pipeline the interrupt handlers properly.” Dima's calloused thumb traced the motherboard pathways, leaving a smudge of oxidation. “Katya's memory management extensions bypass the bottleneck entirely.”

  Their gazes locked across the workbench—minds converging on silicon possibility. In this moment of technical clarity, she felt herself becoming visible. These people couldn't see the ministerial son, the rehearsed speeches, the careful performance. They saw only her architecture, her algorithms, her logic—the truest parts of her consciousness rendered in assembly code.

  “It would actually work,” she murmured, the realization flowing through her veins. The interrupt handler she'd sketched on graph paper during her father's dinner last week—it wasn't just theory. The memory management extensions she'd debugged at three in the morning while the house slept—they had purpose.

  Dima's pencil hovered above his circuit diagram. “Not just work. Exceed specifications.”

  “A machine that shouldn't exist,” Irina breathed, “but will.”

  The prototype Pentagon hummed on the workbench between them, its green power LED blinking rhythmically. Katya resisted the urge to touch it, to physically connect with this creation that existed outside the boundaries that constrained her everywhere else.

  Silence settled as Dima rolled the final schematic into a cardboard tube. Checking her calculator watch, she noted three hours until she needed to be home, before questions arose about her whereabouts.

  “So that's it,” Dima said, glancing at his own timepiece. “We meet again on Thursday to test the preliminary memory management circuit.”

  “Hold on.” Irina reached into her bag and extracted a vodka bottle. “We need to make this official.”

  Azamat's face brightened. “A proper Russian tradition! Excellent thinking.”

  From across the room, she observed Dima gathering an assortment of vessels: chipped teacups, a laboratory beaker, and jam jars with faded розовое варенье labels. Something shifted inside her—a desire to contribute, to mark herself as part of this moment.

  “Wait.” She reached inside her coat, fingers closing around the silver flask engraved with her father's initials. A symbol of her other life. She placed it on the workbench alongside the others, the expensive metal incongruous among the mismatched containers.

  Irina poured generous measures into each vessel. The clear liquid shimmered, reminding Katya of the crystal decanters in her father's study.

  “Every project needs a name,” Irina said, recapping the bottle. “Something that honours what we're creating.”

  “Not Project Chimera?” Vitya suggested, his voice quiet as always.

  Azamat shook his head emphatically. “Too clinical. This machine deserves something with pride!”

  The words materialized in her thoughts before she realized she would speak them. “Pentagon v3 Ultra,” she said softly.

  They all turned toward her, and she fought the instinct to shrink from their attention.

  “It builds on tradition while signaling transformation,” she explained, finding confidence in the logic of her reasoning. “The Pentagon lineage continues, but evolves.” Like her—preserving what was expected while nurturing what was true.

  Dima considered this, nodding slowly. “Pentagon v3 Ultra. I like it.”

  “Perfect.” Irina raised her beaker. “To the Pentagon v3 Ultra! May it confuse Western analysts and delight Russian programmers.”

  “To mad systems!” Azamat proclaimed, lifting his teacup with theatrical flourish.

  Raising the silver flask, Katya felt its weight—the weight of her father's world—becoming something different in this moment. Their vessels clinked together in discordant harmony, and she sipped the burning liquid, feeling it trace fire down her throat.

  Azamat struck a dramatic pose, pressing one hand to his chest while extending the other. “While they upgrade by replacing,” he declared in an exaggerated orator's voice, quoting from Irina's white paper, “we evolve by integrating!”

  The performance broke through something in Katya. She covered her mouth as laughter escaped—genuine, unguarded—her eyes crinkling at the corners. Dima's laugh emerged as a rusty sound beside her. Vitya's shoulders shook silently while Irina tossed her head back, blue-streaked hair catching the workshop light.

  For this brief interval, the walls between her worlds thinned. Not education, not background, not the privilege that came with her father's position—none of it mattered. Only shared purpose existed here, in this garage suffused with solder and possibility.

  As they packed their materials, Irina distributed pages of her white paper between them. Taking her portion, Katya secured the technical diagrams and code samples in her backpack alongside a ministerial briefing she would need to review before morning. Separate worlds, nestled against each other.

  Dima extinguished the desk lamp. Darkness claimed the garage except for the red power indicator of the Pentagon, blinking steadily. She watched its pulse, drawing comfort from its constancy as she prepared to step back into her other life.