Vitya stared at the Pentagon 128 on his desk, its green power LED pulsing in four-second intervals. A quiet hum from the machine provided a counterpoint to the silence of the early morning flat. His index finger moved along the edge of the paper that lay unfolded beside his keyboard, following the double-headed eagle letterhead that transformed ordinary correspondence into commands.

  The conscription notice.

  His fingers drummed an irregular pattern on the laminate desk surface, nothing like the methodical tapping that accompanied his coding sessions. This was noise without purpose, an interrupt without a handler.

  Citizen Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich, the document began, the formal address lending weight to what followed.

  Calculations reckoned autonomically. Age: 34. Standard conscription ends at 27. But reserve mobilization... Specialists needed? Category: Signals Intelligence, Level 3 clearance... Sole caregiver? Yes, documented. But sufficient?

  The variables refused to resolve into a predictable outcome.

  From the bedroom came the soft mechanical whir of the oxygen concentrator. His mother would need her morning medication in exactly forty-three minutes. This schedule must remain immutable despite the paper that threatened to rewrite everything.

  Reaching into the desk drawer, Vitya extracted the technical specifications for the К1801ВМ1 processor. The conscription notice slid beneath it, followed by three faded issues of Микропроцессорные Средства и Системы on top. With a push, the drawer closed, problem deferred.

  Displaced magazines revealed an unlabelled diskette. He paused, recalling the stranger's handshake at the Cyberpunks Unity demo party a week ago—a swift exchange followed by muttered words, he struggled to recall the exact phrasing. “Something you'll appreciate.” That black square of plastic, an obelisk of magnetic potential, encoded secrets awaiting discovery.

  “Your mother... she would be proud.”

  Words almost distant now after the excitement of yesterday's garage meeting, and the naming of their project. His demonstration had dazzled the other Pentagon collaborators, yet the texture rotation's buffer overflow corrupted each frame transition.

  Vitya rotated the disc between thumb and forefinger. Another mystery drifting upward through his mental priority stack, incrementing its importance with each passing day. The write-protection shutter snapped closed in his finger—then open again—as he pondered its contents. An enigma refused relegation to the status of background process.

  He returned the diskette to its hiding place. For now. The buffer overflow demanded immediate attention.

  In the monitor's phosphorescent glow, his eyes followed the execution path of his code. Beside him, the Pentagon's fan spun with a steady rhythm as natural in his mind as respiration.

  With closed eyes, the memory map unfolded in his thoughts. Registers laid out before him—not as abstract concepts, but as clearly defined boxes on graph paper, each with its precise function and limitations.

  The kitchen table. 1979. His mother's hands guided his small fingers across squared paper.

  “No, Vitochka,” she tapped the pencil against the grid where his calculation spilled outside the box marked ‘R4’. “This register holds only sixteen bits. See how your value overflows? You must respect the machine's boundaries.”

  The memory of her sketch of the Электроника 60's memory architecture surfaced, along with his confusion about drawing computers instead of using them. Real computers lived behind locked doors at her workplace, guarded by serious men with clipboards and security badges.

  “But Mama, when will I see a real computer?” he'd asked.

  She'd smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Computers break, Vitochka. Paper doesn't. Before you touch a machine, you must understand what happens inside.” She tapped his forehead. “The most important processor is this one.”

  His eleven-year-old self had sighed dramatically, but remained at the table as she drew the entire memory map. Years before he would have a БК-0010 in his hands, his mother explained how data flowed through the PDP-11 instruction set architecture shared by the Электроника and БК.

  She taught him to track register changes with different colored pencils, debugging imaginary programs on paper before a single line of code existed. Blue for initial values, red for changes, green for final states.

  “This is how we think, Vitya,” she'd explained. “Interrupts are like conversation—we must pause our thoughts to truly hear others. The processor does the same, suspending its work to attend to more urgent matters.”

  Vitya opened his eyes, returning to the present. His notepad lay beside the keyboard, filled with the same color-coded tracking system she'd taught him decades ago. He'd been unconsciously using her methodology all along—blue ink marking initial memory addresses, red noting overflow points, green highlighting corrected values.

  He adjusted two lines of assembly code, reallocating the buffer to prevent overflow. The solution wasn't flashy or clever—it was methodical, built on the fundamental principles she'd inscribed into his thinking long before he'd touched a keyboard.

  The Pentagon accepted his changes. The demo ran flawlessly, texture rotation smooth as liquid. He sat back, hearing his mother's voice across the years: “See? The machine only knows what we tell it. But we must first understand what we want to say.”

  The buffer overflow error yielded to Vitya's persistence at 3:17 that morning—a perfect execution after fourteen revisions. He closed his eyes now, savouring the hollow quiet of the flat. Three weeks since Maxim's departure, and the absence lingered like a commented-out code block—both a relief and a void. The flat exhaled, free from his brother's rigid certainties, yet emptier without his presence.

  The night's success flowed into morning routine. Vitya sliced carrots into uniform 3mm discs, each cut landing with rhythmic exactitude. The kitchen counter transformed into an assembly line—vegetables sorted by colour, density, and cook time. His mother's evening meals required meticulous timing, a sequence not unlike the interrupt handlers he'd written last night.

  The knife struck the cutting board with a sharp report. Thock. The sound morphed, his mind reprocessing the audio buffer into the memory of Maxim's boots on hardwood. Thock. Thock. Thock.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Three weeks ago. Maxim packing, movements economical, efficient. Not like the brother who once sprawled across their shared bedroom floor, surrounded by circuit diagrams.

  "Look, I respect what you do, your creativity," Maxim said, folding an undershirt with military corners. "But at the end of the day, what changes? Meanwhile in Grozny..." He paused, eyes fixed on the crisp edges of fabric. "People I trained with aren't coming home."

  Vitya's fingers tightened around the knife handle. He stood frozen in this same kitchen, watching his brother transform into a stranger with a familiar face.

  "And what changes when you go? More graves on both sides?" The words escaped before he could catch them in a breakpoint. "More speeches about national pride?"

  Maxim's face—their mother's eyes, their father's jaw—met his. A flash of doubt. Or hurt? It quickly disappearing beneath resolve. He exhaled slowly, then zipped his duffel bag with a single, violent motion.

  "It's not that simple, Vitya." His voice almost apologetic. "Politics… I don't know. But the men in my unit, they need people who know what they're doing. That's real to me."

  With careful attention, Vitya aligned the carrot slices in an orderly grid, adjusting two that threatened to disrupt the pattern. The potatoes followed, cubed to 5mm, arranged by size gradient.

  The image reasserted itself: Maxim adjusting his uniform in the hallway mirror. A transformation completed. Nothing remained of the brother who'd helped him carry home his first БК computer, who'd sat beside him during those first programming lessons with their mother.

  Focusing on the kitchen counter, Vitya blinked. He'd separated the food into neat, symmetrical patterns without conscious thought. Six piles. Six components. Six memory registers.

  Control where he could find it.

  Vitya balanced the breakfast tray with careful steadiness. Two fingers beneath the left edge compensated for the slight weight imbalance caused by the glass of cranberry juice. The tray itself—a laminate rectangle salvaged from a secondhand shop—wobbled less than 0.5 centimetres in any direction. Acceptable parameters.

  At her door, he paused, listening. The oxygen concentrator hummed its steady rhythm—thirty-five cycles per minute. A soft knock followed, three measured taps.

  “Mama? Breakfast.”

  “Come in, Viktor Chernov. I've been thinking about memory allocation strategies.”

  Vitya froze. Her voice—clear, focused, present. Not the foggy confusion of recent weeks. He pushed the door open.

  His mother sat propped against her pillows, spine straight despite the illness that compressed her lungs. Her eyes tracked his movement keenly, not the usual vague scanning of the middle distance.

  “Good morning,” he said, setting the tray on the bedside table. “The medicine is under the napkin.”

  She waved dismissively at the pills. “Tell me about last night. Did the demo execute properly?”

  Vitya blinked. “You remember I was working on—”

  “The texture compression algorithm. Of course.” She adjusted her oxygen cannula. “Did your friends appreciate what you accomplished?”

  He pulled the chair closer to her bed. “They did. When the cube unfolded into the corridor, they were speechless.”

  A smile transformed her face—the mathematician's smile he remembered from childhood, when he'd solved a particularly elegant equation. “Tell me how you managed the vector rotation without sacrificing frame rate.”

  His usual reserve melted away as he leant forward. “I pre-calculated the sine table values but compressed them using a differential encoding scheme. Each value stores only the difference from the previous one, requiring just four bits instead of eight.”

  “Smart. And the processor overhead for retrieval?”

  “Minimal,” he continued, guiding another spoonful to her lips. “I unroll the lookup into a tight loop that executes in exactly seventeen T-states.”

  Her expression brightened with understanding. “What about the higher rotational velocities? You'd risk accumulation errors in the differential values.”

  The spoon hovered as Vitya paused. These moments of connection were precious—fragments of her still accessible through the shared language of code and mathematics. “I implemented a correction factor every sixty-four frames.”

  The oxygen hissed steadily as she considered this. “Try register-pairing your counter variables. You could eliminate that correction entirely.”

  Her fingers sketched patterns in the air, mentally stepping through his algorithm, finding optimizations he'd missed.

  “You use a jump table for interrupts, yes? Then you could use shadow registers to preserve accumulator state during your interrupt handler.”

  He took her hand, paper-thin skin over programmer's bones. “I never thought of that.”

  She laughed—a sound he hadn't heard in months. “You've exceeded the design specifications... just like I taught you.”

  Concern gripped her features for a moment as her mood dipped again. “Viktor, do you remember what I told you about closed systems versus open ones?”

  He squeezed her hand. “A demonstration proves what you know. A system proves what you can learn.”

  “The military is a closed system. Your Pentagon is open—adaptable, responsive to change.” Her grip tightened around his fingers. “Always choose the open system.”

  A solution clicked into place for Vitya, answering a question he hadn't quite formulated. His mother navigated Soviet bureaucracy while creating revolutionary algorithms; insights from those days applied to more than just code.

  The clarity began to fade from her expression—like memory addresses becoming inaccessible after power loss. The moment passing.

  “The juice needs drinking,” she murmured, her voice already drifting. “The parameters are changing.”

  “I implemented your optimisation method.” Vitya adjusted her oxygen tube with quiet efficiency. “Colour-coded register states to track memory allocation.”

  Her gaze briefly focused on him. “Blue initial. Red changes. Green final.”

  “Yes. Exactly that.”

  “Rest now, Mama. I'll implement your suggestions tonight.”

  She smiled vaguely, already receding into the mental fog that reclaimed her. But for those few minutes, they'd shared the language that connected them more deeply than words—the elegant logic of systems pushed beyond their designed limitations.

  Across her bedside table, his mother's fingers sorted the small white pills into patterns. Not by time of day or dosage as he'd arranged them, but by their molecular structure—a system only she understood.

  “Anticoagulants separate from bronchodilators,” she murmured. “Memory address conflicts.”

  He didn't correct her. The chemical organisation made perfect sense to her programmer's mind, even as other connections frayed. In his notebook, he documented the unexpected condition, just as she'd taught him to when debugging complex systems.

  “Your medication in fifteen minutes, Mama,” he said, checking his watch against the schedule posted above her bed. “I need to check the oxygen flow first.”

  “System parameters require optimisation,” she replied, still focused on the pills.

  Approaching the concentrator, Vitya calibrated the flow rate with methodical precision. Each action followed his internal checklist—the same approach he applied to testing demos. He'd learned it from her years ago, watching her debug mainframe systems at Arsenal. Now he employed it in maintaining her fragile health.

  In his notebook, he recorded the oxygen saturation reading—96%. Within acceptable range. Next check: temperature. Pulse. Respiration. Each value documented with timestamp and condition notes.

  The conscription notice still lay buried in his desk drawer. He'd read it five times since it arrived, calculating probabilities and outcomes. But now, observing as his mother's frail hands mapped invisible algorithms in the air, the calculations simplified.

  The military required his service. His mother required his care. The two were incompatible processes competing for the same resources.

  But unlike code, where efficiency demanded the termination of redundant processes, this wasn't about efficiency. It was about value. About what remained when systems failed and memory leaked away.

  After she drifted to sleep, Vitya updated his care journal. The entries resembled debugging logs from his programming projects:

  10:50 - Nutrition intake 80% of target

  10:55 - Period of lucidity (technical discussion, 4.5 minutes)

  11:03 - Oxygen saturation 96% (stable)

  11:15 - Medication administered (all)

  11:22 - Sleep initiated naturally

  NOTE: Pill reorganization by chemical structure indicates residual pattern recognition. Preserve this capability by allowing self-organization of non-critical items.

  He closed the journal and tucked the blanket around her shoulders. The care routine he'd developed was as complex as any demo he'd created—a system with its own elegant logic, designed to preserve what mattered most.

  “A demonstration is impressive, Vitochka, but a true system must adapt,” his mother had told him, her voice precise and gentle. “Anyone can make a machine perform one task beautifully. The real challenge is creating something that responds to the unexpected.”

  Vitya remembered.