The Pentagon 128's flickering display consumed Vitya's world. Three crucial adjustments stood between him and demo perfection—the raster interrupt for palette shifting, remapped memory addresses to circumvent ROM hooks, and a final tweak to the sine table calculations. His fingers danced across the keyboard with drilled rhythm, hand-labeled keys worn smooth from countless nights of coding.

  “MOV HL, 0x56A0,” his lips forming each letter as he typed. “LD A, (HL)”

  Cathode ray tube glow cast shadows through his workspace while sweat beaded at his temples. Nine hours hunched before the screen. Perspiration threatened to blur his vision, yet his hands refused to abandon their task—not with victory so near.

  Three notebooks sprawled beside his keyboard, their pages crammed with assembly instructions and memory maps. The leftmost one elucidated a different purpose: precise rows of red ink detailing a crucial algorithm—medication schedules, temperature readings, fluid intake measurements.

  The Pentagon's fan stuttered with two sharp clicks—a death rattle Vitya knew intimately. He reached for the power supply beneath the case, delivering two precise taps that jolted the ageing hardware back to life.

  “Five more minutes,” he murmured, his words a prayer to tantalum and solder.

  The final sequence of mnemonics, each keystroke precise and intentioned. The assembler churned through his code. Darkness claimed the screen before light exploded outward—geometric impossibilities bloomed as cubes splintered to spirals, birthing luminous tunnels that synchronised with the AY chip's three-voice symphony.

  Vitya allowed himself the faintest smile. Three months of ruthless optimization, every byte squeezed to its limit—crystallised into fifteen seconds of digital transcendence. Let the Western computing elite mock Soviet engineering now.

  The Casio F-91W chirped at his wrist, shattering his moment of triumph. Vitya's eyes snapped to the digital display: 16:30.

  The smile evaporated. He wrote the demo binary out to disk with staccato keystrokes, inscribing the date and version number in his precise hand. His fingers found the red notebook, sliding down columns of medical data until he fixed in on the current time slot.

  Mother's evening medication. Blood pressure check. Dinner preparation.

  The machine would wait. She couldn't.

  Vitya reached out and depressed the power button. He held his breath.

  Darkness claimed the screen. The system stirred to life.

  The AY-3-8910 chip screamed—a subharmonic growl that defied its prosaic origins. His modifications forced harmonics no Sinclair designer ever intended. Sound waves shook the walls.

  A lone cube materialized on screen, multiplying into four, then sixteen. Wireframes pirouetted in precise mathematical ballet. Vertices tracked perfectly at 50Hz, mocking physics itself.

  Colours bled together in forbidden unions of blue and green. Edges shimmered between states that held no place in the Pentagon's design specs. His code tore through documentation, shattered barriers, forged new laws in silicon.

  Muscles twitched involuntarily, tracing phantom keystrokes, remembering endless nights of optimization. Between mother's care routines, he stole time. Measuring clock cycles. Counting scanlines. Testing. Failing. Rebuilding.

  Monitor light blazed in his eyes as sheer will, mathematics, and stubbornness transcended Soviet technology.

  Pixels danced complex choreographies across eighteen-year-old hardware architecture. Kaleidoscopic tunnels erupted across the screen—colours shifting in ways the Pentagon should not permit. From the cramped basement's rear wall, Vitya watched the audience, arms folded, while twenty faces glowed in the light of his creation.

  “Сука! He's raster-splitting the ULA!” Oleg lunged forward, chair scraping concrete.

  Bodies gravitated toward the monitor. Forgotten cigarettes dangled between slack fingers, scattering ash onto the floor. A voice murmured cycle calculations, counting available frames. Heads shook in stunned silence.

  Fourteen distinct colours rippled across each scanline, another boundary shattered. Pure mathematics reified as light. Code pirouetting along hardware's razor edge.

  The corner of Vitya's mouth quirked upward—his sole concession to triumph.

  From his wristwatch, a series of melodic peeps. Vitya blinked away hypnotic polygon tunnels burning afterimages across his vision as he muted the alarm.

  With a decisive motion, he plunged the Pentagon's screen into darkness.

  At the adjacent table, his mother's medication station beckoned. An old ГУМ desk lamp—salvaged from university days—bathed the plastic pill organiser in amber light. The seven-by-four grid of compartments mapped out a calendar of chemical necessities, each transparent lid bearing Cyrillic letters in his engineer's script.

  Monday evening. Three white tablets, one blue, half a yellow.

  Vector calculations mirrored this geometry—orderly rows and columns etched into memory like machine code. Caring demanded the precision of assembly language. A single misplaced value meant system failure.

  Grey paint crumbled from the lamp's base beneath Vitya's touch. Sweeping away the debris, his eyes locked on the evening dose with parsive scrutiny.

  Silence gripped the basement as pixels morphed across the screen. Geometric patterns imploded, their fragments collapsing into fresh configurations. Against the back wall, Vitya studied not the screen but the faces before him.

  The Pushkin model emerged point by point—each real-time vertex defying the Pentagon's limitations. Wireframes sketched an outline before solid polygons fleshed out the poet's distinctive profile. Dithered patterns wove his signature curls while mathematical formulae sculpted his proud nose and contemplative gaze, born from sleepless nights of perfectionism.

  “Ебануться,” someone whispered. “Is that running from memory or disk?”

  “Memory,” Vitya replied. “Full rotation model at eight frames per second.”

  Pushkin's head rotated with mechanical grace, each turn unveiling fresh intricacies. His features wavered at certain angles—betraying the Z80 processor's boundaries—yet transcended the hardware's known capabilities. Vitya's custom fixed-point library, crafted in meticulously optimized assembly, sang in rhythms undreamed of by the system's designers.

  “You're pushing the ULA beyond spec,” a voice called out. “The refresh rate—”

  “Modulates through forced interrupts,” Vitya cut in. “I'm telling the beam where to go.”

  The crowd gasped at the sudden doubling in polygon count, Pushkin's features pulled into sharp relief. Dithered patterns shifted, casting digital light across the poet's face until his lips seemed to quiver with unspoken verse.

  A voice from the front row: “*I love you, Peter's creation...*”

  More voices joined, weaving “*The Bronze Horseman*” into a reverent chorus beneath the digital manifestation. Years of Soviet schooling surfaced in each perfectly-recalled line, poetry flowing through their veins like digital signals.

  Ephemeral satisfaction played on Vitya's face. The fruit of a conscious decision. Pushkin served as more than mere technical demonstration—he embodied their shared heritage. Let Western coders chase their chrome spheres and abstract landscapes. This belonged to them. It spoke to Russian hearts alone.

  The poet's visage transformed again, wire-frames returning, then dissolving into dancing particles that inscribed Vitya's handle in razor-sharp Cyrillic. The audience erupted into applause, chairs shuffling as attendees leapt to their feet.

  Sasha, the event organiser, shouldered past the press of bodies. “Vitya! The memory allocation—how did you fit the vertex tables?”

  “Page switching.” Vitya traced imaginary memory addresses in the air. “I'm banking ROM out completely during rendering.”

  “Pure insanity.” Sasha gripped his shoulder, fingers trembling. “Brilliant insanity.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The display flickered once, steadied into the third sequence. Vitya's Casio showed 23:09. His mother slept until midnight—time enough to witness his code dance through its final movements, accept the quiet victory earned through weeks of meticulous coding.

  Eighteen minutes until departure. Twenty-three until the last bus would leave him stranded.

  Vitya felt for the Metro token in his jacket pocket—touching its smooth edge, probing the centre depression, clutching this metal lifeline home. The schedule burned in his memory, a countdown from his mother's next medication. Miss the 23:32 bus and his carefully orchestrated routine would collapse.

  The token bit into his fingertip with cold certainty, while the room around him celebrated phantoms constructed in light and memory.

  The final sequence unfolded, stealing Vitya's breath. Eight layers of bitplanes cascading across the screen in mathematically complex directions. Each independently addressed. Each forging its own path through the Pentagon's documented capabilities.

  A sine wave writhed in the upper left corner. Cyrillic text flowed below, its rhythm a perfect counterpoint. Between them, six more layers twisted and convolved, pulling the tapestry of pixels into three dimensions.

  “Блядь,” a voice hissed from the front row. “How many interrupts is he firing per frame?”

  The room fell silent save the crystalline notes flowing from the modified AY chip. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor wove three distinct voices through hardware meant for simple beeps. Harmony chiming in perfect concord, voices soaring clear and distinct. Vitya's rewritten sound driver commandeered CPU cycles during the vertical blank—stolen moments between frames.

  Sweat gathered at his temple while he monitored the demo's flow. Acrid fumes of hot solder and overclocked circuits stung his nostrils, twisting together with stale cigarettes and perspiration. Two dozen bodies packed the basement, their collective breath thickening the air with reverent concentration.

  The screen divided further, layers spinning at conflicting speeds. Logic dictated system failure—the Z80 screamed forty percent beyond its rated clock, while the ULA chip strained to access forbidden memory addresses. The display contradicted reality.

  Balanced on that razor's edge between brilliance and catastrophe. Each hand-counted cycle, every memory access mapped down to the byte.

  Spilled beer and kvass coated his boot soles, each step peeling away from the tacky floor. Plastic cups ringed the room's perimeter. Bach's mathematics made audible guided the audience in their mesmerised sway.

  A flash of movement from his right. A heavyset man with a patchy beard leaned forward, kvass cup tipping toward the exposed modification board wired into the computer's side panel.

  Pure instinct drove Vitya's arm upward. His palm struck the cup's base, redirecting the dark cascade across the man's chest rather than the delicate circuits. Kvass droplets peppered his fingers, yet the machine remained pristine.

  Vitya never broke his concentration on the screen.

  Words of protest died in the bearded man's throat as the demo crescendoed. Layers of code merged into perfect synchronicity, spiralling toward the centre like cosmic debris caught in a gravitational well. Bach's composition soared through the hardware's limitations, creating harmonics that defied the Pentagon's architectural constraints.

  Text fragments spiralled into Vitya's signature, rotating through dimensions. The room froze. Overdriven speakers unleashed a final chord, piercing the damp air.

  Darkness swallowed light. Sound died.

  Three heartbeats of stillness.

  Applause thundered through the basement.

  The phone's vibration resonated through the steel desk beside him. Vitya grasped the device.

  Cyrillic text glowed on the screen: “Дозатор проверен ??”

  Tension eased from his shoulders into the stale air. The oxygen dispenser functioned correctly. Mother breathed safely.

  One. Two. Three.

  Relief flickered and died. Vitya set the phone down, dragging the small stack of fan-fold printout generated during the demo towards him. He spotted the memory allocation error in line two minutes in.

  The crowd splintered into knots of animated discussion. Against the back wall, he observed them dissect his code, eyelids heavy. Post-demo fatigue seeped into his bones—hours of work distilled into brief minutes of digital geometry.

  A figure peeled away from the throng. Tall, gaunt, cigarette stains yellowing his fingers. Vitya recognised the man's posture before his face—the telltale forward slouch of countless keyboard hours etched into his spine.

  “Vitaly Mikhailovich.” The man thrust out his hand. His vowels unspooled in that distinctive Siberian cadence—elongating where Muscovites clipped, softening where locals harshened. Novosibirsk, perhaps, or somewhere nearby.

  Vitya shook the offered hand. Callused palm. Programmer's grip.

  From his pocket, the man extracted a floppy disc in a plain paper sleeve. “Something I thought might interest you.” He pressed it into Vitya's palm with a small nod. “Твоя мать... она гордилась бы.”

  Your mother... she would be proud.

  Those words crashed through Vitya's consciousness like a fatal exception. His muscles froze, each byte of data in the disk pressing against his palm with impossible weight.

  Across one final heartbeat of eye contact, the Siberian dissolved back into the crowd.

  Vitya pocketed the disk, feeling its plastic edge like a memory address. Questions formed in his mind—did this stranger know his mother? What could he have meant?

  The underground tech networks stretched farther than most imagined, connecting communist-era enthusiasts across eleven time zones—but this felt different. Personal. A mystery that must wait.

  The watch display blinked 23:17. Exit routine.

  An aging Ikarus lurched around another pothole, jolting Vitya from his counting. Twenty-eight… twenty-nine… He bit back a curse and started over, hovering his hand above the static bag in his lap. Interior lights flickered through the cabin, threatening darkness at each bump. His mind catalogued passengers automatically: forty-seven souls. Six drunk. One child. Two pensioners.

  Streetlights strobed through fogged windows, illuminating the small ICs in pulsating intervals. Sixty-four kilobyte RAM modules. Angstrem fabricated relics nestled in factory packaging. Each chip contained enough memory to run his three-week optimized polygon fill routine.

  “K565RU7,” he muttered, fingernail tracing the Cyrillic markings. “Batch 1989.”

  Metal groaned as their driver swerved around a Mercedes. A Coca-Cola billboard blazed red against night sky, its model's smile dominating twenty metres of darkness. Beneath, workers' faces peeled from a mural on concrete—Soviet heroes with upraised arms, forever reaching toward their promised future. Neon light caught the passing Mercedes, baptizing it in capitalist crimson.

  Eight chips to stabilize the Pentagon's expanded memory. Four more for graphics controller modifications. The remaining eighteen—assuming they functioned—might fetch enough at Gorbushka Market to cover Mother's medication for three weeks. Perhaps four, with the right buyer.

  “Next stop: Prospekt Vernadskogo,” crackled the automated voice through failing speakers.

  Vitya tucked the static bag into his coat pocket, mentally allocating each chip to its purpose. Moscow's new economy rewrote valuations between heartbeats. One week scarcity, the next a glut of imports finding their way eastward. These chips commanded double their worth the previous month. In a week's time they might fetch half.

  A Nokia billboard rose overhead, flaunting a mobile phone barely larger than a Yava cigarette pack. “THE FUTURE IS NOW,” blazed the English text.

  A grimace crossed his face. Such futures. Businessmen clutching their miniature phones, celebrating instant connections. Blind to the raw power lurking in these cast-off circuits. His Pentagon birthed three-dimensional worlds through pure logic—each interrupt timed to the microsecond, every clock cycle a mathematical brushstroke. Engineering poetry that scorned venture capital and foreign patents.

  Passing beneath the M-line overpass. Exhaust fumes blackened its Soviet concrete, yet the structure endured—stripped of pretense, executing its function with machine-code efficiency. A mirror of his Pentagon. His mother's oxygen concentrator. Himself.

  Four chips to resurrect the concentrator's filters. Two for the power supply's contingency circuits. Moscow's contradictions streamed past while his calculations ticked onward—glittering storefronts casting shadows over bread queues, new German cars gleaming against the decay of Khrushchev-era blocks.

  Metal screeched as the bus lurched to a halt, slamming passengers forward. Vitya clenched his fingers around the pocket's contents, shielding them from impact. The driver bellowed curses at a shadowy figure darting across their path. Diesel fumes choked the air as they inched through Moscow's midnight streets.

  The watch face glowed: twenty-three minutes until Mother's medication. Eighteen for the route home. Five minutes' grace. Perhaps.

  The lobby's dented mailboxes huddled beneath flickering fluorescent tubes. Several compartments gaped open, their locks long since surrendered to time or determination. His remained intact among the rust-flecked decay.

  The key caught twice before the mechanism clicked. The small door protested with a metallic squeal that echoed through the concrete vestibule. Vitya's fingers sifted through the cramped space, extracting a bundle of correspondence—utility demands, glossy adverts, and one cream-coloured official envelope bearing the stern weight of government letterhead.

  Inside his flat, he nudged the door shut with his heel, deposited the mail onto the side table's worn surface, then eased off his shoes. Each toe cap aligned with mathematical exactness against the baseboard.

  The flat welcomed him with its nightly orchestra of machines—Mother's oxygen concentrator exhaling its metronomic breath, kitchen clock measuring moments in metallic clicks, refrigerator punctuating the darkness with its mechanical pulse.

  Vitya dispensed two precise pumps of antiseptic at the bathroom sink, working the cold gel into his palms. The mechanical scrubbing sequence initiated—fingers interlacing, thumbs circling through opposing palms, nails scoring across lifelines. Like object code, the ritual executed without variation.

  “Step one complete,” he murmured, reaching for the designated towel.

  The kitchen table beckoned, his Электро?ника МК-52 calculator flanking a pristine ledger. First column: time. Second: millilitres. Third: active compound concentration. The previous entries aligned perfectly with the calculator's stored values.

  “Deviation zero-point-three percent. Within acceptable parameters.”

  The next scheduled administration neared. Mother's IV bag demanded replacement. Vitya scratched the data into the sheet's fourth column.

  Vitya clicked on the desk lamp and booted the Pentagon. The machine chimed its distinctive two-tone greeting. His diagnostic utility loaded while he thumbed open the demo performance log—its pages dense with Cyrillic annotations.

  Numbers marched across the screen:

  Frame rates: 12.7, 12.8, 12.6, 12.9.

  Rendering pipeline load: 89.4%.

  The pen moved across the notebook, mirroring the precise columns of his mother's medication chart. Both systems demanded perfection, rejected deviation.

  “System stable,” he wrote, echoing the morning's “Patient stable” in his medical log.

  The Pentagon's cooling fan spun down to a steady rhythm. Vitya placed the unlabelled diskette beside his keyboard—the parting gift from the stern-faced Siberian who'd cornered him at demo party.

  He rifled through the stack of envelopes. Electricity. Water. His attention drifted to the small anti-static bag of RAM chips on his desk—vintage Soviet silicon, the sale of which he depended upon to keep his mother alive.

  The cream-coloured envelope stopped his breath. Official letterhead gleamed beneath his trembling hand. Two griffons reared beneath vermilion text: MINISTRY OF DEFENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

  The Pentagon's hum mingled with the oxygen concentrator's whisper from his mother's room. Time clicked forward, relentless, while his fingertip traced the seal's cold edge.