Dima pressed his thumb to the anti-static bag's seal, knuckles raw beneath flux-stained skin. Plastic crinkled like audio snow from a far-off radio as he slit the seam. The bag unfurled—a breath of warm resin and ozone drifting out—new board, barely cooled.

  He presented it with both hands. Green fibreglass drank the sickly light; Byzantine tracks coiled in dense geometries: angular, purposeful, alive. Each via a pin?prick star in its firmament; pads for IC sockets adorned the circuit in gold. Each corner bore the mark of a hand-filed finish. The “001” serial number in faint white silk-screen proclaimed both birth and possibility.

  The garage's space heater rattled, metal protesting the cold, yet nobody moved.

  Irina edged forward, glasses slipping down her nose as she peered at the fractureless routing. “Gorgeous impedance,” she uttered in that Dublin lilt she never notices. Katya, beside her, pressed a finger gently to her own trace, the path ending where she'd forced a symmetry compromise for signal integrity—a tight spiral that remapped A16 without crossing a single signal line. Her jaw worked, silent calculation giving way to faint satisfaction.

  Azamat’s breath stayed shallow, his eyes already scanning the PCB like numbers on a receipt. Vitya imagined the cost tallied silently—each cap and diode accounted for, priced in risk.

  Vitya observed them. Their forms drew closer, as if warmth stitched them into a single circuit. Their silhouettes in the half?light gathered around the newborn machine. He reached out, not touching, only following the air above the PCI header, mapping pin assignments in his mind. IRQ lines, data buses, DMA bridges—every path a promise.

  For a moment the garage fell cathedral?quiet. The hard lines of Dima's jaw softened. He swept his scarf aside, not looking at anyone, then set his creation gently on the clean plastic sheeting in the workbench's centre: an altar cloth of sterile transparency. The click of fibreglass on bench wood fractured the spell.

  Vitya leaned in, the world beyond Dima's garage receding: the boiler-room pay lines, Ministry-issued threats, mother's laboured breathing. Within the boundaries of the pad-locked door, green and copper gleamed with shared defiance.

  “Fabricating this nearly finished me.” Dima's calloused fingers gestured toward the PCB. Expression shifted as he spoke, his usual stoic mask cracking to reveal pride. “The etching plant boss wouldn't even talk until I arrived with two bottles of Stolichnaya and tickets for next month's Spartak match.”

  Vitya tracked the conversation's current as if stepping through code, monitoring each subtle state change. Dima's frame eased with every confession, shoulders uncoiling, tension bleeding away.

  “Their chemicals—Chinese knockoffs,” Dima continued, shaking his head. “Concentration sat at half-strength. I spent nine hours running test scraps, adjusting the timing cycle-by-cycle.”

  This PCB stood worlds apart from every Russian specimen Vitya ever handled: edges crisp, traces uniform throughout. The gap between functional and pristine.

  “Then the UV machine overheated,” Dima pointed to the southwest corner. “Temperature spiked to ninety-three degrees. Nearly torched the lot.

  “And your German flux saved the batch.” He tossed a glance Azamat's way—a silent nod passing for gratitude among men raised on Soviet reticence. “If I'd used Russian stuff, pits would have cratered the ground plane. This—” he indicated a dense cluster of converging tendrils near the memory controller “—could never have worked.”

  Dima's rough fingertips brushed the perfectly square edge he'd spent the night filing. Vitya followed the DMA bus path, as though phantom pulses from a logic probe danced along its lines. The copper broadened near the memory controller—Dima's steady hand. Contraband flux left its citrus impression in the air. Twelve millimetres on, Katya's hair?pin spiral liberated the address lines; two bytes beyond, Vitya's instruction buffer marshalled the 3Dfx opcodes into strict formation with their data. Each trace on the board wove their distinct marks into a single circuit—raw imagination hardened into digital reality.

  Irina tapped the gleaming ground?plane with a screwdriver. “I wish I could tell my old uni friends at Sun what we achieved with salvaged windings, smuggled flux and three hours of sleep.” A wry grin flickered around the circle—no one needed it explained.

  The mood shifted phase, the room's energy cooling. Katya stepped into the lamplight. Her fingers followed a suspended path above the memory bus, almost caressing the air.

  “Now that it's real, what next?” Her voice even yet urgent. “Copper doesn’t revolt on its own. These boards and parts make three prototypes. If the world never boots them, we’ve built a rumour. We need a release plan.”

  Her words waited in the silence, threatening to upend celebration—a buffer teetering at overflow. Vitya's hand twitched, as he studied each face in sequence: Dima's jaw bracing itself, Azamat's gaze flicking toward his bag, Irina's eyes sharpening behind thick lenses.

  “We're all under fire,” Irina said, her Dublin accent hardening to steel. “It's not just the machines.”

  Patterns emerged—defensive subroutines he'd embedded into code, triggered by threat, transforming the garage into a command post.

  Azamat straightened, his merchant's smile vanishing. “Saw unfamiliar faces at Gorbushka. Two men out of place—wrong clothes, wrong questions.” He produced his notebook, flipping to a clean page. “One asked Nurlan-aga about components for ‘something special.’ The other mentioned ‘the next step after the Pentagon 128.’”

  Vitya mapped the situation in his mind, variables lining up one after another. Coincidence shrank to a rounding error; observers traced their circuits.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Azamat rubbed his nose, notebook balanced against his palm.

  “Stallholder from pavilion fourteen—met the man once,” he muttered, eyes skimming a circled eight on the page. “Cornered me, started poking about who’s putting together a ‘next?gen Pentagon’. Reeled off crazy?specific details: bank?switch maps, dual?plane video mixer. There's some wild market chatter going on.”

  The steady rhythm of his mother's oxygen concentrator skipped in his mind—filter change due in four hours. The conscription letter in his desk drawer further contaminated his thoughts. Uncertainty settled into the spaces between breaths, every detail signalling a system under watch.

  From her bag, Irina extracted a small notebook bound in electrical tape. “No design notes on networked machines. Nothing digital, ever.” She tapped the cover. “Docs rotate—one week each, always in a different spot.”

  Dima's hands curled protectively around the board's edge. “Kirov Computing Club got hit last month. FSB said copyright, but they walked off with hardware designs.”

  “Three arrested at Chaos Constructions,” Irina added. “Also supposedly just software, but people said they wanted hardware projects.”

  Reality crashed through Vitya's momentary triumph. Their creation—tangible, powerful, real—transformed into something far more dangerous. Each circuit they'd laid with such care now broadcast vulnerability.

  “We need dead drops,” Vitya said, surprising even himself. “Agreed places, a rotation, never mention meetings electronically.” Blueprints for secrecy flickered—his mother's records, his own documentation habits. Already plotting defences, as he would build collision detection. “I'll devise a protocol.”

  Amidst the tension, Vitya's hand reached for his Nokia 3330—a reflex as ingrained as his debugging routines. Three times daily he monitored the forums and newsgroups, scanning for whispers about their work. A security protocol he'd established with Irina when the group's first circuit sketches materialized.

  The others turned toward him, expressions shifting. Their creation caught the light, its pathways connecting their separate skills into a single organism more capable—and more dangerous—than they had intended.

  Vitya's thumb glided across worn plastic, the tiny screen casting his face in a blue glow. Muscle memory navigated through the menus to the WAP browser, the pattern etched into his nervous system alongside his mother's medication schedule.

  A chirp signalled connection to Irina's NNTP gateway hosted on her café's infrastructure. Milliseconds ticked by in his mind, two timeouts before the link held. Too slow—he'd hunt the inefficiency in the handshake later.

  Skeletal grey text scrolled across the display, Usenet posts stripped of all decoration. He focused on the lead message in relcom.comp.sys.pentagon:

  “Is it true someone's built a Pentagon with 3D acceleration? Heard it's out of Café “Bytes”—anyone know more?”

  Vitya’s thumb froze mid?scroll. A tremor rippled through his fingers, making the Nokia tap staccato against the timber bench. Breath snagged, thin and ragged, while sweat beaded along his temple. The grey Usenet lines like an interrogation lamp, each glyph carving fresh threat vectors into his thoughts, the still-warm prototype metres away.

  “Concrete outside interest,” he muttered, voice delicate as paper.

  The air thickened. Dima's shoulders locked. Azamat edged nearer to the board. Irina checked the windows, examining the newspaper coverings for gaps.

  Katya moved first, pulling a mechanical pencil from her breast pocket. She flipped over a scrap of schematic paper, and crafted a response in tight, controlled letters.

  “Acknowledge but mislead,” she instructed, without looking up. “Reference optimized matrix multiplication algorithms—technically true but nothing about hardware.”

  Vitya gave a measured nod as she wrote. Her language circled around details, enough to satisfy casual interest while revealing nothing of their implementation. She worked with a natural sense of information security.

  “How many know?” Azamat asked quietly.

  “Too many,” Irina replied, moving to peer over Vitya's shoulder at the phone screen. “That's the problem with great ideas—they generate noise.”

  Vitya's thumb paused above the keypad. Their work spanned two domains—physical, digital—both exposed. Under the workbench lamp, copper pathways intertwined with their vision; now, the project's digital ghost seeped into networks beyond their control.

  Katya handed over her draft. Vitya transcribed, letter by letter, building a digital smoke screen around the board.

  Dima pinched the silver Mylar, folding a crisp ninety-degree seam then another, sealing the anti?static bag in his neat method. Their prototype disappeared from view millimetre at a time, like sunset over Moscow's skyline. Vitya’s shoulders hunched; a slow breath caught against his ribs, refusing release.

  Quiet settled in. Only the space heater's metallic rattle interrupted, measuring out monotonic time. Vitya counted cycles, habitually marking each flyback interval.

  No one volunteered speech. What words followed creation? They'd bent physics and economics, wrested the improbable from collapse. Vitya understood the mathematics in every bus line and backplane, yet the totality escaped capture in calculation.

  “Now we're visible,” he said, his own words startling him—a phrase escaping past all constraint.

  Four faces turned.

  “What do you mean?” Azamat asked, though his tone suggested he already knew.

  Vitya gestured toward the phone still in his hand. “Creation leaves tracks. Digital. Physical.” Images of medical charts, lives compressed to data, flickered in his imagination. “We've made something that shouldn't exist. People notice impossibilities.”

  Irina smiled, her Trinity accent coming to the fore. “We made something extraordinary.”

  The heater clicked off.

  Dima stowed the prototype in a metal case, snapping the latch shut. The sound cut through the garage like an end-of-program marker.

  “Three live builds,” Dima said, hands resting firm. “If they plan to stop us, let them try all three.”

  Vitya's thoughts raced: Who were “they”? FSB? Business interests? Competitors in the tech scene?

  Katya broke her silence, voice clear but her hand unsteady at her watch. “We've made more than hardware. We've demonstrated that their constraints don't bind us.”

  Constraints. Vitya lived for the shattering of them. Demo code bent machines to his will, but hardware followed rules; people, far less deterministic.

  He tallied the evidence: market probes, message whispers, FSB raids, draft threats. Conclusions formed—inescapable and unignorable. His body tensed, instinctively bracing for errant code that might crash the process.

  The metal case glinted. Their work now both wonder and warning—rising edges of digital signals already spreading free. Obsession breathed out a revolution: That the world wasn't supposed to see. That adversaries would covet or destroy.

  “Listen.” Vitya kept his tone level. “If the FSB uncover this build, they'll seize every disk, charge us with stockpiling dual?use tech, and send us through Lefortovo’s basement lifts. No lawyer, no appeal, just concrete and silence.”

  The words hung like static.

  Dima spoke. “We spread the risk tonight.”

  He opened a dented tea tin, revealing the three HD64180s on anti-static foam.

  “One chip each, one board each. Different hide?outs, different metro lines. No single arrest kills the project.”

  Azamat slipped his prize into the hidden compartment at the base of his messenger bag.

  Katya slid hers into the lid of her briefcase.

  Vitya pocketed the last chip, handing the tin back to Dima.

  “Lights. Door, alarm, go.”

  The heater ticked its final revolutions into silence as the garage sank into blackout, their revolution now scattered across the city like encrypted packets.