Chapter 9
Logan
The simulation crashes for the third time in an hour.
I stare at the error log, running the variables in my head, trying to find the fault in my logic. The adaptive model worked perfectly in isolated testing. But when we scale it to full neural-density scenarios, something breaks. Every time.
“It’s the handoff,” Audrey says from her workstation. “Between priority tiers. The algorithm can’t process the queue fast enough when multiple high-priority signals compete for the same frequency band.”
She’s right. Of course she’s right.
She’s brilliant.
“So we need a tiebreaker protocol,” I say, already pulling up the relevant code. “Something that arbitrates between competing signals without adding latency.”
“Exactly.” She rolls her chair closer to look at my screen. “What if we weight by signal origin? Motor cortex gets priority over sensory feedback in urgent scenarios.”
“That could work. But how do we define ‘urgent’ in a way the algorithm can parse?”
She’s quiet for a moment, thinking. I watch her out of the corner of my eye—the way her brow furrows, the way she taps her pen against her lips, the way her hair is starting to escape from its ponytail after hours of running tests.
She looks almost like her. Like the Audrey I knew pre-Sweden.
I want to say that out loud. That she looks like herself.
That she looks like the person I still dream about, the person I can’t stop missing even when she’s sitting two feet away from me.
But I don’t. I keep my mouth shut and my brain on the code.
“Amplitude thresholds,” she says suddenly. “Urgent signals tend to have higher amplitude. We could set a threshold that automatically bumps high-amplitude signals to the front of the queue.”
“And pair it with a decay function so the threshold adjusts based on overall system load.” I’m already typing, translating her idea into code. “If the system is under heavy strain, the threshold lowers to prevent bottlenecks.”
“Yes.” She leans in closer, watching my fingers fly across the keyboard. “That’s exactly—yes. Logan, that’s perfect.”
Her hand lands on my arm.
It’s nothing. A casual touch, the kind of thing colleagues do all the time. Excitement over a breakthrough. Totally normal.
My entire nervous system goes haywire, anyway.
This is the problem with skipping the formative years.
Everyone else learned to calibrate their responses to human contact somewhere between middle school dances and college hookups.
I learned to calibrate neural signal frequencies.
The result is that a woman’s hand on my forearm registers like a five-alarm fire.
Her palm is warm. Her fingers are slim and certain. Three points of contact, maybe four, and my skin is suddenly the most sensitive organ in my entire body.
“Sorry.” She pulls back quickly, like she’s realized what she did. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine.” My voice comes out strangled. I clear my throat, try again. “It’s fine. Let’s run the simulation.”
I don’t tell her that my arm is still burning where she touched it. That I can feel the ghost of her fingerprints like a brand. That I’ll probably be thinking about those three seconds of contact for the next six hours.
That’s the kind of information that makes people uncomfortable.
She nods, retreating to her workstation.
It’s almost eight. The rest of the team left hours ago, and the lab has gone quiet—just the hum of servers and the blue glow of monitors. The overhead lights are dimmed to reduce screen glare, which means we’re working in something close to twilight.
It’s just us. In this weird, charged, twilight space.
Friends for the sake of the project.
I focus on the code. On the numbers. On things that make sense.
The simulation runs for forty-seven minutes without crashing.
“Holy shit,” Audrey breathes, watching the data scroll across her screen. “Logan, look at these stability metrics.”
I roll my chair over—maintaining distance this time—and look. She’s right. The numbers are better than anything we’ve achieved so far. Not perfect, but promising. Really promising.
“We need to run extended tests,” I say. “At least a few hours of continuous operation to make sure this holds up under sustained load.”
“Agreed.” She glances at the clock. “I can set it to run overnight and check the results in the morning.”
“Or we could stay. Monitor in real-time. Catch any issues as they develop.”
The words are out before I can stop them. What am I doing? Suggesting we spend more time alone together? After she touched my arm and I nearly had a cardiac event?
But she’s nodding. “That’s probably smarter. If something does go wrong, we’ll know exactly when and why.”
“I’ll order food,” I hear myself say. “There’s a Thai place that delivers until midnight. Pad see ew, extra vegetables, no bean sprouts, right?”
She looks at me. Blinks. “Yeah. And…ah…you want the spicy red curry with tofu instead of chicken.”
She remembers.
I fight the smile that threatens to crack my face open.
She holds my gaze for a split second too long before looking away. “I’ll grab some waters and energy drinks from the break room. Want anything else?”
“No, I’m good.”
She disappears and I order the food, then set up a multi-monitor display so we can watch the simulation metrics in real time.
My hands are jittery. I flex them, try to will the adrenaline out of my system.
I should be used to this by now—the chemical surge that comes with Audrey praise—but it’s worse now.
Now that I know exactly how capable I am of ruining everything.
She comes back carrying a bottle of water in each hand, two cups of ice tucked under her arm. She sets them on the table between our workstations. “They’re out of La Croix and Red Bull,” she says, shuffling the waters so the labels face the same direction. “Is this OK?”
“It’s great.”
She sits, and for a while the only sound is the soft click of our keyboards. The simulation eats up memory and keeps time spinning out for both of us. I watch her more than the monitors.
Not obvious, at least I hope not. But enough that if she glanced up, she’d know.
The Thai food arrives. We eat at our desks, using chopsticks and spacing the cartons between our monitors so we can keep working while we refuel.
She tucks her legs up on the chair in a way that makes me remember every all-nighter we ever shared in the old Carmichael basement lab.
She even does the thing where she wipes the condensation ring off the desk with her palm.
I catalog every tiny habit, like an archivist desperate to preserve a dying species.
“So.” She doesn’t look up from her monitor, but her voice slices cleanly through the silence. “Last night.”
I almost choke on a mouthful of curry.
“I did not expect to see you at O’Malley’s,” she says, finally facing me. “That was…odd, right?”
Her tone is almost playful, or maybe she’s just trying to make it not weird—like she wants to pretend it wasn’t as deeply unsettling for her as it was for me.
I nod, hoping the food gives me a plausible delay before answering. “It was unexpected. But not unwelcome.”
She laughs under her breath.
“I always got the sense you’d prefer your social collisions to be scheduled, color-coded, and confirmed by three calendar reminders.”
“Four,” I say before I can stop myself. “Fewer than four, and I start to panic.”
She smiles at that. It’s not the shattering, radiant version I remember from the first NeuraTech launch, but it’s a smile, nonetheless.
“Dominic is a force of nature,” I add. “If he wanted all of us in the same place at the same time, there was never any choice.”
She toys with her chopsticks, gathering noodles in a careful, looping motion. “He’s good at manufacturing chaos. I respect it.”
“I think he’d appreciate your respect,” I say. “Dominic collects admiration like trading cards.”
“How did you two even become friends?” She shifts in her chair, pulling one leg up and resting her chin on her knee. “You’re so... different.”
“That’s a polite way of saying he has social skills and I have spreadsheets.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s accurate, though.” I poke at my curry, considering how much to share. “We met at Harvard. I was twenty, working on my second degree, running a side business that was... legally questionable.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “The ‘questionable earnings’ Dominic mentioned at O’Malley’s.”
“You caught that.”
“I catch everything. I just didn’t have the bandwidth to process it at the time.” She leans forward, curiosity overtaking caution. “What kind of side business?”
“Grade alterations. Record modifications. Making problems disappear for rich kids whose parents had more money than oversight.” I shrug. “I was good at it. Had a system of communication with clients that I thought no one could crack. I assumed I was untouchable.”
Her eyebrows climb toward her hairline. “You were running an academic black market at Harvard?”
“I prefer ‘grade optimization services.’”
“I bet you do.” She’s fighting a smile now. “Dominic figured it out?”
“He sure did.” I almost smile at the memory. “He made it his mission to track me down because some idiot I’d helped was about to snipe his Pierce Goodman internship. Showed up at my door ready to murder me.”
“And instead of turning you in, he... what? Decided to be your friend?”
“He decided to be my business partner first.” I set down my chopsticks. “Made me a deal—I’d stop screwing him over with any grade changes, and he’d invest my earnings. Then he’d stay quiet, and we’d split the returns.”
“He leveraged you into being friends, in other words,” Audrey says, a little spark in her eyes now.
“Pretty much. After a while, he decided I was worth keeping, I guess. Not that I ever understood why.”
She’s silent a moment.
“That makes sense. You two have a weird chemistry.”
I look at her—the way she’s tilting her head—and realize she means it as a compliment.