Early July, 1989.
University of Tokyo, Faculty of Science, Large-Scale Computing Center.
The Hongo Campus was quiet at night, stripped of its daytime academic bustle. Rain washed Yasuda Auditorium's red-brick exterior and ran through drainpipes into the culverts below.
Behind the heavy explosion-proof steel doors, the constant-temperature AC system ran at full capacity. The air held the faint ozone smell that high-heat electronics always gave off.
Four people stood around a mobile blackboard in the center of the computer room.
Murai Jun held a piece of chalk. White dust coated his knuckles. Three doctoral students from the WIDE Project core team stood around him, each with thick stacks of data printouts in their hands.
The whiteboard was covered in network topology diagrams and routing-protocol logic.
"The wide-area packet loss rate still won't drop below the safety threshold," said a doctoral student with messy hair, pointing at a node on the map. "The physical latency is between the Hitachi mainframe's TCP three-way handshake and the edge nodes' response time. If we raise the retransmit count, we'll just clog the channel."
Murai Jun stared at the formulas. His brow was furrowed.
"We need to streamline the redundancy checks in the protocol stack," he said. "I think we have to do hardware-level preprocessing at the interface to take some of the verification load off the software."
In this room — the top of Japanese computing — they were arguing about the global cutting edge of network interconnection.
A few meters away, a desk lamp lit an experimental bench.
Suzuki Emi sat on an anti-static stool. She wore a white lab coat with the University of Tokyo Faculty of Science emblem. Thin silver-wire glasses sat on her nose. In her hand was a high-precision soldering iron.
Sizzle—
The tip touched solder. A wisp of blue smoke rose and was pulled straight into the overhead exhaust fan.
Emi precisely soldered a custom ASIC chip onto a green expansion board. She set the iron down and checked the joints with a magnifying glass.
She turned her swivel chair toward the group at the whiteboard.
"Professor Murai."
Emi's voice was calm. Eight months of living in data had made her quieter, sharper.
"If you want to strip software verification pressure, you can use the hardware gateway board I just flashed," she said.
She held up the green circuit board. It was still warm.
"I added a hardware buffer queue between the MAC layer and the IP layer. The board handles the checksum calculation. The host CPU only processes payload data, so we don't burn clock cycles on headers."
The doctoral students stopped talking and looked at the board.
One of them walked over, took it, and studied the traces and pinouts.
"Hardware interrupt to intercept packets…" He pushed his glasses up. Respect showed in his eyes. "The logic loop is clean. This should save at least fifteen percent CPU overhead. Researcher Suzuki, your architecture work is as precise as always."
Murai Jun stepped over and glanced at the compiled code on Emi's terminal.
"Plug this into the main node for stress testing tomorrow," he said, snapping the chalk onto the table. "You handle the hardware-software integration, Suzuki. Everyone else, prep for the next phase."
The team scattered to their stations.
In this lab full of male engineers and dry data, nobody thought Emi was out of place anymore. Eight months of brutal focus and competence in both hardware and software had earned her equal footing.
Other doctoral students sometimes grabbed beer at an izakaya or read manga in the lounge.
Emi had cut everything. No entertainment. No socializing.
She hadn't taken Murai Jun's advice to wear cheaper clothes. She still wore her S-Collection custom lab coat, just with the University of Tokyo emblem added. It made her look like a pampered showpiece.
But for eight months she'd slept by the server racks half the time. Dozens of original English manuals were dog-eared from use. Canned coffee and convenience-store onigiri were her only fuel.
Social life, entertainment, sleep — all compressed to survival minimum.
Her hardware and software talent, already near human limits, had gone supernova under that ascetic pressure.
Can't stop. Must be more useful. Must prove I deserve to stand beside her.
She was the sharpest technical blade this team had.
Click.
The electronic lock on the explosion-proof door flipped from red to green.
The heavy metal hinges turned.
Cold air from the corridor cut through the stale lab air. The breeze carried a faint scent of lily of the valley.
The doctoral students looked up toward the entrance.
Fujita Tsuyoshi, in a sharp black suit, stepped in first like a wall.
He moved aside.
Saionji Satsuki entered.
She wore the beige trench coat she'd been favoring. Her heels made crisp sounds on the anti-static floor. The lab went subtly still at the sight of her.
Emi's hands froze on the keyboard.
She knew that scent.
This… this is?
She turned her head sharply.
Her eyes focused, and the figure she'd been missing filled her vision.
It's her… it's really Satsuki-chan…
She tried to stand, but her legs had no strength from the sudden rush. She could keep a straight face through endless compile failures, but now she felt like she might cry.
Want to go to her… want to hug her…
That familiar scent was right there.
A shadow fell across Emi's monitor, covering part of the green code.
Satsuki didn't speak. She reached out with a leather-gloved hand and smoothed Emi's messy short hair twice with her fingertips.
"You've worked hard."
The cool voice carried through the room.
Emi bit her lower lip hard. Metallic salt spread in her mouth. The pain let her force back the sting in her eyes. Her hands left her weak knees and gripped the stainless steel bench.
Her chest rose and fell. She took a deep breath and shoved the emotions down.
"Welcome back. Did Europe go smoothly?"
Her voice still had a nasal edge and a tremor, but she kept it steady.
Still in front of everyone. Must hold it together…
"I brought back some interesting souvenirs."
Satsuki pulled her hand back. Her eyes swept the lab and settled on Emi's tired face.
"Your isolation is over. Pack up."
Emi blinked. Her hands were still on the bench. "Eh? But Professor Murai…"
"I've cleared it with the Faculty of Science," Satsuki said. "You keep your special researcher status. You can access the supercomputer ports anytime. You'll still work on the project. But your physical time is under my command now."
Satsuki turned toward the door.
"Bring your brain and come with me. There are some old fossils who need a lesson from you."
Facing a command that ignored all of Emi's existing schedules, Emi felt no resentment. Her face actually flushed a little.
Yes… Satsuki-chan didn't forget me… I belong to Satsuki-chan…
She stripped off the lab coat, tossed it on the chair, yanked the encrypted hard drive from the bench, and jogged after Satsuki.
The explosion-proof door closed.
The exhaust fans' drone returned.
The doctoral students looked at each other, confused. They didn't know who could walk in and take their ace with two sentences.
But nobody stopped her, and Suzuki followed willingly, so it probably wasn't a problem.
They shrugged and went back to work.
...
An hour later.
Marunouchi, Tokyo. Saionji Industries Headquarters.
Basement Level Four.
The elevator dropped with a slight weightless pull. The digital display stopped on -4.
The metal doors slid open.
The airlock hissed as pressure equalized.
The view opened.
The highest-security "Black Box Lab" lay before them.
Constant temperature and humidity held the space at exactly 22°C and 45% humidity. A grid of shadowless lights lit every corner.
Top-tier electron microscopes, spectrometers, and parallel computing terminals shipped from the U.S. sat on anti-static benches. Thick black power cables ran like dormant snakes under the raised floor.
Dr. Klaus Weber, in a gray cleanroom suit, stood at a bench. Dieter and Frank were running voltage tests on a Japanese high-precision sensor.
Hearing footsteps, Weber turned.
The East German scientist who had walked through a life-and-death border crossing gave a small nod.
"Miss Saionji," he said in German.
"Dr. Weber. Is the equipment satisfactory?"
Satsuki stopped at the bench.
Fujita Tsuyoshi stepped forward and set the heavy lead-foil cylinder he carried onto the metal tabletop.
Thump.
The dull impact made a screwdriver beside it jump.
"Of course, my lady. This equipment is a full generation ahead of Jena," Weber said, looking at the blinking indicators. Technical excitement filled his cloudy eyes. "God knows what we were working with before…"
Satsuki cut him off before he could start reminiscing and turned slightly, bringing Emi forward.
"Allow me to introduce you," she said. "Suzuki Emi. Chief Technical Consultant for the Saionji Group. She will handle digital modeling of the entire optical system and all compute interfacing."
Weber's words died. His eyes landed on Emi.
A young Japanese girl stood there.
Doubt flickered in the old East German's eyes. Handing a project that touched national industrial lifeblood to a kid violated his entire worldview.
Emi ignored the look.
Here, only Satsuki could move her.
They had already had their moment in the car. Now it was calm, professional Emi's turn.
She stepped forward, pulled on anti-static gloves, unscrewed the lead cylinder, and removed the microfilm.
The waterproof oil-paper packets came out. Several rolls of microfilm and a stack of blueprints covered in German and physical parameters spread under the lights.
The bright incandescents shone through the translucent film. Complex optical paths reflected onto Emi's silver-wire glasses.
Tiny light points danced across the lenses.
Her pupils tracked the intersecting lines. Her breathing caught in her throat. Her fingertips tapped the stainless steel bench.
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap…
The sound of nails on metal mixed with the low hum of the HVAC.
"Dr. Weber. Extreme ultraviolet refraction creates extreme thermal load on the lens surface," Emi said, loading film into the high-resolution scanner. She spoke fluent English and threw out core parameters immediately.
"In your design, for the molybdenum-silicon multilayer reflective film, what thermal distortion redundancy did you allow for continuous wavelength bombardment?"
Weber blinked.
Dieter and Frank stopped their tests.
No pleasantries. No introductions. She had cut straight to the deepest technical water.
"Redundancy is set at 0.2 nanometers," Weber said, switching modes instantly. His tone went rigorous. "We used a dynamic thermal-compensation fluid model."
"Not enough," Emi said, tapping the keyboard and pulling up the first scanned optical path.
"In production, standing-wave effects on the wafer surface cause uneven heat. A 0.2-nanometer margin will cause focal drift. We need to recalculate the lens curvature parameters and compress thermal distortion tolerance to the picometer range."
Weber moved fast to the screen and stared at the magnified traces. The two disciples crowded in.
Analog physics from the old era and digital compute from the new era were stitching together in this buried black box.
The scanner's green light moved across the microfilm line by line.
"Regarding the aspheric coefficient calculation for the fourth projection mirror…"
"Import these variables into the ray-tracing matrix. Set grid density at…"
"The reflectivity decay of the molybdenum-silicon multilayer needs a new 3D coordinate…"
The dense physical terms and computer commands blended with the scanner's mechanical sound into a constant background hum.
Satsuki stepped back.
She didn't join the technical debate.
Specialists handle specialties. She didn't understand this, so she left it to people who did.
She walked to the one-way glass wall. The HVAC's low thrum covered the group's intense discussion. Green light from the scanner pulsed on the glass, reflecting the faint curve of her lips.
The blade was finally sharpened.