“And extra sauce,” Leon adds.
Theo reaches for a bag and makes quick work of unwrapping his sandwich. The warm, spicy scent of charred meat quickly fills the room. For a few minutes, the tension actually lifts. Leon and I keep up a steady stream of mindless chatter while Theo eats in focused silence, savoring every bite.
But the reprieve is short. Once the containers are empty, it’s back to the grind. We split the tasks—Leon digs back into the control timing code while I start the painstaking process of reviewing the safety logs line by line.
Somewhere around seven, Leon exclaims, “Eureka!”
I drop my pen. “What? You found it?”
“The drift!” he says, spinning his laptop around so fast, it nearly slides off the table. “Look at the time stamps. It’s repeating every tenth cycle, like clockwork.”
I lean in, squinting at the scrolling data, and suddenly Theo is right there beside us. He’s leaning over my shoulder, his chin nearly brushing my hair as he scans the screen.
“Darn,” he mutters, his voice low and sharp withrealization. “It’s overwriting the command queue mid-execution.”
The fix is so glaringly simple, it’s almost frustrating. “If we reassign the redundant buffer, it should stabilize the timing,” I say, pointing to the logic jump.
Theo’s focus sharpens instantly, that brilliant engineering mind clicking into high gear. “Do it.”
Leon’s fingers fly over the keyboard. “Rerouting the timing call . . . adjusting the safety check delay . . . and . . . done.”
The simulation starts. We watch in agonizing silence as the progress bar crawls across the screen. Once. Twice. Three times. Each test cycle comes back steady, the numbers holding firm. Then the screen flashes a glorious neon green—stable launch achieved.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” I shout, jumping to my feet so fast, the chair nearly flips over.
“Team Orlando for the win!” Leon whoops, punching the air. “Take that, London!” He catches himself and looks quickly at Theo. “Uh, no offense, boss.”
“None taken,” Theo says dryly, though the corners of his mouth lift. “There’s a reason I plucked you from the London office to join me in Orlando.” He leans in, his eyes sharp behind those reading glasses. “Now, show me the data. I want to see it run again.”
We run the simulation one more time, and the result is identical. Perfection.
“Right, then,” Theo says, standing up and stretching his back until it cracks. “Come on. I owe you both my sanity and a pint.”
We gather our things, all eager to escape Excelsior Parks HQ.
The following morning,the energy in the office is electric. The word has spread—Vortex Rise is officially back on track.
Theo calls a flash meeting in the conference room. “I have some brilliant news,” he says, pausing for just enough dramatic effect to make everyone lean in. “We’re back on schedule.”
He clicks through the latest safety logs, breaking down the nuances of the glitch and the fix we implemented. When he finishes, the room erupts. There are whistles and cheers of “Well done, mate!” and “Knew you’d sort it, you always do.”
Theo holds up his hands to quiet the room. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I didn’t find the error. All the credit goes to our visiting engineers from Orlando—Kaori and Leon. They’re the ones who caught the timing conflict in the buffer.”
He leads another round of applause, and this time, the entire room is looking at us. Leon basks in it, flashing a megawatt grin as he elbows me. “Didn’t I tell you we’d pull it off?”
I smile, my cheeks flushing warm. I feel a bit like a fraud. Leon did the heavy lifting. I didn’t do anything except keep Theo fed and watered.
“What’s all this noise about?”
The temperature in the room seems to drop ten degrees. Cuthbert Harris is standing in the doorway, arms folded tightly across his chest.
“Mr. Harris,” Theo says flatly. Every trace of the warmth from a moment ago has vanished behind aperfectly constructed mask. “We’re celebrating a resolution to the software issue on Vortex Rise.”
“I see,” Harris says, stepping into the room. He looks like he’s searching for a reason to be angry. “Well done, I suppose. Though, of course, a glitch of that magnitude shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
The room goes silent. The vulture’s claws are out.
“A project of this scale should have tighter quality control,” he continues, his gaze sweeping over the team before landing squarely on his son. “How far off schedule are you? And how much is this latest setback going to cost me?”
