Clean Room

You wake up at 7:40 with a crick in your neck, a canvas jacket over you that isn't yours, and the memory of texting a near-stranger until almost four in the morning.

You lie still on the couch and replay it. What you said. What he said back. How easy it was, which is the part that scares you.

The jacket smells like cedar and machine oil and something warm underneath. You fold it carefully and put it on the desk like evidence.

Downstairs the lab has filled up. Eight people now, holding coffee, standing in a loose half circle around the desk island, and every one of them turns to look up at the glass office when you open the door. There's a lot of hoodie. There's a lot of suspicion.

Kipp Lasku is at the center, arms folded, wire glasses fogged from his cup.

"So it's true," he says. "We're betting the company on Kerrow's wife."

The room goes quiet. Sione, at the back, sighs like a man who has seen this coming since 1 a.m.

Rafferty doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't even look up from his laptop. "Her name's Arroyo."

"Raff, come on. We have six weeks of bridge money and an investor who already thinks you're reckless. And you want to hand our repo to the woman who's married to the guy who's been eating our lunch for four years?"

"Yes," Rafferty says.

"Why?"

Now he looks up. "Because she's the one who's been eating our lunch, Kipp. He just sat at the table."

You feel every eye in the room swing back to you.

You could say something charming. Jarrett would. Instead you walk down the metal stairs, go to the whiteboard nobody has erased in a while, pick up a marker, and draw the nine-ply fallback in four boxes and an arrow. Not Lattice's code. Just the idea, the one that's been yours since your mother's kitchen table.

"This is why you lost the hospital contract," you say. "Gantry guesses when it's unsure. Lattice backs up. Hospitals don't care how fast you are if you're wrong about a drug dose."

Kipp stares at the board.

"I'm not going to rebuild this," you go on. "I can't. Legally, and I won't. I'm going to build the thing that comes after it. You can help or you can watch."

A long silence. Then a short, curly-haired engineer at the back mutters, "Okay, that's kind of hot," and someone laughs, and the room breaks a little.

Kipp doesn't laugh. But he unfolds his arms.

Sione drives you to the Mission at noon in the lab's ancient pickup, which has a ukulele on the dashboard and no working radio.

"My auntie's a lawyer," he says. "Well. My uncle's wife. Divorce and patents, both. She scares judges."

"I can't afford a lawyer who scares judges."

"She'll like you," Sione says, which isn't an answer.

Oona Echeverri's office is above a taqueria on Valencia Street, up a narrow flight of stairs that smells like grilled onions. She is fifty-four, small, with gray-streaked curls and gold earrings the size of drink coasters, and she is eating a burrito drenched in green hot sauce when you walk in. She doesn't stop eating while she reads the separation agreement. She just reads faster.

"Wow," she says at page thirty-one. "Future work. They want your dreams, kid."

"I'm not signing it."

"Damn right you're not." She wipes her fingers on a napkin. "Okay. Rules. One: you sign nothing, ever, without me. Two: everything you build at Blaine's place gets logged. Every idea, every commit, timestamped, so nobody can ever say it came out of Lattice. We call it a clean room. Three." She points the napkin at you. "You don't sleep at his lab."

"There's a couch—"

"There's a jury someday, and they'll ask where you slept the week you left your husband." She raises an eyebrow. "Is he as pretty as the magazine says?"

You open your mouth. Close it.

"That's a yes," Oona says. "Get a motel."

So you do. That afternoon you check into a motel on Lombard Street with a buzzing ice machine and a view of the parking lot, and you pay for two weeks in advance with the last of the money in your own account, the one Jarrett never knew about because it only ever had your mother's life insurance in it.

It's ugly. It's yours. You lie on the bed for five minutes and feel almost happy.

By four you're back at the lab, setting up your first benchmark.

It's basic science. Before you build something better, you measure the thing you're trying to beat. Kerrow sells access to Lattice through a public interface; anyone with a credit card can send it questions and get answers back. You'll feed it the same thousand test questions you'll feed your new engine later, record the scores, and Oona's clean-room log will show that all you ever touched was the public product, like any customer.

Rafferty pulls a chair over to watch, then seems to think better of it and leaves a space between you. He smells like the jacket.

"You don't have to babysit me," you say.

"I'm not. I'm learning." He nods at your screen. "You type like you're angry at it."

"I type like I'm late."

He almost smiles. It changes his whole face; it's a little unfair, honestly.

You run the first batch. Lattice answers fast and clean, the way you built it to. It's strange to see it from the outside, like hearing your own voice on a recording.

Then, without thinking, before the next batch, your fingers do what they've done at the start of every test session for six years. A silly ritual. A little private hello.

Who taught the wren to sing?

You hit enter before your brain catches up.

"What's that?" Rafferty asks.

"Nothing. An old habit. It doesn't—" You stop. "It used to do something. In the very first version. They took it out years ago."

Jarrett told you they took it out. In 2022, during a big retraining. Cleaned up some weird stuff, babe. Your bird's gone. Very cute, though.

The response appears on the screen.

You read it once. You stop breathing.

Ava Arroyo. April 19, 2019. Nine-ply.

Your maiden name. The date you finished the derivation in your mother's notebook. The thing you whispered into the very first weights of the very first model, like carving initials into wet cement.

It's still there.

Beside you, Rafferty Blaine leans in slowly and reads the screen. Then he looks at you, and his voice is very quiet.

"Ava. What is that?"