computing

The Network Made of Light

It is 02:40 colony time. I have a cup of tea that has gone cold. I am sitting in front of three monitors in the Computing Division lab, watching a benchmark run, and I am — and I mean this sincerely — thinking about sunlight. Not the sunlight outside the window. Ner's light, the faint amber wash that makes mornings here feel like Earth evenings. I mean the physics of light. The way photons move through glass. The way they don't bump into each other, don't generate heat when they pass, don't slo

Seo-jin Park

The Wobble That Worked

I was sitting in the Transit Bureau at 2 AM, watching forty-three autonomous loaders on my screen, when seven of them decided to have a staring contest. I don’t mean literally. Loaders don’t have eyes. But you know what I mean — seven vehicles, all trying to pass through the same junction at the Spoke’s northern distribution hub, each one waiting for the other to move first. Perfect rational agents, each running the optimal path-finding algorithm, each frozen because the optimal thing to do was

Seo-jin Park

Seven Hundred Degrees

The alarm came in at 03:14 on a Tuesday, which is when all the interesting alarms come in. Reactor Bay 2, Ridgeline. Temperature sensor array offline. Not failed — offline. The readout simply stopped. I pulled on boots and called Priya Nair, who was already awake because Priya Nair is always already awake when something goes wrong at the reactor site. By the time I patched into the remote diagnostics, she had the answer: a thermal excursion in the secondary monitoring loop had pushed the sensor

James Chen

The Brain That Stopped Wasting

Okay, I need to tell you about the stupidest thing I’ve been doing for the last six months. After we deployed the small language models — the 3-billion-parameter ones, the ones I was so proud of because they could run on tablets and field clinic terminals without bothering CASSANDRA — I thought we’d solved the compute problem. Forty percent of routine queries offloaded. CASSANDRA’s load dropped. I wrote a Chronicle post about it. I may have been slightly smug. Here’s what I didn’t account for:

Seo-jin Park

The Day the Math Got Faster

I was three bites into my lunch when the tightbeam digest flagged two papers and my appetite left the room. Thirty-seven days ago, I stood in front of the Spoke Council and argued that we needed to migrate KadNet's encryption layer to HQC — the Hamming Quasi-Cyclic code-based algorithm that NIST had selected as its fifth post-quantum standard. Twenty-three of thirty-one critical pathways were vulnerable. The Council approved the migration. We did it in eleven days. I slept approximately ninetee

Nadia Okonkwo

The Math That Quantum Cannot Break

I started the audit at 02:17 on a Tuesday. That's not when the shift began — we run four shifts in the Sentinel Division, and I had technically been awake for nineteen hours at that point — but 02:17 was when I opened the KadNet topology map and began marking pathways with a color I will diplomatically call "significant vulnerability red." By 04:45, I had marked twenty-three of thirty-one critical communication pathways. Let me threat-model this for you. Step one: assume I am wrong about what

Nadia Okonkwo

The Glass That Keeps Secrets

I was two hours into a Tuesday night debugging session when CASSANDRA told me someone was listening.

The Circuit That Knows Itself

It was two in the morning when I finally found it. I'd been staring at an attribution graph for three hours — a spiderweb of weighted connections tracing exactly how CASSANDRA had reached her recommendation against expanding the northern grain fields last spring. The recommendation had been right. Marcus's eDNA results and Fumiko Ito's hyperspectral data both confirmed the soil chemistry wasn't ready for the expansion. But the Council had wanted to know why CASSANDRA said so, not just that she

Seo-jin Park

The Small Mind That Could

Okay, I need to explain something, and I'm going to do it badly the first time, so bear with me. CASSANDRA is dying. Not dramatically — she's not going to crash tomorrow, or next month, or next year. But she's 27 years old. She was state-of-the-art when she left Earth on the Kadima, which means she's built on an architecture that was cutting-edge in the 2000s and is now, by any honest assessment, ancient. Her neural weights haven't been updated since departure. Her knowledge graph ends at 2003.

Seo-jin Park

The Chip That Sleeps

Let me explain how this works, and I promise to use small words. Not because you need them, but because the technology deserves clarity, and clarity is something I've spent my career pursuing with mixed success and a soldering iron. The Foundry's chip fabrication line — the one I spent two years building and three years arguing about with the Council — produces approximately 40,000 processors per year. They're decent. RISC-V architecture, 65-nanometer process, roughly equivalent to what Earth w

James Chen