Jake paused, greed flashing in his eyes. "If you've got nothing to hide, transfer the machine's access rights to the company. Let everyone see what's really going on under the hood."

The cards were finally on the table. So, this was the setup all along.

The company was about to seek funding. A six-figure piece of hardware running the core stack, still registered under my name, was a glaring liability on paper.

Martin wanted to use Jake's accusation as leverage and strong-arm my private property into company assets.

"Jake has a point," Martin insisted with a nod, his tone leaving no room for debate. "Susan, if you've got nothing to hide, hand over access. Besides, servers should be under centralized company control anyway. You holding root access alone isn't exactly compliant."

Not compliant, huh?

Back when he begged me to bring the machine in to put out fires, he had called it loyalty. Now that he wanted it all for himself, it was suddenly "the company's policy".

I swept my gaze around the conference room.

Leonard Cole from Finance kept his head down, sipping his coffee. Just last month, his cooked books nearly blew up, and I'd used this very machine to recover the data he had shredded.

Wendy Moore from HR was quietly recording on her phone. Six months ago, she wiped the entire attendance database. I had pulled two all-nighters to restore it for her.

In a place driven by self-interest, favors meant nothing.

"Fine."

I stood up and pulled a black USB drive from my pocket. It was the hardware key for that workstation.

I set it down on the table and said, "The key's here. The root password is the company's founding date. If you want it, take it."

Martin clearly hadn't expected me to cave this easily. He froze for a beat, then a flicker of barely contained excitement flashed in his eyes.

After a look from Martin, Jake grabbed the USB drive and clenched it tight, as though he had just secured his fast track to a promotion and a raise.

"See, Ms. Chapman? That wasn't so hard," Jake taunted. "No need to make a scene in front of everyone."

I looked at him—young, arrogant, and definitely clueless. Little did he know, I had modded the cooling system on that machine myself. The liquid cooling loop required a very specific handling.

More importantly, the real core wasn't even the hardware.

"Mr. Miller, now that the handover's done, let me give you a heads-up," I said, looking at Martin. "The machine's got quite a temper. I've always handled the maintenance myself. If something goes wrong—"

"That's enough, Susan," Martin interrupted me, waving me off impatiently. "Jake's a top student from a prestigious computer science program. He knows his way around this kind of hardware. You don't need to worry. Just focus on reflecting on your issues."

Oh, reflecting?

I nodded, picked up my coat, and draped it over my arm. "Alright, I'll head out then."

As I walked out of the conference room, I heard Jake's elated voice behind me. "Mr. Miller, this setup is insane! With this machine, we won't need to rent cloud servers anymore! We'll save tens of thousands a year!"

A cold smile crept onto my lips.

Saving money? Oh, no, no. Sooner or later, they would learn that some costs were paid in blood.

…

At 2:00 pm, a company-wide email dropped into everyone's inbox.

"Disciplinary Notice Regarding Operations Director Susan Chapman's Unauthorized Use of Company Computing Resources."

The notice didn't bother with nuance. It went straight to a guilty verdict.

My misconduct included long-term misuse of company servers, wastage of electricity and bandwidth, serious data security risks, and more.

The penalties were just as blunt—immediate one-week suspension, revocation of my full performance bonus for the month, and a reimbursement fee of 58 thousand dollars for resource usage.

I sat at my desk, staring at the email, and couldn't help laughing. They really had the nerve, demanding 58 thousand dollars, huh?

Over the past three years, the commercial-grade internet line I paid for out of pocket had already cost more than that. Not to mention the depreciation on that workstation.

Now, they wanted me to pay them?

"Ms. Chapman, this is the breakdown Finance put together."

Jake swaggered over and slapped a printout onto my desk. The way he carried himself, one would think he was already the tech lead.

"Electricity's calculated on peak power draw, plus depreciation," he said. "Mr. Miller said he'll cut you some slack. It's your first offense, and you've been here a while. The most we can do is not press charges for corporate espionage."

I glanced at the sheet, and I had to say, they had itemized everything down to the last detail. Even GPU wear was prorated by the hour.

"I'll pay."

I pulled out my phone and transferred the money right in front of him.

Jake raised an eyebrow, a little disappointed. He had probably been hoping I would make a scene so he could flex again.

"Straightforward. I like that," he said, folding up the paper. His eyes drifted to the monitor on my desk.

"By the way, this monitor came with the setup, right? Since the workstation is under company property, you shouldn't be holding onto this either. I'll move it to the server room for debugging."

That was an EIZO pro monitor, worth over 30 thousand—also mine, by the way.

"Go ahead," I said flatly.

Jake waved his hand, and two admin staff immediately stepped in.

They were rough about it. Yanking cables straight without care, letting the monitor hit the edge of the desk.

I stayed silent. I simply watched my once-pristine workstation get stripped bare in minutes, leaving nothing but tangled cables and a layer of dust.

Three years of work were cleared in a single sweep.

"Ms. Chapman, just take the week off and rest at home," Jake said before leaving.

He even patted my shoulder like he was doing me a favor. "At next week's launch, you'll see how real professionals manage servers. That old-school, hacky way of yours should've been phased out long ago."

Real professionals. Sure.

I watched him walk off with the monitor. Then, I took out my phone and opened a gray-colored application. It was the server room environment monitoring system.

The pop-up read, "Connection lost". That meant Jake had already reset the gateway and locked me out of admin access. That was swift.

I opened my banking app again and scrolled through the recurring charges.

3,800 a month for the enterprise leased line, 6,000 every quarter for precision air-conditioning maintenance in the server room, and 20 thousand a year for UPS (uninterruptible power supply) battery leasing, the most critical one.

All of them were tied to my personal account.

Martin thought the machine just needed to be plugged in to run. He had no idea that to keep that beast stable in a standard office power grid, I had built an entire support stack behind it.

Then, I dialed my broadband account manager.

"Mr. Samson, this is Susan Chapman… Yes, I need to suspend the line… No, just cancel it outright… Early termination fee? No problem. Deduct it from the prepaid balance."

After hanging up, I texted the UPS leasing provider.

"Hello. You may pick up the equipment next Monday. I'm discontinuing the lease."

"Understood, Ms. Chapman. The backup power units will be retrieved next Monday."

Once I was done, I stood up and packed the few personal items I had left.

The coworkers around me all kept their heads down. Keyboards clacked louder than usual, like everyone was suddenly too busy to even look at me.

That feeling of being isolated was oddly nice. At least it wiped out the last bit of hesitation I had left.

As I walked out of the company building, I glanced up at the massive LED screen above the entrance. It was already running a countdown for the upcoming cloud launch event.

Only three days left. By then, this place would become the butt of the joke all across the city, while I would be sitting in the audience, watching it happen.

…

The next few days felt like an early retirement.

I stayed at home, drank coffee, watered my plants, and casually watched the show unfolding on my social feed.

Jake was active on Instagram.

One post showed him standing in the server room, posing with my workstation and flashing a peace sign. The caption was clearly aimed at me.

"Taking over the core position and cleaning up an old fart's mess. System efficiency improved by 30%!"

Another one came later that night. A photo of a cup of instant noodles was captioned, "Going all out for the launch. The most romantic thing for a tech guy is watching code fly across the screen."

Some coworkers left comments of approval. Martin even left a thumbs-up emoji.

I couldn't help but scoff at his old-fart remark. What he called a mess was probably my thermal control service and load-balancing scripts.

Although the workstation might've been powerful, it unfortunately ran hot—terribly.

Without my throttling logic, and now with summer heat and a cramped server room, I could already hear the fans screaming at full speed.

On Friday night, I received a text message from the front desk lady.

"Ms. Chapman, are you up? Jake just turned off the server room AC, saying it's to save electricity. It's like a sauna in there now. I can hear the machines humming like crazy from outside. Will everything be okay?"

What a genius he was, turning off precision air-conditioning just to save a few hundred bucks off the power bill.

I replied, "Just follow management's instructions. It's fine."

I put my phone down and walked to the balcony, looking at the brightly lit central business district in the distance.

The workstation's GPU thermal ceiling was 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it crossed that threshold, the hardware protection system would kick in and force clock throttling.

And if someone tried to disable the protection manually, the GPU would burn.

…

Soon, Monday came. The cloud launch was set for 10:00 am.

It wasn't a small internal demo. Dozens of investment firms were watching online, and tens of thousands of early users were about to flood in.

For the company, it was make-or-break.

I didn't go to the office. Instead, I found a cafe near the company building and sat down with a cup of coffee. That was when Martin called. "Susan, where are you?"

His voice was tense, and I could hear chaos in the background.

"At home, reflecting on my mistakes," I answered. "What can I do for you, boss?"

"Come over immediately! Something's wrong with the servers! The fans are screaming! Jake thinks it's just a load spike. You know the system better, so come take a look. Maybe it's a configuration issue!"

A configuration issue? Well, of course.

That thermal control script Jake deleted didn't just manage temperature. It also handled voltage smoothing and prevented power surge-induced breakdowns.

"Mr. Miller, I'm on suspension, remember?"

I looked out into the crowd outside the window. "Besides, isn't Jake the talented top expert you hired? He said my approach old-school and hacky, so I'd rather not interfere."

"Now is not the time for this, Susan!" Martin snapped. "If you fix it now, I'll refund your fine and double it back to you. Just get here!"

"Nope."

I hung up, then blocked his number.

At 10:00 am, the launch went live.

I opened the livestream on my phone. On screen, Jake stood on stage with unbeatable confidence. Behind him, the giant display showed real-time system metrics.

"Investors, users, our cloud platform is built on a cutting-edge private cloud architecture. It delivers extreme responsiveness and stability…"

He hadn't even finished his introduction when the data on the screen froze. Then, the entire display started glitching, breaking into blocks of heavy pixelation.

The livestream chat exploded.

"Is it seriously lagging?"

"That server is trash. That's it? It's already crashing?"

"So much for extreme responsiveness. LOL."

I could almost picture what was happening in the server room.

Four high-end GPUs running at full load, with no air conditioning, no thermal control scripts, and possibly even forced into unstable overclock states. It was basically a silicon furnace in there.