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.

With the heat nowhere to go, core temperatures spiked in seconds.

Thermal paste cracked under stress. Solder joints softened and failed. This was no longer a system crash, but physical destruction at a hardware level.

…

My estimate was accurate. 20 minutes later, my phone vibrated again.

This time, it was Jake. I picked up and put him on speaker.

"What kind of trap did you leave in that goddamn machine, Susan?" he cried out in a panic, alarm sirens blaring in the background.

"It's smoking! All services are down! Even the backup data can't be read! Did you remotely lock the system?"

"Watch your words," I replied calmly. "That's a serious accusation. You had the hardware key, reset the gateway, and revoked my access. I can't even get into the building. How exactly am I supposed to lock anything?"

"Then, why didn't the UPS kick in?" he questioned harshly. "Why didn't the power failure protection trigger?"

"Oh, that?"

I chuckled softly. "The UPS was leased. The contract expired, and since the company didn't renew it, the leasing provider terminated the service remotely. That's standard procedure, isn't it?"

The other end of the line went silent. Then came the sound of Martin snatching the phone.

"You sabotaged our production operations, Susan! I'm calling the police! You're going to jail!"

"Do it." I stood up and paid the bill. "While you're at it, we can also clarify the ownership of that machine properly with the police."

…

When I pushed open the company doors, chaos already erupted. Calls from furious investors, refund requests from users, employees scrambling in panic…

Even the air smelled burnt. Right—that would be the metallic stench of fried circuit boards and scorched silicon.

Martin rushed out of the server room, drenched in sweat. When he saw me, he reacted as if he had spotted both a lifeline and an enemy at the same time.

"Susan… you've got some nerve showing up here. Fix the damn machine now! We can talk about everything else after!"

I ignored him and walked straight up to Jake. His face was streaked with soot—probably from the smoke—and his whole body was shaking.

"Move," I uttered coldly.

Jake instinctively stepped aside, and I walked into the server room.

Although I was prepared for the worst, the sight still tightened my chest. The once-pristine, high-performance beast was gone, reduced to nothing but charred mass.

"There's nothing I can do," I said, exiting the room and looking at Martin. "Core is fried. Drives are physically damaged. The data's gone. All of it."

Martin's legs gave out. He collapsed onto the floor, mumbling, "Gone… It's all gone…"

The launch was an obvious failure. Not only was funding out of the picture, but the penalty clauses would also hit hard. The company was doomed.

"Police! Over here!"

A commotion erupted at the entrance.

Martin suddenly snapped upright like he had been electrocuted. He pointed at me and shouted, "Officer, it's her! She sabotaged my company's servers and caused the business to collapse! Arrest her!"

Two police officers walked in and scanned the chaotic scene. "Who made the report?"

Martin gritted his teeth. "I did!"

"Good timing," I chimed in. "I'd also like to file a report. This machine is my personal property. I have full purchase invoices and equipment registration documents.

"The company illegally occupied my private assets, and due to improper handling, caused catastrophic damage. I demand full compensation."

I opened my bag and pulled out a stack of documents. There were printed invoice copies, as well as the expired UPS leasing contract.

Martin froze, his face draining of color.