“It’s not working,” Derek whispered, his voice trembling. “The swarm latency. When the drones hit the urban density threshold, the collision-avoidance protocol eats up too much processing power. The battery drains before they can complete the last-mile delivery. We’re at sixty-eight percent efficiency. We need ninety-five for the shareholder demo on Friday.”
“You have forty-eight hours, Derek,” Gavin hissed, ignoring Jaime as she refilled his water. “I put forty million into this. If those drones drop out of the sky on Friday, I will strip you for parts. I will sue you for gross negligence, and I will make sure you never manage a lemonade stand again.”
“We’ve tried everything,” Derek said, rubbing his temples. “We tried Dijkstra. We tried A-star search. The computation is just too heavy for the onboard chips. We need a supercomputer on the ground, but the latency is too high. It’s physics, Gavin. We can’t beat physics.”
Jaime paused. She was holding the coffee pot midair. She knew this problem. Five years ago, before her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis had forced her to drop out of MIT’s theoretical mathematics program, before the medical bills had crushed her family into poverty, before she had taken this job to keep the lights on, she had written a thesis on dynamic node-shifting in chaos theory. They were not fighting physics. They were fighting a redundancy in their own code. They were trying to calculate every drone’s path individually.
“Excuse me,” Gavin snapped, looking up at her. “Did the coffee pot freeze? Pour it or leave.” Jaime blinked. The mask of the server slipped back into place. “Sorry,” she murmured. She finished pouring and stepped back, but she did not leave. She hovered near the service station, wiping down a clean counter just to stay within earshot.