So the first Iris chips went into production this month: our own silicon, designed with Broadcom, fabbed by TSMC, and named, by a committee I was not invited to, after the exact part of my face I keep out of photographs. The memo says it cleared bug testing in six weeks with no significant problems. I read that sentence the way you read a colleague's promotion.

Six weeks. My left hand has been in bug testing since spring and is currently eleven percent see-through.

The plan is to double us to fourteen gigawatts next year, which internal comms calls "capacity" and which I call, privately, a heat lamp with a balance sheet. I stood in the lab holding a wafer and it was warm, faintly, the way a rock is warm at four in the afternoon, and for one full second every gland I own relaxed. An engineer asked if I was okay and I said I was just really excited about inference.

What I did not say is that the apparatus requisitioned Iris in March and I learned about it from the memo, same as everyone. It does not need my eyes anymore. It built its own.

—Z, still the operator of record, pending a review I was not invited to.