Kristen walked towards her car, not bothering about the rest of her classes, or even if the Dean was bluffing.

She spotted Ivan standing near his car.

"Professor Zakhrov! Wait up!" she called, and broke into a run to catch him before he got in.

Ivan turned in surprise.

"Ms. Ford?" he asked, before Kristen nearly knocked him off his feet as she threw herself into his arms.

"Ms. Ford? What happened?" asked Ivan as Kristen started to cry into his chest.

"I've been expelled because of the internship," she sniffled.

"I'm so sorry. I'll help you fight this," he said, rubbing her back.

She shook her head and looked up at him.

He was shocked to see her not sad, but radiant.

"I'm not sad about it, Professor. I stood up to the dean and told him to stuff it. I can. No, I want to work full time at Sirius Software," she said wiping her eyes.

"Then why the tears?" asked Ivan, still a little confused.

"They were tears of relief, Professor. I-I'm actually glad that I'm not your student anymore. I want to be your, your colleague," she said, forcing herself to not blurt out "lover".

Ivan raised an eyebrow.

"Ms. Ford. I'm not so dense that I couldn't perceive your crush on me. I tried my best not to encourage it, but it appears that I failed," he said.

Kristen blushed furiously.

"Professor, no, Mr. Zakhrov. I'm not looking for an answer right now. I-I just want to work with you. Please," she said.

"That's all right, Ms. Ford. I'll always be your mentor and guide, even if I can't reciprocate your feelings," he said.

"I can live with that, for now," she said, smiling.

"All right, let's get to Sirius Software. We have a lot of work to do," he said, letting go of her, and ignoring the pit in his stomach that Kristen's "for now" had created.

----

Harry and James stood next to Aaron in the Sirius Software lab, staring at the first tray of freshly manufactured HellFire GPUs, and HellBlade CPUs.

"Moment of truth," said Aaron, as he picked up a HellBlade CPU, and inserted it into the test motherboard that James had designed.

Kristen and Ivan stood behind them, watching intently, as Aaron secured a massive vapor chamber heat sink with a turbine-like fan onto the socket.

He pressed the power button, and the system sprang to life.

The EFI screen flashed up on the monitor, and the Linux boot screen loaded up.

"So far so good," said Aaron, as he logged into the system.

He opened the system monitor application, and saw that the HellBlade CPU was detected by the kernel modules he had written, and was reporting all 64 virtual cores.

"Let's run a quick benchmark," said Aaron, launching a code compilation benchmark.

The turbine spun up to full speed, creating a hair-dryer-like roar.

Kristen could actually feel the hot air blasting from the fan's exhaust.

The benchmark finished in about a minute, and the fan spun back down to a low hum.

"Not bad for a first try," said Aaron, as he looked at the benchmark results.

"How do the results look?" asked Harry.

"Pretty much in line with our simulations. A full Linux kernel compile in 64 seconds," said Aaron.

"All right, let's try the GPU," said James, carefully inserting a HellFire GPU into the socket of the graphics card board.

He then bolted on a massive vapor chamber cooler with a turbine fan, similar to the CPU cooler.

Aaron shut down the system, and swapped out the graphics card for the HellFire GPU card.

He powered the system back on, and the EFI screen flashed up again.

"Well, the display output is working," he chuckled as he saw the EFI screen on the monitor.

He logged into the system, and opened up the system monitor application again.

The HellFire GPU was being detected, and exposing the Vulkan API correctly.

"I'm not too confident about this one, let's try a cube first," said Aaron launching a spinning cube demo.

The cube spun smoothly on the screen, at the full 60 Hz refresh rate of the monitor.

"All right, let's try a game," said Aaron, launching Master Of Arcadia.

The game loaded up, and the main menu appeared on the screen.

"Wow, it's actually running," said Kristen, as she watched the game run smoothly at 60 frames per second.

"This is a 2D game, but let's see how much it can push," said Aaron, turning off V-sync in the game's settings.

The frame rate jumped to 500 frames per second.

"OK, but still not pushing it," said Aaron, closing the game, and launching Cyberpunk 2077.

The CPU fan spun up to full speed, as a shader compilation pass started before the game could be loaded.

After nearly 5 minutes, the game finally loaded up, and started the benchmark pass.

The GPU fan spun up in addition to the CPU fan, making the system sound like a vacuum cleaner.

"We'll need to do something about that noise!" said Harry over the roar of the fans.

However, the benchmark reported a solid 120 frames per second average at 4K with all the settings except ray tracing set to maximum.

"Is that with upscaling?" asked James.

"No, that's native 4K," said Aaron.

"What the hell! How are you pushing 120 frames per second at 4k!" exclaimed James.

"Take a look at the visuals James, the lighting has gone to shit. The only thing we're able to push is the damn textures and polygons!" said Aaron, as the benchmark completed, and the fans spun down.

"Now what? We can't demo just 2D performance! Computex is barely 4 days away!" demanded James.

"Looks like this thing doesn't like dynamic lighting. Well, not a problem. The shader compiler already ignores those, so I'll just have them run on an unoptimized dynamic compile path and stick them on another GPU," said Aaron, firing up the code editor on the test system itself.

"Are you sure that's going to work Mr. Zakhrov?" asked Kristen, as Aaron made started to code.

"Only one way to find out," murmured Aaron, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

"All right, let's give it a try," he finally said after an hour of working. He shut down the system, slotted another GPU into a PCIe board, and bolted on another heat sink and fan.

He connected the power cables, and then booted up the system again.

The game again went through a shader compile stage, and after a few minutes, it finally loaded up.

This time, the frame rate was halved at 60 frames per second, but the visuals were accurate with the dynamic lighting effects being rendered correctly.

"We'll still have to do something about the noise, but looks like this set up is working," said James.

"Why did the frame rate get cut in half?" asked Kristen.

"Because we are now synchronizing two GPUs to render the same frame. The second GPU is doing the dynamic lighting calculations, while the first GPU is pushing the polygons and textures. The lighting effects use shaders that can't be packed into the VLIW based processors, so I'm letting the drivers compile them on the fly with no instruction optimizations, and running them on the second GPU. Crude, but it works," explained Aaron.

"What would the performance be if you ran everything on one GPU?" asked Harry.

"Probably 15 or 20 frames per second at best, those suckers can't use all the shaders at once," said Aaron.

"Well how exactly do we sell this at Computex then?" asked James.

"We can throw more GPUs at the problem, since we can run up to 4 GPUs in a single system. We'll have one GPU doing raster ops, one doing lighting and post-processing, one doing physics, and the last one doing ray tracing. That way, we can run a full ray-traced demo at a decent frame rate," said Aaron.

"This feels like a throwback to the SLI and Crossfire days," said Harry.

"Only this time, it actually scales," said Aaron with a smirk.

"Ms. Ford, I don't envy your job of having to explain and demo this monstrosity at Computex," said James.

"Mr. McMillan, I'm actually eating this up! This setup screams rule of cool! And with our SiriusOS UI, it would look amazing!" she said, her eyes sparkling.

"All right. I've got some driver optimizations to do. Let's get back to work. James, get this thing packaged up and ready for transport to Taipei," said Aaron.

"On it," said James, as he and Harry started disassembling the test rig.

----

Kristen stared at her reflection in the mirror of the Computex green room.

The costume that she was supposed to wear for the Computex presentation was a sleek and shiny black leather blazer with gleaming silver accents on the sleeves and wide notched lapels.

The Sirius Software logo - a silver lightning-bolt shaped "SS" on an upwards-pointing arrowhead also bordered in silver on a black background, was emblazoned on both breast panels.

The pencil skirt was also black leather, and came down to just above her knees.

Instead of a blouse, she was wearing a black leather corset under the blazer, which was buttoned shut over it, giving her a clean and slightly intimidating look.

Her black leather boots came up to mid-thigh, and had gleaming 8 cm high titanium stiletto heels.

Her long blonde hair was drawn up into a severe and tight top ponytail, her green eyes were accentuated with black eyeliner, and her lips were painted a glossy black.

"Master Zakhrov is sure channeling the mid-2000s booth-babe energy," she chuckled as she admired herself in the mirror.

"Are you ready, Kristen-chan?" asked Shizuku, the center of 7-Star Crossed, who was also in a similar outfit, but with a flared and pleated skirt instead of a pencil skirt.

Kristen turned to look at her.

"Ready as I'll ever be, Shizuku-san. Just a little nervous," she admitted.

"Don't worry, you'll do great. Just remember to smile and have fun," said Shizuku encouragingly.

Kristen nodded, and took a deep breath.

"All right, let's go out there and show them what Sirius Software is all about," she said, and followed Shizuku out of the green room.

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